Elle and Dakota Fanning in Talks to Co-star in a Biopic on the Shaggs




The Fanning sisters, Elle and Dakota, are in talks to team up as siblings (method!) for a planned feature film about the sixties family girl-group curiosity the Shaggs. The Shaggs, one of rock's quirkier no-hit wonders, were comprised of four New Hampshire sisters — Dot, Betty, Helen, and Rachel Wiggin — who had no seeming musical aptitude, but formed a band anyway because their father, Austin Wiggin, insisted his mother’s session with a palm reader pre-visioned their global success despite their awkward, gangly appearance.
They recorded one cacophonous album, 1969's Philosophy of the World, which was widely derided, and they laid down the instruments they weren't quite sure what to do with in the first place after their father's death in 1975. But they did have their fans, like Frank Zappa, who infamously called them "better than the Beatles," and the band NRBQ, which rereleased the girls' album in 1982.
Dieckmann (who directed 2009's Motherhood, with Uma Thurman) spent the late eighties and early nineties shooting music videos for R.E.M., Aimee Mann, and the Throwing Muses, and first set up her Shaggs movie at the now-defunct Artisan Entertainment, and it bounced around Hollywood for years — until now.
Oddly, just as the Fanning sisters are boarding Dieckmann’s cinematic project, a long-gestating Off Broadway musical about the Shaggs and their only album is also finally and simultaneously taking shape. The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World starts previews in mid-May, and opens Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in June.



It’s almost Greek in nature,” says John Langs, the musical’s director and co-creator. “There’s a very clear line of an American Kronos, devouring his children: He essentially imprisoned his teenage daughters and erased their years of going from girls to women, and replaced it with endless band practice and calisthenics. Now, with our show and the movie coming together, I feel like we’ve become instruments of this prophecy. I feel the hand of Austin Wiggin pushing at my back.”

Monkees set Fox date for retro tour






Susan Whitall / The Detroit News
Sixties popsters the Monkees will bring their 45th anniversary tour to the Fox Theatre on June 23. This time around, three of the four Monkees — Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork — are on board, with Mike Nesmith sitting it out. The U.S. tour will mark the first live appearances by the Monkees in a decade. The group was put together for a comedic CBS-TV show that ran from 1966-68 and scored a number of pop hits, including "Last Train to Clarksville," "Daydream Believer," and "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone." While derided as a fake band in the '60s, the group went on tour to prove they could play, and their pop catalog is more admired today than in their heyday. Tickets are $23, $33, $53 and $103, and go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday at lympiaEntertainment.com, Ticketmaster.com and Fox Theatre box office. To charge by phone, call (800) 745-3000.

Attack of the flying saucers! How six 'UFOs' sparked a nationwide panic when they landed in Britain in 1967

