Julie Andrews has revealed how she felt when she met her Mary Poppins co-star Dick Van Dyke for the first time.

Andrews, 88, starred opposite Van Dyke, 98, in the classic 1964 movie musical. She opened up about the memory during the two-hour CBS special “Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic,” which aired Thursday (Dec. 21).

“If I remember correctly, it was very hot in early September and the Disney team had built a large stage out in the back of the studio and created a shade roof out of a huge tarp,” the Sound of Music actor explained. “When I arrived on the first day, Dick was already working with the choreographers and dancers.”

She continued: “I had never done a film before, and I had given birth to my beautiful daughter Emma almost six weeks earlier, and I quickly realized that I had better pull up my socks and get in shape.” I found It's pretty daunting, I can tell you that.

Andrews remembered Van Dyke as “young, as fit as can be and truly stunning to look at,” adding that the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang actor “couldn't have been kinder, genuinely sweeter and more helpful.” I like to think so “We hit it off straight away.”

“It was so nice to see him imitating the animated penguins or trying to ride the pony on the carousel. Become a magical chimney sweep. Actually, I think it was a very enjoyable film for the entire company,” she said.

“Mary Poppins” star Dick Van Dyke (Getty Images)

Andrews' first film role as the eponymous Mary Poppins, a magical nanny who brings fun and imagination into the lives of the two Banks children, earned her an Oscar for Best Actress. The next year she received an award for her starring role in 1965's The Sound of Music, followed by a third nomination in 1982 for the comedy musical Victor/Victoria.

Van Dyke, who played Bert in the original, returned for the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns to play Mr. Dawes Jr., the son of Van Dyke, the greedy director of London's most important financial center also starred in the 1964 classic.

In early February, the Bye Bye Birdie actor revealed his secret to staying so young. “Having a beautiful young woman half my age taking care of me—that works!” Van Dyke told Yahoo!.

He credited his wife, 52-year-old makeup artist Arlene Silver, with helping him maintain a “positive attitude” and go to the gym “three days a week” to work out.

“I encourage everyone to do that because that’s how people age,” he said. “It's just a matter of stiffening up and not exercising the muscles and lungs. Practice is the answer.”

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Tom Kean Jr., the son of a popular two-term New Jersey governor, beat six Republican opponents Tuesday to win the nomination to compete against Representative Tom Malinowski, an embattled Democrat accused of ethical lapses, in what is shaping up to be the state’s most competitive midterm contest.

Another son of a storied New Jersey political family, Robert Menendez Jr., easily won a Democratic House primary, making it likely that he and his father and namesake, the state’s senior senator, will serve together in the Capitol.

Mr. Malinowski, 56, in a swipe at Mr. Kean’s three unsuccessful campaigns for Congress, said: “I want to do this job. He just wants to have this job.”

Mr. Kean, 53, who narrowly lost to Mr. Malinowski in 2020, said his opponent had “squandered” the opportunity to serve New Jersey during two terms in Washington.

Mr. Kean’s primary opponents had challenged him from the right as they competed for the support of conservative Republican voters aligned with former President Donald J. Trump. Outside a school near Mr. Kean’s home in Westfield, NJ, where he voted on Tuesday with his wife and daughters, a sign parroting one of Mr. Trump’s favorite labels read, “Warning RINO alert.”

But just after midnight, he was more than 22 percentage points ahead of his closest opponent in a race that was seen at least in part as a measure of Mr. Trump’s grip on the Republican Party in a state better known for a moderate brand of Republican politics once epitomized by leaders like Mr. Kean’s father, Gov. Thomas H Kean.

The largely suburban Seventh Congressional District is filled with the type of affluent, well-educated voters who helped Democrats take control of the House in 2018.

During the last midterm cycle, Democrats in New Jersey flipped four seats—many of which, including Mr. Malinowski’s, are again seen as potential battlegrounds.

As he runs for re-election, Mr. Malinowski is facing allegations that he failed to report stock trades as required. He is also running in a district that gained more Republican-leaning towns when the borders were redrawn to reflect demographic changes in the 2020 census.

But late Tuesday, Mr. Malinowski’s campaign got a potential boost from an unlikely camp: Republicans hoping to make a home for centrist voters with the creation of a new party, the Moderate Party. The new party, which will almost certainly face legal challenges, has filed nominating petitions on behalf of Mr. Malinowski.

