Past Special Guests

Jane Lahr

Jane Lahr is the only daughter of Bert Lahr, the legendary "Cowardly Lion" of the classic 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie musical, THE WIZARD OF OZ. As such, she is both an ebullient exponent of “the second generation of Oz" and -- in her own right -- a highly successful author, editor, and anthologist. Her thirty-five years of experience in publishing encompasses work as a founding partner of Stewart, Tabori & Chang, as Associate Publisher of Greenwich Workshop Press, as Director of Advertising, Publicity and Promotion at Harry N. Abrams, and as Director of Special Sale for Abbeville Press. She comes to Chittenango to celebrate her father, whose career spanned six decades and included triumphs in the theater, in motion pictures, and on television. Lahr played everything from burlesque to Shakespeare, from vaudeville to Aristophanes, from Broadway musicals to WAITING FOR GODOT. Most memorably – and incomparably -- he companioned Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley (and Toto, too…) on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz in the best-known, best-loved motion picture of all-time. When Lahr, pun-in-cheek, sighed “If I Only Had the Nerve” -- or forever devastated the vibrato/bravado posturings of classical baritones in “If Were King of the Forest” – he achieved a never-surpassed combination of comedic and heart-rending artistry.

Jane began her career at Harry N. Abrams, Inc., where she pioneered the area of Special Sales and became Director of Advertising, Publicity, and Promotion. She left Abrams to help co-found Stewart, Tabori & Chang, where she was pivotal in the packaging and marketing of GRAND MOTHER REMEMBERS. With Lena Tabori, she co-edited LOVE/A CELEBRATION IN ART & LITERATURE, which is now in its twenty-fourth year of publication.

She has packaged such books as JEAN HOWARD'S HOLLYWOOD and ONLY THE BEST and edited THE CELTIC QUEST, a selection of both the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild. In May 2006, Welcome Books (distributed by Random House) published Lahr's SEARCHING FOR MARY MAGDALENE: A JOURNEY IN ART & LITERATURE, which won an Independent Book Publisher Award in the category of religion in 2007. That same year, Jane co-edited Joan Grant's SPEAKING FROM THE HEART: REINCARNATION & WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN. She is partner in the book packaging/agenting company, Lahr & Partners LLC. In addition to developing and promoting traveling exhibitions, Jane includes such artists as Maurice Sendak, Milton Glaser, Paul Jenkins, Robert Rahway Zakanitch, Joseph Raffael among her clients.

The sister of THE NEW YORKER drama critic John Lahr, Jane was married to theater critic Martin Gottfried. She is now married to Sherman E. Crites of Stonington, CT, and Columbia, MO. Her daughter is writer Maya Gottfried.

Jane is on the Board of Directors of The Abby Whiteside Foundation and The School of Images, both in New York City; the latter establishment was founded by Dr. Catherine Shainberg in 1982.

Gregory Maguire

Myrna Swensen, “Munchkin by Marriage” As a teenager, Myrna Clifton was scheduled to appear in MGM’s Wizard of Oz, as were her parents. The girl’s emergency appendectomy sidelined the family trip to Culver City, California; by the time they were ready to travel, the film was too far into production for them to be cast. Several years later, however (and still in her native Texas), Myrna caught the appreciative eye–and heart–of movie “Munchkin soldier,” Clarence Swensen. Their subsequent love affair resulted in a 63-year marriage, three daughters, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren. Since Clarence’s passing in 2009, Myrna has continued to appear at nationwide Oz festivals, where the Swensens were much-admired, much-loved regulars for two decades.

Mr. De Shields first achieved national recognition in 1975 for creating the title role in the legendary musical, The Wiz, a soulful remake of Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, which won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. He secured his status as Broadway veteran with equally show stopping performances in the world premiere of two plays—Mark Medoff’s Prymate (Drama Desk nomination), Michael Jacobs’ Impressionism, with Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen—and three legendary musicals: The Full Monty, for which he received Tony, Drama Desk and Astaire Award nominations, in addition to both the Outer Critics Circle and Drama League Awards, Play On! (Tony nomination), and Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Drama Desk nomination). In 2009, he made a note worthy debut as Teiresias, the blind poet, in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Euripides’ The Bacchae, directed by Joanne Akalaitis, with a score by Philip Glass, at Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre. New York audiences also will remember Mr. De Shields for his widely acclaimed collaborations with Alfred Preisser at the Classical Theatre of Harlem: as Makak in Derek Walcott’s Dream On Monkey Mountain, in the title roles of Archbishop Supreme Tartuffe, Caligula and King Lear, and Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity (Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk and Drama league Award nominations/Outstanding Leading Man in a Musical).

