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In the News...

From The New York Jewish Post

ART AND ENTERTAINMENT BY MDL

INTERNATIONAL STARS AND CELEBRITIES OF THE MONTH: ILIL ARBEL, ALISON ENGLAND, ERIKA LUCKETT, PAULETTE ATTIE, LIESL MULLER, NATALIE DESSAY, ROBERTO ALAGNA, ANN PLAGIANOS, NINA GRUSCHWITZ.

Photo: The great Paulette Attie.

Imagine a world without music!? A sky without stars?! Empty stages and silent orchestras?! Imagine our lives without cherished memories, some permissible escapades and days without nights...and nights without the sparkling voices of  bursting talents and captivating divas!? This could and would be the end of our world, the apocalypse of the mind and the soul. Fortunately, our world is filled with beauty, tender whispers, innocent creative madness, flashes of hope and delightfully beautiful musical virtuosity bursting from within the heart and soul of Alison England, Erika Luckett, Anne Paglianos, Paulette Attie, Anna Bergman, the sweet, tender, wise and loving words and phrases of Ilil Arbel,  and perhaps the eternal sacred whispers and exploding laughters of Melina Mercouri?!

Photo: Alison England, broadcasting live.

Imagine a world without the poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo,  a world without the screaming of the bleeding souls of Goya, a world without Brahms, Chopin and Ravel...a world without children playing with their dolls, cars and torturing their toys...a world without the smiles and the faces of people we love...a world without books by Tolstoy, Ilil Arbel, Voltaire, Proust and Chateaubriand...Everyday, every single dawn and sunset that enters my life invites me to thank the daring maker of our universe. For I know, every new day in our lives will bring new hopes, new possibilities, new opportunities and an ultimate reason for creating, writing, composing, singing and spreading warmth and beauty around us. Thanks to THE music and THE beautiful voices of artists, entertainers, even crazy and silly comedians, our world shines brighter and warmer. Our guests  and international artists of the month gave me this ultimate reason for rejoicing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo and caption by Suzanne Freeman: Paulette Attie runs the scales on a piano while students at P.S. 1 in New York City loosen up their vocal chords.

PAULETTE ATTIE: A TRANSCENDENTAL LEGEND FOR ALL TIME

Paulette made both the Jewish and International lists of the 100 most unusual and outstanding women of the year.  In just one single month, 7 magazines and newspapers in the United States and Europe wrote glowing articles about this legendary artist. And three times, her photo crowned their front page and covers! People use to say, legends are made not created. It is true to a certain degree. The ultimate truth is this: Legends are nor made, nor created. They are legends! They escape us. They are beyond our intellectual and emotional measurements. They transcend time and space. And since when, time and space are or were created? They were before us and will remain long time after we are gone. And this is WHY we call the best of us "LEGENDS". When a legend is born like Paulette Attie, we do not take note. When a legend like Paulette Attie enters the SCALA of our lives, the shadows and the lights of all understanding and confusion, the sublime and the absurd intellectualism, the beauty and the provocative, the time and space mingle, unite, begin to disturb us and confuse the hell out of us. We do not fully understand the magnitude of their talents and immense impact on us. We smile, we laugh, we admire them, we applaud them, we gossip about them, sometime we hate them and envy them...but almost all the time we call them "LEGENDS". If they have passed away, they become "LEGENDS". If they are still around, we call them "LIVING LEGENDS". And I have problem with this. Why LIVING legends? Why not simply LEGENDs, since we did agree that they escape time, space and the mind of those who naively taught us that we are bound by time and space. PAULETTE ATTIE is this sort of legend: TRANSCENDENTAL!

 

Photo: (left to right) Peter Howard, John Wallowitch, Rod Derefinko, Frances "Frankie" Gershwin, Paulette Attie, Chuck Prentiss, Bertram Ross.