Mr. Menendez won in a largely urban district where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans five to one; winning the primary in the Eighth Congressional District, which includes parts of New Jersey’s two largest cities, is often tantamount to victory in the general election.

A lawyer making his first run for office, Mr. Menendez had an array of political and union support early on — as well as crucial backing from his father, also a Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Just after midnight, when The Associated Press called the race for Mr. Menendez, he was 70 percentage points ahead of his main challenger, David Ocampo Grajales.

If he wins in November, Mr. Menendez, 36, will occupy a seat held for a decade by Representative Albio Sires, a Democrat who announced in December he would not run for re-election.

Mr. Ocampo Grajales, the son of immigrants from Colombia, said last week that he had entered the race to give Democrats a viable alternative to a handpicked candidate.

“It’s not so much who Menendez is himself, but what he represents: more of the same,” said Mr. Ocampo Grajales, 25.

The New Jersey congressional candidate Tom Kean Jr., with his family, after voting at Wilson Elementary School in Westfield, NJ, on Tuesday.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

A Republican primary in a central New Jersey swing district represented by Andy Kim, a Democrat running for his third term in Congress, was the state’s most colorful contest.

Bob Healey Jr., a former singer in a punk band who helps run his family’s yacht-manufacturing company, beat two challengers, Nicholas J. Ferrera and Ian A. Smith, with the backing of the Republican Party.

In March, Mr. Smith, the former owner of a gym that repeatedly flouted Covid-19 lockdown rules, was charged with driving under the influence, reviving talk of his past conviction for vehicular homicide. He served time in prison for killing a teenager in 2007 while under the influence of alcohol, and pleaded not guilty to the new charges.

“I may have sung in my past about killing someone,” Mr. Healey said during a debate in May. “Ian actually did kill someone.”

By midnight, the winner of the Republican primary to face Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat competing for re-election to a fourth term, had not yet been called.

Frank Pallotta, a wealthy former investment banker who lost to Mr. Gottheimer two years ago, was 5 percentage points ahead of Nick De Gregorio, a Marine Corps veteran, with about 85 percent of the vote counted.

Mr. Pallotta won the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump in 2020, but not this time. He also had raised significantly less money than Mr. De Gregorio, who had emphasized his service in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We did everything we possibly could, and we left no stones unturned,” Mr. De Gregorio said as he watched the returns come in from the Republican Party headquarters in Bergen County. “We went out there and we listened to what the voters had to say.”

Mr. Menendez will be a heavy favorite in November against Marcos Arroyo, a housing inspector from West New York, NJ, who was the lone Republican candidate to enter the race.

Mr. Menendez has said that, if elected, he would focus on expanding access to early childhood education and issues that affect the cost of living in New Jersey, where property owners pay some of the nation’s highest taxes.

“One of the things we’ve focused on — just because we don’t know the climate that we’re going to be walking into, should we win — is trying to think about what Democratic proposals haven’t been passed yet that we can have bipartisan support for,” Mr. Menendez said in an interview on Saturday.

Before being appointed to the Senate in 2006, Senator Menendez held the House seat that his son is now seeking. The borders of the district, formerly the 13th Congressional District, have since been redrawn slightly.

The state debuted a new electronic voting system in November, but this was the first time that New Jersey voters were offered a chance to cast ballots in person, on machines, during a primary election.

Still, with no statewide races on the ballot, turnout was low.

“We were told that we were the fourth and fifth people in our district to be voting today,” Gov. Philip D. Murphy said on Tuesday morning, “and they’ve been open for a while.”

Shlomo Schorr contributed reporting.

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FREMONT (CBS NEWS) — Tesla is recalling nearly 579,000 vehicles in the US because a “Boombox” function can play sounds over an external speaker and obscure audible warnings for pedestrians.

The recall is the fourth made public in the last two weeks as US safety regulators increase scrutiny of the nation’s largest electric vehicle maker. In two of the recalls, Tesla made decisions that violated federal motor vehicle safety standards, while the others are software errors.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says on its website Thursday that the cars and SUVs have what Tesla calls a “Boombox” function that allows drivers to play sounds while the vehicles are moving. This violates federal safety standards that require pedestrian warning noises for electric cars, which make little noise when traveling, the agency says.

Read more on CBSNews.com>>

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In Ashes to Ink, Lisa Lucca wrote moving memoirs in which she recalls how she came to terms with her gay father. Lucca not only learns to accept who her father is, she also realizes that she and her father loved each other as best they could, despite the problems they had.

