AT WHAT AGE DO BABIES CRAWL

Frampton Comes Alive

If you were challenged to name five rock albums that epitomized the '70s, Frampton Comes Alive! should probably top the list. Former Humble Pie guitarist Peter Frampton recorded a few perfectly fine albums with his band Frampton's Camel, but it wasn't until some of those tracks were recorded at a live performance in San Francisco and released as Frampton Comes Alive! that he became a household name. Buoyant pop, sentimental ballads, arena rock--this album has it all. The double-LP package set sales records and contained three bona fide radio hits ("Baby, I Love Your Way," "Show Me the Way," and "Do You Feel Like We Do?"), one of which, shockingly enough, was over 14 minutes long. No wonder that, to many, the two-and-a-half-minute songs of the Damned and the Sex Pistols felt like a breath of fresh air a year or two later. --Lorry Fleming

(Of course, I did NOT take this photo. Just wanted to commemorate such an extraordinary woman and inspiring artist!)

Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81
New York Times
By Rob Hoerburger
December 25, 2008

Eartha Kitt, who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-business career that lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81 and lived in Connecticut.


The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman.


Ms. Kitt, who began performing in the late ’40s as a dancer in New York, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.


With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of “Faust” in which Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy.


Ms. Kitt’s career-long persona, that of the seen-it-all sybarite, was set when she performed in Paris cabarets in her early 20s, singing songs that became her signatures, like “C’est Si Bon” and “Love for Sale.
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Returning to New York, she was cast on Broadway in “New Faces of 1952” and added another jewel to her vocal crown, “Monotonous” (“Traffic has been known to stop for me/Prices even rise and drop for me/Harry S. Truman plays bop for me/Monotonous, monotone-ous”). Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in May 1952, “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.
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Shortly after that run, Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and recorded her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither diction and vaguely foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal sizzle could be just as powerful as a bonfire. Though her record sales fell after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other singers with pillow-talky voices like Diana Ross (who has said she patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet Jackson and Madonna (who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in 1987).


Ms. Kitt would later call herself “the original material girl,” a reference not only to her stage creation and to Madonna but also to her string of romances with rich or famous men, including Welles, the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson and the banking heir John Barry Ryan 3rd. She was married to her one husband, Bill McDonald, a real-estate developer, from 1960 to 1965; their daughter, Kitt Shapiro, survives her, as do two grandchildren.


From practically the beginning of her career, as critics gushed over Ms. Kitt, they also began to describe her in every feline term imaginable: her voice “purred” or “was like catnip”; she was a “sex kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the prowl” across the stage, sometimes “flashing her claws.” Her career has often been said to have had “nine lives.” Appropriately, she was tapped to play Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier, lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy.


Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged hauteur of Ms. Kitt’s cabaret act, she also played serious roles, appearing in the films “The Mark of the Hawk” with Sidney Poitier (1957) and “Anna Lucasta” (1959) with Sammy Davis Jr. She made numerous television appearances, including a guest spot on “I Spy” in 1965, which brought her her first Emmy nomination.


For these performances Ms. Kitt likely drew on the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North, S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said.


At 8 she was sent to live in Harlem with an aunt, Marnie Kitt, who Ms. Kitt came to believe was really her biological mother. Though she was given piano and dance lessons, a pattern of abuse developed there as well: Ms. Kitt would be beaten, she would run away and then she would return. By her early teenage years she was working in a factory and sleeping in subways and on the roofs of unlocked buildings. (She would later become an advocate, through Unicef, on behalf of homeless children.
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Her show-business break came on a lark, when a fr

Oree Dee Willis: a lifetime filled with love of learning, teaching
By Rev. Ed Anderson LTC (Ret.) U. S. Army

Oree Dee Willis' roots run deep in Wilkes County.Georgia, Indeed, she is an Unsung Hero of Wilkes County.

Distinguished African American educator, Oree Dee Willis was born March 22, 1922, in Grady Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Her parents, George Bennie Willis and Sarah Strickling Willis had moved from Wilkes County to Atlanta for a brief period. Shortly after her birth, they moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, to join other family and church members and to seek employment.

