Broadway

Dolly Parton is nearing 70 — she’ll be among the first baby boomers to hit that milestone in January — but as she tells AARP’s Justin Kirkland here, “I’m never going to retire.”

Do you love the theater but rarely go because you can’t understand the dialogue or lyrics?

Hats off to the editors of People magazine for naming Sandra Bullock “2015 World’s Most Beautiful Woman.” Bullock wouldn’t have been my choice — I don’t consider her a “classic beauty” — but I find it intriguing that the ensuing media conversation centered on the idea she’s both beautiful and 50.

Mike Nichols, who died on Nov. 19 at age 83 in New York, might have gone down as one of the great directors in Hollywood history based upon his first two films alone.

Supermodel Christie Brinkley and I have something — OK, one th ing — in common: a fondness for fake hair.

Actress-singer Elaine Stritch, who died on July 17 at age 89 in Birmingham, Mich., wasn't the sort who would go gentle into that good night - or any night, for that matter. The gravel-voiced Broadway diva, who made her career playing what the New York Times once called "brash and bawdy characters," preferred staying out late, and having a cigarette and a drink or three.

Many know him as Walter White - the high school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin of Breaking Bad - but actor Bryan Cranston will be making his way back to television as President Lyndon B. Johnson in a new HBO TV movie.

The Soviets bring down a CIA U-2 spy plane on May 1, 1960, intensifying the Cold War. Captured in Russia, pilot Francis Gary Powers is interrogated for more than a hundred days and imprisoned for nearly two years.

Julie Harris took up acting because she was self-conscious about her looks as a young girl. "I looked so plain - bands on my teeth, bird legs, mouse face, hair that wouldn't curl," she once explained in an interview.

In celebration of the 500th performance of the Off-Broadway hit Old Jews Telling Jokes, we grabbed a few minutes with cocreator Daniel Okrent.