Fay Vincent, former MLB commissioner. ESPN.
“List of people banned from Major League Baseball“.
Merle Louise Simon, who worked extensively with Stephen Sondheim.
Ms. Simon — who worked for most of her career under the name Merle Louise — began her run in Sondheim shows with “Gypsy,” in 1959, and continued with “Company” (1970), “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1979) and “Into the Woods” (1987), Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine’s interpretation of fairy tales. (Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” and the music and lyrics for the other shows.)
“Steve had a real history with Merle,” Mr. Lapine, who directed Ms. Simon in three roles, including the Giant in “Into the Woods,” said in an email. Mr. Sondheim, he added, “loved the energy she brought to the rehearsal room and the stage. Merle was usually the smallest person in the room but always the most ebullient and with the most glorious voice.”
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Hey! New York Times! Spoilers!
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She became “Reagan’s window on the Soviet Union,” the historian James Mann wrote in “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan” (2009), a study of his role in ending the Cold War. “She described the country and the Russian people to the president in terms that he understood and found useful.”
It was Ms. Massie who taught Mr. Reagan the Russian proverb “Doveryai no proveryai” (“Trust but verify”), which he uttered to Mr. Gorbachev when they met in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986 — and repeated so often that Mr. Gorbachev grumbled about it.
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Although Ms. Massie corresponded with Mr. Reagan and met with him before and after trips she made to Moscow — including a private lunch on the Oval Office patio with the president and the first lady, Nancy Reagan — memoirs by Reagan officials involved in U.S.-Soviet relations portray her as a minor figure.
But Mr. Mann wrote that she “played a more significant role” than is generally known. She served as an unofficial emissary, carrying messages between Mr. Reagan and Moscow, and she humanized Russians for Mr. Reagan at a time when he was revising his view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and reaching out to Mr. Gorbachev to ease nuclear tensions.
She was married to Robert K. Massie.
The couple’s first child, Robert, had hemophilia. Caring for him, which the Massies described in a searing memoir, “Journey” (1975), turned out to be an unlikely portal into Russian culture and, ultimately, the Oval Office.
The Massies learned that Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, the last of the Romanovs, had a son with hemophilia. Mr. Massie went on to write a best-selling history, “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1967), with Ms. Massie serving as editor and researcher. Seeking some respite from raising a disabled child, she took Russian lessons.
After their divorce, she married Seymour Papert.
James Carlos Blake, one of those authors I have heard of but have not read. The NYT compares him to Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.
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