Happy Birthday, Donna Reed (and other useless bits...)Today's useless bit of trivial information: Today, January 27, is Donna Reed's birthday. She would have been 87. She was made famous by in her rolls in movies like It's a Wonderful Life (one of my favorites) and her academy award winning performance in From Here to Eternity. Her persona was idealized in The Donna Reed Show. (I was more of a Leave It to Beaver and Family Affair girl, myself) She died in 1986 of cancer.
Why? Why!? Just why do I know this utterly useless bit of information, (or the tasty tidbit about Napoleon) you may ask. I must admit, it is my Sunday morning indulgence. A hot cup of coffee, crawl back in bed and . . . . turn on CBS. I must confess, I watch the CBS show Sunday Morning to start my week. Unlike any regular news show, there is little talk of the spiraling stock market, the increasing insurgency in Iraq and the pontificating of political pundits. This news show is filled with good news and uplifting stories. Why not start my week with a bit of light trivia or thoughtful commentary?
There are more interesting stories as well. Like today's story on the Monuments Men, the men and women whose job it was to recover and return stolen artwork from Hitler's caches after World War II. The book Rescuing da Vinci tells how Hitler and his men looted public and private art collections for their own personal use. They stole the thousands of works by Van Gogh, da Vinci, Botticelli, Kandinsky, Klee, Chagall, and many others from Jewish collectors and public museums. The Monuments Men were assigned to find, recover and return the work. These men, some of them art historians and museum curators, did what they could to rescue major portions of European art and culture from destruction. That was today's art history lesson...
And so, I will fill up my coffee cup, crawl back in bed, and see what commentator Ben Stein has to say this morning.
When you handle yourself, use your head; when you handle others, use your heart.
-Donna Reed