Suzanne Freeman wrote: September 11 — Before Paulette Attie wrote her song, "United Are We," she wrote a poem about September 11, 2001. "It was my immediate response to what was going on in the world," Paulette said. "That took care of me while I was watching all the horror on TV and could see all the courageous deeds. Then, I said to myself, I need to write something that will be meaningful for everybody. That's where the song came from." When the award-winning songwriter and performer made her work public, she began to receive standing ovations, followed by some good suggestions. "When I started singing it to people who are knowledgeable in the music business, they said, 'Paulette, this sounds like a wonderful children's song.' It sort of put a little bee in my bonnet," she told Scholastic News Online. Her search for young voices led her to P.S. 1, a 107-year-old elementary school in the shadow of the World Trade Center. It was the closest school to Ground Zero that was still open for business. The 650 students of P.S. 1 have rehearsed and performed the piece several times over the last year. They were featured on New York 1, a local cable-news program in New York City, and will soon be the stars of their own music video. But on September 11, 2002, they staged their own tribute to the victims of 9/11. No media cameras were allowed on school grounds. The short ceremony, which included a tree planting and the reading of a poem, was for the students, their parents, and teachers only. "It was fabulous," said principal Maguerite Straus. "The kids were happy to be a part of it. They knew it was very special." The entire school met in the outdoor yard, which is where they were when the first plane hit one year ago. "It was primary day, and our school was being used for voting," Maguerite said. "We were ready to start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance when the first plane hit."

  "United Are We" Lyrics by Paulette Attie

Right here's the place to be, the time for you and me,
Enjoy sweet harmony because united are we.
Our heroes heard the call, saw their brothers fall,
Still they gave their all, that's united are we.

Don't need to be a king, don't need a diamond ring,
We've got everything because united are we.
And through the nation wide,
we share the New York pride,
We stand side by side, because united are we.

The reason is simple, it's easy as can be,
When we love one another, united are we.
If I'm a part of you, then you're a part of me,
When we give to each other, we're happy and free.

Don't need remote control, high-techie rigmarole,
Switch on and see the whole, united are we.
And when we're upped and downed, on a merry-go-round,
We can still rebound, turn it around,
We're not lost; we're found because united are we,
Let the words resound: United Are We.

United are we, united are we,
The design is grand, that's the way it was planned,
Let's give ourselves a hand,
Because united are, united are, united are WE!
 

WORLD ART CELEBRITIES JOURNAL called her "The Immortal". LA FEMME MAGAZINE's Louise de Chambertin wrote: "She is Glorious!". ART AND STYLE MAGAZINE saw in  Attie "One of the greatest American singers-entertainers of our time".

Paulette Attie made her singing debut in a talent show at age 3 (and refused to get off the stage). Since then, she has performed in over 1,000 concerts from Carnegie Hall, the Bruno Walter Auditorium, Lincoln Center Outdoors, and the Hollywood Bowl, venues in Japan, Mexico, and Canada, to over thirty cabarets.  Paulette graduated Phi Beta Kappa and number 1 in her class from UCLA and was a showgirl in Las Vegas one week later.  Paulette was selected California’s Sportswoman of the Year, for which she made numerous TV appearances.  TV roles followed on Love of Life, One Life to Live, All My Children, Mercy or Murder, General Hospital, Sesame Street, and the French nightclub singer in the TV movie The Yanks Are Coming (Silver Globe Award).  She produced and performed in a series of yearly concerts at New York's Lamb’s Theatre and was the inaugural performer at the New York and Riverbank State Parks.  Album: Paulette Performs Puccini to Porter. Off-Broadway shows saw Paulette as Lady Capulet in Sensations, Dorothy Parker in Dorothy Parker: A Montage, the Lady in The Lady Of Larkspur Lotion, and playing herself in her one woman show, About Time, including songs and poems which she wrote.  She has played the leading roles in the musicals Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, Can-Can, and Sensations, the operas and operettas The Bald Soprano, The Old Maid and the Thief, The Merry Widow, and La Vie Parisienne, and the plays Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Red Peppers, You Know I Can’t Hear You...., and The Perfect Party.  She is the only American to have appeared with Le Theatre de France, where she was directed by and performed with Jean Louis Barrault at New York City Center and toured with the company in the U.S. and Canada.  She played the voice of the French cat to Mel Blanc's skunk in the cartoon, Pepe le Pew.   Paulette Attie's Musical Playbill, 2 years on WNYC AM and FM had distinguished songwriters joining Paulette in song.  In 1979, Paulette founded the National Musical Theater.  She conceived of and wrote Encore, produced by NMT, with Columbia Artists presenting the national tour.  She’s the recipient of 5 consecutive ASCAP Plus Songwriter Awards 2000 – 2004 and the National Poetry Award, 1998.  Paulette became the first woman performer elected into the Friars Club in 1988.  She was the singer for Israel’s 50th Anniversary in Washington D.C. With numerous articles about show business to her credit, Paulette just completed writing her first book, The Seven Keys to Live a Masterful Life.

And today, THE JEWISH POST adds: Imagine a world without Paulette Attie. It would look like a prairie without wild flowers, and a dark sky without a rainbow. Attie is one of the "ESSENTIALS".