User:Figureskatingfan/Sandbox
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[edit] Cantate Deo
I recently went to a concert of this fine Polish men's choir at my parish, St. Mary's Church in Moscow, Idaho. It inspired me to create a Wikipedia article for them. This first edit is the sources that I've been able to find about them. I realize that this is a challenge, since I don't know Polish, but that shouldn't mean that they don't have a Wikipedia article.
[edit] Sources:
[edit] Maya Angelou
(Note: I'm in the process of re-writing a section of this bio page, relying more upon Dr. Angelou's Caged Bird as a reference. Until it's complete, I'm editing it here.)
[edit] Early years
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, to Bailey Johnson, a doorman and naval dietician, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse, real estate agent, and, later, merchant marine. Angelou's brother, Bailey Jr., gave her the nickname "Maya."[1] When she was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them alone by train to live with his mother, Mrs. Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas.[2] Angelou's first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounts the first seventeen years of her life.
Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" [3] and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At age seven, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. She confessed it to her brother, who told the rest of their family. Mr. Freeman was jailed for one day but was found kicked to death four days after his release. Subsequently, she became mute, believing, as she has stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk." She remained nearly mute for five years.[4]
Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother once again. Angelou credits a close friend in Stamps, teacher Beulah Flowers, for helping her speak again, as well as introducing her to classic literature. In 1940, when she was thirteen, she and her brother returned to live with her mother in San Francisco, California; as the war raged, she attended George Washington High School and by took lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.[5] Three weeks after completing school, she gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson, who also became a poet.[6] To support herself, she worked as a cocktail waitress, dancer, cook, and brothel madam.[5]
[edit] References and notes
- ^ Kellaway, Kate. "Poet for the new America", The Guardian, 1993-01-23. Retrieved on 2007-10-15.
- ^ Angelou, Maya (1969). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 6. ISBN 0-375-50789-2.
- ^ Caged Bird, p. 52.
- ^ Healy, Sarah (2001-02-21), “Maya Angelou Speaks to 2,000 at Arlington Theater”, Daily Nexus 81 (82), <http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=456>
- ^ a b Maya Angelou (1928- ). Poetry Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-10-25.
- ^ Long, Richard (2005-11-01). 35 who made a difference: Maya Angelou. Smithsonian.com. Retrieved on 2007-10-25.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3120264.stm
Guy Johnson: http://usinfo.state.gov/scv/Archive/2005/Jun/30-640427.html
[edit] Pronunciation
I think that there should be a pronunciation guide here, since Ms. Angelou's name is often misspelled. Here's the "draft:"
(pronunciation /ma'ɪɔ ɑnɡɛloʊ'/)
Man, I hope that's right!
[edit] Maya Angelou honors and awards
See List of honors and awards for Maya Angelou.
Dr. Angelou has received "scores of honors and awards."[1] She has been honored by universities, literary organizations, government agencies, and special interest groups. Her honors include a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die,[2] a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away[3], an Emmy nomination for her role as Kunta Kinte's grandmother in the television miniseries "Roots, and "[4] three Grammys for her spoken word albums.[5] She has served on two presidential committees, [6][7] and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000.[8]She has lectured as a Distinguished Professor at several universities, [9] and been honored with over thirty honorary degrees.[10]
[edit] I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Censorship references:
[edit] Robert Loomis
Creating a new article...
Robert Loomis (born 1926) is an executive book editor at Random House, where he has worked since 1957. He has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors."[11]
Many of Loomis' authors have been with him for decades; most notably, Maya Angelou, who has never used another editor in her career, from her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, to six autobiographies and over twenty books of poetry. His authors' loyalty to him and him to them is almost legendary. Loomis represents "the classic mold of the editor, which is to say, in the background. It’s not about him ... but about the genius of his writers."[12] As Angelou has said, Loomis "knows what I hope to achieve in all my work. I don't know anybody as fierce, simply fierce, but he's as tender as he's tough."[11]
Other notable authors who have been edited by Loomis include Calvin Trillin, Edmund Morris, Shelby Foote, Jonathan Harr, and anchorman Jim Lehrer. He edited the Vietnam war epic, A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and in 1998, the novel he edited for Pete Dexter, Paris Trout, earned the National Book Award, "an unprecedented feat in editing."[12][13]
Loomis and author William Styron have known each other since they were both students at Duke University, where Loomis was Stryon's editor at Duke's student magazine. Loomis went on to edit all of Stryon's books except Lie Down in Darkness, his first novel.[11][12]
Loomis is married to Hilary Mills, who wrote a biography about Norman Mailer. He is a certified pilot.[12]
[edit] Blue's Clues
References: [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
YouTube videos: 10th anniversary
Steve & Joe - references: [10] [11] [12]
[13]
Yet for Mr. Burns, there is nothing visual or tangible to work with. He performs his part in an empty blue room, so that his image can be superimposed on the computer-animated world of Blue and her friends later.
"He says it's like acting at the bottom of a swimming pool," said Ms. Santomero.
Fortunately for Blue's Clues and its young viewers, Mr. Burns has the imagination to pull it off.
"tenyears":
Steve: auditioned 1,000 people
- asked him to dress more conservatively
- Steve: "Can you not look like you tomorrow morning?"
- tested with kids
- "There was just something about this kid, who was fresh out of Pennsylvania, who just knew where to look in the camera to really talk to kids. He was just right." - Dr. Alice Wilder, Nick's Director of Research and Development.
- left after seven years and over 100 episodes to pursue musical career
- rumors: "The rumor mill surrounding me has always been really strange."
- Rosie O'Donnell Show
- I knew I wasn't gonna be doing children's television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid's TV show, and it was happenin'--fast."
- worldwide search for new host
- 24-year old unknown actor, Donovan Patton
- April 2002 - Steve "skidooed" to college
I've decided to revamp the entire article. This sandbox is a working draft.
[edit] Origin
Using this about the show's structure:
Every episode of Blue's Clues is constructed in the same way. Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog ... To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects tattooed with one of her paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games--mini-puzzles--the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle ... As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of the show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think--a chair known, of course, in the literal world of Blue's Clues, as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue's three clues and attempts to come up with the answer." - Gladwell, p. 122.
- Attention span - pauses
- Involvement
- Structure
- Repetition?
In 1993, Nickelodeon assigned a team of its producers with the task of creating a new television program for young children, using early childhood education research, as well as how preschoolers watch television and learn from it. The three producers, Todd Kessler, Angela Santomero, and Traci Paige Johnson (whom Brown Johnson, executive creative director at Nickelodeon, called a "green creative team")[14], were influenced by Sesame Street but wanted to utilize research about how children learn in the thirty years since it debuted. "We wanted to learn from Sesame Street and take it one step further," Angela Santomero said.[15]
Based upon the research of theorists like Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts (who served as a consultant for Blue's Clues), Kessler, Santomero, and Johnson set out to develop a television show that took advantage of the fact that when children watch television, they are intellectually and behaviorally active. One of the things that research had discovered since Sesame Street was a change in how attention span in young children was perceived. Sesame Street was developed under the understanding that children have short attention spans; as a result, the show was designed in a magazine-like format.[16] This is evident in the creators' use of pauses--"long enough to give the youngest time to think, short enough for the oldest not to get bored."[17]
Up to that point, children's educational television programs presented their content to their audience in a "one-way conversation," but Blue's Clues revolutionized the genre by inviting their involvement. Its creators believed that if they could do that, children would attend to its content longer than previously expected, up to a half hour, and learn more. They also dropped the traditional magazine format for a narrative format. "... The choice for Blue's Clue became to tell one story, beginning to end, camera moving left-to-right like reading a storybook, transitions from scene to scene as obvious as the turning of a page."[17] Every episode of Blue's Clues was structured in this way. Its pace was deliberate and its material was presented very clearly.[18]
Another way the creators of the show encouraged participation was their use of repetition. At first, Nickelodeon aired the same episode daily for five days before showing the next one. In field tests, the attention and comprehension of young viewers increased with each repeated viewing.[19] Repetition is also built into the structure of each episode. For example, "in an episode called 'Blue's Predictions,' the show's human host, Joe, says some variation of the word 'predict' around 15 times."[16]
[edit] Development
In the summer of 1994, Kessler, Santomero, and Johnson met at the Nickelodeon studios to develop Blue's Clues. At first, the character Blue was a cat and the name of the show was "Blue's Prints." Blue became a dog only because Nickelodeon was already producing a show about a cat.[14] Kessler handled the production aspect of the show, Santomero research, and Johnson the animation and design.[20]
The creators understood that the show's "look and visual design would be integral to the attachment children would have to the show"[21] Johnson utilized simple cut-out shapes of familiar objects with a wide variety of colors and textures to resemble a storybook. She hired artist Dave Palmer to develop what was at that time a new technology--creating the animation from simple materials like fabric, paper or pipe-cleaners and then scanning them into a computer so that they could be animated without repeatedly re-drawing them like in traditional animation. The result was something that looked different than anything else on television at the time. They were also able to animate their shows in less time compared to traditional methods, eight weeks for two episodes as opposed to sixteen weeks for one.[22][16]
Another innovative aspect of the production process of Blue's Clues was the producers' use of research. In addition to using the concepts of early childhood educational research, they field tested every episode three times before putting it on air. (In comparison, Sesame Street tested a third of its episodes once, after they are completed).[15] In their tests at preschools before the premiere, the show was "immediately successful."[14]
Another key to the success of Blue's Clues was casting. According to Traci Paige Johnson, she was cast as Blue's voice because out of the show's crew, she sounded the most like a dog. Nick Balaban, who, along with Michael Rubin, wrote the music for the show, was cast as the voice of Mr. Salt. (Balabin reported that Mr. Salt was not originally French; he spoke with a Brooklyn accent.)[14]
The most important casting was that of the host, essentially the only human in the show. After over 1,000 auditions and months of research, the producers hired actor/performer Steven Burns,[14] who became a producer of the show by 1999.[23] Burns remained on Blue's Clues for seven years and was in over one hundred episodes, until he left to pursue a musical career in 2002. He was replaced by Donovan Patton, who was subjected to the same kind of scrutiny to earn the job.[14]
[edit] Reception and influence
Blue's Clues premiered on September 8, 1996.[14] It was a "smash hit," largely in due to the intensive and extensive research its producers employ.[24] Within eighteen months of its premiere, 100% of preschoolers' parents knew about the show, an awareness comprable to "top-tier" shows like the 30-year old Sesame Street. It became the highest-rated show for preschoolers on commercial television; by 2002; 13.7 million viewed tuned in each week. In 2000, the show had generated over $1 billion in licensing products. It has received numerous awards for excellence in children's programming, educational software, and licensing, and has received nine Emmy nominations. More than ten million Blue's Clues books were in print by 2001, and over three million copies of six CD-ROM titles based on the show have sold since 1998.[25][18]
Blue's Clues was one of the first children's television show that allowed countries outside the U.S. to produce their own versions of the show. It was a run-away hit in the U.K., and has become part of pop culture in Korea. The "dubbed" American version is shown in over sixty countries.[26]
The show's extensive use of research in its development and production process has inspired several research projects studying its efficacy as a learning tool. In 2000, four studies, funded by Nickelodeon and the University of Alabama, researched the impact of Blue's Clues on its young viewers. When repeated viewings of the same episode were tested, children showed increased material comprehension, especially in their use of problem-solving strategies. Regular viewers tended to interact with other TV programs more than other children. A longitudinal study was also conducted; it indicated that watching Blue's Clues increased children's information-acquisition skills (sequencing, patterning, relational concepts, and transformations). Finally, the show improved children's flexible thinking--solving riddles, creative thinking, and non-verbal and verbal skills.[27]
Like the show that inspired it, Sesame Street, Blue's Clues influenced its genre. Its innovative use of research, technology, and interactive content influenced many shows for preschoolers since its debut.[24]
[edit] The Wiggles
[edit] Characters
I'm rewriting this section. I'm thinking that the "Minor characters" subsection suffers from WP:NOTE, so I believe that it should be deleted and the notable content folded into earlier stuff. Here's the draft of my edit:
Aside from the four Wiggles, there are four secondary characters that usually appear in their videos and live concerts. They were developed in the early 1990s, and were originally played by group members and by Anthony's brother Paul Field, the band's manager. They are now played by hired actors, occasionally touring without The Wiggles as "Dorothy the Dinosaur and Friends." In 1998, Sam Moran hosted this show before becoming Greg Page's understudy.
For their stage shows, The Wiggles utilize two 16-metre trucks, three tour buses, a cast of thirteen dancers, and ten permanent crew members.[28] The "Wiggly dancers" have always made up a major part of their shows and TV programmes, and portray many of the minor roles.
Minor characters of note include The Cook (portrayed by Anthony Field's late father, John and Crowded House drummer Paul Hester[29]) Professor Singalottasonga and Dapper Dave (both played by Sam Moran[30]), and Officer Beaples and Fiona Fitbelly (both played by Wiggles' choreographer Leanne Halloran.[31]
[edit] Early career
Using his connections with the Cockroaches, Field arranged with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to distribute their album in Australia. Their manager suggested that they tour, so they began performing at pre-schools, childcare centres, and malls.
The basic act was later augmented with supporting characters — the "friendly pirate" Captain Feathersword (played by Paul Paddick since 1993) and the animal characters Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus, and Wags the Dog. These characters were initially performed by the members of the band: Field playing Captain Feathersword and Wags, Cook playing Dorothy, and Fatt playing Henry.
From Wiggly way article:
Another departure point in their story is Circular Quay, where the quartet-with-no-name (Page, vocals; Cook, bass; Field, bagpipes, trumpet, tin whistle; and Fatt, piano accordion) busked with Anthony's brother John, and Mick Conway (bass drum, duck calls). Conway was a tap dancer, among a host of other performing talents, and John Field had two fox terriers that had learned to menace Conway's flickering feet at every opportunity.
The crowd pouring off the Manly Ferry would be serenaded with what Fatt now calls the ensemble's "greatest hits". They included the songs Hot Tamale and Moonlight Bay, which would later become known to a younger audience as Hot Potato and Wiggle Bay. Conway was introduced to the throng as "the dog-defying tap dancer".
Page remembers the venue for the Wiggles' public debut as a child-care centre in Randwick with 20 children sitting on the floor, waiting for four nervous guys to sing to them.
The CD The Wiggles was released in August 1991. After four weeks spent conceiving and preparing a show, the Wiggles took to the road: a tour of the forecourts of Westfield shopping centres around Sydney.
Exposure on children's TV on the ABC built their following, as did small tours around Sydney and country NSW, where they played shows that had been promoted by local playgroups or nursing mothers' associations, with whom they split the door money.
They travelled in Fatt's van and towed a trailer; they were their own roadies, lugging in the PA system that Page had supplied. Between songs, Page attended to the mixing desk at the side of the stage. Merchandising in those distant days consisted of Fatt's Globite suitcase, laden with cassettes. "It was very much a cottage industry situation," he says.
