Anais NIN ~~ Georgia O'KEEFFE ~~ Lucia PAMELA

ANAIS NIN ~ 1903 - 1977 ~~ Writer and diarist, born in Paris, of a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anais spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style, she is best known for her life and times in "The Diary of Anais Nin" and "The Early Diaries of Anais Nin." The legendary relationship between Anais and Henry Miller produced letters that reflect nearly a 10-year liaison. When Nin met Miller she was living in France and married to Hugo Guiler. The marriage was hardly conventional and she and Miller began a passionate love affair. Nin said, "There is not one big cosmic meaning for all. There is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person." GEORGIA O'KEEFFE ~ 1887 - 1996 ~~ Born in Sun Prairie, Wis., O'Keeffe graduated from the Chatham Protestant Episcopal Institute in Williamsburg, Va. in 1904. She then studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. With her paintings she vividly portrayed the power and emotion of objects of nature. This was first seen in her charcoal drawings of silhouetted bud-like forms exhibited in 1916 that brought her fame. During the 1920s, she explored this theme in her magnified paintings of flowers which to this day enchant people amorously. After spending a summer in New Mexico, Georgia O'Keeffe, enthralled by the barren landscape and expansive skies of the desert, would explore the subject of animal bones in her paintings of the 1930s and 1940s. Just as with the flowers, she painted the bones magnified and captured the stillness and remoteness of them, while at the same time expressing a sense of beauty that lies within the desert. Georgia O'Keeffe was married to the pioneer photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1924. It was at Stieglitz's famed New York art gallery "291" that her charcoal drawings were first exhibited in 1916. The union lasted 22 years, until Stieglitz's death. O'Keeffe died on March 6th in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore, unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone." ~~ LUCIA PAMELA ~ 1904 - 2002 ~~ Best known for recording a music album "Into Outer Space With Lucia Pamela" in 1969 about her fictional travels to the moon, Ms. Pamela was a one-of-a-kind entertainer. Born in St. Louis, she moved to Fresno, Calif., where she managed the Fresno Storyland Amusement Park, where she also played Mother Goose. Ms. Pamela formed what some say was the country's first all-female orchestra, Lucia Pamela and the Musical Pirates, in which she claimed to play 15 instruments. One of Ms. Pamela's proudest accomplishments was building a rocket, touring the Milky Way and stopping on the moon to record her album. With the feel of a warped bebop children's album, it features Ms. Pamela on all instruments -- piano, accordion, drums, clarinet, and probably various household appliances -- accompanying herself as she tells, with gee-whiz glee, tales of amiable lunar roosters, trips to Mars and blue winds. She also created a coloring book that tells the story of a moon trip in which she meets cows, Indians and anthropomorphic cashews. "Some of the people there spoke Almond," she wrote. Ms. Pamela is survived by a son and one daughter, Georgia Frontiere, owner of the St. Louis Rams.