I know, this is an obvious choice, but it is still a classic:
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Musical interlude.
Monday, April 8th, 2024Obit watch: March 18, 2024.
Monday, March 18th, 2024David Breashears passed away on March 14th. I haven’t seen much coverage of this, but I was able to find an obit from Outside.
I think most Everest fans are familiar with him. He did several climbing documentaries, including the IMAX “Everest”.
Breashears shot Everest during 1996 climbing season, and witnessed the deadly blizzard that killed eight climbers and was later chronicled by author Jon Krakauer in the Outside feature and best-selling book Into Thin Air. Breashears helped with the rescue and recovery of climbers after the incident, and his experience led to another Everest film, the 2008 Frontline documentary Storm Over Everest. The film included interviews with survivors, video from the 1996 expedition, and recreated scenes of the storm and rescue efforts.
Speaking to Frontline, Breashears said he felt it was necessary to retell the story via film and not just words to try and help viewers understand the tragedy. “For me, to see and hear direct testimony from a person who has overcome such adversity, has survived such a difficult and stressful event, is very powerful,” he said. “There is something so much more poignant about seeing a person’s face and looking into their eyes and hearing their voice than just reading about them on a written page.”
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According to Wikipedia, he also did the climbing shots for David Lee Roth’s “Just Like Paradise” video.
Obit watch: March 12, 2024.
Tuesday, March 12th, 2024Eric Carmen, musician. NYT (archived).
I don’t have any association with or memories of “All By Myself”, but I do remember hearing “Hungry Eyes” a lot on the radio.
Jean Allison, actress. No “Mannix”, but she did do a fair number of cop and cop adjunct shows. Other credits include “Hec Ramsey”, “McCloud”, and “Lou Grant”.
Obit watch: March 8, 2024.
Friday, March 8th, 2024Vice Admiral Richard Truly (US Navy – ret.), astronaut and former NASA administrator. NASA.
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But he returned to NASA as its associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program in 1986, less than a month after the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight due in part to launching in too cold temperatures, killing its seven-person crew, which included a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.
A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would be launched only in daylight and in warm weather (the Challenger was launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I do not want you to think this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the proper thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “The business of flying in space is a bold business.”
He added: “We cannot print enough money to make it totally risk-free. But we certainly are going to correct any mistakes we may have made in the past, and we are going to get it going again just as soon as we can under these guidelines.”
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He remembered walking to his office on his first day as associate administrator to find people crying in the corridor “because of the pounding they had been taking in the media,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Colorado School of Mines, where he was a trustee at the time.
“By that time,” he added, “rather than an airplane accident, it had been portrayed as NASA killed its crew. It was the start of the most tumultuous engineering, political, cultural, social endeavor that I ever found myself in.”
He was appointed administrator by George H.W. Bush, but (according to the NYT) left after three years because of a dispute with “Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was the chairman.”
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Steve Lawrence, of Steve and Eydie fame. NYT (archived).
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Akira Toriyama, manga guy and creator of “Dragon Ball”.
John Walker, AutoCAD and Autodesk guy.
The idiosyncratic Mr. Walker put his mark on a company that was anything but corporate in spirit. A 1992 article in The New York Times described Autodesk under Mr. Walker as “a cabal of counterculture senior programmers” who “took their dogs to work and tried to reach a consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by electronic mail.” (In those days, email was still a novelty in the business world.)
That same year, The Wall Street Journal scored a rare interview with Autodesk’s “founding genius.” The resulting article noted his quirks, including the fact that he did not allow the company to distribute his photograph in any form. He was prickly in manner during the interview, the reporter noted, and insisted that it be conducted in front of a video camera, debated each question and claimed a copyright on the conversation.
Obit watch: February 15, 2024.
Thursday, February 15th, 2024Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, soprano.
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…it was merely a prelude to a long career that included her New York City Opera debut in 1982, once again as Musetta in “La Bohème,” as well as performances throughout Europe.
In addition to making Musetta her own, she also made the title role in Verdi’s “Aida,” an Ethiopian princess held captive in ancient Egypt, a signature. At one point she even performed the role amid the temples of Luxor in Egypt itself.
In 1992, Ms. Fernandez won a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equivalent of a Tony, for best actress in a musical for her rendition of Carmen in “Carmen Jones.”
The prelude was her role in a movie, which is what she may be most famous for.
“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.
The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.
Ms. Fernandez played Cynthia, and the tape plays the MacGuffin.
When this came out in 1981, Siskel and Ebert reviewed it, and I wanted to see it. A moped chase through a subway? I was there, man. But at that time, it was hard for me to see foreign films in a theater, or on home video. I don’t recall “Diva” being re-released or playing anywhere when I was in college, even at the Union when they still had a film program.
