Willie Geist on the Moment it Hit Him That Daughter Lucie is Leaving for College
'We just had a high school graduation a few days ago for Lucie Geist,' Willie told TODAY anchors (and dads!) Craig Melvin, Al Roker, Carson Daly and Peter Alexander at a TODAY Father's Day celebration.
'All the best stuff is still coming,' Willie said.
At the same time, he isn't sure what life will be like when Lucie moves away. Willie, his wife, Christina, and their 15-year-old son, George, will have to figure out how to recalibrate living in their home as a family of three most of the time.
'We feel like we've done the best we can. She's a great kid, and so we're thrilled for her,' Willie said. 'But we're a family of four. Somebody's taken a tire off the car and you've got to figure out how to drive the car on three wheels, you know?'
Peter Alexander reminded Willie of how wonderful it can be to begin a whole new phase of your parental relationship with the younger child.
'I don't know how he feels about that, but we're excited about it,' Willie joked about George.
Willie and Christina have been struggling with the fact that Lucie is not going to be living nearby — she's moving several hours away.
For now, the couple can track Lucie's whereabouts on an app, but they plan to sign off while she's at school, noting that seeing her location at all times might be more troubling than reassuring.
'Look,' said Al Roker. 'I think it's one of those things where at a certain point you've got to give it up to God, you know? You've done what you can. And you're just there to catch them.'
Willie also spoke about Lucie's milestone when he co-hosted TODAY With Jenna & Friends on June 10.
'As any parent who has been through this — or maybe you're going through it right now — knows, the excitement at times becomes terror,' he shared.
'The graduation week, there are parties and things at school. You're kind of busy ... and then all of the sudden you're sitting there and you're looking up at that stage and go, 'Oh, that's her! That's Lucie. That's my daughter walking across and shaking the hand of the principal and getting the diploma,'' Willie told Jenna.
'She was on stage speaking, which was an amazing thrill, and I think that's when it really hit me and Christina,' he added.
'All of a sudden, she's ready to go,' he said. 'And you hope you've instilled in her all the values and the habits and the things she'll need to go out in the world.'
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
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Los Angeles Times
6 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Inside the final burst of Elvis Presley's creativity 48 years after his death
Two and a half years before he died, Elvis Presley sat on the floor of a walk-in closet at the Las Vegas Hilton and discussed a project that might have changed the course of his life. The meeting, as recounted by Presley's longtime friend Jerry Schilling, put the King of Rock and Roll face to face with Barbra Streisand, who'd come to see Presley perform at the Hilton in March 1975 then sought an audience after the show to float an idea: Would Presley be interested in appearing opposite Streisand in her remake of 'A Star Is Born'? At the time of the duo's conversation — Schilling says that he, Presley's pal Joe Esposito and Streisand's boyfriend Jon Peters squeezed into the closet with the stars in a search for some quiet amid the commotion backstage — it had been six years since Presley had last played a dramatic role onscreen; Streisand's pitch so tantalized him, according to Schilling, that they ended up talking for more than two hours about the movie. 'We even ordered in some food,' Schilling recalls. Presley, of course, didn't get the part famously played by Kris Kristofferson — a casualty, depending on who you ask, of Streisand's insistence on top billing or of the unreasonable financial demands of Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker. (In her 2023 memoir, Streisand wonders whether the character of a self-destructive musician was in the end 'a little too close to his own life' for Elvis' comfort.) Whatever the case, Schilling believes that the disappointment over 'A Star Is Born' set Presley on a path of poor decision-making that effectively tanked his career before his tragic death at age 42 on Aug. 16, 1977 — 48 years ago this weekend. 'That was the last time I saw the twinkle in my friend's eye,' Schilling, 83, says of the sit-down with Streisand. An intriguing new box set commemorates the King's final burst of creativity. Released this month in five-CD and two-LP editions, 'Sunset Boulevard' collects the music Presley recorded in Los Angeles between 1972 and 1975, including the fruit of one session held just days before the meeting about 'A Star Is Born.' These were the studio dates that yielded songs like 'Separate Ways,' which Elvis cut amid the crumbling of his marriage to Priscilla Presley, and 'Burning Love,' his last Top 10 pop hit, as well as 1975's 'Today' LP, an exemplary showcase of Presley's latter-day blend of rock, country and blue-eyed soul. Is yet another repackaging of Presley's music really something to get excited about? The Elvis industry has never not been alive and well over the half-century since he died; in just the last few years, we've seen Baz Luhrmann's splashy big-screen biopic, the latest book from the singer's biographer Peter Guralnick (this one about Parker) and not one but two documentaries about the so-called '68 comeback special that heralded Presley's return to live performance after nearly a decade of film work. More gloomily, 'Sunset Boulevard' arrives as Priscilla Presley — who got her own biopic from director Sofia Coppola in 2023 — is making headlines thanks to an ugly legal battle with two former business partners she brought on to aid in managing the Presley brand. (The feud itself follows the sudden death two years ago of Priscilla and Elvis' only child, Lisa Marie Presley.) Yet the new box offers an opportunity to ponder the curious position Elvis found himself in once the glow of the comeback special had faded: a rock and roll pioneer now strangely removed from the culture he did as much as anyone to invent. 