Madison Square Garden Quotes

somtimes people say that you can not live your dreams. sometimes people say that you can not sell out madison square garden. well this is what i tell them-NEVER SAY NEVER

Tonight I want to forget all your insecurities. Tonight I want you to reject anyone or anything that has made you feel like you don't belong, or don't fit in, or has made you feel like you're not good enough or pretty enough or thin enough, or like you can't sing well enough or dance well enough, or write a song well enough, or like YOU'LL NEVER WIN A GRAMMY, or like YOU'LL NEVER SELL OUT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN! You just remember that you are a god damn superstar and you were born this way!

To be content, horse people need only a horse, or, lacking that, someone else who loves horses with whom they can talk. It was always that way with my grandfather. He took me places just so we could see horses, be near them. We went to the circus and the rodeo at Madison Square Garden. We watched parades down Fifth Avenue. Finding a horse, real or imagined, was like finding a dab of magic potion that enlivened us both. Sometimes I'd tell my grandfather about all the horses in my eleborate dreams. He'd lean over, smile, and assure me that, one day, I'd have one for real. And if my grandfather, my Opa, told me something was going to come true, it always did.

I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.

Ironically, the tattoo represents the opposite for me today. It reminds me that it's important to let yourself be vulnerable, to lose control and make a mistake. It reminds me that, as Whitman would say, I contain multitudes and I always will. I'm a level-one introvert who headlined Madison Square Garden—and was the first woman comic to do so. I'm the ‘overnight success’ who's worked her ass off every single waking moment for more than a decade. I used to shoplift the kind of clothing that people now request I wear to give them free publicity. I'm the SLUT or SKANK who's only had one one-night stand. I'm a ‘plus-size’ 6 on a good day, and a medium-size 10 on an even better day. I've suffered the identical indignities of slinging rib eyes for a living and hustling laughs for cash. I'm a strong, grown-ass woman who's been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by men and women I trusted and cared about. I've broken hearts and had mine broken, too. Beautiful, ugly, funny, boring, smart or not, my vulnerability is my ultimate strength. There's nothing anyone can say about me that's more permanent, damaging, or hideous than the statement I have forever tattooed upon myself. I'm proud of this ability to laugh at myself—even if everyone can see my tears, just like they can see my dumb, senseless, whack, lame lower back tattoo.

Furthermore, some of the best people in the country were connected with the Communist movement in some way, heroes and heroines one could admire. There was Paul Robeson, the fabulous singer-actor-athlete whose magnificent voice could fill Madison Square Garden, crying out against racial injustice, against fascism. And literary figures (weren’t Theodore Dreiser and W. E. B. DuBois Communists?),

The others forgot the work and the weather watching them throw. It was art. A thousand dollars a throw in Madison Square Garden wouldn’t have gotten any more breathless suspense. It would have just been more people holding in.

There was a big “Sesame Street Live” extravaganza over at Madison Square Garden, so thousands of people decided to make a day of it and go straight from Sesame Street to Santa. We were packed today, absolutely packed, and everyone was cranky. Once the line gets long we break it up into four different lines because anyone in their right mind would leave if they knew it would take over two hours to see Santa. Two hours — you could see a movie in two hours. Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they’re not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two hours and they go over the edge. I was sent into the hallway to direct the second phase of the line. The hallway was packed with people, and all of them seemed to stop me with a question: which way to the down escalator, which way to the elevator, the Patio Restaurant, gift wrap, the women’s rest room, Trim-A-Tree. There was a line for Santa and a line for the women’s bathroom, and one woman, after asking me a dozen questions already, asked, “Which is the line for the women’s bathroom?” I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? “I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.

