Marianne's Birthday 9/13/2014

Did You Know? - A tutu is a skirt worn as a costume in a ballet performance, often with attached bodice. It consists of a Basque (or waistband, as it can either be part of the bodice or a separate band) and the skirt itself might be single layer, hanging down, or multiple layers starched and jutting out.

The bell-shaped Romantic dress of the mid-1800s gave way to the tutu at the end of the 19th century. Connoisseurs of ballet, the Russians wanted to see the new technical feats and fancy footwork of their ballerinas.

The new long, floppy, 16 layer tutus reached to the knee and allowed the female dancers much greater mobility in such technically demanding ballets as Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and Paquita.

Quotation To Remember: Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Quotation To Remember: The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.

Did You Know? - A connoisseur (French traditional (pre-1835) spelling of connaisseur, from Middle-French connoistre, then connaître meaning "to be acquainted with" or "to know somebody/something.") is a person who has a great deal of knowledge about the fine arts, cuisines, or an expert judge in matters of taste.

In many areas the term now has an air of pretension, and may be used in a partly ironic sense, but in the art trade connoisseurship remains a crucial skill for the identification and attribution to individual artists of works, where documentary evidence of provenance is lacking. The situation in the wine trade is similar, for example in assessing the potential for ageing in a young wine through wine tasting.

Quotation To Remember: There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.- Sofia Loren

Did You Know? - The carafe /kəˈræf/, is a container without handles used for serving wine and other drinks. Unlike the related decanter, carafes do not include stoppers.

Coffee pots included in coffee makers are also referred to as carafes.

In France, carafes are commonly used to serve water. To order a carafe d'eau ("carafe of water") is to request to be served (free) tap water rather than bottled water at a cost.

Did You Know? - Italian (About this sound italiano (help·info) or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, as a second language in Malta, Slovenia and Croatia, by minorities in Albania, Eritrea, France, Libya, Monaco, Montenegro, Romania and Somalia, and by expatriate communities in Europe, in the Americas and in Australia. Many speakers are native bilinguals of both standardised Italian and other regional languages.

According to the Bologna statistics of the European Union, Italian is spoken as a native language by 59 million people in the EU (13% of the EU population), mainly in Italy, and as a second language by 14 million (3%). Including the Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland and Albania) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is around 85 million.

Did You Know? - The earliest documentation of a "Chianti wine" dates back to the thirteenth century when viticulture was known to flourish in the "Chianti Mountains" around Florence.

The merchants in the nearby townships of Castellina, Gaiole and Radda formed the Lega del Chianti (League of Chianti) to produce and promote the local wine. In 1398, records note that the earliest incarnation of Chianti was as a white wine.

In 1716 Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany issued an edict legislating that the three villages of the Lega del Chianti (Castellina in Chianti, Gaiole in Chianti, and Radda in Chianti) as well as the village of Greve and a 3.2-kilometre-long stretch (2-mile) of hillside north of Greve near Spedaluzzo as the only officially recognized producers of Chianti.

This delineation existed until July 1932, when the Italian government expanded the Chianti zone to include the outlying areas of Barberino Val d'Elsa, Chiocchio, Robbiano, San Casciano in Val di Pesa and Strada. Subsequent expansions in 1967 would eventually bring the Chianti zone to cover a very large area all over central Tuscany.