Word: mabel
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Doomsayers to the contrary. Ronstadt trilled winsomely as Mabel...
...DIED. Mabel Mercer, 84, reigning queen of cabaret singers for nearly 70 years, whose unsurpassed ability to turn even the most banal tune into a timeless vignette of love and loss delighted generations of supper-club audiences; of heart disease; in Pittsfield, Mass. Born in England of a white English mother and black American father, Mercer gained renown at Bricktop's Paris café in the 1930s and went to the U.S. in 1939. As her husky contralto began to fail, she honed her unique blend of cadenced speech and vocalizing, delivering such songs...
...Sweet communions," she called those first nights just after her marriage. "Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable." Also, "a little Heaven just after dinner." And on the morning she got pregnant in May 1879, "a very happy few minutes of love in our room." This was bright-eyed Mabel Loomis Todd, 22, of Washington, who played the piano and painted water-colors and confided to her diary about her young husband David. When David Todd moved to Amherst to teach astronomy, Mabel began flirting with one of the students, Ned Dickinson. She then took up with his unhappily married father Austin...
Peter Gay, Berlin-born professor of history at Yale and author of such highly regarded works as The Enlightenment and Weimar Culture, tells the rather steamy tale of Mabel Todd in considerable detail because she illustrates to perfection the basic thesis of his ambitious new book: that the middle classes of the Victorian century, widely thought to have suppressed sexuality in favor of piety and profit, were just as amorous as their great-grandchildren of today. Even Queen Victoria was not really Victorian, says Gay, for she "drew, and bought, male nudes and gave her adored husband Albert just such...
...then some people are not at all sure that Tune is made of ordinary clay. "Tommy is extra-special-half of this world and half of another," says Bufrnan, who worked with him on a 1975 production of Mack & Mabel. Writer Larry King, who worked, and occasionally collided, with Tune during rehearsals of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, is not even sure about the first half. "Man, I don't know!" he writes in his book The Whorehouse Papers. "I think that dude grew up on a different planet." Tune, 43, does not smoke or drink...