Gregory Maguire is best known for his 1995 novel for adults, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. A New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, and cited by Barnes & Noble in its “Discover Great New Writers” recommendations for the Fall of 1995, Wicked inspired the Broadway musical of the same time and three bestselling sequels in the Wicked Years cycle, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. The Tony Award-winning Wicked, well into its eighth year on Broadway and playing in nine productions internationally, has broken box office records in nearly every venue in which it has appeared. All his other novels for adults—Lost and Mirror Mirror among them—have appeared on national bestseller lists. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was made into an ABC television film starring Stockard Channing and Jonathan Pryce. Maguire has recorded two of his novels available on tape and CD. His work is available internationally into more than twenty languages. Born and raised in Albany, New York, and schooled in a parochial setting until college, Maguire published his first novel for children at the age of 24. He has written seventeen novels for children and eight novels for adults, as well as picture books, short stories, essays, and signal reviews for major journals like the Sunday New York Times Book Review and Ploughshares. Furthermore, he has contributed essays to the progressive Catholic journal Commonweal and editorials to the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor. He performed an original story for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and hosted an episode of NPR’s “Selected Shorts.”

Maguire began his career by teaching literature and creative writing to children and to adults. For eight years he helped direct the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at Simmons College, Boston. For a quarter century he co-directed an educational charity he helped found, Children’s Literature New England, Inc., established to raise awareness of the significance of literature in the lives of children.

Maguire has contributed a chapter to Click, a novel to benefit Amnesty International. He also continues to lecture at colleges and universities both in the United States and abroad. Maguire has lived in the United States and in London and Dublin. Currently he spends his time in Massachusetts, Vermont, and France with his husband, the painter Andy Newman, and their three children.

André De Shields

In a career spanning more than forty years, André De Shields has distinguished himself as an unparalleled actor, director, choreographer and educator. He is the recipient of the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival Living Legend Award, and the coveted 2007 Village Voice OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Among his numerous accolades are eight AUDELCO Awards, including Outstanding Lead in a Musical (Archbishop Supreme Tartuffe, 2009) and Outstanding Lead in a Drama (Knock Me A Kiss, 2011). He holds two Doctor of Fine Arts degrees honoris causa from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the State University of New York-College at Buffalo.

Regional audiences have witnessed his precedent setting performances as Robert in David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, Henry Drummond in Inherit The Wind, Willy Loman in Death Of A Salesman, Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came To Dinner, Scott Joplin in Tin Pan Alley Rag, Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, Jacob Strand in Ibsen’s Ghosts (starring Jane Alexander), and the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. His film and television credits include Extreme Measures with Hugh Grant, Prison with Viggo Mortensen, Rescue Me, Life On Mars, Lipstick Jungle, Sex And The City, Law & Order, Cosby, the NBC movie-of-the-week, I Dream Of Jeannie-15 Years Later, as Haji, King of the Genies, a PBS Great Performance: as Tweedledum in Alice In Wonderland and Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Emmy Award).

A triple Capricorn, Mr. De Shields is the ninth of eleven children born and reared in Baltimore, Maryland. www.andredeshields.com. Namaste!

Emma Ridley—Return to OzEmma Ridley is a performance artist, with a history in dance, music, film, television, and burlesque. With her many transformations, including losing over 100lbs after having 3 babies, she has inspired a generation. Emma spent most of her early years being in the spotlight, starting at the tender age of only 8 months advertising as the Gerber baby, as well as appearing in many feature films, including Jackie Collins ‘The World is Full of Married Men’, starring Tony Franciosa and Carol Baker, playing their 4 year old daughter Lucy. Emma played another character called Lucy in the well known ‘Hammer House of Horrors’ film ‘The House That Bled To Death’. Many more film and television projects followed.

