MERCE CUNNINGHAM, American dancer and choreographer born (d: 2009); Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington, and received his first formal dance and theater training at the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle. From 1939 to 1945, he was a soloist in the company of Martha Graham. He presented his first New York solo concert with his lover, John Cage in April 1944. Merce Cunningham Dance Company was formed at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1953. Since that time Cunningham has choreographed nearly 200 works for his company.

In 1973 he choreographed Un jour ou deux for the Ballet of the Paris Opera, with music by Cage and set design by Jasper Johns. (A revised version was presented there in 1986.) The Ballet of the Paris Opéra also performed a revival of his Points in Space in 1990. His work has also been presented by New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Zurich Ballet, and Rambert Dance Company (London), among others. He choreographed right up until his death and will always be revered as one of the most important modern choreographers of the 20^th century.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD, 60s British pop singer, born (d: 1999); Of the female artists of the “British Invasion,” Dusty Springfield made the biggest impression on the U.S. market. She was the first solo act of the British Invasion and from 1963 to 1970, scored 18 singles in the Billboard Hot 100. She was voted the Top British Female Artist by readers of New Musical Express in 1964, 1965, and 1968. Springfield is an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame.

The fact that Dusty Springfield was never in a publicly known relationship meant that the issue of her being bisexual continued to be raised throughout her life. In 1970, no less, Dusty told the Evening Standard: “A lot of people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it....I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't see why I shouldn't.”

In the standards of year 1970, that was a very bold statement. Three years later, she explained to the Los Angeles Free Press: “I mean, people say that I'm gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. I'm not anything. I'm just ... People are people.... I basically want to be straight.... I go from men to women; I don't give a shit. The catchphrase is: I can't love a man. Now, that's my hang-up. To love, to go to bed, fantastic; but to love a man is my prime ambition.... They frighten me.”

Later she stated that she had enjoyed relationships with both men and women and "liked it". Later she avoided the issue, apart from the occasional comment in the presence of her drag queen fans and Princess Margaret at the performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1979: “I am glad to see that royalty isn't confined to the box.” Dusty's 1981 live-in relationship with Canadian singer Carole Pope, burdened with drug and alcohol abuse and self-injury, was described in a chapter of Pope's 2000 autobiography Anti-Diva.

In 1995 Springfield was diagnosed with breast cancer. She received months of radiation treatment and for a time the cancer was in remission. In apparent good health again, Springfield set about promoting the album and gave a live performance of "Where Is a Woman to Go?" on the BBC television music show Later With Jools Holland, backed by Alison Moyet and Sinead O’Connor. Cancer was detected again in the summer of 1996. After a fight, she was defeated by the illness in 1999. She died in Henley-on-Thames on the day she had been due to go to Buckingham Palace to receive her Order of the British Empire insignia.

Before her death, officials of St. James’s Palace gave permission for the medal to be collected by Springfield's manager, Vicki Wickham. She duly presented it to the singer in hospital, where they had been joined by a small party of friends and relatives. Songwriter Burt Bacharach, describing her voice said, “You could hear just three notes and you knew it was Dusty.” Elton John, speaking at her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said, “I think she is the greatest white singer that there ever has been.”

MARGOT ADLER, journalist, born (d: 2014); American author, journalist, lecturer, Wiccan priestess, radio journalist and correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) Adler was born in Little Rock, Arkansas and grew up mostly in New York City. Her grandfather, Alfred Adler, is considered the father of individual psychology.

Adler wrote Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, considered a watershed in American Neopagan circles. The book provided the first comprehensive look at the nature-based religions in the US, and became what was for many the first point of contact with the larger subculture. She was a speaker at the 1986 WinterStar Symposium, from which the Association for Consiousness Exploration produced her lecture tape From Witch to Witch-Doctor: Healers, Therapists and Shamans and the panel discussion The Magickal Movement: Present and Future (with Isaac Bonewits, Selena Fox, and Robert Anton Wilson).

Her second book, Heretic's Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution, was published by Beacon Press in 1997. Adler was a Wiccan priestess of the Gardnerian Wicca tradition and a Unitarian Universalist.

BAMBI GAUTIER, American archivist and editor, born; Bambi is a Radical Faerie archivist and was a co-recipient of the Monette-Horwitz Award for service to the LGBT community. Bambi worked for Gay Pride in Noho, started a Gay youth group which included bisexual youth, and worked with ACT UP and Queer Nation. His first “baby step”, as he puts it, for Gay activism was organizing people to go from the Pioneer Valley to the March on Washington in 1987. Bambi lives in Northhampton, Massachusetts and is an active member of the Faerie Camp Destiny community, a faerie sanctuary in Vermont.

EDNA FERBER, American author died (b. 1885); In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book So Big, which was made into an early talkie movie in 1932, starring Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and George Brent. It was the only movie Stanwyck and Davis ever appeared in together, and Stanwyck played Davis' mother-in-law, although only a year older in real life, which allegedly displeased her, as did the attitude of the hoydenish Davis. A 1953 remake of So Big starred Jane Wyman in the Stanwyck role, and is the version most often seen today.

A close friend of and correspondent with English playwright and bon vivant, Noël Coward, Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Ferber and another member of the Round Table, Alexander Woolcott, were long-time enemies, their antipathy lasting until Woolcott's death in 1943, although Howard Teichmann states in his biography of Woollcott that this was due to a misunderstanding. According to Teichmann, Ferber once described Woollcott as "a New Jersey Nero who has mistaken his pinafore for a toga."

Edna Ferber died on April 16, 1968, at her home in New York City, of cancer, at the age of 82. The New York Times said, "…she was among the best-read novelists in the nation, and critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day."

Her novels generally featured a strong female as the protagonist, although she fleshed out multiple characters in each book. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the non-so-pretty persons have the best character.

Ferber had no children, never married, and is not known to have engaged in a romance or sexual relationship with anyone of either gender. In her early novel Dawn O’Hara, the title character's aunt is said to have remarked, "Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning -- a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling." Ferber did take a maternal interest in the career of her niece Janet Fox, an actress who performed in the original Broadway casts of Ferber's plays Dinner at Eight and Stage Door.