The 1950s never took Marilyn Monroe very seriously. Only after she died in 1962 from an overdose of sleeping pills did the world learn just how seriously she wanted to be taken. Aside from her ambitions as an actress, she tried poetry, which interested Carl Sandburg enough for him to request copies of three short works. Published in the August McCall's, they mirror Marilyn's somber side. Samples:
Don't cry my doll Don't cry
I hold you and rock you to sleep
Hush hush I'm pretending now I'm not your mother who died.
Help Help
Help I feel life coming closer
When all I want is to die.
When inmates of Massachusetts' Walpole State Prison formed a JayCee group, their first gesture to the local townspeople was to stage a barbecue and dance for senior citizens. Trying out a waltz, one white-haired woman found herself in the arms of Albert DeSalvo, the self-confessed but never prosecut Boston Strangler. DeSalvo, who is serving a term for breaking and entering and assault, proved a model escort.
"You can really groove on God this way," said one youth at Manhattan's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. To make up for the fact that the late Mahalia Jackson had died last January before she could sing a promised benefit concert at the cathedral, 4,000 admirers came to hear Duke Ellington read the Bible and Clara Walker and Delores Hall sing gospel tunes. Then they prayed and clapped happily in time with the music. Said Rutgers University Professor Samuel Proctor, who delivered the sermon: "It was joyful music, a joyful occasion, as joyful as Mahalia's own life and music were." -
"I'm just tired of waiting," explained the Rev. James Groppi, the militant priest of Milwaukee's St. Michael's Catholic Church. "It'll be the fourth time a parish has opened up in the black community, and each time I've been bypassed." So, since his archdiocese ignored his request for transfer to a church in the black district, Groppi resigned. His next planned project: studying at the Antioch School of Law. "Apparently," said Groppi, "the church is telling me something. I'll be better able to serve people in the community if I know something about the law." -
Even Leonard Bernstein has to rest sometimes. So the man whom Igor Stravinsky once likened to a musical department store announced that he will take a year off from conducting in order to write new theater pieces. Among his main projects: a musical version of the dybbuk, the Jewish legend of a wandering evil spirit that seeks to possess its victims. Bernstein's vacation won't begin until September 1973, by which time he will need it even more. His imminent schedule includes stints at the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony and, as a change of pace, a year as professor of poetry at Harvard.
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