Names and faces
The stage lights have been hard to get used to and she worried about limited rehearsal time, but ballerina Misty Copeland has put aside her nervousness and is finding her feet on Broadway. “It’s an incredible feeling,” she said this week after making her debut in the dance-heavy musical On the Town at the Lyric Theatre. “I felt nervous that I was going to forget stuff, which I don’t typically feel. We rehearse so much as ballet dancers, and the steps become ingrained in your muscle memory.” Copeland is playing Miss Turnstiles, a love interest for one of three sailors enjoying a few hours of shore leave in 1940s New York. The role requires both acting and singing, in addition to plenty of dancing, including a 15-minute ballet at the end. The part in this staging of the musical was originally done by Megan Fairchild, a principal dancer at the prestigious New York City Ballet. Copeland, who recently became the first black woman to be a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, had only six rehearsals and sang her dialogue out loud only twice before going on, but each time she appeared the crowd went wild, cheering her entrances, big numbers and giving her a thunderous standing ovation at the end. “The audience is so different from what I’m used to. You know immediately that they are excited to be here, and it’s an incredible feeling. I just felt so overwhelmed — that first entrance and throughout,” she said.
When a possible baseball Hall of Famer tweets about Nazis and ends up in the doghouse with ESPN, he should take heart: Sarah Palin has his back. In a tweet deleted earlier this week, Boston Red Sox World Series hero Curt Schilling compared Muslims to Adolph Hitler. “The math is staggering when you get to the true #s,” including a photo of Hitler with the text: “It’s said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How’d that go?” But, when the pitcher turned-ESPN analyst’s comments appeared on social media, Schilling was suspended — albeit just from covering the Little League World Series — for the remark. “Curt’s tweet was completely unacceptable, and in no way represents our company’s perspective,” ESPN said. “We made that point very strongly to Curt and have removed him from his current Little League assignment pending further consideration.” Palin stepped in to Schilling’s defense in a lengthy Facebook post, writing that the network is “a journalistic embarrassment” and “ESPN — what happened to you? Your intolerant PC police are running amok and making a joke out of you!” Palin wrote that ESPN, by suspending Schilling, is misleading the public about the threat posed by terrorism. Her advice: “Stick to sports.”