A lot of musicians would like to break out of the band and take center stage behind the mike. But not Sheila E., a drummer who turned to singing reluctantly. That`s why she`s soooo happy backing up Prince on his concert film, ”Sign o` the Times.” ”I`m a musician first and a singer second,”
says E. ”I always wanted to play for Prince`s band, but he had a drummer. So Prince encouraged me to sing and make my own records.” E. is so delighted to be banging the drums that ”half the time when we`re onstage, I`m crying,”
she says. ”There are times when the songs are so intense that it`s like a natural high.”
”Driven” seems to be Barbra Streisand`s middle name. She sings, she acts, she writes, she produces and she directs. ”Slow down,” was the advice ex-husband Elliott Gould says he once gave to her. ”I tried to tell her there`s nothing left to prove, and she told me, `Yes, there is.` ” In the January issue of Ladies Home Journal Streisand explains what makes her run:
”I`d like to do everything I can to avoid being an old person who says:
`Why didn`t I do that? Why didn`t I take that chance?` ”
A lot of grown men will identify with Bill Cosby as he describes the aging of his body in ”Time Flies” (Doubleday). In it Cosby says he was once ”a perpetual-motion machine . . . I could eat a whole pizza on the run.”
But that, in time, changed. Recalling how at age 30 he once played basketball with some teenage boys, he says: ”One of the boys went up high for the ball. For a moment I accompanied him, and then I returned to the launching pad. A little while later, he also came down and found me pondering a melancholy truth: If a man of 30 wants to go flying with a boy of 16, he had better do it on Pan Am.” Cosby ruefully adds, ”I watched my body turn from a temple to a storefront church.”
REPLAYS
”Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”
H.L. Mencken
”Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.”
H.L. Mencken
”I feel bad that I don`t feel worse.”
Michael Frayn
