Born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas in March 1922, Cyd Charisse had a brush with polio as a child, making dancing seem a pretty remote possibility.  But the sickly Tula began dancing at home at the encouragement of her father.  By the age of 14 she was dancing with a Russian ballet troupe.  He built her a practice bar and a full-length mirror in her bedroom.  He wanted her to work and stretch her muscles.  She began dance lessons at age 8.  “I was this tiny, frail little girl, I needed to build up muscle,” she would say in a later interview, “and I fell in love with dancing from the first lesson.”  During a family vacation in Los Angeles when she was 12, her parents enrolled her in classes at a Hollywood ballet school.  As a teenager, she returned to the school as a full-time student.  One of her teachers there was Nico Charisse, a handsome young dancer.  At age 14, she auditioned for and later joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, touring under Russian-required stage names Natacha Tulaelis and Felia Siderovaa.  Later, on a European tour, she and Nico Charisse met again, became involved, and were married in Paris in 1939.  She was 18.  Their son, Nicky, was born in 1942.  World War II in Europe led to the break-up of the dance company and Charisse returned to Los Angeles, where she resumed dancing.  There she was discovered by choreographer Robert Alton (who had also discovered dancer Gene Kelly) and joined the MGM film studio as a ballet dancer.  She soon began a career of dance film-making that paired her with two of the best dancers then in Hollywood—Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  These roles and others would take her beyond ballet, and into many styles of dance.  Her film debut came in 1943 under the name Lily Norwood in Something to Shout About, with Don Ameche and Janet Blair.  That role came about when David Lichine was hired for a ballet sequence in the film and he needed a partner.  The movie was not a blockbuster, but its ballet sequence attracted notice, and Charisse, still billed as Lily Norwood, began receiving movie offers.  “I had just done that number with David as a favor to him,” she would later explain.  “Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head.  I was a dancer, not an actress.  I had no delusions about myself.  I couldn’t act—I had never acted.   So how could I be a movie star?”  But movie dance star she would later become, and signed on at MGM with a seven-year contract.  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/cyd-charisse-1950s-1990s/

Rebranding has helped the aronia berry catch on and develop into what is now a multi-million dollar industry.  The berry's new name comes from its genus, Aronia melancorpa, but the fruit is also commonly known by its traditional and much less appetizing name of "chokeberry."   Native to North America, the aronia berry has been cultivated in Russia and eastern Europe for juices and wines since the early 20th century.  Now it is also becoming popular in the U.S., where farmers in the upper Midwest are planting thousands of aronia berry shrubs.  Its current trendiness can be traced to to Sawmill Hollow Family Farm in the Loess Hills of western Iowa, where most in the industry believe the first bushes were planted for commercial cultivation in the U.S.  Andrew Pittz and his family are the driving force behind it.  In 1997, his parents planted about 200 bushes, having looked for a crop they could cultivate on the heavy, silt-heavy soil near the Missouri River.  The bush turned out to grow well in the Midwest, as it has few pests and doesn't require replanting every year.  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/aronia-berry-rebranding-helps-a-new-superfood-catch-on/

"Salad days" is a Shakespearean idiomatic expression to refer to a youthful time, accompanied by the inexperience, enthusiasm, idealism, innocence, or indiscretion that one associates with a young person.  A more modern use, especially in the United States, refers to a heyday, a period when somebody was at the peak of their abilities—not necessarily in that person's youth.  The phrase was coined in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in 1606.  In the speech at the end of Act One in which Cleopatra is regretting her youthful dalliances with Julius Caesar she says:  . . .  My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood . . .   The phrase became popular only from the middle of the 19th century, coming to mean “a period of youthful inexperience or indiscretion."  The metaphor comes from Cleopatra's use of the word 'green'—presumably meaning someone youthful, inexperienced, or immature.  Her references to "green" and "cold" both suggest qualities of salads.  Find uses in popular culture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_days

