Other books that might interest you

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  Christmas TV Memories -...

  Herbie J Pilato, Marlo Thomas

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  For most of us, fond memories of the Christmas season are inseparable from television's holiday presentations. The world loves everything from iconic cartoons like How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas to the groundbreaking Julia sitcom segment, "I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas," Christmas in Rockefeller Center, and the 1992 television-remake of Christmas in Connecticut directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Christmas TV Memories: Nostalgic Holiday Favorites of the Small Screen embraces it all, offering a tinsel-decked traipse down memory lane and chronicling animated classics, variety shows, made-for-television features, and holiday-specific episodes of series like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. With a foreword by bestselling Free to Be You and Me author and That Girl star Marlo Thomas, along with commentary from other celebrities, historical quotes, and insights from entertainment journalists and archivists, Christmas TV Memories serves as the go-to companion to the small screen's most cherished holiday programs.

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  Sesame Street Around the World -...

  Tamara Kay

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  Given the sometimes extraordinary politicization of culture, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries. Sesame Street's global success raises two questions. First, how does a US icon like Sesame Street spread around the world, gaining acceptance as a local cultural product? Second, how does the nonprofit that created it, Sesame Workshop, and its partners around the world navigate cultural differences, manage conflicts, and construct shared collective representations to create Sesame Street programs that resonate with local audiences? 
  Tamara Kay answers these questions using data from seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and 200 in-depth interviews with Sesame Workshop staff and international partners from seventeen countries. Kay argues that Sesame Workshop's secret is its engagement in coproduction, meaning it works with partners as a transnational team to create local Sesame Street programs.  She traces the processes of coproduction, beginning with the imagination of the cultural product, to its disassembly, reconstitution, and dissemination.  
   
  The Sesame Street case grapples with and illuminates culture in transnational interaction, providing insight into a range of other transnational organizational partnerships and different kinds of hybrid cultural products.

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  The Working Actor’s Survival Guide

  James Hill

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  Being an actor isn’t just about the work you do when the camera rolls or the curtain rises. It’s about everything that happens in between. 
  In The Working Actor’s Survival Guide, James Hill offers a grounded, honest, and quietly reassuring companion for anyone navigating the unpredictable rhythm of a life in performance. From auditions that don’t lead anywhere, to the strange stillness of not working, to the pressure of staying “ready” in a career built on uncertainty, this audiobook explores what it really takes to keep going when the industry isn’t giving you momentum. 
  With clarity and compassion, it looks at the realities often left unspoken: the emotional toll of rejection, the importance of voice and training, the value of fringe and am-dram work, the role of teaching and survival jobs, and the constant balancing act between creativity, identity, and financial survival. It doesn’t offer shortcuts or false promises, but something far more useful — a way of understanding how to sustain yourself, creatively and practically, over the long arc of a working life. 
  At its heart, this is not a book about becoming an actor. It’s a book about staying one. 
  For anyone who has ever wondered if they’re falling behind, thinking of quitting, or quietly trying to hold their place in a difficult industry, The Working Actor’s Survival Guide is a steady voice in the wings reminding you that the work continues — even when it doesn’t look like work at all.

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  Stage Combat: Armed (Rapier &...

  Roger Bartlett

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  This clear and comprehensive manual contains everything you need to know in order to create and portray armed stage fights with the rapier and dagger (or just a rapier) that are dramatically effective, and, above all, safe.
  Starting with the essential concepts, including footwork, eye contact, targeting and distance, it then takes you step by step through all the key techniques:
  
  - Performing attack moves including slashing and slicing, thrusting, and cutting
  
  - Parrying moves and defending yourself against attacks using a single weapon or two weapons together
  
  - Counterattacks such as taking control of your partner's blade and ripostes
  Each technique is clearly described and extensively illustrated, with accompanying online videos demonstrating every move. Also included are sections on how to put together your own fight sequences, make them dramatically compelling and realistic, and convey your character's pain, wound or death.
  Whether you are an actor preparing for a role with a sword fight, or a student learning your craft, this book will help you execute the techniques with precision and control, build your confidence and keep you safe. It also helps you to recognise when you may need to call upon the services of a qualified professional. For those already trained in stage combat, it will serve as an invaluable refresher as well as supplementing your ongoing training.
  Whatever your current level of experience, Stage Combat: Armed is a vital resource for directors, actors, students and teachers, or indeed anyone looking to incorporate safe, effective sword fights into their stage productions.
  Roger Bartlett is a professional fight director and Master Teacher for the British Academy of Stage & Screen Combat (BASSC), the UK's leading provider of stage-combat training. He is also the author of Stage Combat: Unarmed.

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  Ennui Go - A Memoir of a Hippie...

  Karen Miller

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  From the Bronx to Greenwich Village, Haight Ashbury to the hills of Vermont, Karen Miller’s life has been anything but ordinary -  a whirlwind of love, loss, and reinvention.  In this unflinching and often funny memoir, she navigates through adventures and misadventures, all set against the backdrop of a time defined by drugs, sex, and rock and roll, accompanied by a variety of lovers and the baby she adored.  Her story is a testament to the resilience of a woman finding her way through the era’s upheaval.

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  Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters

  Lynnée Denise

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  A queer, Black “biography in essays” about the performer who gave us “Hound Dog,” “Ball and Chain,” and other songs that changed the course of American music. 
   
  Born in Alabama in 1926, raised in the church, appropriated by white performers, buried in an indigent’s grave—Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton's life events epitomize the blues—but Lynnée Denise pushes past the stereotypes to read Thornton’s life through a Black, queer, feminist lens and reveal an artist who was an innovator across her four-decade-long career. 
   
  Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters “samples” elements of Thornton’s art—and, occasionally, the author’s own story—to create “a biography in essays” that explores the life of its subject as a DJ might dig through a crate of records. Denise connects Thornton’s vaudevillesque performances in Sammy Green’s Hot Harlem Revue to the vocal improvisations that made “Hound Dog” a hit for Peacock Records (and later for Elvis Presley), injecting music criticism into what’s often framed as a cautionary tale of record-industry racism. She interprets Thornton’s performing in men’s suits as both a sly, Little Richard–like queering of the Chitlin Circuit and a simple preference for pants over dresses that didn’t have a pocket for her harmonica. Most radical of all, she refers to her subject by her given name rather than "Big Mama," a nickname bestowed upon her by a white man. It's a deliberate and crucial act of reclamation, because in the name of Willie Mae Thornton is the sound of Black musical resilience.

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