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Jane Fonda

JANE FONDA
 
 
Jane Fonda  (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru.  She is a two-time Academy Award winner.  In 2014, she was the recipient of the American Film Institute AFI Life Achievement Award.  In 1982, she released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda’s Workout, which became the highest-selling video of the time.  In 2009, she returned to Broadway after a 45-year absence, in the play 33 Variations, which earned her a Tony Award nomination; while her recurring role in the HBO drama series The Newsroom (2012-2014) has earned her two Emmy Award nominations.  Fonda was a visible political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War and has been more recently involved in advocacy for women.  She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women, and describes herself as a feminist.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
The Vietnam Veterans Benefit Concert near Washington, D.C., on July 4, 1987 – which was nationally televised on HBO – seems to be largely forgotten today; it is even omitted from the “1987 in music” article in Wikipedia.  I took the concert to be, in large part, an apology from the 1960’s counter-culture for their disgraceful treatment of Vietnam Veterans (if I am not mistaken, even Jane Fonda put in an appearance), though no one was taking back anything that they had said about the politicians and many of the generals. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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After touring with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden in their “Indochina Peace Campaign” in 1971 and 1972, Holly Near began writing songs and performing in the Los Angeles area.  

 

(January 2014)

 

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In 1969, Mick Farren “liberated” the earliest large-scale rock concert in the U.K., the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival by encouraging the fences to be torn down.  This concert – which took place the month after Woodstock (and with many of the same acts) – featured the Who, the Band, Free, Joe Cocker, and the Moody Blues.  But the real excitement was caused by the inclusion on the bill of Bob Dylan, who had been little seen since his near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966.  When Dylan took the stage, audience members included three of the Beatles, three of the Beatle wives, three of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim, Syd Barrett, and Elton John.   

 

One of the main reasons for the location of the original Woodstock was to lure Bob Dylan out of hiding – the idea was to throw a huge party practically on his doorstep that surely he couldn’t resist attending.  Woodstock is the name of the town where Dylan lived (and also members of the Band); the festival itself was in Bethel.  But resist he did; Bob Dylan instead signed up to appear at the Isle of Wight Festival and set sail for England on August 15, 1969, the day that Woodstock opened.

 
(March 2014/1)