| 56-year Disney Legend helped create `Small World'
In need of a job in 1944, Santa Monica High School graduate Joyce Carlson followed a friend to Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif., where she landed work in the traffic department delivering mail and office and art supplies. But what started as just a job turned into a career for Carlson, who spent the next 56 years involved first with Disney animated movies and then theme park attractions worldwide. Carlson, who helped ink animated films such as Cinderella, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty before helping create the original model for the ''It's a Small World'' attraction for the 1964 New York World's Fair, died of cancer Wednesday at her home in Orlando, Fla. She was 84. As part of Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's theme park attraction design division, Carlson worked on many attractions but is most closely identified with ``It's a Small World.'' In addition to working on the model for the ride, she was known as the artist behind many of its singing dolls.
Laurie Metcalf
Right out of college, she and a group of Chicago friends started Steppenwolf Theatre, which grew into one of America's most distinguished companies. (Her 20-minute monologue in Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead is an off-Broadway legend.) Later, she picked up a little sitcom called Roseanne, which rewrote the rules of television comedy with its unblinking look at blue collar life. Now Metcalf is exercising her gift for being up to the minute on Broadway, co-starring in David Mamet's new comedy November. It's a Mamet play unlike any other, with the structure of a classic comedy in the Kaufman & Hart vein but filled with scabrous jokes on such hot-button topics as the torture of prisoners, campaign fundraising, the Middle East and gay marriage. Nathan Lane stars as a U.S. President willing to shake down the national turkey lobby to save his faltering re-election campaign, with Metcalf as his lesbian speechwriter, who's not above a little blackmail to get married on national television.
Microsoft's Connected Learning Community Grants Enhance Programs at 35 ...
(CSRwire) Emmanuel Hutchinson, a student at Tucson High School, gave up football to attend classes at the Tucson-Pima Arts Council's Multimedia Arts Education Center, a component of the Council's Arts Education Program. He found the environment safe -- other kids didn't try to intimidate him and teachers treated students like adults, with respect and trust. Since graduating from the program in May, he's even returned to do a presentation using posters he created with Microsoft Greetings 2000 software. Thanks to the program, he's also found a career path -- Emmanuel wants to become a computer graphic designer. Connected Learning Community Grants The Multimedia Arts Education Center offers a tuition-free intensive computer mediated arts technology program for lower-income, middle school students who otherwise might not have access to this kind of technology.
Green fashions finding a following among designers
At the "aWear: An Eco Fashion Event," an all-day teach-in and celebration of sustainable style held recently at Green City Gallery in Berkeley, designer Kirsten Beneke showed off her dresses made from recycled fabric scraps. To conserve electricity, Beneke didn't use a sewing machine, instead making an elegant pink evening gown by simply cutting the fabric and securing it with a purple sash. Other attendees showed their support for ecological fashion by participating in a clothing swap that featured fuzzy scarves and lots of fluorescent caftans (it was in Berkeley, after all). "I made sure everything I was wearing tonight was sustainable" - as in purchased at thrift stores, said Abraham Kneisley, the gallery's spokesman. Even though "aWear," an event put together by Beneke, was sparsely attended, it points to a growing area of fashion interest among those who aren't just obsessed with having the latest looks from the hottest designers on the pages of glossy magazines.
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