Betty MacDonald Fan Club. Join fans of the beloved writer Betty MacDonald (1907-58). The original Betty MacDonald Fan Club and literary Society. Welcome to Betty MacDonald Fan Club and Betty MacDonald Society - the official Betty MacDonald Fan Club Website with members in 40 countries.
Betty MacDonald, the author of The Egg and I and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Series is beloved all over the world. Don't miss Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald biography and his very witty interviews on CD and DVD!
ABBA have announced that they have written and recorded their first new songs since they split in 1983. The Swedish four-piece, who had nine No 1 hits in the UK between 1974
and 1980, and who have sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide, announced on Instagram that they had recorded two new songs for a project in which avatars of the band will perform.
The band said in a statement: “The decision to go ahead with the
exciting Abba avatar tour project had an unexpected consequence. We all
felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and
go into the recording studio. So we did. And it was like time had stood
still and we had only been away on a short holiday. An extremely joyful
experience!” One of the two new songs that resulted, called I Still Have Faith in You, will feature in a TV special to air in December. The statement concluded: “We may have come of age, but the song is new. And it feels good.” Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus revealed details of the band’s forthcoming project in Brussels earlier this week.
The centrepiece is the two-hour TV show co-produced by NBC and the BBC,
which will see the band perform as computer-generated avatars. Ulvaeus
said the band had been digitally scanned and “de-aged” to look like they
did in 1979, when they performed their third and final tour. The avatars are then set to tour the world from next year. Abba formed in Stockholm in 1972. They comprised two couples: Ulvaeus
and Agnetha Fältskog; and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, all
of whom had enjoyed musical careers in Sweden. The group burst on to the
international stage after winning the Eurovision song contest in
Brighton in 1974 with their song Waterloo.
From
the mid-70s until they split, Abba built up a formidable arsenal of
global hits including Knowing Me, Knowing You, Take a Chance on Me,
Dancing Queen and The Name of the Game – all of which reached No 1 in
the UK. Fältskog and Lyngstad were the lead singers; Andersson and Ulvaeus
composed the songs. Never less than impeccably produced and performed,
Abba’s records were critically disdained at the time, but their
popularity has endured. Their 1992 compilation Abba Gold has sold 30m
copies – more than 5m of those in the Britain – and spent 833 weeks in the UK album charts. Their jukebox musical Mamma Mia! debuted in the West End in 1999 and is still running both in London and worldwide; its website claims that it has been seen by 60 million people in 440 cities.
The stage show was adapted into a film in 2008,
which grossed $615m (£447m) worldwide. A sequel, Mamma Mia: Here We Go
Again, will be released in June. The actor Lily James – who is set to
appear alongside the cast of the first film including Meryl Streep,
Amanda Seyfried and Colin Firth – told the BBC last week:
“There’s lot of songs in there, lots of new ones. Lots of ones,
actually, that weren’t in my repertoire of Abba and I think they’re
going to be huge hits again, and reawaken the love of Abba.” Abba’s split in 1983 followed the divorces of both couples. Ulvaeus
and Andersson went on to write two musicals, including Chess – a revival by the English National Opera opens on Friday in London
– before largely devoting themselves to Abba’s legacy. Fältskog and
Lyngstad have kept much lower profiles, though Fältskog – long claimed
to be a recluse – returned to pop music with an album, A, which was
released in 2013. The group have long held out against lucrative offers to reform –
they were reported to have been offered $1bn to play a concert in 2000.
In 2014, Ulvaeus told Billboard: “you will never see us on stage again … we don’t need the money, for one thing.” Peter Robinson, editor of Popjustice,
described the announcement as “the biggest pop news of the 21st
century. Most fans grudgingly admired Abba’s refusal to record new
music, but I think we all sometimes daydreamed about the band possibly,
maybe, one day having a rethink at the right time, on the right terms
and for the right reasons, which seems to be what’s happened here.” He
added: “It’s a pop miracle.”
Claire
Dederer, Author of Poser : My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses lives
in Seattle and writes about books and culture for the New York Times,
Vogue, Newsday, and many other publications.
Dear Betty MacDonald Fans,
I knew of the Betty MacDonald Fan Club but didn't know its activities were so extensive. That's wonderful.
I
checked in with the magazine and they said please feel free to reprint
or repost.
I will keep you updated if I do any more pieces on Betty.
Thanks so much for all you are doing!
All the best,
Claire Dederer
Second Read — January / February 2011 Her Great Depression
Re-reading Betty MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest’s bust years
By Claire Dederer
From
the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with
me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a
writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking
for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle,
someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a
book. A book that got published.
