A gift for giving; buying 'Tupperware!'
GIVING IT THEIR ALL Two Boston-related charitable donations are among the top 10 such gifts given nationwide, according to the Slate 60. Frank Batten Sr. and his wife, Jane, ranked No. 7 for giving $141.2 million last year, $32 million of which went for capital improvements at the Harvard Business School, from which Frank Batten graduated in 1952. He is the retired chairman of Landmark Communications, which owns the Weather Channel. At No. 9 is a gift of $127 million from the late Jane Bancroft Cook, an heir to the family that founded Dow Jones & Co., to establish Jane's Trust in Boston to support arts, education, the environment, health, and welfare projects in New England and Florida. The list, which was just announced, was started eight years ago by online magazine Slate as a way to rank some of the biggest philanthropic efforts each year. Other notable gifts from around the region come from No. 35, Arthur Rock, who gave $25 million to the Harvard Business School, and No. 51, Frederick Pardee, who gave part of a $340,000 gift to Boston University's Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
IT'S FOR REAL After years of starts and stops and various types of delays, the plan to open a new theater in Provincetown is near reality. Some 300 people, including the Obie Award-winning director and actor Andre Gregory ("My Dinner With Andre" and "Vanya on 42nd Street") and artist-actress-writer Norris Church Mailer, made their way through the Provincetown Theater on Saturday. Still very much a construction site, the concert floor where the stage and 180 seats will be was poured early last week at the former car dealership in the town's East End. The theater will serve as the new home for both the Provincetown Repertory Theater and the Provincetown Theater Company. Among the other news announced for the $3 million project is a June "direct line" play directed by Phyllis Newman that features three-minute segments by playwrights strung together as one production. Among those participating are: Charles Busch, Eve Ensler, Harvey Fierstein, John Guare, A.R. Gurney, David Henry Hwang, Terrence McNally, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson.
DEAL SEALED The feature film rights for Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's "American Experience" documentary "Tupperware!" were purchased by Crossroads Films, an independent film production company. The documentary, which recently aired on WGBH in Boston, the home of "American Experience," looks at the historic and cultural signficance of Tupperware and the uneasy existence between inventor Earl Tupper and the marketing genius Brownie Wise. Kahn-Leavitt will be one of the six producers for the project, which doesn't yet have a writer.
`TABLE' CLEARED FROM SCHEDULE Boston Magazine food writer Annie Copps's weekend show on 96.9 FM Talk has been canceled to allow the station to move to a more news-oriented format similar to its weekday programming. In an e-mail, Copps, who has hosted the Saturday afternoon show for 3 1/2 years, wrote: "[It is] a big bummer for me, because I loved doing the show and we had a strong following." The show, "Table Talk," did not air on Saturday.
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