Soft-shoe was one of two distinct styles of tap dancing developed in the late nineteenth century.
Easy going and smooth, it required soft-soled shoes.
In contrast, the fast, energetic buck-and-wing employed wooden soled shoes.
The two styles merged by 1925, with metal taps added to the toes and heels.
By 1940, when the Oscars ceremony was only a dozen years old, character actor Walter Brennan (18941974) had already won three Best Supporting Actor awards for his performances in Come and Get It (1936), Kentucky (1938), and The Westerner (1940). Katharine Hepburn has won four Academy Awards, for Best Actress. Ingrid Bergman won three, two…
A Harvard University student named Lothrop Withington, Jr., swallowed a 4-inch goldfish on a bet on March 3, 1939. The event was publicized in the Boston papers and soon created a new campus fad.
Charlie Brown’s father was a Barber.
At least six actors have played Al Capone: Paul Muni, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara, and Robert DeNiro. Brand played him twice: in The Scarface Mob (1959) and Spin of a Coin (1962).
Over a 60-year period, groundhogs have been only 28 percent accurate in guessing when spring will start. This may be because their staying out of their burrows or rushing back into them has more to do with sexual desire or hunger than with weather or shadows.
The 12-tone theory is music based on the serial ordering of all 12 pitches on the chromatic scale. the scale that includes both the black and white keys on the piano. (The diatonic scale of seven pitches includes only the white keys.) In the 12-tone system, developed by Austro-Hungarian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) in the…