Colbert Nembhard looked more like a traveling salesman than a librarian in his dark suit with his rolling suitcase on a recent Wednesday morning in the Bronx.  He had strolled 10 minutes to the Crotona Inn homeless shelter from the Morrisania Branch Library, where he has been the manager for 25 years.  As he dug through the dozens of books stuffed inside the suitcase, an announcement crackled over the intercom inside the shelter, where 87 families live:  “Mr. Nembhard is here to read stories and sing songs to your children.”  Mr. Nembhard made do in a small office filled with file cabinets and dated desktops that also serves as a computer lab, a children’s classroom and a community recreation room.   For the past eight years, Mr. Nembhard has turned the shelter’s day care room or its dimly lighted office into an intimate library, tapping into the imaginations of transient children with the hope of making reading books a constant in their lives.  Mr. Nembhard’s partnership with the homeless shelter, operated by SCO Family of Services, began informally, and has served as a model for a citywide initiative to place small libraries at shelters for families.  In September, 2016 the Library of Congress recognized the city’s Department of Homeless Services for best practices in literacy for its Library Pilot Project, an initiative that has created small libraries in 30 shelters for families with children since March 2015 with the help of a donation of 3,000 books from Scholastic Inc.  The progam includes the Crotona shelter, where Mr. Nembhard was already a fixture.  His example gave volunteers a blueprint for how to go to shelters and read to children.  “It’s a pleasure to come in here,” Mr. Nembhard began on that Wednesday, never removing his jacket during a presentation that was just short of a Mr. Rogers routine.  He began to sing, “Good morning to you,” and followed with “Wheels on the Bus.”  The children joined in with a chorus of “round and round, round and round.”  Nikita Stewart   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/nyregion/a-bronx-librarian-keen-on-teaching-homeless-children-a-lasting-love-of-books.html?_r=0

December 9, 2016  Austria’s Word of the Year Has 52 Letters by Erin Blakemore   Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung.  To an English speaker, it may seem like a meaningless, even endless assortment of letters, but it turns out that it’s an award-winning German word.  As the Associated Press reports, a survey of 10,000 Austrians has chosen the lengthy noun as its word of the year.  Roughly translated, the word means “postponement of the repeat runoff of the presidential election.”  The super-long word was coined this year in response to a similarly drawn-out presidential election in Austria.  In May, Austrians elected Alexander Van der Bellen to the presidency.  But Van der Bellen’s victory was a narrow one, and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the country’s far-right party, contested the results and claimed that voting irregularities warranted a new election.  The repeat runoff was due to go ahead on October 2, but then something sticky happened.  As The Guardian’s Kate Connolly reports, the government requested a postponement of the repeat runoff when issues with the glue used to seal mail-in ballots were discovered.  The election was postponed and a new term was born.  The election finally went forward with higher turnout.  This time, the far-right party was rejected by Austrian voters by an even wider margin.  The events were watched with amusement and exhaustion by Austrians.  As the jury of experts who judged the contest told the Austrian paper Der Standard (in German), it is “both an expressive and ironic commentary [on] the political events of the year.”  The German language is famous for its compound words, which let speakers coin their own words by clumping together other ones.  Since compound words can be made up on the fly by anyone and are so unwieldy they’re rarely used, they don’t always make it into the dictionary.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/austrias-word-year-has-52-letters-180961375/

Alan Thicke died December 13, 2016 at the age of 69.  While Thicke was best known as a sitcom actor, he was also a successful theme song composer.  And in some cases, such as the Diff'rent Strokes theme song "It Takes Diff'rent Strokes," Thicke was even a featured singer.  On occasion, Thicke collaborated with his then-wife singer and Days of Our Lives star Gloria Loring--mother of Robin Thicke--on these projects, with her singing singing on the Diff'rent Strokes spin-off The Facts of Life theme song.  Colin Stutz  Link to videos of Thicke's ten best TV theme songs at http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7624440/alan-thicke-10-best-television-theme-songs

The present full moon, the one that was up there December 13, 2016  and will be only a little less than full on December 14, is called the Cold Moon.  This happens to be the third supermoon in three months.  A supermoon has come to be recognized as a full moon that occurs when the moon is also at its closest approach to the Earth.  The moon’s orbit is elliptical, or egg shaped, and therefore includes points where it is closest to us, and points where it is farthest.  In the Northern hemisphere, the Earth is closer to the sun in winter than in summer.  That means the sun’s gravity exerts a stronger pull on the moon, which draws it just a little closer to the Earth at the time it is full.  Martin Weil   https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-full-moon-is-a-supermoon-and-the-cold-moon/2016/12/14/fe7642a4-c1c2-11e6-9a51-cd56ea1c2bb7_story.html?utm_term=.d2d6bebedd81

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1664  December 14, 2016  On this date in 1836, the Toledo War unofficially ended.  On this date in 1911, Roald Amundsen's team, comprising himself, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, became  the first to reach the South Pole.