Angus Cloud (7/31)
Cloud, a native of Oakland, CA, was recruited into acting after being spotted on a NYC street by the director of the HBO drama Euphoria, in which played a "kindhearted" drug dealer to teenagers. At the end of season 2, Cloud's character was wounded and arrested. The coroner determined that Cloud accidentally overdosed on meth, cocaine, fentanyl and benzodiazepines.
Paul Rubens (7/30)
The unique comic talent that brought us the delightful "Pee-wee's Playhouse" also appeared in Cheech and Chong movies. He died after a six-year battle with cancer.
Patricia Ann Goldman (7/26)
A progressive Republican, Goldman began working in government as a senior at Goucher College in 1964, and led poverty and workforce programs for the US Chamber of Commerce from 1967 to 1971. She was appointed by Jimmy Carter and re-appointed by Ronald Reagan to the National Transportation Safety Board, where she served from 1979 to 1988, most of that time as vice chair. She was one of the few Republicans present at the founding meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971, and at the 1976 Republican National Convention she helped NWPC secure the continued endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment and tried to prevent the party platform from opposing Roe v. Wade. In 1995, she became the president of the WISH List, a political action committee raising funds for female Republican candidates in favor of abortion rights. After surviving ovarian cancer, in 1997 she co-founded and was the president of the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance. "I don't think a Republican feminist is an oxymoron," she said. Sinead O'Connor (7/25)
I'd just read and written about O'Connor's 2021 book Rememberings, in which she talks about her use of weed and its effect on her music. I nearly heard her perform live when I spotted her name (misspelled) on the marquee at San Francisco's August Hall while attending ICBC 2020, but the show was sold out. I swore I wouldn't let that happen again. But now I've lost my chance; we all have. She had a lot to heal from in her life, and has died at age 56 of as-yet-unknown causes. Tony Bennett (7/21)
The beloved, iconic crooner refused to record gimmicky songs and instead devoted himself to The Great American Songbook, bringing it to new generations starting with duets with Elvis Costello and k.d. lang on MTV's Unplugged. Recording this Grammy-winning duet with Amy Winehouse, Bennett calmed her down by bringing up Dinah Washington, noticing her influence on Winehouse's singing. Bennett was a lifelong liberal Democrat who participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965; Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan who drove him to the airport after the march was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Source. As reported by CelebStoner, Bennett used marijuana and other drugs, and spoke up for drug legalization days after Whitney Houston died, mentioning Winehouse and Michael Jackson also. “I witnessed that in Amsterdam,” he said. “It’s legal, and as a result there’s no panic in the streets. There’s no deals, there’s no ‘Meet me at the corner and I’ll give you something.’ You’re always afraid you’re going to get arrested. You have to hide. Why do that?”
Eleanor Vadala (7/19)
Chemist, materials engineer and balloonist Vadala was director of research and development at the Naval Air Development Center in Pennsylvania, where she helped to develop light synthetic materials for use in aircraft. One of her jobs was the testing of fabric in existing balloons to ensure they could be used safely. Vadala was the third woman in the United States to be FAA-certified as a balloon pilot and as member of the Balloon Club of America, she participated in 66 balloon flights, 47 flights in gas balloons and 19 flights in hot air balloons. In 2019, she was inducted into the Balloon Federation of America Hall of Fame, at the National Balloon Museum in Indianola, Iowa. She died at the age of 99. Jane Birkin (7/16)
The British-French singer, actress and fashion icon is perhaps best known for the "Birkin bag," which came about in 1984 when she sat next to a Hermes executive on a plane and complained as a young mother she couldn't find a bag to carry baby bottles. Though ultimately she found the bag too heavy to carry, and she objected to the company's use of crocodile skin, the bag has, over the years, become a status symbol, with prices ranging from $10,000 to $500,000. As a child, Birkin demonstrated in the streets of London against capital punishment, and in the 1970s, she appeared at the Bobigny trial, in support of four women accused of having helped a high school student to have an abortion following a rape. Birkin campaigned against the far-right in France, participating in a protest denouncing Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. In a 1970 interview she expressed her surprise that the sexy hit song she recorded with Serge Gainsbourgh, "Je t'aime... moi non plus" was banned by the Vatican. Known for her frequent collaborations with Gainsbourg, her work with Agnes Varda in the ’80s produced “films that are as artistically audacious as they are original in their approach to sex and the female body,” Richard Brody wrote in 2016.
