People and Celebs

When the rest of the world paused last winter to commemorate "the Day the Music Died," the name given to the date of Feb. 3, 1959, when an Iowa plane crash claimed the lives of rock pioneer Buddy Holly and his tourmates, the man probably most responsible for burning that phrase into the popular imagination was nowhere to be seen or heard.

"Taking Woodstock" is set entirely in upstate New York. But the genesis for Ang Lee's latest film took place in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the green room at KRON-TV.

After being offered a role in the new "Halloween II," Margot Kidder turned to the Internet to see what director Rob Zombie was all about.

"All the kids in town said, 'You haven't heard of Rob Zombie? He's cool.' I Googled him," she says. "My first thought was, 'Oh my! His music sure is loud.' "

Showtime's "Nurse Jackie" ends its first season Monday as it puts the title character's infidelity front and center.

As Art Linkletter never said, kids say the darnedest things about body parts.

"There was a brown fake arm and a lot of tan fake arms," commented 6-year-old stoic Julia Comes, unfazed after her recent discovery of a table of bloody severed limbs in her upscale Memphis, Tenn., neighborhood, where the cast and crew of the MTV horror production "Savage County" was in residency this week.

Should we hold singer Jack Jones or songwriters Burt Bacharach and Hal David responsible?

"Hey, little girl/ Comb your hair, fix your makeup/ Soon he will open the door/ Don't think because there's a ring on your finger/ You needn't try anymore/ For wives should always be lovers, too."

In the past month, Kevin Spacey turned 50 and his latest film, "Shrink," a comedy drama about a Hollywood psychiatrist whose personal problems rival those of his celebrity clients, opened in theaters.

Six facts you might not know about Jack Kerouac:

1. Kerouac believed that his older brother, Gerard, who died of rheumatic fever at age 10, was an actual saint, and in later life he often felt that Gerard was speaking directly to him from heaven.

An interview with Jack Kerouac by Steve Allen, done in 1959, is available on YouTube, at www.youtube.com. In the interview, Kerouac talks about writing "On the Road," and the meaning of the word "Beat." He also reads from "On the Road," which had become an immediate best seller and had Kerouac labeled the voice of his generation.

Reading beyond "On the Road"

Toward the end of writer Jack Kerouac's life, the so-called King of the Beats was having trouble paying his mortgage. Upon his death in 1969, his estate was valued at $91 -- compared with around $20 million today.