I was always on the lookout for
a message, something that would tell me that this thing could be done. I
realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a
message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to
another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a
child, the message I sought was simple: This place is worth writing
about.
Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a
non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. There were few nationally
published authors from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at
all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read
anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the
names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken
Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, though I didn’t even pretend to enjoy
it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer
newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins
and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy’s first memoir, but
she seemed to hate the place.
And, eventually, I read Betty
MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form
of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my
mother’s shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by
MacDonald: Anybody Can Do Anything.
I had seen it before but
assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had
mushroomed on my mother’s shelves over the past few years. Bored enough,
I picked it up—and found therein an enchanted world. Enchanted because
it was exactly real. Anybody Can Do Anything is Betty MacDonald’s story
of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame
house (not unlike my family’s) in the University District (just a mile
or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were
very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me
feel that I was seeing my life reflected in her pages.
It’s funny
to think of a time when Betty MacDonald’s books were new to me. Over
the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own
neighborhood—with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the
end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with
her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island
in Puget Sound. Her first book was The Egg and I, set in the 1920s. This
chronicle of MacDonald’s life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with
her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a
fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This,
putting aside her books for children, was followed by The Plague and I, a
surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis
sanitarium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of
lying in bed for a year is one of life’s mysteries. Next came Anybody
Can Do Anything, which I held in my hands. Finally she wrote Onions in
the Stew, about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three
years before she succumbed to cancer at the age of forty-nine.
But
it was Anybody Can Do Anything, with its Seattle locale and its
scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me.
As
the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on
the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at
twenty, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he
could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point
with the rain, the chickens, the monomaniacal husband, the whole affair.
“Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this,” she recounts, “I
wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and
I seemed to have married the wrong man.” She snatches up her little
daughters and makes her long, rainy, difficult way back to the city by
foot, bus, and ferry.
There she and her girls are folded happily
back into her large family’s bosom. Her mother’s “eight-room
brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest
dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate
for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house
with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room
plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living
room, four elastic bedrooms…represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and
luxury.”
The book describes life in that teeming, cozy household
with her mother, her three sisters, her brother, and her two little
girls, plus whoever else might be sleeping over in one of those elastic
bedrooms. It also details the literally dozens of weird and
none-too-wonderful jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression:
hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo
retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas tree decorator,
baby sitter, receptionist to a gangster.
The author jumps from
job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves,
like Tom Cruise running from an exploding warehouse. She’s hustled along
in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister Mary, who considers
herself an “executive thinker.”
Mary has a job ready for Betty
as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm, never mind that Betty
is utterly unqualified. Mary won’t hear of such talk. She is quick to
admonish her sister: “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most
people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is
that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting
for some employer to come creeping in looking for them.”
The
truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were
certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle
that emerges is definitively—though quietly—desperate. But on my first
read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of
my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, “There was nothing in
sight but wet pavement and wet sky.” MacDonald describes places that
still existed, that I myself knew—the I. Magnin’s at the corner of Sixth
and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on
the Pike Place Market:
The Public Market, about three blocks
long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting
peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds,
yellows and greens of fresh succulent fruits and vegetables. From the
hundreds of farmer’s stalls that lined both sides of the street and
extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks,
Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares. The
Italians were the most voluble but the Japanese had the most beautiful
vegetables.
Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my
brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a
deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food
they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of
buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did.
I
saw, illustrated perfectly, and in the cold light of nonfiction, the
possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be
struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature
until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s. My mother
told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece
lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it
with a true feeling of awe: the niece of an author lived therein! Of
course I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more
than real; she was tangible. She was prima facie evidence that the
materials I had at hand—those trees, that rain—were enough.
Other
writers came and went; Betty MacDonald was among those who endured for
me. This was because she was funny. No, that’s not quite right. Though I
didn’t have the language for it when I first read her, Betty MacDonald
was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure
out just how she did it.
She wrote long, ridiculous set pieces
about her various jobs. She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who
in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly
of her family’s eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging
self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one’s own
ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example of her rueful tone: Until
I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity.
While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being
labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner,
highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player,
most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most
efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to
learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red
hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and
curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so
coarse is what makes it look so thick.”
It almost goes without saying that she distinguishes herself in night school by being the absolute worst student in every class. MacDonald
was master of the comic memoirist’s first art: self-deprecation. Other
types of memoirists value lyricism, or shock tactics. Comic memoirists
are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest
people in any given room. I know whereof I speak—I am this year
publishing a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists
like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called “nobody”
memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such
memoirists are “neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their
kin.” How, then, to proceed? You’re nobody. You want to write a
memoir. Your first order of business is to let readers know that you
know that they know you’re a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance
as quickly as possible, and never, ever stop. By means of that simple
dynamic, the memoirist makes a friend rather than an enemy of her
reader.