Now, of course, I have “Diva” on blu-ray from Kino Lorber. And it is on our big movie list. I’ve been waiting until we can watch it as a group.
“Diva” was her only film role as an actress, though IMDB also credits her with a 1980 “TV movie” of “La Bohème” in which she sang “Musetta”. (Kiri Te Kanawa sang “Mimi”.)
Obit watch: February 9, 2024.
Friday, February 9th, 2024I wonder sometimes if I lean too much on the NYT for obits. I do try to pull obits from a variety of places (as long as they are trustworthy sources) and the paper of record doesn’t cover everyone, or cover them in a timely fashion.
But the Times also tends to publish obits for interesting people that I just don’t see elsewhere.
Two examples:
Si Spiegel. He was a pioneer of artificial Christmas trees.
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After American Brush unsuccessfully branched out into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, tweaked the brush-making machines to emulate the real trees and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and founded Hudson Valley Tree Company two years later., which began mass-producing 800,000 trees a year on an assembly line that turned one out every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating annual sales of $54 million and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, N.Y., and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multimillionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.
Yes, he was Jewish. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that, but it is a key part of his origin story: he applied for commercial piloting jobs after WWII, but was consistently rejected because he was Jewish.
Mr. Spiegel celebrated Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a winter holiday staple — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times. “My kids liked them.”
The other reason he’s interesting: he flew 35 missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot. On his 33rd mission, his B-17 was shot down and crash-landed in Poland, which was occupied by the Russians at the time.
Elleston Trevor, call your office, please. I don’t see any evidence that he ever wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but I wish he had: I am genuinely curious how they moved the B-17 engine.
Walter Shawlee, who the Times describes as “the sovereign of slide rules”.
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In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s.
Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and estate sales and school district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website, Mr. Shawlee called the find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”
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Lawrence gave me a slide rule tie clip one year, which looks like it may have come from Mr. Shawlee’s website. I treasure it, and wear it on special occasions.
Slide Rule Universe. I was previously unfamiliar with this site, but wow! It looks like a relic of the old school Web, which I absolutely love.
For the historical record: NYT obit for David Kahn.
The U.S. government considered [The Codebreakers] so volatile that the National Security Agency, the country’s premier cryptology arm, pondered how to block its publication. It even considered breaking into Mr. Kahn’s home in Great Neck, N.Y.
Eventually the agency chose more overt means, demanding that the publisher, Macmillan, not release it. The company refused; instead, MacMillan and Mr. Kahn submitted the text to the Department of Defense for review. Mr. Kahn agreed to cut a few paragraphs about Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, which were still classified, but otherwise he kept the book intact.
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Seiji Ozawa, conductor.
Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.
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He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony. He scored many successes over the years, proving especially adept at big, complex works that many others found unwieldy.He toured widely and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
Though relatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 to become music director of the august Vienna State Opera, where he stayed until 2010. The rest of his life was mainly consumed with health issues and with dreams of a major comeback on the concert stage, which he was never able to achieve.
Obit watch: February 8, 2024.
Thursday, February 8th, 2024Mojo Nixon. NYT (archived). THR.
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Here’s a live version of one of my favorite Mojo songs, from 1989:
I’ve written a couple of times about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. Here’s another interesting one: Henry Heard, tap dancer.
Of course, there’s more to the story than that.
He learned to dance at age 6 and was performing in clubs by the time he was 14. On Jan. 7, 1939, the car he was riding in with his group, the Three Dots, was struck by a train at an unguarded crossing in Memphis. Everyone in the car was killed except Henry, who suffered devastating injuries that necessitated the amputation of his right arm and right leg.
After multiple surgeries, he thought his life as a dancer was over and was tempted to give up. But he resolved not to. “I’d seen the blind and the crippled standing on street corners with their tin cups and pencils,” he told The Columbus Star in 1958, “and decided that I wanted to do more with my life than be the object of public curiosity and pity.”
He learned how to dance again, on one leg.
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Wherever he traveled, Heard entertained patients at hospitals, including veterans hospitals, refuting the prevalent attitude that people with disabilities were charity cases to be pitied. He appeared at community events held by the N.A.A.C.P. as well as at Democratic Party fund-raisers, and he founded a long-running annual Christmas benefit for children at the Illinois School and Rehabilitation Center in Chicago, often using his own money for gifts and dinner and dressing as Santa.
Heard was one of a number of African American tap dancers, like Peg-Leg Bates, Big Time Crip and Jesse James, whose artistry made percussive use of a mobility aid.
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He also did a lot of work with disability organizations, while at the same time being highly critical of them:
Obit watch: February 6, 2024.
