In the United States and many other nations, today is Mother’s Day. Like many people, I have a mom (waves to the camera), and I love my mom very much. In much of the world, Mother’s Day is celebrated with the spring equinox or at the end of Lent.

As I have gotten older, I have involuntarily started saying “Mommy” when saying so long on a phone call or good night to her. And I am not 8.

To all the moms out there: you have my love and respect and admiration.

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Don Rickles is 90 today. He is still performing and even has an appearance scheduled for this week. His stand-up act is remarkable, for someone his age or any age, really: it’s unscripted. Yes, he knows what “insults” he will deploy “against” audience members, and he knows that somehow he will convey that he is on the audience member’s side and not punching down at them. “If I were to insult people and mean it, that wouldn’t be funny. There is a difference between an actual insult” and doing that, he often states.
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Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony received its premiere on this date in 1824 at Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna.

By now Beethoven was totally deaf, yet he continued to lead performances of his work as a sort of side conductor; he kept what he thought was the correct tempo and he followed along with the printed score. For this performance, the musicians respectfully ignored him and watched the chief conductor, Michael Umlauf. It was to be Beethoven’s first appearance on stage in a dozen years. (More after the jump …)
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Orson Welles was born on this date in 1915. If he had not been born, America would have needed to invent someone like him. He left a mark on radio, theater, and film history, and he helped push each one of those forms forward into the future; and his public persona—a charming rogue, self-serious yet self-deprecating—is still missed 30-plus years after he left.

To the day he died, at age 70 in October 1985, he was scrambling for support, for the finances to back his film projects. Hollywood’s powers decided in the late 1940s, as a group, that he had decided to go it alone as a filmmaker. So he decided to go it alone as a filmmaker. At this Hollywood’s powers decided, as a group, that Welles could not be trusted, because he had kept his word.
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