'Sunset Boulevard's' title, which the set shares with Billy Wilder's iconic 1950 movie, can't help but evoke the spoiled grandeur of an aging showbiz legend. It also refers to the physical location of RCA Records' West Coast headquarters at 6363 Sunset Blvd., across the street from Hollywood's Cinerama Dome. Now the site of the L.A. Film School, the building is where the Rolling Stones recorded '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' and Jefferson Airplane made 'Surrealistic Pillow' — and where Presley set up in the early '70s after cutting most of his '60s movie soundtracks at Radio Recorders near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. By 1972, rock had long since evolved beyond the crucial influence Elvis exerted at the beginning of his career. Nor was the King particularly dialed into what was happening in music while he was busy in Hollywood. 'We weren't as exposed as much as I wish we would've been to everything going on,' Schilling says on a recent afternoon at his home high in the hills above Sunset Plaza. A core member of Elvis' fabled Memphis Mafia, Schilling has lived here since 1974, when Elvis bought the place from the TV producer Rick Husky and gifted it to Schilling for his years of loyal friend-ployment. 'When you're doing movies, you're up at 7 in the morning and you're in makeup by 8,' Schilling continues. 'You work all day and you come home — you're not necessarily putting on the latest records.' More than the growling rock lothario of Presley's early days — to say nothing of the shaggy psychedelic searchers who emerged in his wake — what the RCA material emphasizes is how expressive a ballad singer Elvis had become in middle age. Schilling says the singer's romantic troubles drew him to slower, moodier songs like 'Separate Ways,' 'Always on My Mind' and Kristofferson's 'For the Good Times,' the last of which he delivers in a voice that seems to tremble with regret. (Presley had to be cajoled into singing the uptempo 'Burning Love,' according to Schilling, who notes with a laugh that 'when it became a hit, he loved it.') But in the deep soulfulness of this music you're also hearing the rapport between Presley and the members of his live band, with whom he recorded at RCA instead of using the session players who'd backed him in the '60s. Led by guitarist James Burton, the TCB Band — that's Taking Care of Business — was assembled ahead of Elvis' first engagement at Las Vegas' International Hotel, which later became the Las Vegas Hilton; indeed, one of 'Sunset Boulevard's' more fascinating features is the hours of rehearsal tape documenting Presley's preparation in L.A. for the Vegas shows that began in 1969. The sound quality is murky and the performances fairly wobbly, as in a take on 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' where Elvis can't quite seem to decide on a key. Yet it's a thrill to listen in as the musicians find their groove — a kind of earthy, slow-rolling country-gospel R&B — in an array of far-flung tunes including 'You Don't Have to Say You Love Me,' 'Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues,' even the Pointer Sisters' 'Fairytale.' In one rehearsal recorded Aug. 16, 1974, Elvis cues his band to play the Ewan MacColl ballad made famous by Roberta Flack: ''The First Time Ever I Saw Your Friggin' Face,'' he calls out as we hear the players warming up. Then they all lock in for a closely harmonized rendition of the song so pretty there's something almost spooky about it. Sitting next to the balcony he was standing on when he got the phone call alerting him to the news of Presley's death, Schilling takes clear pleasure in spinning well-practiced yarns about his years with Elvis: the time John Lennon told him to tell Presley that he grew out his sideburns in an attempt to look like the King, for instance, or the audition where Elvis took a flier on a relatively unknown drummer named Ronnie Tutt who ended up powering the TCB Band. He's more halting when he talks about the end of his friend's life and about what he sees as the lack of a serious artistic challenge that might have sharpened Elvis' focus. Staying on in Vegas a bit too long, making so-so records in a home studio set up at Graceland — these weren't enough to buoy the man he calls a genius. Does Schilling know if Presley saw 'A Star Is Born' when it came out at the end of 1976? He considers the question for a good 10 seconds. 'I don't know,' he finally says. He started tour managing the Beach Boys that year and was spending less time with Presley. 'He never mentioned it to me. I wish I knew. There's probably nobody alive now who could say.'