After Kristallnacht, tight U.S. immigration laws were relaxed somewhat, allowing a trickle of people who wanted to leave Europe to enter the United States. Many of those given priority in a first wave of immigration were artists, writers, composers, and scientists, but even that very circumscribed immigration caused alarm. As late as 1939, 95 percent of Americans did not want any part of a European war.15 And, with the country’s economy still fragile, many people resented those fleeing it as needy hordes who would compete for scarce jobs and dwindling government support. Anti-immigration forces in Congress used fear as an excuse to deny foreigners entry. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in 1938 to investigate newcomers suspected of being communists or spies.16 Alarm and insecurity in some soon hardened into paranoia and hatred. In February 1939, twenty-two thousand people marched through Manhattan, giving fascist salutes and carrying U.S. flags as well as banners with swastikas, toward a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

Richard Durham was a black writer whose credits in radio would run a gamut from Irna Phillips serials to prestige plays for such as The CBS Radio Workshop. But in Destination Freedom Durham wrote from the heart. Anger simmers at the foundation of these shows, rising occasionally to a wail of agony and torment. On no other show was the term “Jim Crow” used as an adjective, if at all: nowhere else could be heard the actual voices of black actors giving life to a real black environment. There were no buffoons or toadies in Durham’s plays: there were heroes and villains, girlfriends and lovers, mothers, fathers, brutes; there were kids named Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, who bucked the tide and became kings in places named Madison Square Garden and Ebbets Field. The early historical dramas soon gave way to a more contemporary theme: the black man’s struggle in a modern racist society. Shows on Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver gave way to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and the lives of Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Nat King Cole. The Tiger Hunt was a war story, of a black tank battalion; Last Letter Home told of black pilots in World War II. The stories pulled no punches in their execution of the common theme, making Destination Freedom not only the most powerful but the only show of its kind.

Epigraphs from Ballroom Dancing: An Erotic Romance of Dominance and Submission "He’s like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married, needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you." —Jacqueline Bouvier, July, 1952, making an observation about her future husband in a letter to her priest “Father L,” the Reverend Joseph Leonard of Dublin, Ireland. "Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday, Mr. President..." —Norma Jeane Mortenson, May 19, 1962, Madison Square Garden, New York City.

America didn’t want war. Both major political parties still supported neutrality. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself . Later he argued that American Jews were a “danger to this country” on account of their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures , our press, our radio and our government .” Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. “America First,” a campaign slogan of Woodrow Wilson, had been adopted by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Within a year the America First Committee was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden.

In February 1939, a Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City drew 20,000 supporters. Marching to the beat of snare drums, men in Nazi uniforms carrying American flags and swastikas had paraded into the Garden where they were greeted by rally organizers. In front of a towering portrait of George Washington, a speaker exhorted the crowd to “protect ourselves . . . against the slimy conspirators and the parasite hand of Jewish Communism.” Meanwhile, a newsreel camera chronicled Nazi guards beating a lone man who dared to protest.

May 19: At 2:00 p.m., Marilyn arrives at Madison Square Garden for a brief rehearsal. She departs to have her hair styled by Kenneth Battelle at a cost of $150. Then she returns to her New York apartment for a $125 makeup session with Marie Irvine. Finally, her maid, Hazel Washington, helps hook Marilyn into her Jean Louis gown, and she arrives at Madison Square Garden approximately three hours before she is to perform. Introduced to an audience of fifteen thousand as the “late Marilyn Monroe” after she delays her entrance (all part of the carefully rehearsed show), Marilyn performs flawlessly as the last of twenty-three entertainers and is clearly the highlight of the evening. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen describes Marilyn as “making love to the president of the United States.” Marilyn also attends a party at the home of Arthur Krim, president of United Artists. She is photographed in a group of Kennedy supporters watching Diahann Carroll sing. To her right is Maria Callas and Arthur Miller’s father, Isidore. She is also photographed with both Robert and John Kennedy, as well as presidential advisor Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Schlesinger and Robert Kennedy playfully compete to dance with Marilyn. Contrary to sensationalistic reports, Marilyn spends the rest of the evening in her New York apartment with her friend Ralph Roberts and James Haspiel, one of her devoted fans.

But the whole group, especially David, was playing the stage as if it was Madison Square Garden. And that’s the sign of greatness. You’ve got to be good in the first place, but when you treat a small, intimate gathering as if it’s a spectacle, you have the makings of a star.

