Happy Star Wars day – May the Fourth be with all of you today!
The Mummy, starring the delightful Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, opened on this day in 1999.
Oscar-winning actor, humanitarian and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn was born on this day in 1929.
Today would have been Paul Gleason’s 82nd birthday. Best known as Vice Principal Vernon in The Breakfast Club and LAPD Deputy Chief Dwayne T. Robinson in Die Hard, Gleason made a career of playing tough guys and cops, thanks to his rugged looks and gruff demeanor. He also had a fantastic sense of humor, even reprising his role as Richard Vernon for the 2001 parody flick Not Another Teen Movie.
One of my favorite albums of the 80s, Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain, was released on this day in 1984. Featuring the absolutely iconic “The Killing Moon”, “Seven Seas” and “Nocturnal Me” (you may recognize it from the Stranger Things season one episode “The Flea and the Acrobat”), Ocean Rain is lush and atmospheric, and used orchestral arrangements to lend a majestic drama to the proceedings. It’s an album that I still love thirty-some years later.
On this day in 1970, four students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, were killed (and another nine injured) by National Guardsmen who’d been called in to quell campus protests of the Vietnam War. The incident inspired Neil Young to write “Ohio”, a quintessential protest song that was recorded by CSNY (along with Stephen Stills’ anti-war song “Find the Cost of Freedom”) and rush-released by Atlantic Records. The single was receiving significant airplay within a few weeks of the shooting.
Peanut Butter and Julie 