"Satchmo, will you get to Heaven?/I doubt it," said Soviet Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenlco in a poetic tribute to the late Louis Armstrong. "But if you do,/Do as you did in the past./And play./Cheer up the state of the angels." The outspoken Yevtushenko has bothered Russia's bosses for years, blessing and blaming with small regard to the Communist Party line. And he has not changed. In one part of his Armstrong's Trumpet he says, "A poet and a great jazzman are equal brothers in what they give the world." Soviet leaders, who frown upon both jazz and angels, have made no comment at all.
It sounded like a new form of Chinese torture: having an appendectomy under local anaesthetic, then getting pierced with needles. While on a tour through Communist China, New York Times Columnist and Vice President James Reston, 61, was flattened with appendicitis. He permitted local surgeons to operate, then with journalistic bravado let them try to relieve the pain by acupuncture—an ancient method of rerouting the forces of yin and yang by sticking needles into parts of an ailing anatomy, but not necessarily near the site of the operation. At week's end, Reston was reported to be recovering nicely.
"He has to be the ultimate skywatch pilot," says his boss. "He lends more credibility to skywatching than anyone you could imagine." Francis Gary Powers, who garnered embarrassing fame in 1960 by getting caught spying on Russia in a U-2 airplane, is still spying —this time on traffic conditions on Los Angeles' freeways. Filling in for a vacationing traffic reporter, Powers says that the biggest change he can spot from his single-engine Cessna is that in the early '60s "when I flew at high altitudes, I could see from the Gulf of California to the Monterey Peninsula on a clear day. Now at 3,000 ft., with all the smog we have, sometimes I'm lucky to see three miles."
It was a dyspepsia-provoking thought. Julia Child, giantess of French cooking, appearing with the Boston Pops Orchestra? Admittedly, she looks like a Wagnerian soprano, but could she sing? As it turned out, she didn't even try. The orchestra played and Julia beamed, mugged and moved her chaotic voice through the narrator's role in Tubby the Tuba. The Boston audience loved it and gluttonously demanded an encore. Reverting to her metier by wheeling out a cartful of bottles, the obliging Julia rapidly concocted a cocktail and served it to Conductor Arthur Fiedler precisely on time with the orchestra's final tonic chord.
Out of the past shimmered the memory of delicate high notes and feminine charm. Soprano Lily Rons, who once warbled Fs above high C, was back in the news. The famed opera singer of the '30s and '40s was honored by the French government with the badge of Commander of the National Order of Merit for her "services to France," including her patriotic work during World War II. One enduring memory: petite Pons singing La Marseillaise to tear-drenched thousands in Rockefeller Center the day Paris was liberated in August 1944.