Roberta

What popular actor appeared on Broadway with Bob Hope in the 1933 musical "Roberta" before making his film debut in 1935's "The Gilded Lily"? Fred MacMurray

There are few designers working today who have had as big an influence on fashion as Giorgio Armani. Founding his company in Milan in 1975, he modernized the suit, giving it a relaxed, soft silhouette, and created a daytime uniform of power and success that defined men's and women's style for two decades. He banished the ugly red-carpet excesses of the 1980s and introduced a modern way of dressing beginning in 1990, when his sleek Oscar-night designs for Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster transformed Hollywood from tacky to tasteful overnight.

Thirteen-year-old Roberta could hear the promise of the United States pouring from her father's voice as she sat at home in Romania listening on the telephone. Though she never met him face to face, she knew he would be her savior. He would sweep her away from the country she learned to hate after being abandoned at age 1 by her mother and forced to live with relatives that either beat or neglected her. And at first Roberta's father seemed to come through, making arrangements in 1997 for the pretty daughter he last saw as a newborn to come live with him in La Verne.

Last weekend, leaders from around the Western Hemisphere gathered in Venezuela to inaugurate the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a regional trade and security organization composed of 33 nations, including Cuba. The United States was noticeably excluded. In fact, in recent years it has been left out of a growing number of such groups. Now Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are threatening to further isolate the United States. They complain that President Obama's policies have alienated our allies in the region and want the administration to take a tougher stance on Cuba.

UC Berkeley student Bradley Page said under cross-examination that he was "fairly certain" that he was at home writing a paper the night of Nov. 4, 1984, when his girlfriend was killed. Police contend that Page confessed killing Roberta (Bib) Lee of Cambridge, Mass., a fellow University of California student, and then burying her in the Oakland Hills.

After seeing his powerful "Savage in Limbo," which recently closed at the Cast, it's fair to say that John Patrick Shanley's "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea," which just opened next door at the Cast-at-the-Circle, is one of those early pieces writers need to write and often regret.

When Kenny Walker talks about Roberta, Georgia, he is not talking about a couple of Kentucky cheerleaders. Roberta, Ga., is your basic small country town, where everybody knows everybody, he said. "There isn't much to do there. If you're a kid there, you're either out playing basketball or you're watching it on TV." Walker grew up in Roberta, maybe 90 miles from here.

I was sitting in one of those bookstore cafes when I noticed a tall, dark man in the distance browsing economics, and I thought to myself: Wow. I just felt attracted, you know? Several seconds passed before I realized: That was no man; that was my husband. There is probably no discovery on Earth happier than the realization that you are in love with the person you happen to be married to. It's the kind of thing you don't think about all the time. Especially if you've been married for 23 years.

SIX years ago -- or was it a dream? -- I spent a day and a half in southern Italy on the Adriatic coast, and there I was left mesmerized by the sun-bleached stone, the blue sky, turquoise sea and dazzling white hilltop towns with twisting cobblestoned streets. I feasted on exquisitely pristine seafood and savored homemade orecchiette sauced with limpid green olive oil and bittersweet rapini served in shallow bowls decorated with blue dots.

They arose early and got themselves all decked out: she in a midcalf dress of some soft beige, he in a jacket and tie--the first tie Scott Roston's roommate had ever seen him wear. Scott Roston and Karen Waltz raced to Las Vegas on Feb. 4 in his leased red Toyota two-seater and were wed in a $25 civil ceremony in a marriage commissioner's office enlivened by some blue and white artificial flowers. Then they raced back to Santa Monica.

What popular actor appeared on Broadway with Bob Hope in the 1933 musical "Roberta" before making his film debut in 1935's "The Gilded Lily"? Fred MacMurray

This match slipped away from Melanie Oudin as quickly as her impatient forehands sailed out of the court, big bunches of errors coming faster and faster. It disappeared into the hands of a steady but unspectacular 27-year-old Italian named Roberta Vinci. "She's 10 years older than me," the 18-year-old Oudin said, exaggerating the age difference by a year. Oudin, the highest-ranked American woman in the draw of the BNP Paribas Open at No. 41, made a quick exit from the tournament at Indian Well Tennis Garden on Thursday.

It had been more than a year in the making, this meeting between Roberta McCain and me. The smart guys who managed her son's presidential campaign got all queasy at the thought of Roberta, unfettered, in a journalist's thrall. I managed a few tantalizing phone calls with John McCain's outspoken mother, a column on my vain pursuit of an interview and a promise that the end of the presidential race would bring a chance for us to share some straight talk.

What Roberta Romero, Britney Spears' personal hairdresser, has heard and seen over the last year would probably fill a book, but when she stepped her black platform pumps into a Superior Court witness box Wednesday there was only one subject on the table: Osama "Sam" Lutfi, the pop star's former confidant. Lutfi was banished from Spears' life 13 months ago when her father, who accused him of filling her body with drugs and her mind with lies, assumed control of her affairs.

"Blessed Is the Match" is not only the title of a solemn, respectful documentary about Israeli Holocaust martyr Hannah Senesh, it is also the opening of the poem that helped make her famous. "Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame" is the first line of that brief poem, a tribute to self-sacrifice written by Senesh in 1944, just days before she was captured in Nazi-held Hungary.

New York designer Roberta Freymann's bib necklaces with colorful sequins and chandelier drops have to be my single favorite discovery of 2008. Perfect for this post-luxe life, they're inspired by a maharajah's jewels, only they're plastic and $225. And now Freymann is bringing them to L.A. at her new Roberta Roller Rabbit pop-up store at the Brentwood Country Mart.

"People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me — they're too personal," Joni Mitchell explained last week during a rare interview. Apparently, nobody told John Kelly not to try adapting her songs. The renowned Obie Award-winning actor and performance artist has been belting out Mitchell's songs for more than 20 years. This weekend, the New York-based Kelly concludes the L.A. run of his acclaimed solo tribute to the iconic, iconoclastic singer-songwriter, "Paved Paradise: The Art of Joni Mitchell," at Renberg Theatre.

The extraordinary Bel-Air Kirkeby Mansion, the beloved home of the late Carlotta and Arnold Kirkeby, is getting every bit of the attention it deserves. Next Thursday the CHIPS (Colleague Helpers in Philanthropic Service) lead off with a major fund-raiser "Inside the Gates," giving benefactors a chance to thrill at the vistas and the mansion, restored to all its grandeur by Los Angeles' top designers. Offspring Carla Kirkeby and her brother Arnold C. Kirkeby are the generous instigators.

Roberta Reardon heads the second-largest union of TV actors in the country. But you won't find her name in the credit listings on the IMDb website. The self-described blue-collar actress has earned a living doing mostly commercials, voice-overs and industrial videos. Her time in the public spotlight has come not from acting but as president of Hollywood's 70,000-member American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

SIX years ago -- or was it a dream? -- I spent a day and a half in southern Italy on the Adriatic coast, and there I was left mesmerized by the sun-bleached stone, the blue sky, turquoise sea and dazzling white hilltop towns with twisting cobblestoned streets. I feasted on exquisitely pristine seafood and savored homemade orecchiette sauced with limpid green olive oil and bittersweet rapini served in shallow bowls decorated with blue dots.