When Oree Dee was six years old, her parents separated and she was brought back to Wilkes County to grow up in the home of her maternal grandmother, Mary Smith Stribling, along with four other cousins and four aunts and uncles. Her Grandma Mary was a midwife. She delivered hundreds of African American babies in the Tignall, Delhi, Sandtown, Danburg, and Washington communities in the 1930s, 40s and 50s including the writer of this article. Moreover, she provided home health care for scores of white mothers who had just given birth.

Oree Dee discovered very early in life that she loved to learn. Even though the few books she and her classmates had at Pole Branch Baptist Church Elementary School were "hand me down" books from the white school in Tignall, she cherished them and absorbed every detail of every text book that was available to her. By the time she was in the second grade, Oree Dee had purposed in her heart that she would be a school teacher. She especially enjoyed attending Pole Branch Church School from first through ninth grade. It was located next to her home church, Pole Branch Baptist Church and was the ancestral church of her father's side of the family.

OREE DE WILLIS
Both the church and school had been founded by her great grandfather, Albert Willis, his sons and daughters and their families, and other African American men and women in the community. Her Grandpa Scott, and his brothers, Andrew Jackson, Will, Jonas, and others had, with their own hands, built the church and school she loved so much. She would go on to be a lifelong member of Pole Branch. Among the members of the church and school that positively influenced her was the church pastor, Rev. H. H. Hunter. Rev. E. R. McLendon replaced Rev. Hunter and he continued to encourage her and all the students to get all the education they could get, to use their heads, and to grow up and "be somebody." Rev. E. R. McLendon was the son of Rev. Toombs McLendon who had been the first pastor of Pole Branch. Rev. E. R. McLendon's mother was related to Oree Dee in that Toombs had married Fannie Willis, daughter of Oree Dee's great grandfather, Albert Willis.

ALBERT WILLIS
Others who encouraged and positively influenced Oree Dee during her formative years were her teachers Mary Smith and Minnie Lee Willis. Minnie Lee was married to Rev. James Walter "Son" Willis who was Oree Dee's father's first cousin. She really felt supported and challenged at Pole Branch Church School. The concept of "it takes a village to raise a child" was alive and well with her. She and all her classmates, especially the Willis children, were expected to study hard and to do well.

Success stories about her late greatgrandfather Albert Willis also inspired Oree Dee. He had been born in 1834 in the shadows of Monticello, the Charlottesville, Virginia, home of Thomas Jefferson, who had died in 1826. Albert Willis had been sold away from his mother for $1,000.00 into slavery in 1845, when he was eleven years old to James Henry Willis, a large plantation owner in Delhi, Wilkes County, Georgia, whose family was formerly from the Charlottesville, Virginia area.

Even as a young man, Grandpa Albert was a talented wood carver, as was his fellow Charlottesville native, Eston Hemings, son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Such was the Willis family's high regard for the wood carving talent of great-grandpa Albert that he was entrusted to delicately carve out the mantle above the fireplace in the James Henry Willis homehouse - a mantle that remains functional and decorative to this very day. In a conversation I had with Mary Sale Stennett, granddaughter of James Henry Willis, in the mid 1970s, she stated (with tears in her eyes) that all the Willis family loved great-grandpa Albert and that he was extremely talented as a wood carver. Now owned by an Atlanta medical doctor, the Willis Plantation homehouse where great-grandpa Albert grew up still stands on Delhi Road.

The 1860 and 1880 Federal Census lists great-grandpa Albert's racial classificationas "mulatto" which indicated that he had a white father. In the James Henry Willis household he was first a house servant, then the personal servant of James Henry Willis. He was allowed to learn to read and write. In 1861 when 41-year-old James Henry Willis (who was married with several children) voluntee

VHS VIDEO TAPE! Baby Alive: Emergency Treatment / Accident Prevention! The Video That Could Save Your Child's Life! Phylicia Rashad and medical experts present a step-by-step guide for prevention and treatment of life-threating situations facing children from birth to 5 years old. Topics covered include choking, drowning, poisoning, head injuries, cuts, burns, first aid, injury prevention, childproofing your home, automobile and travel safety, water safety, and what to look for in nursery items. Approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics.