It is with profound sadness that we bid farewell to the incomparable Linda Lavin, who left us at the age of 87 after bravely battling complications from recently discovered lung cancer. Lavin’s extraordinary career stands as a testament to her exceptional talent, unwavering resilience, and deep passion for her art, and she leaves behind a legacy that will be treasured by her devoted fans and fellow artists for years to come.

Linda Lavin

Born in Portland, Maine, Lavin found her way to the bright lights of Broadway after graduating from the College of William and Mary. She began her career singing in nightclubs and ensemble productions, but her extraordinary talent caught the eye of iconic producer Hal Prince. This led to her breakout role in the Broadway musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman, setting the stage for a illustrious career ahead.

Lavin’s journey through the entertainment industry was marked by both critical acclaim and widespread popularity, most notably as the star of the beloved sitcom Alice. Drawing inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the show debuted in 1976, introducing audiences to Alice Hyatt—an everywoman character who worked as a waitress in a diner while raising her young son after becoming a widow. With her iconic paper hat and a warm, relatable demeanor, Lavin became a symbol of perseverance for working moms everywhere.

The show, which featured unforgettable catchphrases like “Kiss my grits!”, quickly became a hit, reaching the top ten in ratings for several years. Lavin’s portrayal of Alice resonated deeply with viewers, making them laugh and cry in equal measure. Her musical talent shone through as she crooned the show’s theme song, “There’s a New Girl in Town,” which remains etched in the hearts of fans.

In addition to her television success, Lavin was a force on Broadway, earning a Tony Award for her outstanding performance in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound. Her ability to capture the complexity of characters—from a self-described nag in The Lyons to the frazzled yet witty protagonist in Collected Stories—showcased her remarkable range and depth as an actress.

Despite her impressive accolades in theater, Lavin never lost sight of her roots. Her dedication to her craft continued to shine through in recent years, as she actively participated in projects, including a new Netflix series, No Good Deed—a testament to her enduring passion for storytelling. She was also busy filming for the forthcoming Hulu series, Mid-Century Modern, until her untimely passing, reminding us all how vibrant and dedicated she was right up to the end.

Beyond her roles on screen and stage, Lavin’s legacy is also defined by her commitment to nurturing the next generation of performers. Her mantra, “work brings work,” reflects her belief in the value of persistence and seizing every opportunity. This wisdom, offered to aspiring actresses, continues to inspire those seeking a place in the competitive world of entertainment.

The warmth of Lavin’s spirit extended beyond her work; her dedication to the arts included co-founding the Red Barn Studio Theatre in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she produced and starred in numerous acclaimed plays. It became a haven for creativity, showcasing both timeless classics and contemporary works to an appreciative audience.

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As we mourn the loss of Linda Lavin, we celebrate the joy, laughter, and inspiration she brought into our lives through her performances. Whether it was the role of a struggling waitress fighting for her dreams or a beloved mother bringing her family together, Lavin’s characters became an integral part of our cultural fabric. She will always be remembered as a talented actress and an unforgettable icon, reminding us to embrace every moment, and that it’s never too late to pursue our passions.

Thank you, Linda, for sharing your light with us. You will be missed, but your legacy will live on through the countless lives you touched. Rest in peace, dear Alice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Lavin

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Christopher Palma, Penn State

If you have visited an island like one of the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti or Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, you may have noticed how small these land masses appear against the vast Pacific Ocean. If you’re on Hawaii, the nearest island to you is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, and the coast of the continental United States is more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away. To say these islands are secluded is an understatement.

For me, watching the movie “Moana” in 2016 was eye-opening. I knew that Polynesian people traveled between a number of Pacific islands, but seeing Moana set sail on a canoe made me realize exactly how small those boats are compared with what must have seemed like an endless ocean. Yet our fictional hero went on this journey anyway, like the countless real-life Polynesian voyagers upon which she is based.

As an astronomer, I have been teaching college students and visitors to our planetarium how to find stars in our sky for more than 20 years. As part of teaching appreciation for the beauty of the sky and the stars, I want to help people understand that if you know the stars well, you can never get lost.

U.S. Navy veterans learned the stars in their navigation courses, and European cultures used the stars to navigate, but the techniques of Polynesian wayfinding shown in Moana brought these ideas to a very wide audience.

The movie Moana gave me a new hook – pun not intended – for my planetarium shows and lessons on how to locate objects in the night sky. With “Moana 2” out now, I am excited to see even more astronomy on the big screen and to figure out how I can build new lessons using the ideas in the movie.

The North Star

Have you ever found the North Star, Polaris, in your sky? I try to spot it every time I am out observing, and I teach visitors at my shows to use the “pointer stars” in the bowl of the Big Dipper to find it. These two stars in the Big Dipper point you directly to Polaris.

If you are facing Polaris, then you know you are facing north. Polaris is special because it is almost directly above Earth’s North Pole, and so everyone north of the equator can see it year-round in exactly the same spot in their sky.

It’s a key star for navigation because if you measure its height above your horizon, that tells you how far you are north of Earth’s equator. For the large number of people who live near 40 degrees north of the equator, you will see Polaris about 40 degrees above your horizon.

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If you live in northern Canada, Polaris will appear higher in your sky, and if you live closer to the equator, Polaris will appear closer to the horizon. The other stars and constellations come and go with the seasons, though, so what you see opposite Polaris in the sky will change every month. https://www.youtube.com/embed/COHwfKusGbs?wmode=transparent&start=0 Look for the Big Dipper to find the North Star, Polaris.

You can use all of the stars to navigate, but to do that you need to know where to find them on every night of the year and at every hour of the night. So, navigating with stars other than Polaris is more complicated to learn.

Maui’s fishhook

At the end of June, around 11 p.m., a bright red star might catch your eye if you look directly opposite from Polaris. This is the star Antares, and it is the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion.

If you are a “Moana” fan like me and the others in my family, though, you may know this group of stars by a different name – Maui’s fishhook.

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Scorpius may not fully appear above your horizon, but if you are on a Polynesian island, you should see all of the constellation rising in the southeast, hitting its highest point in the sky when it is due south, and setting in the southwest.

Astronomers and navigators can measure latitude using the height of the stars, which Maui and Moana did in the movie using their hands as measuring tools.

The easiest way to do this is to figure out how high Polaris is above your horizon. If you can’t see it at all, you must be south of the equator, but if you see Polaris 5 degrees (the width of three fingers at arm’s length) or 10 degrees above your horizon (the width of your full fist held at arm’s length), then you are 5 degrees or 10 degrees north of the equator.

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The other stars, like those in Maui’s fishhook, will appear to rise, set and hit their highest point at different locations in the sky depending on where you are on the Earth.

Polynesian navigators memorized where these stars would appear in the sky from the different islands they sailed between, and so by looking for those stars in the sky at night, they could determine which direction to sail and for how long to travel across the ocean.

Today, most people just pull out their phones and use the built-in GPS as a guide. Ever since “Moana” was in theaters, I see a completely different reaction to my planetarium talks about using the stars for navigation. By accurately showing how Polynesian navigators used the stars to sail across the ocean, Moana helps even those of us who have never sailed at night to understand the methods of celestial navigation.

The first “Moana” movie came out when my son was 3 years old, and he took an instant liking to the songs, the story and the scenery. There are many jokes about parents who dread having to watch a child’s favorite over and over again, but in my case, I fell in love with the movie too.

Since then, I have wanted to thank the storytellers who made this movie for being so careful to show the astronomy of navigation correctly. I also appreciated that they showed how Polynesian voyagers used the stars and other clues, such as ocean currents, to sail across the huge Pacific Ocean and land safely on a very small island thousands of miles from their home.

Christopher Palma, Teaching Professor, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Whitney Strub, Rutgers University – Newark

Playboy’s decision earlier this month to jettison the nude images in its print edition lays bare the magazine’s own naked truth: it was always really a lifestyle magazine, with nudes simply acting as window dressing.

If it seems counterintuitive for a quasi-smut mag to renounce its own seeming raison d’etre, it’s important to remember that the magazine, since its inception, always held itself at a distance from the world of pornography.

The aspiration of Hugh Hefner’s project was cultural legitimacy – not a globally recognized logo (today, more profitable than the magazine itself), nor the cultivation of a “girl next door” image.

The magazine – at least, how it presented itself – was simply too classy to be confused for porn.

For the most part, it worked.

As a historian, I’ve written about the postwar court battles over pornography and obscenity. And what’s most striking about Playboy’s story is how absent the magazine was from these legal wranglings.

An appeal to masculine taste

Look no further than Playboy’s debut issue, which featured Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

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Its famous opening manifesto announced: “If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you.” Their “articles, fiction, picture stories, cartoons, humor” would all be culled to “form a pleasure-primer styled to the masculine taste.”

Before Playboy, other magazines did feature nude photos, but they were seen as culturally lowbrow: tawdry publications for unsophisticated readers. Other magazines, most notably Esquire, would position scantily clad women next to articles on food, style and other central features of the developing consumer culture, but not quite as boldly as Hefner’s iconic centerfolds.

Still, Playboy treated its own nudity as playful and passé. While it did occupy the “centerfold,” it was packaged as simply another accoutrement of the modern man’s cultural repertoire, which included knowledge of proper cocktail proportions and the finer points of the Miles Davis discography.

The crusade against smut

Playboy’s debut came just one year before America’s moral panic over smut came to a head.

The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials led the charge with a December 1952 report that highlighted “cheesecake” and “girlie” magazines, crime comics for children and, particularly, the burgeoning genre of lesbian pulp fiction novels, which – as the committee wrote in prose befitting its own targets – were “filled with sordid, filthy statements based upon sexual deviations and perversions.”

Yet even in the midst of this frenzied postwar moral righteousness, Playboy eased comfortably into the mainstream.

A few years later, when Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver launched his own anti-porn crusade, Playboy remained conspicuously absent from the hearings, which drew headlines like The New York Times’ “Smut Held Cause of Delinquency.”

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Possessing presidential aspirations (and finely attuned to the optics of media spectacle, having pioneered televised hearings in his earlier investigations of organized crime), Kefauver decided against subpoenaing Hefner.

Instead, he tacitly pandered to anti-Semitic sentiment by forcefully grilling a predominantly Jewish group of erotic distributors. The white-bread Hefner remained above the fray while smut peddlers like Abraham Rubin, Edward Mishkin and Samuel Roth reluctantly testified before Congress. (Roth would suffer the most, spending five years in federal prison for distributing material not substantially different from Hefner’s. His case also led to the 1957 Supreme Court precedent that still undergirds modern obscenity law.)

‘Skirting’ trouble

If Playboy emerged remarkably unscathed from these sexual-political skirmishes, Hefner nonetheless stayed perpetually cautious, calibrating the magazine to fit shifting contexts.

The pubic hair battles with Penthouse in the early 1970s – when Playboy started publishing more graphic images to compete in the expanding adult market – are most famous. But less remembered are earlier adjustments Hefner made to dissociate Playboy from cultural riffraff.

When Time covered the “horde of [Playboy] imitators yipping after pay dirt” in April 1957, it noted that new nude magazines like Caper, Nugget and Rogue were outpacing Playboy in “the smirk, the leer, and the female torso.”

Yet rather going skin-for-skin with its competitors, Playboy tried to distinguish itself through topnotch fiction and journalism (as well as science fiction, as PhD candidate Jordan Carroll notes in his recent study of the magazine).

According to Time, Playboy ultimately found that the most “effective censor was success”; in response to growing readership and ad revenue, the magazine “toned down its gags and dressed up its girls.”

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Indeed, in one striking 1962 letter sent to Hefner by a suburban Chicago chapter of the conservative Citizens for Decent Literature, the group happily informed him that that it had decided not to include Playboy among its list of 37 magazines that should be removed from local newsstands.

Later, in the 1970s, Playboy would attempt to compete with the more graphic pornography unleashed by the sexual revolution and the weakening of obscenity laws. More recently, it has reshaped its content to adhere to the strict regulations of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, which forbid users from posting female (but not male) nipples.

Clearly, 2015 is not the first time Playboy has switched up its strategy to respond to market forces.

The bunny supplants the girl next door

If Hefner’s erotic vision was quaint enough to pass muster even with some conservatives in the early 1960s, today it’s as retrograde as Don Draper. As Washington Post columnist Mireille Miller-Young observes, today’s girl next door isn’t uniformly white, thin, heterosexual and presented with a smarmy editorial voice. Instead, she could be a queer woman of color. She might even be publishing her own porn.

While the magazine once walked a tightrope between smut and sophistication, branding always remained Playboy’s real strength.

Today, 40% of its revenue comes from China – where the magazine itself isn’t even sold. Instead, a recognizable bunny logo that appears on products ranging from cigarette lighters to coffee mugs is what persists.

With limitless free online nudity a click away, the cash flow resides in a licensed logo that represents an upwardly mobile, urban lifestyle – much like it always did.

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Whitney Strub, Associate Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University – Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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