Tuesday, February 6th, 2024Toby Keith. THR. Tributes. Pitchfork.
No offense to Mr. Keith, who died far too young, but: I kind of like “Beer For My Horses”, the song, for many of the same reasons I like “Make My Day” (the T.G. Sheppard/Clint Eastwood duet). They’re both kind of silly but fun songs with a point about as subtle as a man painted purple dancing naked on a harpsichord singing “Subtle points are here again”.
On the other hand, the video for “Beer For My Horses” is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen.
I am assuming Mr. Keith did not have a lot of input into the video. If he did, I’m sure he was dazzled at the thought of working with Willie and didn’t really think it through. No matter what, his legacy isn’t going to stand or fall on that one video.
Wayne Kramer, of the MC5.
Bob Beckwith, the firefighter who posed with George W. Bush after 9/11. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Obit watch: January 24, 2024.
Wednesday, January 24th, 2024Dr. Arno A. Penzias has passed away at the age of 90.
While this is another one of those obits for a relatively obscure figure, I feel there’s a good chance many of my readers have actually heard of Dr. Penzias.
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In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements…
In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?…
The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation…
The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.
Charles Osgood. THR. I feel like I’m giving him the short end of the stick, but there’s really nothing I can add to what others have said about him.
Gary Graham, actor. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and the 2003 “Dragnet”.
Melanie (aka Melanie Safka), who sang at Woodstock. This is another one where there’s not much I can say: pigpen51 may be more familiar with her music than I am.
Obit watch: January 22, 2024.
Monday, January 22nd, 2024What a career. Other credits include “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming”, “A Soldier’s Story”, and…
Mary Weiss, lead singer of the Shangri-Las.
Okay, in a restricted technical sense, Beatrix Potter died on December 22, 1943. This is from the paper of record’s “Overlooked No More” series. While the paper of record ran followup articles after her death, for some reason (and even the NYT staff can’t figure out that reason) they never actually ran an obit for her until now.
Obit watch: January 17, 2024.
Wednesday, January 17th, 2024Professor Peter Schickele, of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.
Damn it.
I was a big fan of Prof. Schickele and his interpretations of P.D.Q. Bach when I was younger. I still am, but I was when I was younger too. (If it’s been a while since I bought a PDQ Bach album, well, it’s been a minute since I bought any albums.)
Fun fact: he stole Philip Glass’s woman. (Well, okay, only sort of. You’ll have to read the obit for the full story. And that is supposedly a NYT “gift” link: please let me know if you have a problem.)
Worth noting: he wrote the score for “Silent Running”.
Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.
Designed to be appreciated by novices and cognoscenti alike, P.D.Q.’s music is rife with inside jokes and broken taboos: unmoored melodies that range painfully through a panoply of keys; unstable harmonies begging for resolutions that never come; variations that have nothing whatever to do with their themes. It is the aural equivalent of the elaborate staircases in M.C. Escher engravings that don’t actually lead anywhere.
True story: once upon a time, I had just bought the new Schickele recording of a recently discovered P.D.Q. Bach work. Lawrence and I were sitting around our apartment listening to it when a friend came over for a visit. Said friend was (like us) a big fan of Glass and other minimalist composers. So we told our friend we had a new Philip Glass recording, and we wanted to play the first track for him.
He was fooled. Right up to the point where the slide whistle came in.
I was lucky enough to see him in performance…
…when he could still climb down a rope.
“They were playing a record in the store,” Mr. Schickele recalled in a 1997 interview for the NPR program “All Things Considered.” “It was a sappy love song. And being a 9-year-old, there’s nothing worse, of course. But all of a sudden, after the last note of the song, there were these two pistol shots.”
That song, he learned, was Mr. Jones’s “A Serenade to a Jerk.”
“I’ve always felt that those pistol shots changed my life,” Mr. Schickele continued. “That was the beginning of it all for me.”
Prof. Schickele also gave me a quote I have been known to use from time to time:
“Truth is just truth – you can’t have opinions about truth.”
John Brotherton, owner and pitmaster at Brotherton’s Black Iron Barbecue. The Saturday Dining Conspiracy has been there twice, and eaten there once. That’s not a shot at Mr. Brotherton, just a statement of reality. When you run a really good barbecue restaurant (which Brotherton’s is), your customers run the risk of the barbecue selling out before they get there.
Dejan Milojević, assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. He was 46.
Lynne Marta, actress. Other credits include “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Then Came Bronson”.
Some followups: Tom Shales in the NYT. And an appreciation of him by one of the NYT writers.
Nice obit for Terry Bisson by Michael Swanwick.
