Get ready: Motown Museum reopens
Get ready, because the Motown Museum is back in business.
The Detroit building where Berry Gordy Jr. built his music empire reopened its doors to the public. It had been closed since March due to the coronavirus pandemic.
And visitors flocked to Hitsville, U.S.A.
“We were almost sold out today,” Robin Terry, chairwoman and CEO of the Motown Museum, told reporters through a “Hitsville” face mask. “So, it seems to be working for our visitors and still meeting our safety and security expectations.”
Before entering the building, guests were required to fill out a health questionnaire and undergo a temperature check. If they passed, museum representatives provided them with a sticker to wear that read: “Signed, Sealed, Delivered. I’m Good,” referencing the Stevie Wonder hit.
Once inside, no more than 10 visitors at a time are given a guided tour of the historic building on West Grand Boulevard. To help maintain the recommended social distance, record-shaped decals are scattered on the floor throughout the museum. They read: “Stop in the Name of Love. Stay 6FT Apart.”
One other big change is that still photography, which had long been forbidden inside the museum, is not only permitted, but encouraged.
“That’s probably the most celebrated change at Motown Museum,” Terry said. “For a long time, you couldn’t take pictures here. And we said, ‘What better time than now to allow our patrons, our fans, to come and capture their moments at Hitsville and share them with the world.”
Gordy launched Motown in 1959. His late sister, Esther Gordy Edwards, founded the museum in the former Hitsville headquarters in 1985. In addition to Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye and many others recorded hits there before Motown moved to California in 1972.
Actor-writer-director Andrew McCarthy, a 57-year-old father of three, keeps getting asked about his “Brat Pack” years in the 1980s.
He is now ready to answer. Grand
Central Publishing announced last week that McCarthy’s “Brat: An ’80s Story” will come out next spring.
Grand Central is calling the book “a revealing look at coming of age in a maelstrom, reckoning with conflicted ambition, innocence, addiction and masculinity.” McCarthy is calling it a longdelayed reckoning.
“For years people have asked me, on a near daily basis, ‘What was it like “back in the day?’ Routinely, I’d offer up any number of stock responses,” he said in a statement. “Finally I thought, ‘Let’s take a hard look under that rock.’ What I found surprised me, at times scared me, and finally made sense of a lot of seemingly disparate parts of my life.”
McCarthy was widely known in the ’80s for such films as “Pretty In Pink,” “Less Than Zero” and “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and for his association with such contemporaries as Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald and Emilio Estevez.
The term “Brat Pack” was popularized by an unflattering New York magazine story that ran in 1985 and portrayed the young actors as shallow and self-absorbed.