Lucca not only shares memories of life with her father, but also writes about her own search for love, which she sometimes sought in the wrong places. She vividly remembers her marriage to a man who did not satisfy her, a man who spent his life on the street and often left her alone with her young son. When she finally made the decision to end this relationship, she was horrified to find that her husband was vicious, vengeful, and didn’t seem to care much about her child. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but Lucca held her head up and did everything possible to make a living and get a good life for herself and her son.

Lucca doesn’t hold back when she writes about her father. She remembers a father who may have loved her lesbian sister more than he loved her. Passages in which she expresses her feelings about this situation are deeply emotional. It must have been a difficult book for her, but Lucca remains open throughout the book. Readers will feel they know the author personally.

She is not afraid to express her feelings about her father’s sometimes confusing behavior. Her father visited her when she lived in San Francisco. She is shocked when he moves to town just two weeks later to live with a man he has just spent a night or two with. But despite everything, whether their relationship is going through a rough patch or not, her love for her father and desire to be loved by him becomes evident.
In an interview, Lucca said that she had heard from readers who had gay parents.

“I’ve heard of others who are younger than me,” she said. “One is straight and the other is gay. In either case, they were less affected by their parents’ coming out, as there was more social acceptance news in the past 15+ years, and their sons had a hard time being teenagers, one of whom disliked his father for months. One gay reader said that as she read the book, she thought more about her family accepting her. “

Lisa Lucca with her father as a child and as a young adult.

Lucca has been writing a diary since her youth. She always knew, ever since her parents divorced and her father came out, that one day she would write about their relationship. Since the book is set in the past few decades, Lucca sometimes uses a language that was the vernacular then, including a language that would no longer be acceptable today. In a brief note at the beginning of the book, Lucca assures her readers that she will in no way condone the use of LGBTQ-hostile slurs. She has not received negative feedback for using this language. In fact, she became friends with Jordan Budd, the executive director of Colage, the national organization for children of lesbian and gay parents.

“We had a really good conversation about it,” she said of Budd. “Those were the words. It was Archie Bunker, that’s how I learned everything about any kind of orientation in Central America in the 1960s, except mom and dad. I haven’t heard anything negative about those words from anyone. I just want to Be.” Realize these are not words I would ever use now. “

Lucca is very pleased with the reaction from readers.

“I think the most important thing I hear from everyone who’s read it is that there is some really raw emotional honesty in it, and that’s exactly what I wanted to convey to readers,” she said. “This feeling, no matter where you are in your family situation, there is room for our parents to be understood as human beings and to be understood as parents. I think the idea of ​​love and sexuality, especially for single parents, is one that I haven’t talked much about. It’s really hard to navigate in these waters. “

She can now see that her father’s world was very different from the world she came from.

“He exposed us in a way that wasn’t exactly popular at the time,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of bad reactions to it, but when I was a single mom I really got sympathy for him because I could see that when you’re 35 and newly divorced, and you want to have some kind of romantic life and are a parent, and how do you do that? “

In her opinion, the book has a universal message that can apply to any parent-child relationship, regardless of whether the parents identify as LGBTQ or not. The message is one of acceptance.

“Even if they are different from us, have different beliefs, different ideals and even values, we can have a much more tolerant relationship with our family if we accept who they are and who we are,” said Lucca. “While it doesn’t mean we’re close, it does mean we’re not at odds because I’ve been so at odds with my family over the years, because I felt misunderstood when I finally accepted them didn’t do. ” Seeing the world and vice versa, in a way, it created this beautiful truce. “

Ashes to Ink is now available in paperback and Kindle editions.

www.lisalucca.com

Help keep the Bay Area Reporter going through these troubled times. To support local, independent LGBTQ journalism, you should become a BAR member.

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SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE, Italy – They marched through the cobblestone streets waving tall brushes like batons, a peppy – if sooty – bunch that occasionally shouted “spazzacaminoooooo”, Italian for chimney sweeps (with a few additional O’s to emphasize).

On the parade route, children held open plastic bags, hoping to catch the presents thrown by the chimney sweeps as they passed. Some were given candy while others looked for needles, buttons, pencils, and even potatoes to be thrown into the crowd.

The adults were given dirty two-handed caresses that left few clean faces among the front row spectators huddled along the track.

