Miscellany and Trivia

"A hotel in Germany is having a hell of a time finding cases of Kabbalah water, a special brand of water blessed by Jewish mystics, before Madonna arrives," the San Francisco Examiner reported some time ago. .

"Apparently, it's the only thing Madonna will drink, but it's hard to find outside of the U.S., more specifically, Hollywood. A source told MSNBC, "It would be easier if Madonna just demanded expensive champagne, like all the other spoiled celebrities."

Arts manager Maxim Gershunoff, remembers an unchoreographed moment during an appearance by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in Romeo and Juliet in Boston – USA:

The performance had been going well, but at the scene where Romeo discovers the body of Juliet after she has taken the sleeping potion, the lights in the orchestra pit blacked out completely. The orchestra’s musicians attempted to keep on playing whatever they could remember of the score. However, one by one each instrument gave up until it was practically like a performance of the Haydn "Farewell"  Symphony. All that were missing were the candles. From the stage, Margot could be heard from Juliet’s funeral bier saying, in full voice, "Rudy, either I am growing deaf or I really am dead."  The curtain had to be lowered until the audience stopped laughing and the theater’s electricians could restore power to the orchestra pit.

During the production of the screen adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (starring Greta Garbo, 1927), the film's producers decided to change the title because they feared that a foreign name would confuse American audiences. After considering various one-word titles, they settled upon "Heat." Screenwriter Frances Marion, however, promptly persuaded them to reconsider. "I think that would be a good ad for Dante's Inferno," she cried, "but I'd hate to see on the billboards: Greta Garbo in Heat!"

Former First Lady Barbara Bush once delivered a commencement address at Wellesley College. "Someday someone will follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the president's spouse," she declared. "I wish him well!"

The date of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation (June 2, 1953) was selected after extensive consultation with British meteorologists, who determined that June 2nd was the most consistently sunny day in the calendar. Needless to say, it rained.

Julian Lloyd Webber remembers: “My favorite anecdote is when I knocked on Yehudi Menuhin’s dressing room in Sydney, Australia, to discuss the finer point of interpretation shortly before a performance of the Elgar cello concerto. Yehudi liked to practice Yoga and was standing on his head. So I placed the score upside down in front of his face and had a lengthy discussion with him about the slow movement while we were both lying on the floor.

Tolstoy was a great pacifist and was once lecturing on the need to be nonresistant and nonviolent toward all creatures. Someone in the audience responded by asking what should be done if one was attacked in the woods by a tiger. Tolstoy responded, "Do the best you can. It doesn't happen very often."

Delphi was revered by the ancient Greeks as the site (at the “omphalos,” the navel or center of the world) where messages from Apollo were supposedly relayed through the Pythia (a kind of spokesperson whose trance-like utterances were interpreted as prophetic statements). The oracle was once asked to name the wisest man in Greece, and replied that Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, was truly wisest. Socrates was later told of the oracle's prophesy. "Since the gods proclaim me the wisest, I must believe it," he declared. "But if it is true, it must be because I alone, of all the Greeks, realize that I know nothing."