This is Wonderful!

It's the birthday of playwright Arthur Laurents (books by this author), born in Brooklyn (1917). He said: "I always wanted to write musicals. When I was a kid, really a kid — seven or eight — I lived in Brooklyn and there was a stock company and my cousin and I would go Saturday afternoons. I remember two productions. One was No, No, Nanette. I still remember them twirling the parasols, thinking, 'Oh, this is wonderful!' The other one was Rain by Somerset Maugham and they had real rain!"

He went on to write West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and many more musicals and films, as well as three memoirs: Original Story By (2000), Mainly on Directing (2009), and The Rest of the Story (2012).