NEW ORLEANS DANCERS GET TO TAP WITH A MASTER
About 20 young dancers -- advanced high-school students and admiring graduates -- did their best to keep up when Gregory Hines led a class at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts."That was tight!" Hines said as the dancers copied his staccato clacks and slides. "You take this to an audition. That's all you got to do!"
Hines, 52, taught tappers from the Perrier Street arts school on Saturday, a day before NOCCA's annual fund-raising benefit at the Storyville District nightclub.
Half of the school's 250 students come from families whose incomes fall below the poverty line.
"Fund-raisers like this give everyone the chance to start off on the same foot," NOCCA spokeswoman Pam Kancher said.
REAGAN'S DAUGHTER FINDS SOLACE IN UNSPOKEN WORD
Ronald Reagan's daughter has learned how to communicate with the former president without speaking a word.
"I found that if I accept that this is the reality that has happened to us -- this is my father's exit from this world -- that I'm just content to be with him and sometimes in total silence looking at a picture book or a book of photographs," Patti Davis said in Sunday's Daily News of Los Angeles.
The 88-year-old former president suffers from Alzheimer's disease, which causes memory loss, impaired judgment and the loss of language abilities.
On Saturday, Davis discussed the effects of Alzheimer's at a women's health forum. About 100 residents and caregivers attended.
GOVERNMENT NEEDS YOU, COKIE ROBERTS TELLS GRADS
Graduating seniors should consider a career in government, the one institution that binds all Americans, said ABC News' chief congressional analyst Cokie Roberts.
"I will not say that this time more than all others calls for the service of every man," she said in her commencement address at Duke University in Durham, N.C. "But I will say there was never a time when the services of those who possess talents, integrity, firmness and sound judgment are wanted more in Congress."
Those weren't her words -- she would have said "every man and woman" -- but those of Thomas Jefferson in 1806 to Barnabas Bidwell, who was leaving Congress, she said.
"Every so often I feel like I want to laminate those words when good people leave Congress and good people like you find that it's not an institution that you think is worthy of your talents."