In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald fails again and
again. It’s an entire book about failure: her own, and the economy’s.
It’s also about persisting in the face of one’s own admitted
shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills,
which she presents as nil: “I wanted some sort of very steady job with a
salary, and duties mediocre enough to be congruent with my mediocre
ability. I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and
file clerk.” Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of
government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National
Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency started in 1933 and charged
with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. There she felt
right at home, surrounded by federal-level incompetence: “There were
thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it
in ten copies.” MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone.
When she’s remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation,
but that of the big-screen version of The Egg and I, starring Claudette
Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable. In the
film, Ma and Pa Kettle—neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in
the book—have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting
caricatures. And the public loved them. On the movie poster, the faces
of these two crackers loom huge; Colbert and MacMurray cower tinily in
the corner. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were
made about them and their fictional fifteen children, and Betty
MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer.
Many
years after all of this, I was having dinner with a British writer who
had undertaken to write about the Northwest. “You have to be careful
about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty
MacDonald: housewife humor,” he said, finishing in scathing (if posh)
tones. MacDonald has been trapped in this role of domestic lightweight.
But her writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with,
say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a mid-century
housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what’s so bad
about Erma Bombeck?)
What MacDonald models in her writing is
actually very freeing—self-deprecation as a kind of passport to the
ordinary. With it, you can take your reader into the most mundane
details of your life, and they will often go.
I teach adult
writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces
about what they’ve achieved. About their good marriages. About their
sterling qualities. “Nobody wants to hear about that except your
mother!” I tell them. Which is never very popular. Even so, I try to
explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: what people want to see
in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If
you can show readers that you have those same failures, those same
smallnesses, and make them laugh about it, they will love you. Or at
least like you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody.
These
simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told
with self-deprecating humor. But what MacDonald achieves in Anybody Can
Do Anything is something more than that: a finely observed journalistic
record of her time. The ridiculous set pieces, the fond portraits of
her family, and what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the
“earthy tang” of her writing do not seem like indicators of a work of
serious journalism. But MacDonald is getting down on paper what she sees
happening all across Seattle, and ultimately providing us with a rough
draft of history. The details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes
pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in
the West during the 1930s. This is a cheerful, unassuming way of
documenting a socially and economically turbulent period. But it’s
documentation nonetheless.
Take, for example, MacDonald’s
account of one of her earliest jobs. This chapter encapsulates the
uneasiness of the early part of the Depression, eerily suggestive of the
economic tenterhooks we’ve been on since 2007. She’s been summarily
fired from her first job as executive secretary to a miner, so the
ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she
works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn’t any of
the qualifications the lumberman is looking for in a secretary, Mary
tells her not to fret. “‘You thought you couldn’t learn mining,’ Mary
told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the
street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to
divide everything by twelve.’?”
As she makes her way to work each
morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: “Now I grew more
and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the
streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of
businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the
battlefield and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread.”
Her employer’s business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she
shouldn’t leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to
stay until the end. “And I did,” we read, “in spite of Mr. Chalmers’
telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct
result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking
they were as good as people like him.” Again, this blame-the-victim
language recalls some of the rhetoric of today’s subprime mortgage
crisis. But despite the boss’s efforts to draw a sociological line in
the sand, he too is laid low by the economic downturn, and the chapter
comes to an abrupt end: “Lumber was over.”
The author and her
family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat.
Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of
endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she
complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: “There
is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to.
You have to adjust to the fact that it’s no longer a question of what
you eat but if you eat.” But sometimes the details tell the story
that the tone masks. When the heat and the electricity have been turned
off, the family relies upon old Christmas candles for light and firewood
for heat: “When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw
and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took
turns sawing up fallen logs.” Here, despite the characteristic pluck,
you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire. This isn’t an overlay of
social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative. Instead, such
commentary is tightly knitted to MacDonald’s own experience. When she
notices that “[e]very day found a little better class of people selling
apples on street corners,” she’s not making an idle observation—she’s
wondering if she’s next.
When I came to write my own memoir, I
was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the
millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had
observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect
parenting. In Betty MacDonald’s writing, I once again found just the
model I needed. It was possible to connect the larger story around me to
my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical.
In fact, the more I focused on the details of my own very particular
experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam
in.