Emma joined the Royal Ballet London at age 6, starred as princess ‘Ozma’, the queen of Oz, in Disney’s ‘Return to Oz’, and won rave reviews as Bobbie Mechelle in Neal Simons’ ‘Last of the Red Hot Lovers’ on the British Stage in Repertoire Theater. She also had a role in the American Disney TV show ‘Boy Meets World’, all while spending her very full youth writing, performing, and producing music and music videos.

Emma then decided to “settle down”, out of the spotlight, on a Californian ranch/farm to raise her 3 children (with horses, goats and chickens, oh my!). She has since returned once again to the spotlight as a successful business creator and owner of “Goddess Fitness Dance”, a completely unique self-expressed ballet, yoga and pole dancing approach to fitness!

Paul Miles Schneider

Bronson PinchotBronson Pinchot ostensibly grew up in South Pasadena, California, without a father, but in truth he grew up in the land of Oz with L. Frank Baum as his adopted father.

In 1970, at the age of eleven, he began to wonder if any of Baum's descendents might still be living in the Los Angeles area, and wrote to one J S Baum listed in the telephone book, inquiring if the gentleman might in fact be the Joslyn Stanton Baum to whom The Road to Oz is dedicated. "Josh" Baum wrote back that he was indeed Baum's first grandson; a friendship resulted, and Mr. Baum enrolled Bronson in the International Wizard of Oz Club. Mr. Baum shared many delightful memories of growing up with L. Frank Baum as his grandfather, the best and most vivid of which were Baum's elaborate Christmas Day doings.

By and by, Bronson ostensibly grew up, although in point of fact he refuses to grow up on principle. He attended Yale University on a scholarship, entered show business, acted in plays, movies and television, developed an obsession for Greek Revival architecture, starred in two seasons of a renovation show, The Bronson Pinchot Project and continued to live nominally in reality and mostly in Oz.

Little known fact: Bronson's nickname, bestowed by his sister, is Bini Aru.

Grant Hayter-Menzies

For over a decade, Grant Hayter-Menzies has specialized in biographies of extraordinary women, publishing the first full length lives of stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke, Chinese-American author Princess Der Ling, diarist Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American ambassador to China and friend to the controversial Empress Dowager Cixi of China, Pauline Benton, the American-born master of Chinese shadow theatre, and most recently Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy Carter. Grant’s newest book, coming out this fall, is a biography of Rags, the mascot terrier of the First Division in France during WWI, and he is working on a book about Dorothy Brooke, the Englishwoman who in 1930 Cairo, Egypt discovered and saved thousands of elderly and abused warhorses, mules and donkeys abandoned by British forces at the termination of WWI. Grant is also gathering material for a book dealing with his ancestors’ three century legacy of enslavement of African and Native American peoples, from Tudor London to the Lincoln administration.

PAUL MILES SCHNEIDER was born in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. At various times he has been an actor, writer, composer, singer, and arranger. While growing up in the Midwest, Paul became pen pals as part of a school assignment with the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton. Paul's mother was an actress on Broadway and live television in the 1950s, his father a freelance photographer for LIFE Magazine and cameraman on "The Patty Duke Show," and his paternal grandfather was the executive vice president and treasurer of Warner Bros. from the studio's inception until 1955. In 2010, Paul relocated to Kansas from Los Angeles, where he spent a decade producing and designing DVD/Blu-ray menus and interactive content for Hollywood films and television shows, working on everything from the "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" movies to "The X-Files" and "Friends" on TV for their home entertainment releases."Silver Shoes" was Paul's first novel, selected as a 2010 Kansas Notable Book by the Kansas Center for the Book and the State Library of Kansas. A sequel, "The Powder of Life," was released in 2012. His latest book, "More Than Tongue Can Tell," co-authored with Warner Bros. film star Andrea King, was published in 2014. He is currently at work on a third novel in the "Silver Shoes" series, called "The Magic Belt." Stay tuned. The best is yet to come!

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