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Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms, yearning to breathe free.
Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms, yearning to breathe free.
the
Give me your music, your art, your huddled masses of words and rhythms, yearning to breathe free.
The Iron Curtain. That was a term I heard often as a kid growing up in the Cold War '60s. What exactly was this metallic barrier, and who or what was behind it, I wondered. Little did I know back then that British Prime Minster Winston Churchill had coined the term to refer to the ideological barrier that separated the…
Each year on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, his son Julian thanks his Facebook followers for their heartfelt condolences, and asks them to buck up, remember the good times, and not wallow in sadness. Right on, Jules. Even though I shed a tear each and every December 8th – the date of John’s murder in 1980 – this year I'd like to present an upbeat memorial to the man whose music changed my life. How about a little story about his influence on the city of Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, where the Lennon Wall - Lennonova Zeď - stands as a symbol of freedom.
Post-communist Czechoslovakia was a country reborn of the fire of rock and roll! Today is the 26th anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution, a peaceful student-led anti-government protest movement that led to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in December 1989. The name of the revolution stemmed directly from Lou Reed's Velvet Underground, the house band of Andy…
On May 4, 1991, the people of Plzen, Czechoslovakia, were celebrating "American Day" to mark the 46th anniversary of their city's liberation from the Nazis by General George S. Patton’s U.S. Army at the end of World War II. It was a major event, and I was lucky to be there to take part in it. I had arrived in Czechoslovakia on April 25 to begin a public relations campaign on behalf of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. At that time, my company was hoping to form a joint venture with a Plzen firm, Skoda, for the purpose of producing power generation equipment. When I heard about the American Day celebration scheduled to take place on May 4, I saw a PR opportunity I couldn't pass up.
If we all experience what Andy Warhol called our "fifteen minutes of fame," I had mine in Bulgaria, a small Balkan nation I visited six times in the early 1990s. As a Westinghouse PR manager, it was my job to inform the Bulgarian media of my company's capabilities related to the country's nuclear program. I knew nothing about Bulgaria when I first visited in 1991. And, I soon learned, Bulgarians knew nothing about Westinghouse, as well. It was my mission to inform them, but it wouldn’t be easy. I survived tricky press tactics, highway breakdowns, dreary hotel rooms and the evils of grape brandy - and ended up loving this ancient country, its culture, and people.