By Michael Hanlon



The alien invaders arrived without fanfare. No gigantic spacecraft casting mile-wide shadows over our great cities. No death rays and no obvious threats to annihilate humankind.
And for their beachhead on planet Earth, these unassuming extraterrestrials chose not Central Park in New York City, nor the lawns of the White House in Washington DC. Instead, this was to be a very British Close Encounter.
After voyaging for tens of light years across interstellar space, the aliens chose to make landfall on the green of a golf course near Bromley, in South-east London, some fields scattered across southern England and a hill in Somerset.
It was a small armada of six flying saucers that arrived in Britain on September 4, 1967. They were not gargantuan, circular craft constructed from exotic alloys, but shiny plastic pods that looked like gigantic fried eggs, and they were each light enough to be manhandled by two burly men.
Forty-three years later, it seems utterly extraordinary that anyone took this invasion seriously. But files released by the National Archives this week confirm just how concerned was the Government of the day about the threat from space.
For this was Britain’s most successful UFO hoax — and a new book reveals in unprecedented detail how it duped the highest echelons of Whitehall.
The hoax caused panic among intelligence agents, senior police officers and top-flight mandarins. And it put Britain on alert for a full-scale interstellar invasion.
‘It was the most effective and elaborate flying saucer hoax ever perpetrated in the world,’ says the book’s author John Keeling. ‘And the hoaxers did it all for £30.’
The hoax exposed the fact that at the height of the Cold War, the British authorities had no idea how to respond neither to an alien invasion nor to an attack by a human foe using unconventional weapons.
In the late Sixties, Britain was in the grip of UFO fever. Every week, sightings were reported from across the land — strange lights, saucers, flying cigar-shaped objects. This was a time of tension both in the Cold War and the Space Race, and paranoia about new technologies and innovations was at its height.
Shows like Dr Who back in the 1960s seemed to encourage alien sightings
It was also an age when extraterrestrials figured strongly in the TV schedules of the time, from Dr Who to the Quatermass series, a factor which is known to have increased reported alien sightings (we saw another peak in the Nineties, corresponding with the transmission of The X-Files).
There were 360 British ‘sightings’ that year of 1967, nearly one a day, and the media was taking the subject of extraterrestrials seriously. This made it just about the perfect time for a handful of clever, mischievous trainee engineers from the MoD’s Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in Hampshire to perpetrate one of the most audacious pranks in student history.
The ringleaders were Christopher Southall and Roger Palmer, both aged just 21. The prank was conceived with the best of intentions — to raise money for charity as part of the college’s Rag Week.
In this it succeeded admirably. But the team had a second, darker motive; they wanted to see how the authorities would react if there was an alien invasion, and to find out just how prepared Britain was.
It looked like mashed human brain and stank to high heaven
The Farnborough Rag committee agreed to the plan in January 1967. But it would not be until September that the invasion would be launched. The idea was to try to make the ‘spacecraft’ enigmatic and sinister rather than cartoonish UFOs.
The students constructed six oval flattened objects, 54 in long, 30 in wide and 20 in deep, moulded from fibreglass and laced with artist’s graphite to give them an other-worldly sheen. They looked more organic than mechanical, and indeed the team always referred to them as ‘eggs’ rather than flying saucers.
They decided that they would have to have something ‘alien’ inside them before they were sealed up. So they concocted disgusting jelly-like goo made from bread dough boiled at a high temperature. It looked like mashed human brain and stank to high heaven. Anyone who tried to break open one of the UFOs was going to be in for a nasty — albeit harmless — surprise.
Also inside each saucer was placed a small electronic loudspeaker, programmed to emit an unearthly wailing noise if the UFO was disturbed.
Each saucer weighed about a hundredweight and just about fitted in the back of a car. The team had to decide where to ‘plant’ them. They drew a line along the 51.5-degree parallel, which runs from Kent to Somerset, and plotted six more-or-less equidistant points.
Britain was in the grip of UFO fever in the late Sixties, with sightings reported every week of a UFO. And so, in the early hours of September 4, they set out, in the dead of night in two-man teams. This was a time when few people drove and the students were wary of attracting police attention. The saucers were hidden in the backs of the cars by blankets, fishing gear and even the casing for a double bass.
Saucer No 1 was placed on the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary, near a new housing development. At 2.30am the alarm inside the saucer began to wail as it was placed in position.
The pranksters fled the scene. Coincidentally, that night there were reported UFO sightings in nearby Rochester. But it was in Bromley, an hour’s drive away, that the fake spacecraft had the biggest impact — thanks to a weird cosmic coincidence.
A strange noise coming from the night sky disturbed the sleep of a woman called Cynthia Tooth. She went to her bedroom window and saw a strange light — a UFO, she claimed — and ‘it went down behind some trees’. She alerted the local paper the next day, and her report played right into the hands of the hoaxers.
As southern England woke up, reports filtered through that the country was under attack
