Backstage With Lena

From ArtsBeat Blog at NYT:

"Lena Horne, who died on Sunday at 92, won a special Tony Award in 1981 for her Broadway revue “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.”

In the show Ms. Horne sang many famous numbers, including “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Stormy Weather,” while dressed in costumes designed by Giorgio Sant’Angelo. The production ran for more than a year at the Nederlander Theater before touring the country.

David LeShay, now the director of communications for the Theater Development Fund, a nonprofit organization that runs New York’s three TKTS discount-ticket booths, was a press assistant at the time and was assigned to take photographs of the many celebrities who visited Ms. Horne after the show.

“As a young photographer I was called upon to take the backstage photos whenever celebrities came backstage,” Mr. LeShay wrote in an e-mail message. “It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my career.”

A slide show featuring some of those photographs can be found here."

David Remnick remembers Natalia Estemirova

From The New Yorker:

"A couple of years ago, at a memorial service for the great Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya put together by PEN, I had the honor of interviewing onstage one of Politkovskaya’s friends, the human-rights activist Natalia Estemirova. Politkovskaya, who was murdered at her home in Moscow in 2006 (as Michael Specter and Keith Gessen have written in The New Yorker), did her best and bravest work in Chechnya for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, one of the few remaining outlets with the audacity to continue publishing the truth about Russia in the Age of Putin. In Chechnya, one of her closest friends and sources of information was Natalia."

Another friend of Anna's died. When this story broke, months ago now, I remember reading several accounts of Ms. Estemirova for each and every scrap of information—and the detail that devastated me the most was that she was probably kidnapped and murdered just after she sent her teenage daughter off to school. I asked once on this blog, imagine if your mother was Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata. I ask it again, here with more force: what if your mother was Natalia Estemirova?