Buzz Feed
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50 Most Binge-Worthy TV Shows Of All Time
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Buzz Feed
a day ago
- Buzz Feed
10 Everyday Phrases With Surprising Origins
It goes without saying that language is always evolving, and new words and phrases enter our everyday speech all the time. Often, we start using them without even realizing it, adopting them naturally from friends, media, or, of course, because of online discourse and social media. Many of these expressions have interesting or surprising origins that most of us never stop to think about. So, I decided to put together 10 terms that all of us use, and whose origins you might not know. "Bucket list" first appeared in popular use in 2007 with the release of the Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson film The Bucket List, where the characters set out to do things they'd always wanted before they died (or kicked the bucket). The phrase was coined by the movie's screenwriter, Justin Zackham, who shortened his own "List of Things to do Before I Kick the Bucket" into "Justin's Bucket List." He ended up using "bucket list" as the title when writing the screenplay. It should come as no surprise that the word "binge-watch" was popularized because of Netflix in the early 2010s. But it actually existed a bit before that! People began using the term in the early 2000s, when DVD box sets of TV shows and DVRs allowed you to watch multiple episodes or entire seasons in one sitting. Netflix helped push the term into the mainstream around 2013, when it began releasing entire seasons at once and even used "binge-watching" in its marketing. Of course, before that, the concept existed, but it was just called a "TV marathon." The term "friend zone" comes from a 1994 episode of Friends. In the episode "The One with the Blackout," Joey tells Ross that he and Rachel are never going to happen because he has waited too long to ask her out, and now he has fallen into "the friend zone." The episode's writers, Jeff Astrof and Mike Sikowitz, to this day, have no idea who came up with the phrase. The word "podcast" is a portmanteau — a combination of the words "iPod" and "broadcast." The term itself was actually created by accident in 2004. The term was first coined by journalist Ben Hammersley in an article he was writing for the UK's the Guardian about the new emerging technology of being able to download audio programs and radio. According to Hammersley, he turned in the article, but was told it was a few words too short. In order to pad it out a bit more, he added the line: "But what to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?" It being called "podcast" makes sense since listening to podcasts on iPods was the most popular way to consume them. The term "catfish" or "catfishing" didn't come from the MTV show; it actually originated from the 2010 documentary Catfish, which later inspired the series of the same name. However, it was the Manti Te'o scandal in 2013 that helped popularize the phrase. Today, when we say "life hack," we mean any simple tip or trick that helps make life easier. However, the term was first coined by tech journalist Danny O'Brien in 2003, to describe clever shortcuts programmers used to simplify their work life. Ever wonder if "spam email" came from Spam the meat? Well, the answer is yes! During WWII and after, because of rationing, Spam became ubiquitous in England. So much so that in the 1970s Monty Python did a popular sketch where a customer tries to order food without Spam at a cafe that served every dish with it, only to be drowned out by a group of Vikings who keep chanting "Spam, Spam, Spam." The repetition and unavoidable presence of Spam in the skit inspired early internet users (many of whom were Monty Python fans) in the 1980s and 1990s to call excessive and unwanted emails "spam." The term "gaslighting" comes from the 1938 play Gas Light and its two film adaptations in the 1940s — both entitled Gaslight. Set in the 1880s, the story is about a husband who manipulates small elements — like dimming the gas lights — in the house while insisting his wife is imagining things, making her doubt her own perception and to think that she is suffering from a mental illness. Though the term was very sporadically used over the decades, it wasn't until the 2010s that it really took off. We might be able to blame the term "main character energy" on the pandemic. The idea of seeing oneself as the protagonist in a story took off on X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok in 2020, and you might have the posts still up to prove it! And lastly, most millennials know this one, but it might be lost on younger people. The term "stan" comes from the 2000 song "Stan" by Eminem, which tells the story of a creepily obsessed fan named Stan who writes increasingly desperate letters to the rapper. Weirdly, "stan" evolved in internet slang to describe anyone who is an extremely devoted or enthusiastic fan of a celebrity, artist, film series, etc. Of course, today, it's used both as a noun ("I'm a huge stan of that show") and a verb ("I stan that singer"). Okay, did you know this? Or do you know the origin of a term you think I should have included? Let me know in the comments below!
