Sunday
Sep. 26, 1999
Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake
Poem: "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake" by Anne Porter, from An Altogether Different Language: Poems 1934-1994, Zoland Books.
It was on this day in 1957 that Leonard Bernstein's musical WEST SIDE STORY opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York.
It's the birthday of JANE SMILEY, author of A Thousand Acres, which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.
GEORGE GERSHWIN was born 101 years ago today, 1898, in Brooklyn. He didn't take much interest in music until he was 12, but then left school two years later to work as a pianist and song plugger on Tin Pan Alley. Gershwin's 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing was the first musical to win a Pulitzer. He also wrote Porgy and Bess and Rhapsody in Blue.
It's the birthday of poet T.S. ELIOT, born in St. Louis, 1888. He was the son of a Missouri businessman, and was raised on the Mississippi, but after college he moved to England, married a British woman, and stayed. He became a British citizen, joined the Church of England and began his best-known work, the series of four long poems on Christianity called "The Four Quartets" which came out about every year and a half beginning in 1936.
It's the birthday of JOHN CHAPMAN, better known as JOHNNY APPLESEED, born in Leominster, Massachusetts, 1774. Even though he owned several hundred acres of his own, he collected discarded apple seeds from cider presses and set out to help pioneer families raise their own trees.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®