Ian McKellen ~ turns 71 today...

Elton John - John's Next Fall Opens To Rave Reviews

ELTON JOHN & "NEXT FALL" (VIDEOS)

John's Next Fall Opens To Rave Reviews

Melissa Etheridge: My Songs 'Aren't Gay Enough' for 'Glee'

By Nicki Gostin Posted May 17th 2010 01:34PM

Melissa Etheridge's eleventh studio album, 'Fearless Love,' is dropping at the same time as she's rebuilding her love life from the ground up. The 48-year-old songstress recently broke up with Tammy Lynn Michaels after nine years and having twins together in 2006. Etheridge spoke extremely candidly to PopEater about the painful timing of the split, the "sexphobia" behind the 'Glee'/Newsweek debacle and the absurdities of being called "too gay" or "not gay enough."Did you separate from Tammy before writing this album?It was written before we actually physically separated, but you know, breakups just don't happen overnight.It must suck having the album and the separation emerge at the same time. Do you wish the timing was different?[Laughs] Absolutely! When I saw these things were about to collide for a while there I thought, I don't want this to come up on top of the album, and then I started doing interviews and they're like, "You're such a family girl, your marriage is great, what's the key to a great marriage?" and I was like, "Oh, I can't sit here and lie." But I would have definitely made the timing different.So is the song 'Miss California' about Tammy?That's a political song. It's about California passing Proposition 8.

Have you been following the Newsweek controversy?No I haven't. Give me the scoop!A Newsweek writer said Sean Hayes was too gay to be in 'Promises Promises.' Kristin Chenoweth wrote a letter in his defense and Ryan Murphy from 'Glee' called for a boycott of the magazine.Oh, the gays are getting miffed! Don't tell us we're too gay or not or whatever. Oh lord, what is gay, anyway? Find me the line -- find me the defining line between gay and straight. Find me the defining line between male and female. There is no line. You cannot draw this line in the sand. Yes, there are plenty of people way over there who will never partake in anything straight and there are people way over there who will never partake in anything gay, but there's a whole lot of gray in the middle. Where's the line? Behind all of it is sexual insecurity. It's sexphobia.Have you been accused of not being gay enough?Oh sure. I've had the gay community say, "Why don't you write a song saying 'her'? Your lyrics are non-gender." They're never happy. And the straight folks, they just assume the lyrics are about a woman, and they assume that if they go to a concert it's going to be all gay people. There are stereotypes we all have. But there's no us and them. Good God, we're all the same.Have you ever been approached to have your songs on 'Glee?'No, I don't think they're gay enough. [Laughs]You're a greenie.Yup, no plastic bottles in my house. My car runs on bio-diesel, which is reclaimed vegetable oil from restaurants.Do you compost?I did for a while, but I was horrible at it. I had rats.I reckon someone could start a business in LA tending compost heaps.I can see it! Compost-For-You. Let's do it! I'll invest.Do you like touring?Touring is the payoff after all the days of being alone in my room writing these songs. I get to see people singing them. It's wonderful.You must have tons of groupies.Well, this will be the first time I'm touring and I'm single. But I am not interested in groupies. I don't need that in my life right now. I have my oldest kids with me on tour -- they're 13 and 11.How do you embarrass them?It's funny because they've drawn a line between what I do for a living, getting up there and singing for people. They allow that because they know that's my work, but if I'm standing around at school and I hum or sing something, they're like, "Oh mom, don't!"I think you are quite the sex symbol.Aww, you're sweet, and you're helping this gal. Thank you so much.Aren't you best pals with Brad Pitt?Not for a while. He's a family man. I haven't spoken to him in a while.How's your health?My health is great. I've been six years free of cancer. I figured out health is about balance. It's what you eat, what you feel, how much you sleep. It's really common things that western society doesn't teach us how to do. You've got to take responsibility; you've got to say, "You know what? I don't need to work that hard. I don't have to buy this." It's not what it's all about.

http://music.aol.com/video/fearless-love-with-intro/melissa-etheridge/bc:66180621001

WATCH MELISSA'S "Fearless Love" video.

Mariah Carey Puts Out Stage Fire Herself

By PopEater Staff Posted May 18th 2010 06:45AM
Mariah Carey acted quickly to put out a fire on stage before her recent concert in Egypt.


The singer used her Twitter to describe the situation. "In Egypt getting ready to go on stage and suddenly there was a surge of power and an electrical fire started under my feet! Wtf?!"
"Naturally, my emergency instincts kicked in and I put out the flames w/a towel. Lol (yet true)," she added.
She finished, "The funny thing about this ish [sic] is an ol'skool radio station in the other room started playing 'aww freak out!' @that exact moment!"
Carey even tweeted a photo of "the charred remains."

BETTY HUTTON singing in "Red Hot & Blue" (1949)

Raquel Welch, Reluctant Sex Symbol

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Legendary Singer Lena Horne Dies at 92

Verena Dobnik AP

NEW YORK (May 9) - Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, died Sunday. She was 92.Horne died at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.

"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs."But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism."I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out ... it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America."While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy, "Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946."Metro's cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can't reach and therefore can't hurt" she once said.Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions - one straight and the other gut-wrenching - of "Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless. ... tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her."When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that among their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.Dropping out of school at 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white.She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in 1940.A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to "pass" in a white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an "Egyptian" makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM.But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals," Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the studio's efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American."I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become," Horne once said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.She got involved in various social and political organizations and - along with her friendship with Paul Robeson - got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.It was also in the mid-'60s that she put out an autobiography, "Lena," with author Richard Schickel.The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry.She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him."Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970-71, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her."I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness."I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."
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