It has been my extraordinary good fortune to find work that makes use of my strengths and doesn’t test my weaknesses. To this day, if you put me behind a busy sales counter, a meltdown would be imminent, for I can’t easily read new faces and shifting attention rapidly from one unfamiliar person to another overwhelms me. If I could choose to have one supernatural power, it would undoubtedly be invisibility, and yet I want and need public acknowledgment of my work. I suffer little stage fright when it comes to public speaking or appearances on radio or television—I’ve got those particular acts figured out—but unstructured participation in social gatherings remains agonizing, unless I know exactly what is expected from me. It would be easier for me to improvise an epic poem before a sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden than to approach an attractive stranger across the room and strike up a conversation.

Pete, the experts decided, was a full-blooded Airedale terrier of the “outside” type. By that I mean that he bored but slight resemblance to the small, nervous, inbred Airedales that figure at Madison Square Garden in February.

bummer guy, but upon further reflection, it seems like it really was me who was the bummer. Interesting. Oh well. No time to unpack that. On to the huge cock. I want to preface this story by saying I have no interest in hockey. I have gone to a couple games and had fun—but that’s mostly because I went with my sister, and we gave ourselves fake bruises. We only went to Rangers games at Madison Square Garden, and I’d wear a neck brace and two black eyes, and put Band-Aids all over Kim. I don’t know why we used to do that, but we liked to look like we had gotten all bloodied. Most people would ignore us and look away as quickly as possible, but some people would ask what happened and we would say we got into a thing with each other.

April 11: Marilyn meets with Bern Stern to discuss a photo shoot for Vogue. Marilyn receives a letter from Kenneth O’Donnell, Special Assistant to the President: “Many, many thanks for your acceptance of the invitation to appear at the President’s Birthday Party in Madison Square Garden on May 19. Your appearance will guarantee a tremendous success for the affair and a fitting tribute to President Kennedy.” Marilyn is charged $624 for a large, stainless steel Hotpoint refrigerator.

per il concerto degli U2 del giorno dopo, al Madison Square Garden.

In 1898, Tesla announced his latest invention: a way to remotely control machines with radio technology. Skepticism was widely expressed and quickly diffused thanks to his Madison Square Garden demonstration of remotely driving a small metal boat through an indoor pond. Many spectators believed that he was

spectacle of Dorothy Thompson at Madison Square Garden — tall, fair, blue-eyed, and laughing in her evening gown at twenty-two thousand “little men” — was not a thing to be forgotten.

April 10: Marilyn appears on time for six hours of costume tests for Something’s Got to Give. She is irritated that Cukor is not there to meet her. She looks radiant, and Peter Levathes tells the press, “This will be the best Monroe picture ever. Marilyn is at the peak of her beauty and ability.” But that evening, producer Henry Weinstein finds her sprawled across a bed and unconscious after an overdose of barbiturates. He calls Ralph Greenson, who revives her. It is announced to the press that Marilyn will be part of the entertainment at the president’s Madison Square Garden birthday party. Marilyn agrees to pay $1,440.33 for the cost of producing a dress decorated with hand-stitched rhinestones, beading, and mirrors.

Tex Rickard started his career staging boxing matches for Nome’s miners, then moved on to New York and built Madison Square Garden, becoming one

How’s the couch work for you?” she said. “I don’t care if we do it on a bed of nails at half court at Madison Square Garden.” They

En su época, la mayoría de las personas mayores que acudieron aquella noche se invitaban a salir directamente, por teléfono o en persona. Así es como un caballero llamado Tim describió la primera vez que le pidió salir a su futura esposa: —La vi en la escuela y le dije: «Oye, tengo entradas para ver a los Who en el Madison Square Garden…». Eso suena muchísimo mejor que escribirse mensajes con una chica durante dos semanas para que al final te deje plantado en un concierto de Sugar Ray.

When you are presented with an opportunity, don’t be afraid to take the risk and go for it. Even if it may seem improbable, or even crazy, believe in yourself. And if you decide to try to achieve something great, understand that it’s a process. It might not be easy. As a matter of fact, sometimes it might seem unreachable. Keep going! You never know where you’ll end up. I’m proof, and I’ve loved every bit of my life, from the fields of Planada, to Madison Square Garden, and beyond.

Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.

