by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. There are about forty days between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, depending on just when the first holiday falls… and for millions these can be the most painful days of the year, a time of acute loneliness, isolation, and despair. All you want to do is put on …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. His given name was Hubert Prior Vallee, and he was born July 28, 1901 in Island Pond, Vermont. Boyishly good looking, suave, charming and a real life Yalie, the world (particularly its female moiety) came to know and love him as “Rudy”. He was the world’s first pop …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. Today is the day I sign up to receive Social Security. It will be a day when low level bureaucrats will prod me, asking questions they already know the answers to, all designed to prove (or not) that I am the Jeffrey Ladd Lant born 66 years ago …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. If you’re a resident of these United States, the fourth Thursday of November will soon be upon us in all its excess, gluttony, and self-congratulation. We know this as Thanksgiving Day, but it most certainly is no day of glorious and heart felt thanksgiving for the crucial centerpiece …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s Program Note. No royal court in Europe was more musically inclined than the imperial Habsburgs who ruled their vast real estate from the most melodious of capitals, Wien. Or as you would say, Vienna. To be a prince of this dynasty (called archdukes) was an honorable thing of course, a …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. Are you one of those people (I call them optimists) who believes the re-election of Barack Obama plus the election of thousands of successful candidates for federal, state, and local offices ends the campaign and should earn all of us in the Great Republic an electioneering respite? My, …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. Did you ever see “Gigi” the 1958 musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe? You should. It burned through a fortune to recreate lush, opulent Third Republic Paris and besides the music is lovely. One song in particular touches my heart — “I Remember It Well”. It’s …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. You’ve seen “Hello Dolly,” of course. Every person who loves The Theatah has gone, and with every great actress who played the great role of Dolly Levy, Carol Channing, Barbra Streisand, Pearl Bailey and so many others. We love them; we love them all. And we love the moment they each …
by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author’s program note. I have long been aware of just how clever the folks at Guinness really are. For me it all started in 1969 when I visited Dublin for the first time and, in sanctified American male undergraduate fashion, made a bee-line for the FREE GUINNESS you got at the …