It wasn’t until the morning that the ‘egg’ left by the hoaxers on the Bromley golf course was discovered — by a caddy named Harry Huxley, who was out early searching for lost balls.
What ensued was straight out of an Ealing Comedy.
Huxley decided to carry on looking for the golf balls before reporting his find.
But later that morning a policemen called Gordon Hampton — ‘Flash’ to his friends and colleagues — saw Huxley while patrolling the lane around the course in his panda car. Huxley told him of his encounter with the ‘egg’.
As PC Hampton stepped out of his car, he heard an eerie, piercing wail coming from the UFO. He radioed the station, convinced this was something extraterrestrial, but was wary of using the words ‘spaceship’ or ‘UFO’ over the airwaves — this was a time when police radios were unencrypted and routinely eavesdropped by radio hams.
‘I’ve found an unusual object,’ he told his boss, who asked him to describe it.
Eventually PC Hampton admitted he had found a flying saucer and a posse was despatched from Bromley station to see if he was drunk or telling the truth.
The local police’s decision to take the saucer through Bromley’s streets back to the station later earned them a serious reprimand from senior Scotland Yard officers, who were concerned that they might contaminate the town.
Once the UFO was in custody, the officer in charge of the operation, a Superintendent Sheppard, phoned someone at Scotland Yard called the ‘back hall inspector’. His job was to field unusual requests from across the nation’s police forces, and contact relevant government departments. In turn, the report landed on a desk at the MoD, just after 9am.
As southern England woke up, reports filtered through that the country was under attack. In Clevedon, Somerset, a paperboy found a flying saucer on Dial Hill. This boy went rushing into his shop and told his boss. Everyone burst out laughing. Shortly after, at a farm in Welford in Berkshire, a postmistress spotted one of the ‘eggs’ in a field.
TV show The X-Files gave people yet more food for thought in the Nineties with regards to alien lifeforms
Now, three UFOs had been found. At 8am, another ‘egg’ was discovered, this time in Winkfield in Berkshire. A man saw the object in his garden and went out to have a look. This particular UFO malfunctioned — its bleeper never went off.
Across the road was a radar station used by NASA to track satellites and the new Gemini manned spacecraft. An engineer at the station came over to have a look and was concerned. The final two saucers — in Chippenham and on the Isle of Sheppey — were not discovered until 8am and noon respectively.
This was an era before mobile phones, before email, indeed before any sort of easy communication at all. Back then they had only pens and telephones. It is perhaps surprising just how rapid the official response was, even though it quickly descended into farce.
Once the MoD was involved, intelligence staff and a senior unnamed flight lieutenant — who later became an adviser to the Thatcher government on missile security — took charge.
‘I asked him what he thought,’ says Keeling, who spoke to him for his book on condition of anonymity. ‘He said: “Well, s**t, what do we do now?” ’
The first thoughts in Whitehall were not, in fact, of aliens, but of Soviet weaponry. Could the Russians have sent a fleet of robots, perhaps primed with nuclear warheads or chemical weapons, as the first wave of an invasion of the West? The MoD asked Britain’s radar stations if they had spotted anything unusual the night before, but there was nothing.
The police and government bodies looked ridiculous. They were furious and there were threats of prosecution
Britain’s top intelligence officers and policemen were mobilised and decided to keep the saucers secret, but news had already broken.
A senior detective drove down to Bromley only to find the police station mobbed with reporters and two TV crews filming the policemen, all happily posing with what might be a Soviet weapon of mass-destruction or an alien spacecraft. The detective exploded with rage.
The detective was followed to Bromley by intelligence agents in a big black car from Whitehall. Geiger counters found the saucer was not radioactive.
By this time, the police had tried drilling into the saucer — only to discover the rotting, smelly dough within. For a while it looked as if Bromley would have to be put into quarantine. A couple of hours later, a Ministry of Defence helicopter was rushed to the Isle of Sheppey egg.
Meanwhile, one of the other saucers, the silent one in Winkfield, was taken down to the police station and put in the lost property office.
The saucers were prodded, drilled, manhandled and in several cases punctured. The Chippenham one was blown up in a controlled explosion by bomb-disposal experts. If they had contained anthrax or smallpox or some deadly Soviet material, never mind alien technology, it would have been a catastrophe.
In the end, the hoaxers’ cover was blown — not by a top detective or MI5, but by a newspaper reporter who knew that the Farnborough students had form. The year before, they had built a convincing ‘robot’ for rag week which had appeared in all the media.
Towards the end of that extraordinary day, the hoaxers held a press conference, at which they admitted their guilt and stated: ‘We believe that flying saucers could land one day, so we landed our own to give the authorities some practice.’
The police and government bodies looked ridiculous. They were furious and there were threats of prosecution. In the end, wiser counsel prevailed, perhaps because the Establishment realised that dragging the whole episode through the courts would only throw more egg on official faces.
As a result of all the publicity, the students raised about £2,000 for charity — they received offers from all over the world for the surviving saucers. One was put on display in a West End restaurant. The Isle of Sheppey saucer was taken by the MoD helicopter crew. And the silent one in the police lost property office just disappeared.

