People & Celebrities

By BETSY PICKLE
Friday, November 17, 2006
Playing the lead in "Flicka" felt natural to Alison Lohman. Riding the horse of the title was another story.

"I'd never ridden, so this was all new," says Lohman, who saddled up alongside country singer Tim McGraw and "A History of Violence" star Maria Bello, who play her parents.

By WAYNE BLEDSOE
Friday, November 17, 2006
Being a woman in music is a lot different now from when singer-songwriter Aimee Mann broke into the business in the early 1980s in the rock band 'Til Tuesday.

"Women were considered a novelty act," says Mann.

By JOHN BEIFUSS
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Born and raised in a tiny Arkansas community named Locust Bayou, former security guard Phil Chambliss is the filmmaking equivalent of a folk artist.

For 30 years he's been cranking out crude, homemade short films to entertain friends and family, never assuming they'd be seen by anyone outside southern Arkansas.

But Chambliss _ like a backwoods blues singer or a rural self-taught painter of Bible scenes _ has been discovered by the cognoscenti, or at least by those with a taste for the weird, funny and expressively personal.

On Oct.

By HEATHER ANN WHITE
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
To many, Freddy Fender was a legend. The Grammy Award-winning musician, who died Saturday, not only contributed to music genres including rock 'n' roll, country and Tejano, but also paved the way for Mexican-American and Latino musicians.

By CASSANDRA HINOJOSA
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Grammy Award-winning musician Freddy Fender, who was diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year and returned to his Corpus Christi, Texas, home for hospice care last week, died Saturday.

Fender, 69, who topped the Billboard charts in the '60s, '70s and '80s with singles that included "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" and "Before The Next Teardrop Falls," was surrounded by family when he died.

"Since last year, Freddy got closer to the Lord than ever," said longtime friend Ruben Rivera, who visited Fender's family Saturday.

By JOHN BEIFUSS
Friday, November 10, 2006
Actress-turned-filmmaker Joey Lauren Adams sounds both weary and rejuvenated when she discusses the journey that took her from Arkansas to California and _ recently _ back to the South.

"I'd been in L.A.

By MARC SHULGOLD
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Van Cliburn may not have been born to play the piano _ but by age 5, he knew his fate.

"When I was 3," the renowned pianist recalled, "my mother found me at the keyboard imitating one of her students." Lessons soon began.

Two years later, Rhilda Bee Cliburn had a heart-to-heart with her precocious son.

By JOHN HAYES
Thursday, November 09, 2006
It's the Al Franken decade. Again.

The comedian's bit from the early days of "Saturday Night Live" may have been slightly prophetic, even if he got the decade wrong.

In the 21st century, Franken is a successful author.

By WAYNE BLEDSOE
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
It's easy to feel like you know David Sedaris before he ever picks up the phone. He's the North Carolina junior-high-school student so affected by a drama presentation that he insisted on speaking to his family in nothing but Elizabethan English for weeks.

He's the obsessive-compulsive boy who could not keep himself from licking doorknobs and light switches and pressing his nose against things until it drove his mother and teachers to drink _ at least when they were talking about him.

He's the grown man who was hired to be an elf at Macy's, the American in Paris who was immediately pegged by American tourists as a non-English-speaking French mugger and the teenage hitchhiker who suddenly realized that getting in a car with a stranger is not such a good idea after all.

Sedaris, his parents, his siblings and his partner, Hugh, all seem real and familiar in a Sedaris essay or monologue.

By SAM MCMANIS
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
In this media age, when glossy magazines seemingly can make a splash only by running celebrity baby photos or having "exclusive" interviews with stars, Ms.