Elsie

Elsie may refer to:

People

Stage name

Family name (last name or surname)

Given name (first name)

A Dangerous Maid

A Dangerous Maid is a musical with a book by Charles W. Bell, music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin (writing under the pseudonym "Arthur Francis"). The script is based on Bell's 1918 play A Dislocated Honeymoon. The story concerns an ex-showgirl who elopes with a society boy, but his family tries to break up the marriage. The Gershwins wrote ten songs for the musical, eight of which were used in the production, which premiered in Atlantic City, New Jersey on March 21, 1921. It toured through several cities and ended in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it closed on April 16, 1921.

The show was George Gershwin's second book musical and his first full score written with his brother Ira. The book is believed to be lost. The show is one of the few Gershwin musicals that never made it to Broadway. The book was revised and retitled Elsie and, later, entirely new music was written for it by Eubie Blake and others. This version was produced on Broadway in April 1923. Even though Elsie ran for only 40 performances, it made history as a rare early example of black songwriters writing for white performers. No one knows why director Edgar MacGregor abandoned the Gershwin score. Several of the songs were later reused, and Ella Fitzgerald had a success in 1959 with her recording of "Boy Wanted".

William Grey Walter

William Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an American-born British neurophysiologist and robotician.

Overview

Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1910. His ancestry was German/British on his father's side, and American/British on his mother's side. He was brought to England in 1915, and educated at Westminster School and afterwards in King's College, Cambridge, in 1931. He failed to obtain a research fellowship in Cambridge and so turned to doing basic and applied neurophysiological research in hospitals, in London, from 1935 to 1939 and then at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, from 1939 to 1970. He also carried out research work in the United States, in the Soviet Union and in various other places in Europe. He married twice, and had two sons from his first marriage and one from the second. According to his eldest son, Nicolas Walter, "he was politically on the left, a communist fellow-traveller before the Second World War and an anarchist sympathiser after it." Throughout his life he was a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. In 1970 he suffered a brain injury in a motor scooter accident. He died seven years later on May 6, 1977 without fully recovering.