Owsley Stanley: the Sixties hero who 'turned on' a generation






Owsley 'Bear' Stanley, the original LSD cook, survived the psychedelic decade to die in a car crash. Kathy Marks reports.


If you cannot remember the Sixties because you were there, you might – if you happened to be living in San Francisco – have Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the original LSD cook, to blame. Stanley, who died in a car crash in Australia on Sunday, fuelled the "flower power" counter-culture that took root in California in the mid-1960s, supplying it with acid that he manufactured after stumbling across a recipe in a chemistry journal.

He also worked with the psychedelic rock band Grateful Dead, who wrote their song "Alice D Millionaire" about him after a newspaper described him as an "LSD millionaire". One batch of his drugs reputedly inspired Jimi Hendrix's song "Purple Haze", and he provided LSD for the notorious "Acid Test" parties hosted by the American writer Ken Kesey, which featured in books by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson.

News of Stanley's death – his car swerved off a road and slammed into a tree near his home in north Queensland – elicited tributes, but also surprise. Despite a youth so misspent that his name became slang for good acid, Stanley had made it to the age of 76. He was even a great-grandfather. In a statement yesterday, his family mourned him as "our beloved patriarch".



The folk hero of the counter-culture came from an establishment Kentucky family: his grandfather was the state's Governor and a Senator; his father was a United States government attorney. Augustus Owsley – he later dropped Augustus – fled to the West Coast in 1963, enrolling at the University of California in Berkeley. He already had done stints in the US Air Force and in a professional ballet company.



At Berkeley, he dropped out after one semester, having discovered the LSD recipe in the university library. Police raided his first laboratory in 1966, but acid was still legal then and Stanley successfully sued for the return of his equipment. Between 1965 and 1967 he produced an estimated 1.25 million doses – stoking the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and enabling countless hippies to follow Timothy Leary's advice to "turn on, tune in, drop out". By then, Stanley – who moved to Australia in the early 1980s, convinced the Northern Hemisphere was heading for another Ice Age – was closely involved with the Grateful Dead. After briefly managing the San Francisco-based band, he became their sound engineer. He is credited with technological advances such as on-stage monitor speakers, as well as creating the first public-address system specifically for music.


Sam Cutler, the group's former tour manager and a close friend of Stanley's since the 1970s, described him yesterday as "an alchemist, a wonderful man, a great thinker". He said: "His death is a grievous loss to his family and the tens of thousands of people from the Sixties on who were influenced by his work with the Grateful Dead."

The first person to produce LSD in large quantities, Stanley was the supplier of choice for many musicians, and is credited with inspiring many classics. Raided again in 1967, Stanley was jailed for two years in 1970 after being convicted of marijuana possession.

In a rare interview, with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, he was unrepentant: "I wound up doing time for something I should have been rewarded for. What I did was a community service, the way I look at it. I was punished for political reasons. Absolutely meaningless. Was I a criminal? No. I was a good member of society. Only my society and the one making the laws are different."

Stanley was a colourful character, nicknamed the Bear after sprouting body hair at an early age and the Dancing Bear because of his ballet background. According to the website jambands.com, he would "pour acid into a squirt bottle and spray musicians and fans alike at shows". The psychedelic dancing bear became one of the Grateful Dead's logos; Stanley also co-designed the band's lightning bolt skull logo.

Psychedelic drugs "bring an understanding of the ecology of the planet and the interaction of all living things, because that's one of the first things you become aware of when you take psychedelics – how everything is alive and everything depends on everything else", Stanley wrote in later years. Every indigenous culture that respected the environment, he said, used "psychedelics of some sort, usually in a regular, ritualised manner".

Stanley – who survived throat cancer in 2006, losing one vocal chord – claimed to have eaten only meat, eggs, butter and cheese since the 1950s. Convinced that vegetables were harmful, he attributed a heart attack he suffered a few years ago to broccoli that his mother made him eat as a child. He wrote in his blog in 2006: "I much prefer cannabis to alcohol, never liked hard liquor and gave away even having the odd glass of wine in '90 when I began lifting weights."

Stanley's wife, Sheila, survived the crash near the town of Mareeba, inland from Cairns. She broke her collarbone, but has been discharged from hospital. The couple have four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Based in Queensland's tropical north, which Stanley believed was most likely to survive another Ice Age, he worked as an artist, making gold and enamel sculptures which he sold online. He also made money from his recordings of Grateful Dead concerts, which he turned into live albums.

Stanley still kept up with the music scene. Among new bands he particularly liked were Wolfmother and the Arctic Monkeys, he told the San Francisco Chronicle. He said: "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD."

