People From Omaha

"The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us...Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to "popular" dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals...I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback."

"Fred taught me a step because I said I can't let this experience be over without my learning something. He taught me the most wonderful Fred Astaire-like step, with an umbrella. It was a complete throwaway; it was almost invisible. It was in the way he walked. As he moved along, he bounced the umbrella on the floor to the beat and then he grabbed it. It was effortless and invisible. As a matter of fact, a few years later I was photographing Gene Kelly and told him that Fred Astaire had taught me this trick with an umbrella. And Kelly said, "Oh I'll teach you one," and he did, and the two tricks with the umbrella in some way define the difference between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and, in my view, demonstrate who is the greater of the two artists. With Gene Kelly, he threw the umbrella way up into the air, and then he moved to catch it, very slowly, grabbing it behind his back. It was a big, grandstand play, about nothing."

"The major difference between Astaire and Kelly is a difference, not of talent or technique, but of levels of sophistication. On the face of it, Kelly looks the more sophisticated. Where Kelly has ideas, Astaire has dance steps. Where Kelly has smartly tailored, dramatically apt Comden and Green scripts, Astaire in the Thirties made do with formulas derived from nineteenth-century French Farce. But the Kelly film is no longer a dance film. It's a story film with dances, as distinguished from a dance film with a story. When Fred and Ginger go into their dance, you see it as a distinct formal entity, even if it's been elaborately built up to in the script. In a Kelly film, the plot action and the musical set pieces preserve a smooth community of high spirits, so that the pressure in a dance number will often seem too low, the dance itself plebeian or folksy in order to "match up" with the rest of the picture."

"I suspect it is this Camelot view that leads Miss Croce to be rather unfair to Gene Kelly...I should say the difference starts with their bodies. If you compare Kelly to Astaire, accepting Astaire's debonair style as perfection then, of course, Kelly looks bad. But in popular dance forms, in which movement is not rigidly codified, as it is in ballet, perfection is a romantic myth or a figure of speech, nothing more. Kelly isn't a winged dancer; he's a hoofer and more earthbound. But he has warmth and range as an actor...Astaire's grasshopper lightness was his limitation as an actor - confining him to perennial gosh-oh-gee adolescence;; he was always and only a light comedian and could function only in fairytale vehicles."

"[[w:Leslie Caron|[Leslie] Caron]] is one of only six women who danced with Kelly and Fred Astaire in movies. She says that while Kelly always danced close to the ground, with Astaire (in 1955’s Daddy Long Legs) she felt as if she was floating. Who did she prefer? She gives me a look. "It's not fair to ask me that. For 70 years, I've refused to answer that. A great dancer is a great dancer." She says they were such different men – Kelly tough and generous, Astaire urbane and genteel."

"I think I can pinpoint the one moment when the American style of dressing first appeared. It was in an appalling 1933 movie called Dancing Lady during an otherwise forgettable dance number. It also just happened to be Fred Astaire's first on-camera dance. But don't look at the steps. Look at the outfit: Astaire is wearing a single-breasted, soft flannel suit with two-tone spectator shoes and a turtleneck. You wish you could look that stylish! Later that year, in Flying Down to Rio, we get the full Astaire impact. The muted plaid suit is not all that striking, but Fred is wearing it with a soft button-down shirt, a pale woven tie, silk pocket square, bright horizontally striped hose and white bucks. Whoa! Now that's different. This melange of the classic and the sporty was an American innovation. As we approach the impeccable Astaire's 100th birthday on May 10, it's worth remembering that he remains the greatest exemplar of that style."

"(Cary Grant) is, along with Fred Astaire, the best-dressed actor in American movies"

"The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style"

"Because your candle burns too bright well, I almost forgot it was twilight. Even if I think that you are right, well, I'm tired of being down, I got no fight. You're wonderful, and it's beautiful, but I'm already somebody's baby. And if i went with you, I'd disappoint you, too."

"Elliott: "Do you want to hear a happy or a sad song?" Crowd: "Happy!" Elliott: "Old or new?" Crowd: "Old!" Elliott: "Happy and old, that's a strange choice.""

"The clock moved a quarter of a turn, the time it took a cigarette to burn"

"Wearing clothes that clash Wondering 'is this treasure, is this trash?' Still trying to decide"

"I'm sorry you seem so stung, and I'm sorry you feel you have to hold your tongue when you're so pretty and smart"

"Here come your pride and joy The comic little drunk you call your boy, Making everybody smile"

"Your arsenal of excuses you never told her when you walked out on the savannah shoulder with your veins all full of beer thinking 'well at least now everything is clear'"

"Don't you know that I love you? sometimes I feel like only a cold still life only a frozen still life that fell down here to lay beside you."

