The Mousetrap by mystery author Agatha Christie

On 23 December, in 1970 a record took place in a theater: it was the day that the 7,511th performance of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” was performed!

The Mousetrap is a murder play by the great mystery author Agatha Christie. The Mousetrap opened in a theater in the West End of London in 1952, and has been running continuously since then. It has the longest initial run of any play in history, with its 25,000th performance taking place on 18 November 2012. It is the longest running show (of any type) of the modern era.

By tradition, at the end of each performance, audiences are asked not to reveal the identity of the killer to anyone outside the theater, to ensure that the end of the play is not spoiled for future audiences.

The play is based on a short story, itself based on the radio play began broadcast on 30 May 1947 called Three Blind Mice.  Christie asked that the story not be published as long as it ran as a play in the West End of London. The short story has still not been published within the United Kingdom but it has appeared in the United States in the 1950 collection Three Blind Mice and Other Stories.

When she wrote the play, Christie gave the rights as a birthday present to her grandson Matthew Prichard. Outside of the West End, only one version of the play can be performed annually and under the contract terms of the play, no film adaptation can be produced until the West End production has been closed for at least six months. Mrs. Christie’s vagaries!

The suggestion to call it The Mousetrap came from Christie’s son-in-law, Anthony Hicks.

What’s out! A mouse Trap!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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Tennis match with Chris Evert!

On 21 December, in 1954 a world no. 1 professional tennis player was born: Christine Marie “Chris” Evert

Chris was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Colette Thompson and Jimmy Evert, and raised in a devout Roman Catholic family. Her father was a professional tennis coach, and tennis was a way of life in his family.

She was a huge tennis star winning 18 singles championships and three doubles titles. Overall Evert won 157 singles championships and 29 doubles titles.

Evert reached 34 Grand Slam singles finals, more than any player, man or woman, in the history of professional tennis. She reached the semifinals or better, in singles, of 52 of the 56 Grand Slams she played, including the semifinals or better of 34 consecutive Grand Slams played from the 1971 U.S. open through the 1983 French Open (Roland Garos). Evert never lost in the first or second round of a Grand Slam singles tournament.

Chris’ affairs and weddings were some of the stories! The romance with the top men’s player Jimmy Connors captured the public’s attention in the 1970s, mostly after they both captured the singles titles at Wimbledon in 1974. They got engaged, when she was 19, but the romance did not last. A wedding was planned for November 8, 1974, but it was called off. In 1979, Evert married the British tennis player John Lloyd and changed her name to “Chris Evert-Lloyd.” The marriage ended in divorce in 1987. Then in 1988, Evert married two-time Olympic downhill skier Andy Mill and they have three sons together. This also ended in a bad divorce on December 4, 2006, with Evert paying Mill a settlement of U.S. $7 million. Recently Evert and Australian golfer Greg Norman were married on June 28, 2008, in the Bahamas. But after 18 months of marriage they announced their divorce.

All the above was “food” for the media. The bottom line is that Chris was one of the biggest and most inspirational woman tennis player of all times. And this is it in our hearts!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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Through paper we travel with Frank Sinatra to New York!

As today, December 12 in 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey a star was born. The name was …Frank Sinatra!

Sinatra was the only child of Italian immigrants Natalie Della (Garaventa) and Antonino Martino Sinatra.

During the Great Depression, his mother Dolly provided money to her son for outings with friends and expensive clothes. In 1938, Sinatra was arrested for carrying on with a married woman, a criminal offense at the time. For his livelihood, he worked as a delivery boy, and later as a riveter at a shipyard, but music was Sinatra’s main interest, and he listened carefully to big band jazz. He began singing for tips at the age of eight, standing on top of the bar at a local nightclub in Hoboken. Sinatra began singing professionally as a teenager in the 193’0s, while he learned music by ear and never went to a music school to learn how to read music.

In May 1941, Sinatra was at the top of the male singer polls in the Billboard and Down Beat magazines. On December 30, 1942, Sinatra made a “fabulous opening” at the Paramount Theater in New York. Jack Benny said, “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion… All this for a fellow I never heard of.” When Sinatra returned to the Paramount in October 1944, 35,000 fans caused a protest parade outside the theater because they were not permitted to get in.

And a great career started that is going to last about five decades!

Sinatra had three children, Nancy, Frank Jr., and Tina, all with his first wife, Nancy Sinatra. He was married three more times, to actresses Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and finally to Barbara Marx.

Sinatra used to love glamorous surroundings and he appreciated to have people always around!  He acknowledged this, telling in an interviewer in the 1950’s: “Being an 18-karat manic-depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.” In her memoirs My Father’s Daughter, his daughter Tina wrote about the “18-karat” remark: “As flippant as Dad could be about his mental state, I believe that a Zoloft a day might have kept his demons away. But that kind of medicine was decades off.”

Apart of his personal life no one can forget his big hits as an actor or as a singer.

Autumn in New York, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, April in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Someone to Watch Over Me, Love and Marriage, Stardust, Strangers in the Night, Somethin’ Stupid” (with Nancy Sinatra), My Way, Something, Theme from New York, New York, Teach Me Tonight, Mack the Knife …we could write forever…

This is Frank Sinatra, our Frankie!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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With few wise words Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement

“When baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game, and so, I’ve played my last game.”

With these words Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement on December 11, 1951.

A three-time MVP winner and 13-time All-Star, DiMaggio is the only player to be selected for the All-Star Game in every season he played. During his thirteen years with the Yankees, the club won ten American League pennants and nine World Series championships. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak (May 15 – July 16, 1941), a record that as of today still stands. DiMaggio was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.

DiMaggio made his major league debut on May 3, 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. The Yankees had not been to the World Series since 1932, but they won the next four Fall Classics. In 1939, DiMaggio was nicknamed the “Yankee Clipper” by Yankee’s stadium announcer Arch McDonald, when he likened DiMaggio’s speed and range in the outfield to the then-new Pan American airliner.

In January 1937, DiMaggio met actress Dorothy Arnold. They married at San Francisco’s St. Peter and Paul Church on November 19, 1939, as 20,000 well-wishers jammed the streets. Their son, Joseph Paul DiMaggio III, was born at Doctors Hospital on October 23, 1941. In the September 1949 issue of SPORT magazine, Hank Greenberg said that DiMaggio covered so much ground in center field that the only way to get a hit against the Yankees was “to hit ’em where Joe wasn’t.” On February 7, 1949, DiMaggio signed a record contract worth $100,000 and became the first baseball player to break $100,000 in earnings.

Marilyn Monroe? Yes of course! According to her autobiography, Marilyn Monroe originally did not want to meet DiMaggio, fearing that he was a stereotypical arrogant athlete! Their marriage was filled with “violence”. One typical forceful incident occurred immediately after the skirt-blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch, the very known Marilyn’s pose. The couple had a “yelling battle” in the theater lobby. A month later, she filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. That was exactly 274 days after the wedding.

DiMaggio was a heavy smoker for much of his adult life. After a lung cancer operation he returned to his Florida home on January 19, 1999, where he died on March 8.

Joe, “Joltin’ Joe” or “The Yankee Clipper” was an american baseball hero. You can find tones of memorabilia about him. And people love them!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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