‘In 1970, she moved to San Francisco, where many younger people were flocking to restart. As first, she was skeptical of her friends’ ravings about the Dead.
“That ragged sound?” Ms. Godchaux-MacKay recalled in a 2007 interview with The Baltimore Sun. “I didn’t think they could play. I figured, ‘These guys must be good-looking.’ So I checked the back of one of their album covers and went, ‘Nope, that’s not it.’”
But soon after arriving, she caught a performance by the Dead at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.
“To them, music was an adventure, like something spiritual,” she told The Sun. “I’d never heard anything like that. I thought, This is what I want to do.”
She was married to a jazz pianist, Keith Godchaux, who found out that Jerry Garcia, the band’s frontman, was playing at a nightclub. The couple approached Mr. Garcia, who gave them his phone number.
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The Grateful Dead performing on “Saturday Night Live” in 1978. From left, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ms. Godchaux-MacKay and Jerry Garcia.Credit…Fred Hermansky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank
“I can’t believe the chutzpah we had,” Ms. Godchaux-MacKay told The Sun. “I didn’t know people did that to him all the time. But Jerry just always had his antennas up.”
Within days, they were in the band, forging a relationship that would last the rest of the decade. Ms. Godchaux-MacKay helped shape several of the Dead’s most famous songs, including “Eyes of the World” and “Playing in the Band”…’ (Sopan Deb via The New York Times)
Donna and Keith were in what I consider the greatest configuration of the Dead. Her style was controversial and divisive for Deadheads of the era, with some cringing when she would cut loose and others feeling she goaded the mix to new heights.
‘Sunday (Nov. 2) marked the 25th anniversary of continuous human occupation of the International Space Station (ISS), which has carved out a spot in the history books as one of our species’ grandest (and most expensive) technological achievements.
Don’t save any confetti for a semicentennial celebration, however — the ISS is in its home stretch. NASA and its partners plan to deorbit the aging outpost toward the end of 2030, using a modified, extra-burly version of SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule to bring it down over an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
And not just any stretch — the “spacecraft cemetery,” a patch of the Pacific centered on Point Nemo, which is named after the famous submarine captain in Jules Verne’s 1871 novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”
“This remote oceanic location is located at coordinates 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W, about 2,688 kilometers [1,670 miles] from the nearest land — Ducie Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands, to the north; Motu Nui, one of the Easter Islands, to the northeast; and Maher Island, part of Antarctica, to the south,” officials with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in a brief Point Nemo explainer …’ (Mike Wall via Space)
‘The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that shit.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.
These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified …’ (Tom Nichols via The Atlantic)