American rock band Steely Dan loosely based their 1976 single on Owsley Stanley's exploits. The lyrics "On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene/ But yours was kitchen clean" refer to Stanley's reputation for producing LSD with a high level of purity.

In his 2008 memoirs, former rock 'n' roll tour manager Sam Cutler wrote that Hendrix's 1966 single paid homage to a particularly potent batch of Stanley-made acid. However, despite its reputation as the epitome of psychedelic drug-inspired music, the famous guitarist always maintained the song was a love song and had nothing to do with drug culture.

The San Francisco psychedelic blues-rock band is said to have been named after a street brand of LSD produced and promoted by Stanley. The American composer's lesser-known 1968 track mocked the hippy movement and those who followed the philosophy of its lyrics: 'I'll go to Frisco/ Buy a wig & sleep/ On Owsley's floor'.

Spring Break

The beach loomed strong in the '60s on two very different fronts: desegration and debauchery. But Fort Lauderdale continued to build and expand. It also felt the pull of history and the sting of civic unrest.
One unusual, and controversial, construction was the Henry E. Kinney Tunnel, which burrowed 35 feet under the New River where a drawbridge had stood for 32 years. The tunnel, named after the Broward editor of The Miami Herald who campaigned for it, is Florida's only non-private tunnel.

Nova University of Advanced Technology got its start in a storefront on Las Olas Boulevard. Now named Nova Southeastern University, it's the state's largest private university. Broward Community College also opened with 701 students on land where the airport now sits. Now Broward College, its student body currently tops 20,000.




The Pier 66 hotel and its rotating rooftop restaurant became an overnight tourist draw. And the New York Yankees came to Fort Lauderdale for spring training in 1962 and returned for 34 more seasons.

The same year the Yankees arrived, a young man named H. Wayne Huizenga bought a single garbage truck and smattering of accounts. From that modest start, Huizenga rode the region's growth wave and his own entrepreneurship to help form Waste Management and create two other Fortune 500 companies as well as two new sports franchises.

The Cold War too had an effect. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the military again deployed to Port Everglades, a staging area for possible hostilities.

In 1964 the core of Hurricane Cleo, a category 2 storm whose 110 mph winds wrenched bricks off buildings, raked over Fort Lauderdale, more windy than wet. But the biggest of the city's figurative storms resulted from people: mobs of college students and determined groups of black activists.

In December 1960 the film "Where the Boys Are" premiered at the Gateway Theatre. The movie, filmed on Fort Lauderdale beach, recounted the romantic adventures of a group of college kids on Spring Break, at the time a minor annual influx.

No longer. Three months after the movie's premiere 50,000 college students swarmed Fort Lauderdale. Beachside streets resembled parking lots, and though the kids' mayhem was generally harmless, families kept their distance.

After decades, the ever-growing yearly pilgrimage became too much for the city to absorb. Spring Break was ultimately quashed. Also quashed was the ban on blacks on Fort Lauderdale beach. On July 4, 1961, a small group of activists including Eula Gandy Johnson, Dr. Von D. Mizell and his niece Lorraine Mizell clasped hands and staged the first of a series of "wade-ins" at city beaches. Tired of a lack of cleanliness and facilities at the "black beach" across the inlet, the protesters demanded entree to the shore like anyone else. A judge overruled city efforts to halt the protests, and a year after the first wade-in officials opened the beaches to all.

But racial tensions still simmered. The decade ended with the city's sole race riot in 1969. Angered over an alleged police shooting of a black woman outside a store, African-Americans unleashed their pent up rage in a week of rioting. Businesses were burned in the city's predominantly black northwest neighborhood. Thirty-four were injured

ON THIS DAY



On March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War, the My Lai Massacre was carried out by United States troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley Jr.

The Chicago Transit Authority AKA Chicago formed in 1967

I love those pointed shoes and those suits


Jean Dinning, Songwriter of Pop Tragedy ‘Teen Angel,’ Dies at 86




By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: March 12, 2011




That fateful night the car was stalled upon the railroad track


I pulled you out and we were safe but you went running back.

Love, death, adolescent angst. It all added up to a song that became almost mythical the minute it was released in October 1959: “Teen Angel.”Mark Dinning, a pop singer of modest renown, sang it. Many American radio stations and the British Broadcasting Corporation refused to play it, saying it was too gruesome. Teenagers nonetheless soon learned enough about it to make it a No. 1 song for two weeks in February 1960.

