Did You Know…47th Edition

Dying in 1872 at 63 from heart disease, seven years after the American Civil War ended, the beloved southern Commander of the Confederate State’s Army, Robert E. Lee’s last words were…

strike the tent, meaning, takem’ all down…we’re on the move.

The actor Jack Nicholson lived the first 4 decades of his life thinking his mother June was his sister,   and his grandmother, Ethel May, his mom.

 A lavender marriage is the union of one or both parties who prefer their own gender. The writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, for example.

 On Martha ‘Patsy’ Jefferson’s death bed, she made her grieving husband Thomas promise he would never marry again, not wanting her children brought up by another woman, a promise he would never break. 

The actor Jerry Orbach, before his success on the TV show Law and Order, was a struggling Broadway actor.

 When he started making money, he rented space for a clubhouse for him and his theater pals. After he died of prostate cancer in 2004, they all assumed it would be closed, but Jerry in his will, left the means to keep it thriving.

 In 1991, The South African actress Charlize Theron’s mother, Gerda, shot and killed Charlize’s father who, while drunk threatened to kill them both. No charges were filed; a clear case of self-defense. 

  The writer John Steinbeck famously known for his novel, The Grapes Of Wrath, had a poodle called Charley, he also wrote about.

  Method actor Robert Di Niro, obtained a Taxi Driver’s License driving a cab 15 hours a day in preparation for his role as Travis Bickle in the 1976 film, Taxi Driver. 

 In the I Love Lucy episode when her nose catches fire after guest actor, William Holden lights her cigarette, was an accident, but since the cameras kept rolling and it was pretty hilarious, they kept it in.  

 When the actress and writer Carrie Fisher married singer and songwriter, Paul Simon in 1983, because they were both so short (she 5’1″, he 5’3″) she said, she hoped no one would mistake them for salt and pepper shakers. 

Can’t top that.