Billy Joel was supposed to have a triumphant first on Sunday night, April 14. The Piano Man was headed to high time for his first- ever broadcast network performance special, The 100th Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, following fifty times in the music business. still, his broadcast was cut short by CBS. Why did CBS cut short Billy Joel’s broadcast? The event, which was supposed to state on CBS from 9 to 11p.m., was blazoned before this time’s Super Bowl and taped on March 28 during Joel’s 100th performance at the fabled New York City theatre. Unfortunately, the Joel musicale’s airing was delayed due to the network’s live content of the Masters golf event. As a result, numerous observers missed the show’s dramatic conclusion and were forced to switch to the original news.

Madison Square Garden—of all places—to open his campaign on 12 August,

A few days after Paul was banned from Madison Square Garden, over six thousand people showed up at a Harlem rally for him. And though the leadership of the black establishment either failed to support Paul or joined in the attacks against him, a significant portion of black public opinion became even more sympathetic.

Twenty thousand people streamed into Madison Square Garden, past protestors and mounted police, beneath a marquis advertising the “Pro-America Rally.” Inside, the crowd faced a thirty-foot-tall portrait of George Washington, surrounded on both sides by American flags—and swastikas. Long files of clean-cut boys in ties marched in, followed by a row of wholesome girls wearing modest dark skirts. They were graduates of youth training camps—summer camps, some called them—sponsored by German loyalists. Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund, took the stage and promised to be “the Hitler of America.

It felt like a commune. We got up at the same time, ate together and there were people from all walks of life—smart, loving, spiritual people. I worked and gave the church money, but the group marriage ceremony at Madison Square Garden was for me the beginning of the end. My arranged marriage was supposed to expunge karma from my lineage and make this a purified relationship with one’s spouse. After a while, I realized I didn’t want to be married to the woman they’d arranged for me and then met another woman and broke my vows. I began to think that the Reverend Sun Myung Moon was a megalomaniac, especially when we had to sit through these four-hour speeches in which he railed on and on about morals. . . . —James Townsend, on the Unification Church

WE WENT TO Paul Simon’s farewell concert at Madison Square Garden. He was seventy-seven; I never thought someone could retire from rock and roll. Paul’s music triumphed over his stiff personality, and the show went right onto my all-time-best list.

Steeped in a literature claiming that men were created in the image of a warrior God, it’s no wonder evangelicals were receptive to sentiments like those expressed by Jerry Falwell in his 2004 sermon, “God is Pro-War.” Having long idealized cowboys and soldiers as models of exemplary Christian manhood, evangelicals were primed to embrace Bush’s “‘ cowboy’ approach” and his “Lone Ranger mentality.” God created men to be aggressive—violent when necessary—so that they might fulfill their sacred role of protector. 27 At the 2004 Republican National Convention, Christian recording artist Michael W. Smith stood on the stage of New York’s Madison Square Garden, declaring his love for his president and his country. He then recounted how, only six weeks after the September 11 attacks, he had found himself in the Oval Office with his good friend, President Bush. They spoke of the firefighters and other first responders who had given their lives trying to save others. “Hey W,” said the presidential “W” to the singer. “I think you need to write a song about this.” Smith did as he was asked. And there, standing before the convention audience as patriotic images flashed on the screen behind him, he performed “There She Stands,” a song about the symbol of the nation, the American flag, standing proudly amid the rubble. It was a small rhetorical step to change the feminine “beauty” all men were created to fight for into the nation herself. 28

The look in Pitbull’s eyes made me feel like he wasn’t kidding. A part of me couldn’t believe it—here’s one of the most famous musicians in the world, who can headline Madison Square Garden, yet he seems dead serious about fetching coffee for Carlos Slim Jr.

Sony paid both stars handsomely for their consistent success: $20 million against 20 percent of the gross receipts, whichever was higher, was their standard compensation. They also received as much as $5 million against 5 percent for their production companies, where they employed family and friends. Sony also provided Happy Madison and Overbrook with a generous overhead to cover expenses—worth about $4 million per year. To top it off, Sandler and Smith enjoyed the perks of the luxe studio life. Flights on a corporate jet were common, with family members and friends often invited along. On occasion, Smith’s entourage and its belongings necessitated the use of two jets for travel to premieres. Knowing that Sandler was a huge sports fan, Sony regularly sent him and his pals to the Super Bowl to do publicity. In addition to enjoying the best tickets and accommodations, they had a private basketball court to play on, which the studio rented for them. Back at the Sony lot, the basketball court was renamed Happy Madison Square Garden in the star’s honor. When anybody questioned the wide latitude and endless indulgence given to Sandler and Smith, Sony executives had a standard answer: “Will and Adam bought our houses.

