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You Learn Something New Every Day (cont.)


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The poet Gabriele d’Annunzio created – apparently at the behest of Mussolini – a number of neologisms in Italian to expunge foreign words from the language, particularly English ones (much like Hitler did). So “lo sandwich” became “il tramezzino”, from the Italian “to partition”. Other inventions, like for basketball and boxing, haven’t survived anglification. But a big one did: in football, the top team doesn’t win "the championship" (with a trophy, I guess), but instead “lo scudetto”, or the badge, whose design he also apparently created.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Louis Comfort Tiffany has an extensive oeuvre in painting and drawing, never mind the glass. I saw a lot of his work at the Nassau Museum of Art today.

Maybe I knew but forgot, who knows?

I did not expect some vast Serra pieces in the sculpture garden.

(Yes, it was the best possible weather to be wandering around a sculpture garden in March, even if the grass was a bit squelchy.)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/22/2024 at 9:40 PM, splinky said:

On this date, for many years, Broadway's Tommy Tune would accidentally call my cell. It took me forever to figure out he must have been trying to call Sondheim to wish him a happy birthday. The calls stopped after Sondheim's death.

I wonder what Sondheim's phone number was.

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My first residence in New York, Sondheim lived on the same floor while having his Turtle Bay place renovated. So I didn’t really need his number.

But my fun story, same place, after I moved in I had a lengthy voicemail (land line) from Tony Franciosa, thinking he was speaking to a producer or agent about an opportunity. And it was so much his voice. It never occurred to me to record it as we didn’t expose everything on line back then. 

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