Michael Swanwick also has a touching piece up about his friend of 50 years, Tom Purdom, which I encourage you to go read.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Monday, December 25th, 2023All of my readers this year have been good. So I’m not going to post any of the accordion versions of “I Saw Three Ships” I found on YouTube.
A short one from AvE:
May 2024 be better for everyone than 2023.
“Thank’ee,” said Scrooge. “I am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty times. Bless you!”
Obit watch: December 6, 2023.
Wednesday, December 6th, 2023Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., another one of those unsung big damn heroes.
His most famous invention was probably the plastic blood bag:
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No matter what I may have thought of Lear’s politics, he served honorably in WWII (52 combat missions in B-17s).
John Nichols, author. (The Milagro Beanfield War)
Denny Laine, of the Moody Blues and Wings.
Obit watch: November 30, 2023, part 2.
Thursday, November 30th, 2023Shane MacGowan. Pitchfork. NYT. THR.
I’ve never been a Pogues fanatic. I pretty much missed them when they were an operational band, and the first thing I ever heard from them was “Fairytale Of New York”. I think we can play that now. After all, it is the Christmas season.
Later on, I picked up some more Pogues by way of “The Wire”. Unfortunately, I can’t find a clip of a drunk McNulty (not the valued commenter here, the other one) repeatedly ramming his car into a bridge abutment while playing “Transmetropolitan”…
And Shane MacGowan was Irish, but I think I’d be willing to grant him honorary US citizenship just for this song, which should probably be the national anthem. (Well, either that, or “You Never Even Called Me By My Name”.)
Frances Sternhagen, actress. THR. Other credits include “Law and Order”, “Up the Down Staircase”, and “Communion”.
Obit watch: November 19, 2023.
Sunday, November 19th, 2023I’m aware of Rosalynn Carter, but I think it’d be better to wait until tomorrow to post an obit roundup.
Captain Don Walsh (USN – retired). Regular readers of this blog might recall the name. For everyone else: on January 23, 1960, Lt. Walsh and Jacques Piccard descended in the bathyscaph Trieste seven miles under the ocean, to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, into the Challenger Deep.
Late in life, Dr. Walsh began to revisit his pioneering dive site. In 2012, at age 80, he advised the filmmaker James Cameron when he became the first person since Dr. Walsh and Mr. Piccard to make a dive into the Challenger Deep. “I feel so fortunate,” Dr. Walsh said at the time. “Dudes my age are mostly sitting in rockers passing around snapshots of grandkids and great-grandkids.”
He also advised the undersea explorer Victor L. Vescovo when he dived into the Challenger Deep in 2019. The next year, Mr. Vescovo once again made the dive; this time, he took Dr. Walsh’s son, Kelly, as a passenger. The two men spent four hours exploring the planet’s deepest spot.
He was 92. According to his son, he died “sitting in his favorite chair”.
Viktor Belenko passed away on September 24th, but his death was not widely reported back then. Mr. Belenko was the Soviet pilot who defected to Japan in his MIG-25 in 1976.
The MiG-25 turned out to be a paper eagle. Its giant wingspan was not for maneuverability but simply to lift the plane and its 15 tons of fuel off the ground. It couldn’t even do its job: Though it flew fast, it was no match for the American aircraft it was meant to take down.
Of great value, though, was what Lieutenant Belenko told the Americans about conditions and morale within the Soviet armed forces.
American officials had long believed that Soviet military personnel were chiseled supermen. Lieutenant Belenko revealed that they were often half-starved and beaten down, forced into cramped living spaces and subject to sadistic punishment at the tiniest infraction.
During a visit to a U.S. aircraft carrier, he was astonished that sailors were allowed unlimited amounts of food, at no cost. He once bought a can of cat food at a grocery store, not knowing it was for pets; when someone pointed out his error, he shrugged and said it still tasted better than the food sold for human consumption in the Soviet Union.
John Barron’s book MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lt. Belenko is available in a Kindle edition.
David Del Tredici, composer. I remember hearing the name a lot in the 80s and 90s when I was buying music, but I don’t think I ever owned a Tredici recording.
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But his fascination with Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books led him toward the lushness of a neo-Romanticism that erupted with full force in “Final Alice” (1975), a 70-minute score for soprano and a huge orchestra that was packed with hummable melodies, as well as just enough chaotic brashness to keep its late-20th-century provenance clear.
Some atonalists regarded “Final Alice” as a betrayal. But a PBS broadcast and a recording by the soprano Barbara Hendricks, with Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (which had commissioned the work), brought “Final Alice” to a large audience that embraced it enthusiastically — as did many musicians.
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Suzanne Shepherd, actress. Other credits include the LawnOrder trifecta (original recipe, “Criminal Intent”, Sport Utility Vehicle), “Uncle Buck”, and “Requiem for a Dream”.