Jean Dinning, Mark’s sister, wrote “Teen Angel.” She got the title from reading a magazine article about juvenile delinquency that said good kids deserved a flattering name, like “teen angel.” She wrote half of the song, then jolted awake one night, as if someone had shaken her and handed her the rest of the words.

What was it you were looking for that took your life that night?

They said they found my high school ring clutched in your fingers tight.

Ms. Dinning died on Feb. 22 in Garden Grove, Calif., her daughter, Cynthia Wygal, told The Orange County Register. She was 86.
Early, tragic death was in the air in 1959. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash earlier that year, and memories of James Dean’s death in a head-on collision four years earlier were still fresh.
Teenagers in 1960 scooped up Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her,” the tragic tale of a teenage boy who enters a racing car championship to win prize money to buy Laura a wedding ring. After the inevitable crash, his last words are the title of the song.
“Teenage coffin songs” became a genre, at least to sarcastic disc jockeys.
But if “Teen Angel” captured a moment in time, it also had legs as a piece of popular culture. It was sung at Woodstock by Shah-Na-Na and was heard in the 1973 movie “American Graffiti.”
When a panel chosen by the Recording Industry of America Association, the National Endowment for the Arts and Scholastic Inc. rated the songs of the 20th century in 2001, “Teen Angel” took 219th place.
The British newspaper The Observer included “Teen Angel” in a list of the top 50 teenage anthems since 1940.
Eugenia Dinning, who later changed her name to Jean, was born on March 29, 1924, in Grant County, Okla., where her father lost the farm in the Depression and became a Maytag salesman who moved often. His nine pitch-perfect children improved a succession of church choirs.
Jean and her sisters Lou and Ginger won several amateur contests when Jean was 10. As the Dinning Sisters, they had a 15-minute radio show in Enid, Kan., when they were still young and went on to national fame on NBC radio, in movies and on records.
Their million-seller was “Buttons and Bows” from the 1948 movie, “The Paleface.” Other hits included “A Pretty Girl Milking Her Cow” and “We Fell in Love on the Greyhound Bus.”
“The Billboard Book of No. 1 Hits” said Jean first played “Teen Angel” to her brother Mark (whose birth name was Max) at a family dinner. Before the dishes were cleared away, Mark recorded it on a tape recorder. Jean later had several 45s made and mailed him one. When he took it to a record store to play it, an appreciative crowd gathered around the listening booth.
Mark didn’t love it at first, but MGM soon persuaded him to record it. It sold more than 2.5 million copies.
The song was copyrighted twice, both times with Ms. Dinning’s name and the name of her former husband, Red Surrey. The two had agreed to share credit for any song either one wrote during their marriage, and after they divorced she received full credit for “Teen Angel” as part of the settlement.
Her ex-husband did not figure in her accounts of how the song was composed, though he may have helped shape the music.
Ms. Dinning is survived by her sisters Ginger and Dolores (who succeeded Lou in the group); five children, Shay Edwards, Cynthia Wygal, Howard Mack, and Ronald and David Surrey; eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Mark Dinning died in 1986.
To some, “Teen Angel” raises more questions than it answers. Why was the ring loose in the car? Had he just given it to her? Had it fallen off her finger?
The uncertainty is clearly part of the song’s appeal, and the narrator desperately wants these answers himself. “Teen angel, teen angel,” the song ends, “answer me, please.”


Click the picture below to watch the Utube version of the song

 

I'm finally going to Disneyland, March 2011

Burbank movie producer Walt Disney

Rod Sterling

York and Serling

Censored



Hollywood -- Frank Lattourette, producer, and James Mosher, writer and co-producer, of TV's 'Medic', examine the film strip of a Caesarean Section birth scene that they accuse New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman of having cancelled from a TV showing on 'Medic.' NBC spokesmen and Church officials denied that the Cardinal had anything to do with the cancellation. The National Broadcasting Company announced that it was cancelling the film because the baby birth sequence "would be unsuitable for home Audiences."

ummm...Robin

Burt Ward

Car 54 Where Are You? 1961-1963

Joe E Ross and Fred Gwynne

Car54.jpg


Joe E. Ross (Joseph Roszawikz)  Ross's personal life was as noisy and troubled as his screen characters. According to fellow nightclub comedian Hank Garrett, Ross was "married eight times and they were all ex-hookers. It was cheaper to marry them than keep visiting them." Co-workers also complained that Ross was continually vulgar, even cursing around children. Imogene Coca, who played Ross's caveman wife in the sitcom "It's About Time," hated working with Ross and referred to him as "that awful man


Ross died of a heart attack on August 13, 1982. He was stricken while performing in the clubhouse of his apartment building in Van Nuys, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.[2] He was buried in Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetery. Ross' gravestone is inscribed with the double entendre "This man had a ball!"


