A love letter to my local public radio and TV stations

The radio station I spend most of my driving and working time listening to—WABE 90.1 FM, Atlanta's National Public Radio affiliate—is having one of its two semi-annual pledge drives this week and next. I just pledged to renew my membership...with a bigger payment than last year. In the Comments section of the pledge transaction page, I posted a shortened version of my reasons why, which you can read back of the cut.

Those of you who share my affection for public radio and TV will probably not need the explanation...but for anyone else who does, or is just curious, read on. And if your local NPR or PBS station is having a pledge drive, buy or renew your membership now...and kick in a little extra, if you can. And while you're at it, get ahold of your Congresscritters in both houses and tell them to stop efforts to de-fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Don't ask them—tell them; they work for us voters, after all...or at least, they're supposed to. This year, more than ever, public broadcasting needs us all to step the hell up.
( Why I re-upped with a bigger pledge than last year...and why you should, too. )

In Memoriam: Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE, 1932-2011

One of the last bona fide Hollywood screen legends of the studio-system era is gone...and HIV/AIDS activists have lost a true and strong ally. Actress and activist Elizabeth Taylor died on Wednesday this past, 23 March, of congestive heart failure at 79. She passed away at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA after being admitted weeks earlier, and was interred the next day in a private ceremony at the world-famous Forest Lawn Cemetery in the same city. (Newsweek magazine reports that, by Ms. Taylor's final request, her funeral did not actually begin until 15 minutes after its announced starting time; she wanted to be fashionably late even for her own burial! My father always used to say, "When the Man Upstairs calls your name, that's one time you will not be late!"; seems that Liz proved him wrong.)

I don't know what else I can add about this grand lady that hasn't already been said or written much better elsewhere (starting with here)...except that one of the brightest stars in the show-business firmament has finally fallen. I prefer not to dwell on the controversy and scandal that often surrounded her personal life, or the physical deterioration of her later years, but to remember her youth and impossible beauty, her many gifted performances (two of which won her Academy Awards), and her tireless work to de-stigmatize and properly fund research into a deadly disease that has since ravaged half a continent in Africa (as my Songbird, who worked 2.5 years there to help reduce the death toll, can attest) and has taken far too many lives here and elsewhere as well. Liz was one of the first, if not the first, of her industry colleagues to risk her career and fandom for the cause, at a time when "the gay cancer" was still an illness that not even a star of her longtime friend Rock Hudson's caliber and popularity could afford to publicly admit having until it was too late to save him...and opened the floodgates for more of them to do likewise.

In one of her most famous roles, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, La Liz cried defiantly, "Maggie the Cat is alive!" So she is...and always will be, on screen and in hearts the world over. Now those famous violet eyes have closed forever...and her husbands, children and other family, her friends, fans and colleagues have my deepest sympathies. Thank you, dear lady, and sleep sweet; you damned well earned it.