"I'd say you make the perfect angel in the snow all crushed out on the way you are, I'd better stop before it goes too far."

"Next door, the TV's flashing blue frames on the wall. It's a comedy from the seventies with a lead no one recalls. He vanished into oblivion it's easy to do and I cried a sea when you talked to me the day you said we were through. But it's all right, some enchanted night I'll be with you"

"And though you'd rather see me gone then to see there come the day, I'll be waiting for you anyway"

"Shine on me, baby cause it's raining in my heart."

"You disappoint me, all you people raking in on the world. The devil's script sells you the heart of a blackbird."

"My mama told me 'baby stay clean there's no in between.' but all you ladies and you gentlemen, between is all you've ever seen or been."

"You don't deserve to be lonely, but those drugs you got won't make you feel better. Pretty soon you'll find it's the only little part of your life you're keeping together."

"Haven't laughed this hard in a long time I better stop now before I start crying Go off to sleep in the sunshine I don't want to see the day when its dying."

"She appears composed So she is, I suppose Who can really tell? She shows no emotion at all Stares into space like a dead china doll"

"They took your life apart And called your failures art They were wrong, though They won't know 'Til tomorrow"

"It's a picture perfect evening And I'm staring down the sun Fully loaded, deaf, and dumb And done waiting for sedation to disconnect my head Or any situation where I'm better off than dead"

"I'm in love with the world, Through the eyes of a girl, Who's still around the morning after."

"Crooked spin can't come to rest, I'm damaged bad at best."

"I'm going out now like a baby A naïve unsatisfiable baby Grabbing onto whatever's around For the soaring high or the crushing down With hidden cracks that don't show, but that constantly just grow."

"I could make you satisfied in everything you do, All your secret wishes could right now be coming true And be forever with my poisoned arms Around you. No one's gonna fool around with us."

"Drink up, baby, look at the stars I'll kiss you again Between the bars Where I'm seeing you there With your hands in the air Waiting to finally be caught Drink up one more time and I'll make you mine..."

"I'm looking at a hand full of broken plans And I'm tired of playing it down You just want her to do anything to you There ain't nothing you won't allow You wake up in the middle of the night From a dream you won't remember flashing on like a cop's light You say she's waiting and I know what for The white lady loves you more"

"I'm a junkyard full of false starts And I don't need your permission To bury my love under this bare light bulb. The moon is a sickle cell It'll kill you in time."

"You turned white, like a saint But I'm tired of dancing on a pot of gold... ...Flecked paint."

"Your hand on his arm, the hay stack charm around your neck, strung out and thin, calling some friend trying to cash some check, he's acting dumb, that's what you've come to expect. * I can't beat myself I can't beat myself And I don't want to talk. I'm taking the cure so I can be quiet Whenever I want. So leave me alone You ought to be proud that I'm getting good marks."

"Church bells and now I'm awake And I guess it must be some kind of holiday I can't seem to join in the celebration But I'll go to the service And I'll go to pray And I'll sing the praises of my maker's name Like I was as good as she made me..."

"I'm a roman candle My head is full of flames I want to hurt him I want to give him pain And make him feel this pretty burn."

"There's some records that sell millions of copies, that it's really unclear if anybody liked it who was making it, y'know?"

"Here's a song I made up while I was watching Xena the Warrior Princess with the sound off. It's a fact. I had a secret crush on Xena. It was a secret to me too. I wouldn't admit it. She's pretty fuckin' tough. She has a good yell... she kills the stupid gladiators with the log-trap. Release the log-trap! She releases the log-trap and they all get... crushed. They'd all wanna be with her if they could, but unfortunately they're not on her side. It's a lot better with the sound off. Really, it is. And the song didn't have anything to do with Xena... but... I was about half a bottle through Jameson's... if that makes any sense."

"I don't intend to write depressing songs and I'd probably rather write happy ones"

"[when asked about cigarettes] I don't recommend them... but I smoke them."

"I think the music business will eventually crush me, but I [smiles]... I'm ready."

"Gimme one good reason not to do it (because we love you), so do it."

"This is the place where time reverses. Dead men talk to all the pretty nurses. Instruments shine on a silver tray Don't let me get carried away."

"The scraping subjects, ruled by fear, they told me whiskey works better than beer."

"Veins full of disappearing ink Vomitting in the kitchen sink."

"I see you're leaving me and taking up with the enemy the cold comfort of the in between a little less than a human being a little less than a happy high a little less than a suicide the only things that you really tried."

"I met a girl, snowball in hell she was hard and as cracked as the liberty bell."

"So I wait for confirmation That you're never gonna use your starting gun."