Frederick Hubbard "Fred" Gwynne (July 10, 1926 – July 2, 1993) was an American actor. Gwynne was best known for his roles in the 1960s sitcoms Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters, as well as his later roles: Pet Sematary and My Cousin Vinny. He was also recognised for his distinctive baritone voice.

Gwynne was born in New York City, a son of Frederick Walker Gwynne, a partner in the securities firm Gwynne Brothers, and his wife Dorothy Ficken. His paternal grandfather was an Episcopal priest born in Camus, near Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland, and his maternal grandfather was an immigrant from London, England. Gwynne attended the Groton School, and graduated from Harvard University in 1951. Gwynne spent most of his childhood in South Carolina, Florida, and Colorado because his father travelled extensively. At Harvard, he was a member of the Fly Club, sang with the a cappella group the Harvard Krokodiloes, was a cartoonist for the Harvard Lampoon, (eventually becoming its president), and acted in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals shows.

Have Gun, Will Travel

Boone (standing) on set of Have Gun, Will Travel
Boone was born in Los Angeles, California, the middle child of Cecile (née Beckerman) and Kirk E. Boone, a well-to-do corporate lawyer. He was descended from Squire Boone, younger brother of frontiersman Daniel Boone. Richard's nephew is actor Randy Boone (born 1942); his cousin is actor-singer Pat Boone; his first cousin once removed is actress-singer Debby Boone (Pat's daughter). Boone graduated from Hoover High School in Glendale, California. He attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, but left prior to graduation and tried his hand at oil-rigging, bartending, painting and writing before joining the United States Navy in 1941. He served on three ships in the Pacific during World War II, seeing combat as an aviation ordnanceman and gunner on TBM Avenger torpedo planes.

      After cancellation of his weekly show, Boone and his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. While living on Oahu, Boone helped persuade Leonard Freeman to film Hawaii Five-O exclusively in Hawaii. Prior to that, Freeman had planned to do "establishing" location shots in Hawaii, but to do most production in Southern California. Boone and others convinced Freeman that the islands could offer all necessary support for a major TV series and would provide an authenticity otherwise unobtainable. Freeman, impressed by Boone's love of Hawaii, offered him the role of Steve McGarrett; however, Boone turned it down, and the role went to Jack Lord, who shared Boone's enthusiasm, which Freeman considered vital. Coincidentally, Jack Lord had appeared with Boone in the first episode of Have Gun – Will Travel, entitled "Three Bells to Perdido."

I really liked this show

What's My Line

George !

Superman!

JeffersonAirplane before they became a starship

The Nuns used to show films in the classroom with this guy talking about...I don't know, I fell asleep most of the time

Werner von Braun

Bell Telephone 1965 "The Future is now"

Shirley MacLaine and Bob Fosse, rehearsing a scene for Sweet Charity.

MacLaine and Fosse

Watts 1968

Jack Ruby

I read Archie comic books

The Monkees!

the monkees before

Watts 1968

Mai, 1968

Paul

November 1963

Billy Wilder, on the set of Irma La Douce 1963

The Dave Clarke Five (Rick Huxley; Lenny Davidson; Dave Clark; Denis Payton; Mike Smith).

The Dave Clark Five

Jimi Hendrix at The Hollywood Bowl, 1968.

Jimi Hendrix

Rreverie1965, Lichtenstein

Barbara recording 1968

How bored are these kids?

You can have a He-Man voice

Crosby Stills nash and Young

Joan Baez, God what a depressing person

This is what Burl Ives looked like before the Baby Boomers were around

What ever happen to the World's Fair?

Century 21 Poster

Christmas 1961

Westing House ad (1951)

The Beach Boys

Peter Paul and Mary

Peter, Paul and Mary

This was shown in 1968 and its still on every Christmas

John Lennon, Anne Murray, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper and Mickey Dolenz whoop it up at the Troubadour.