Closer To You Than Ever Before

Closer to You Than Ever Before By: Danette Wall Thirty-year-old Skyy Thomas has three special dreams that she desperately wants to come true. In this order… the first goal is to open her own daycare center; the second goal is to have a safe house for homeless and abused children; and last, but not least, the most challenging of them all, is to convince her best friend and lover to forget about the past and look forward to their future together after she intended to propose to him. Three years later, Skyy has been working her butt off making her dreams a reality. One morning, she gets up out of bed with a smile on her face, the first in a very long time. Skyy goes into her newly remolded bathroom to take a shower. Rushing out of her house and running to the driveway, where her blue Jeep is parked, Skyy unlocks the car to get in. After pulling out, Skyy remembers that she received a text message last night. While reading the message, Skyy begins to hyperventilate and what she reads almost causes her to have a car accident with the car directly in front of her. When she finally arrives at work that morning, her hands are shaking so badly that she can barely turn the darn Jeep off. However, before exiting the Jeep, Skyy contemplates returning the text message or placing a phone call.

This book provides a unique chronicle and analysis of the work of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire, an extraordinary Broadway songwriting team whose work is revered by musical theater aficionados. Anyone interested in Broadway musicals will enjoy this book, which covers other well-known figures who feature prominently in the Maltby/Shire story, including Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, Francis Ford Coppola, Craig Lucas, Mike Ockrent, Susan Stroman, Garth Drabinsky, and Jonathan Tunick. The book includes enlightening, entertaining interviews with the subjects as well as illuminating analyses of some of Maltby and Shire's greatest songs.

When Virginia and Michael begin recovery from alcoholism in Alcoholics Anonymous, they correspond several times a week. They view letter writing and their deepening relationship as a lifeline in the chaos of change. Letters selected from over 2000 written during the next five years chronicle the raw material of their recovery. As their recovery becomes increasingly mired in conflict between the deception required to maintain their relationship and "rigorous honesty" required to attain lasting sobriety, Hoot and Gin (alter egos) spontaneously emerge in the writing. With the mobility of mental apparitions, these "kids" are traded back and forth by their adult counterparts, nurturing, modeling new behaviors, broaching sensitive subjects, and teaching the healing art of laughing at self. They help the adults move through stuck places and give up stubborn resistance to change. For anyone contemplating recovery or living with an alcoholic, who is questioning how Twelve Steps can have any practical application to a situation as complicated as theirs, Hoot 'n Gin reveals how two skeptical people eventually find all twelve are gifts, not punishment. This trip through the Twelve Steps demonstrates how the act of letter writing can augment a recovery program by encouraging introspection, lending support, and measuring progress.

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would "invigorate" the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America's race problems. Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. Philippa grew up under the adoring and inquisitive eyes of an entire nation and soon became the role model and inspiration for a generation of African-American children. But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the "little Harlem genius." Suffering the double sting of racism and gender bias, Philippa had been rejected by the elite classical music milieu in the United States and forced to find an audience abroad, where she flourished as a world-class performer and composer. She traveled throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia performing for kings, queens, and presidents. By then Philippa had added a second career as an author and foreign correspondent reporting on events around the globe--from Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lamberéné to the turbulent Asian theater of the 1960s. She would give a command performance for Queen Elisabeth of Belgium one day, and hide from the Viet Cong among the ancient graves of the Annam kings another. But behind the scrim of adventure, glamour, and intrigue was an American outcast, a woman constantly searching for home and self. "I am a beauty--but I'm half colored...so I'm always destined to be an outsider," she wrote in her diary. Philippa tried to define herself through love affairs, but found only disappointment and scandal. In a last attempt to reclaim an identity, she began to "pass" as Caucasian. Adopting an Iberian-American heritage, she reinvented herself as Felipa Monterro, an ultra-right conservative who wrote and lectured for the John Birch Society. Her experiment failed, as had her parents' dream of smashing America's racial barriers. But at the age of thirty five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: She was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam. The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler's restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through, from the Great Depression, through the Civil Rights movement, to the Vietnam war. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

This popular collection of prayers and faith declarations is now available in a beautiful leather gift edition. Readers will learn to pray according to Gods Word and His Will, enabling them to grow spiritually like never before!

God Is Closer Than You Think Curriculum Kit Six Sessions on Experiencing the Presence of God The story of the Bible is the story of God's desire to be with people. God is extending himself, stretching out to reach us, to fill our lives with his presence. Every moment of your life is like a page in a Where's Waldo? book. God is there, the Scriptu...

"In 1980s India, the Ramsay Brothers and other filmmakers produced a wave of horror movies about soul-sucking witches, knife-wielding psychopaths, and dark-caped vampires. Seeing Things is about the sudden cuts, botched prosthetic effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage in these movies. Such moments may very well be "failures" of various kinds, but in this book Kartik Nair reads them as clues to the conditions in which the films were once made, censored, and seen, offering a view from below of the world's largest film culture. Combining extensive archival research and original interviews with close readings of landmark films including Purana Mandir, Veerana, and Jaani Dushman, this book tracks the material coordinates of horror cinema's spectral images. In the process, Seeing Things discovers a spectral materiality-one that informs Bombay horror's haunted houses, grotesque bodies, and graphic violence and gives visceral force to our experience of the genre's globally familiar conventions"--