Evelyn M. Witkin (7/8)
During her senior year at New York University in 1941, Witkin (neé Evelyn Ruth Maisel) joined a group of students protesting the university’s policy of benching Black athletes whenever its sports teams played opponents from segregated schools, causing her to be suspended and sending her to Columbia instead of NYU for graduate school. There she studied the nascent field of genetics and "her discovery of the process by which DNA repairs itself opened the door to significant advances in the treatment of cancer and genetic defects." Witkin won the National Medal of Science in 2002 and in 2015, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the highest honor in the medical sciences after the Nobel Prize. In 2021, on her 100th birthday, the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers renamed one of its premier research laboratories for her. Her son Joseph is a doctor and a founding member of the rock ‘n’ roll group Sha Na Na. Source.
Tara Heiss (7/7)
A 5-foot-6-inch point guard who played college basketball for the Maryland Terrapins from 1975 to 1978, Heiss was the first women's basketball player to score 1000 points. Maryland won the first Atlantic Coast Conference tournament in 1978 and Heiss was named Most Valuable Player. A member of the 1980 US Olympic team, she was unable to compete due to the United States boycott of the Olympics in Moscow that year. Heiss played for the Allentown Crestettes in the Amateur Athletic Union and the New Jersey Gems in the short-lived Women's Professional Basketball League. Many consider her the best point guard in the history of US women's basketball.
Marlena Spieler (7/6)
Coco Lee (7/5)
Lee was a musician, actress, dancer, and singer from Hong Kong. She released 18 studio albums, two live albums, and five compilation albums, including her first English-language album, "Just No Other Way." Her single "Do You Want My Love" received international attention, entering the top 50 of the US Billboard Dance Club Play chart. Lee performed "A Love Before Time" from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at the 73rd Academy Awards, becoming the first Chinese American to perform at the Oscar ceremony. She was also the first Chinese ambassador for Chanel. In 1998, her song "Colors of the World" was used for the opening of the Football World Cup, and she sang the theme song "Reflection" (shown) and voiced Fa Mulan in the Mandarin version of Disney's Mulan. Her death came after a suicide attempt at the age of 48.
Catherine Burks-Brooks (7/3)
In 1961, it been 15 years since the Supreme Court ruled that segregated seating on interstate buses and trains was unconstitutional. Yet Southern states continued to float the ruling. The Freedom Rides pushed back, organizing teams of riders, Black and white, to board buses and challenge Jim Crow laws. Burks, a 21-year-old student, joined a ride and challenged Bull Connor, the notoriously bigoted public safety commissioner who dumped the riders by the side of the road in rural Alabama near the Tennessee line, telling him they would see him in Birmingham by high noon. The students sought shelter at the home of an elderly Black man who was too frightened to let them in, until Burks asked to see the lady of the house, who gave them entry. After completing two more rides and enduring weeks of imprisonment at Parchman, Mississippi's infamously brutal state penitentiary, she reenrolled at Tennessee Agricultural University, earning a degree in education and teaching into her 70s. Source.
Vicki Anderson (7/3)
Born Myra Barnes, Anderson sang and recorded a number of singles under both her birth and stage names. In 1970, she released her most famous song, the feminist anthem "The Message from the Soul Sisters." She toured the UK with the James Brown Funky People Revue in the late 1980s and again with husband Bobby Byrd, the founder of The Famous Flames, in the mid-1990s.
Dr. Susan Love (7/2)
Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, originally published in 1990 and now in its sixth edition, has sold nearly half a million copies. A seventh edition is scheduled to be published this fall. "In an era when surgeons were overwhelmingly male and deference by their female patients was still expected, she exhorted women to ask hard questions about their treatment." She advocated lumpectomy followed by radiation over mastectomy when possible, and questioned the utility of mammograms in detecting cancer in younger women. Her negative appraisal of hormone replacement therapy, then routinely recommended to treat menopausal symptoms, was vindicated some years later, when the therapy was found to increase the risk of breast cancer, heart disease and strokes. Dr. Love was a founder of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, and was chief visionary officer of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation. Source.
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