The festival is a time of celebration and attracts thousands of tourists to the town in the Vigezzo Valley near the Swiss border. But neither the sweepers nor the local residents have forgotten the past horrors of a dirty and dangerous trade that depended on child exploitation. Memories of poverty and humiliation weigh on those old enough to remember.

“When the event started in the 1980s, few locals attended because they were ashamed,” said Claudio Cottini, the mayor of Santa Maria Maggiore.

The city’s identity has long been linked to commerce. The local chimney sweep museum shows a map from the 16th century on which the Vigezzo valley is referred to as the “Camifeger valley”, Swiss-German for the “valley of the chimney sweeps”.

At that time and for centuries afterwards, families in the area were so poor that many sent their sons to work as chimney sweeps when they were 6 or 7 years old. It was one mouth less to feed.

The children who have been trained to be “Padroni” or master sweeps and word of mouth about their lives tell sobering stories of abuse and misery.

“That is the origin of the term” lighting a fire under a person’s bum “: If the children did not work fast enough, the masters would say,” Hurry up or I will make a fire in the grate, “said Diane Pilger from Long Island, NY, former President of the National Chimney Sweep Guild in the US She attended this year’s festival with her husband John and daughter Krista.

Purposely malnourished to keep them lean, the young sweepers were forced to take narrow prints, scratching elbows and knees while scrubbing smoldering soot from the sides of a chimney. They traveled to distant lands for insignificant pay. Beatings were the order of the day.

“They have been despised, humiliated and abused, but they have made tremendous sacrifices so that they could send money home to help their families,” said Anita Hofer, vice president of Italy’s National Chimney Sweep Association and organizer of the festival.

The fate of the chimney sweeps, Ms Hofer said, was not so different from that of the thousands of African migrants who have faced a dangerous Mediterranean crossing in recent years to lead a better life in Europe.

“Moving to another country to escape poverty is one of the hardest things to do,” she said, adding that many Italians, whose history is full of emigrants, have lost sight of it. “We should be more understanding because our ancestors had similar experiences.”

Every year visiting sweepers make a pilgrimage together to the nearby town of Malesco to see the statue of Faustino Cappini, a 12-year-old sweeper who was electrocuted in 1929 when he stuck his hand out of a chimney and accidentally touched an electrician’s wire. It was common for children to signal to their masters that they had cleaned the fireplace at the very top.

Such tragedies are largely a thing of the past today. Technology, modern chimneys, and strict safety and certification rules have made cleaning a much less dangerous task. And chimney sweeps can still find work.

“We have 2.6 million saunas in Finland,” said Juha Tuomi, a Finn who has been sweeping for 46 years, “and many of them burn wood.”

These changes have helped locals grapple with the uglier aspects of their history and explain how a trade tied to Dickens’ hardship stories is now the inspiration for a happy festival.

“Over time it has become something to be proud of,” said Mayor Cottini. “Now there is a realization that this land gave our ancestors a deal, and we pay homage to that.”

The American contingent of the festival numbered 38, one of the largest groups, though a far cry from the 420 German fighters who took part in the parade, with a samba band.

All the sweeps wore their smartest, neatest, mostly black best, even though the September sun provided summer temperatures.

The Swiss decorated their necks with bright red scarves. The Japanese wore elegant kimono-style jackets, while the Scots wore kilts. Contrary to the fashion trend, the Dutch were dressed in white, a throwback to the time when they were cleaning chimneys for their royal houses. Cylinders were de rigueur.

“This is really where it all started,” said Rosanna Ramoni, a local resident who is the MC of the parade. “This is the place of the heart, of its roots.”

While the parade gives the local economy a boost, the area is far more affluent than it was when it sent chimney sweeps out into the world.

At other times of the year, tourists flock to admire the frescoed exteriors and commercial art galleries of Santa Maria Maggiore, taking advantage of the Vigezzo Valley’s reputation as the “Valley of Painters”. Wealth has also come through Switzerland, where many locals commute and earn considerably higher wages than in Italy.

When the parade ended, the fraternization defeated national identities and the Scots marched with the Russians. The Japanese were bombarded with requests for photos. and a local sweeper, Livio Milani, scurried across the roof of the old town hall to wave an Italian flag. It was a happy moment.

“This is the picture you need to take home,” said Ms. Ramoni as the sweepers and onlookers cheered.

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