New OSB Chair Appointed

Nicholas Burlett is the new chair of Opera Santa Barbara replacing Joan Rutkowski after a four-year reign. Burlett, a graduate of Cornell University, New York, is a director of engineering for an international safety and security software firm and moved to our Eden by the Beach in 2004.

“We must be willing to look for ways to overcome the stereotypes and tell new stories which might be more immediately accessible to the younger generation,” says Burlett, a longtime volunteer at Bunnies Urgently Needing Shelter (BUNS), a rabbit and guinea pig rescue organization.

Bravo!

Mark Fleischman Remebered

On a personal note, I remember Mark Fleischman, former owner of the legendary Manhattan club Studio 54, who has died at the age of 82 by an assisted suicide at the Dignitas Clinic in Zurich, Switzerland.

Fleischman, who I had known for many years having been an habitué at the club in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, before my get up and go got up and went, suffered from undiagnosed degenerative brain illness for six years which left him, in his own words, “more or less a vegetable” in a wheelchair.

His deal with the previous 54 owners, included passing on to them ownership of his Madison Avenue-based Executive hotel, which Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager then renamed Morgans, the start of their hostelry empire, which came to include the Paramount and the Royalton.

Fleischman, who was also co-owner of the Century Club in Los Angeles, lived an immensely colorful life, and I admired his personal courage in dying on his own terms.

Sightings

Singer Katy Perry filming a Dolce & Gabbana commercial in Capri, Italy… Local rocker Adam Levine celebrating his eighth wedding anniversary with wife Behati Prinsloo in Maui… Writer T.C. Boyle checking out The Honor Bar…

Pip! Pip! Be safe, wear a mask when necessary, and get vaccinated.