Surfing Through The Obits

I love reading obituaries and today's NYTimes has two good ones. The first is about William Gottlieb, the jazz photographer who captured legends like Billie Holiday and Miles Davis at their peak. Whatever image springs to mind when you think of them, chances are Gottlieb snapped it. But this is the passage that caught my eye:

In 1941, he quit his advertising job to do graduate study in economics and teach low-level classes at the University of Maryland, but continued his column. He said he left the university after it refused to let him teach a course on jazz, for fear it would overly praise black people.

Then there's a piece on actress Alida Valli (who starred in "The Third Man") which has this head-spinning transition:

Rather than comply with the dictates of the fascist government, Ms. Valli retreated into hiding and in 1944 married Oscar de Mejo, a Surrealist painter and composer, whose most successful song was "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth."

Life doesn't get quirkier than that.