You can read Moneyball as a testament to the analytical awakening in American sports, but you can also read it as a celebration of the irreversible integration of finance ideals and sports strategies. You can read it as a manual for integrating the ideological insights of finance capitalism into a front office, but you can also read it as evidence that our culture’s outrageous mania for computation, quantification, and efficiency is now striding alongside our favorite athletes on the playing surfaces of Fenway Park and Madison Square Garden. Make no mistake, this mania has always been there, but in post-Moneyball America, computation, quantification, and efficiency have achieved a superstar status like we’ve never seen before.

You shrug. “I told you, I don’t bother with politics.” “A luxury members of your class can afford, since their interests will always be protected. Meanwhile, there’s a certain faction in this country—men who call themselves patriots—who are quietly working to undermine the very values they claim to stand for. And they’re counting on people like you not bothering. They claim to be patriots, ginning up the public with talk about purity and real Americans, but what they really want is to marginalize Jews, remove them from powerful places, deny them a place in society entirely if they have their way. That’s how it started in Europe, Belle, with a bunch of patriotic Germans spouting nonsense about purity, and they want to do the same thing here. They’re organizing right now, right under your noses. The Bund. Lindbergh and his crowd. Charles Coughlin, a priest with an anti-Semitic radio show. And they’re gaining traction. The Bund held a rally in Madison Square Garden. Twenty thousand people doing the Nazi salute on American soil, and no one’s paying attention. Some are even cheering them on. The only way to keep those so-called patriots out of power is to pay attention, Belle, to decide where you stand on the issues before you accidentally find yourself on the wrong side.” You wait until I finish, then give me one of your cool looks. “And is there always a wrong side?” “Maybe not always, but just now—yes, there’s a wrong side. Not all the bad guys are in Germany, Belle. People need to realize that. They need to pay attention.

The war’s getting closer to the U.S. every day. It’s easy to think what happened in France could never happen here. But let’s not forget: on February twentieth last year, our own Madison Square Garden was filled with twenty thousand chanting, stomping, shouting Americans rallying in support of Nazi Germany. That’s right—twenty thousand Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. Right here, in the heart of New York City. It’s a warning America’s not immune from the authoritarianism running rampant across Europe. And it’s a call to arms to those who believe the United States is the last, best hope for freedom and democracy.

wanted to go to a Knicks game. Of course I did—I’d only ever been to one Knicks game in my life; tickets were both expensive and difficult to come by. After I said yes, I thought of the awkwardness of sitting there for a whole game with a boss almost four times my age. Maybe we could pass the time by talking about the game. Or ferrets. Before I could even finish worrying, Kenneth left me instructions on where to pick up my press pass. Whoa. Hold the rotary, wall-mounted phone. I was going as press? I was going as press. By myself. At seventeen, I was technically too young to get a credential. But Kenneth had been working with Madison Square Garden so long, that rule didn’t even matter. The Knicks’s media department assumed I was eighteen, and when I got to the Garden, there was a credential waiting for me with my correctly spelled name on it. It could have said Dave Hoffmeyer; I’d have been just as excited. If I thought the lobby of the NHL was impressive, you can imagine how I felt the first time I stepped into a professional locker room. I took copious notes during the game and stuck my recorder in the face of anyone who was talking. And, feeling bold, I even interviewed a few people who weren’t talking until I asked them to. While waiting for the players to finish showering and come out for interviews, I approached two celebrity fans. They were standing in the interview area, so I figured they were interested in being interviewed. The first fan was New York Jets wide receiver and number one–overall draft pick Keyshawn Johnson. Johnson flatly (and rudely) turned me down, even going as far as to call me kid. And not in the endearing way that Superman said it to Jimmy Olsen. Hurt but not broken, I walked over to Hanging with Mr. Cooper star Mark Curry, who couldn’t have been