In today’s episode, we talk with President and CEO of the Farrah Fawcett Foundation and Farrah's long-time friend, Alana Stewart. She shares how the foundation was started and how it benefits The American Cancer Society and Stand Up to Cancer. We also talk about their upcoming Tex-Mex Fiesta benefit at The Rustic on October 20th.

“For the first time, we are celebrating the legacy of Farrah in her home state by bringing our Tex-Mex event to Dallas, instead of the traditional location in Beverly Hills. Farrah was a Texas girl so this would have meant so much to her,” said Alana Stewart.

Alana will be co-hosting along with Farrah's former Charlie’s Angels co-star, Jaclyn Smith. George Hamilton will Emcee, Honorees include Linda Gray, (of TV’s Dallas) and a special acknowledgement to Ryan O’Neal for his continued support of the FFF. Special performance by Sheryl Crow. Friends of FFF coming in from LA include: Morgan Fairchild and Donna Mills.
​
You don’t want to miss this amazing event on October 20th at the Rustic, for more info and to purchase tickets visit www.thefarrahfawcettfoundation.org

All of the prints (21@16x20) I'm donating are fully matted and ready to ship - they should go in the mail next week. Thank you to the Artist Angle Framing in Frederick, MD. They did an excellent job and were very generous to donate their time and supplies!

Image courtesy of Getty Images

American music changed on July 6, 1954, when Elvis Presley, just nineteen, walked into the Sun studios in Memphis to make his first commercial record. American television changed on October 15, 1969, during a very brief moment in an episode of The Flying Nun. Alejandro Rey, who played a roguish but lovable casino owner, sat on a couch next to a 22-year-old Texas girl with shiny blonde hair who was dressed in a sailor blouse and miniskirt. “Soon,” he said, “we’ll go out to sea.”
​
“Out to see what?” she said with a dizzy giggle.

Within a year of his modest beginning, Elvis was a national figure. The leading musical stars of the day were people like Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, and Perry Como, considerable talents all. Elvis’s heat burnt them to cinders. Watching him on Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan, and the couple of lesser-known television shows where he was introduced to the whole country, anyone could see that Elvis was a sexual phenomenon of immense power. But no one could have seen then what ultimately is important about him. He was the originator and the lifelong king of a kind of music that is the most powerful common experience for all those born between World War II and 1960.

​Farrah Fawcett took longer to reach the national consciousness. But when she did, in 1976, she became the first person from television to claim the same worshipful adulation and obsessive interest from the public that Elvis received as a rock star. That first appearance on The Flying Nun came too early—at a time when the generation that had made Elvis an icon was either in or just out of college. Farrah’s emotional moment had not yet arrived. The winds of social rebellion were blowing, and rock was the informing idea behind a youth culture whose focus was sex, drugs, and urgent yearnings of either a political or religious kind. It was the era when all that Elvis had begun held sway.