The message that Betty Macdonald sent me, through this book,
is one of sufficiency: Your small life is enough. Other writers might
be looking for a message that will feed their huge ambitions. From
books, they learn how far they might go with their own writing. For me,
the question has always been: How close to home might I stay? MacDonald’s
qualities as a writer—the focus on the very local, the self-deprecating
humor, the careful and personal observation of social changes—are
modest qualities. They inspire through their very humility. The homely,
says Betty MacDonald, is more than enough. This was the message I needed
to hear. There’s a clue, of course, right there in the title. It’s been
telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a
writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you.
Such
lack of pretension doesn’t necessarily come with great rewards. There
are no monuments to Betty MacDonald. No endowed chairs, no scholarships,
not even a public library conference room named after her.
But in the
shallow green bowl of Chimacum Valley, a two-lane road leads to the
chicken farm where MacDonald lived for four tough years. It’s been
renamed “The Egg and I Road.” It veers west from Route 19, cutting
through farmland before heading up a hill into some evergreens. It’s
nothing special. It’s just ordinary. It’s just a county road.
we know all the 'real' persons in Betty MacDonald's books especially very strange Dorita Hess.
Betty
MacDonald Fan Club members in 40 countries admire Wolfgang Hampel's
fascinating stories, satirical poems and very witty interviews but also
his brilliant friends.
I contributed a letter written by Betty MacDonald's fabulous grandmother Gammy. The
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Memorial Letter Collection is very interesting
and includes the most important letters written by Betty MacDonald,
Mary Bard Jensen, Sydney Bard, Gammy and many other members of the
family.
It's a great feeling to be part of Betty MacDonald Fan Club.
Whether you plan to drive near or far, there’s a Washington State destination just right for your family spring break getaway.
Northwest Washington Family Spring Break Ideas
1. Bellingham. A sweet little city
often overlooked by families motoring up I-5; the college town of
Bellingham deserves it own multi-day stay. See my post on 20 Things to Do in Bellingham with Kids, go on a scenic drive (stop often for candy!) and play in the snow at Mt. Baker.
2. San Juan Islands. Go whale watching on the ferry ride, then arrive in the supercute village of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, where you’ll probably stay, unless you go out to Roche Harbor. Drive around the island, using the article 13 things to do with kids on San Juan Island as your guide. Great vacation with bigger kids (elementary age).
5. Tacoma. Yes, you’re very near Seattle, but Tacoma
deserves its own spring break exploration, in my opinion, particularly
with toddlers and preschoolers. Visit the beluga whales at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium (and let the kids go nuts on the great outside play structures) then bring toddlers to the new Children’s Museum of Tacoma.
8. Port Townsend. This Victorian seaport is inherently charming, and offers great family-friendly dining and activities for families. You could easily spend a few days here, with excursions to visit Port Angeles‘s kid-friendly picks.
South and East Washington Family Spring Break Ideas
9. Columbia Gorge. I grew up here! But don’t hold that against the Columbia Gorge. Check in at the Skamania Lodge (offering MANY kid-friendly spring-break activities), then go for a hike and count the violets for me.
10. Leavenworth-Lake Chelan. Tiny Leavenworth is great for a day or two — check out these quick guides on things to do with kids in Leavenworth and kid-friendly dining.
But this destination can be combined with other destinations. Lake
Chelan is another two hours away, but if you’re willing to make this a
road trip, Lake Chelan’s pedestrian-friendly town and lovely lakeside views are worth another day or two.
13. Walla Walla. If you like to unwind from a family day with a glass of wine, Walla Walla has you all set, with more than 100 wineries in town. But there’s plenty of non-vino activities (thank goodness!) to keep kids occupied, including a children’s museum.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club, founded by Wolfgang Hampel, has members in 40 countries.
Wolfgang Hampel, author of Betty MacDonald biography interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and friends. His Interviews have been published on CD and DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club. If you are interested in the Betty MacDonald Biography or the Betty MacDonald Interviews send us a mail, please.
Several original Interviews with Betty MacDonald are available.
We are also organizing international Betty MacDonald Fan Club Events for example, Betty MacDonald Fan Club Eurovision Song Contest Meetings in Oslo and Düsseldorf, Royal Wedding Betty MacDonald Fan Club Event in Stockholm and Betty MacDonald Fan Club Fifa Worldcup Conferences in South Africa and Germany.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Honour Members are Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald's nephew, artist and writer Darsie Beck, Betty MacDonald fans and beloved authors and artists Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Traci Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler, music producer Bernd Kunze, musician Thomas Bödigheimer, translater Mary Holmes and Mr. Tigerli.
