rmcrae

Sade’s Love Delux is so perfect for playtime.

I never found Zac to be attractive until recently. His latest look is really hot. His brother, Dylan, is very handsome.

I gathered there were two people in her immediate world:  Donna Summer, the performer who will forever be remembered as the artist with the string of hits such as "Love to Love You", "I Feel Love", "Hot Stuff", "Bad Girls", etc.
And then there's LaDonna Gaines Sommer Sudano, daughter, wife, mother of three and grandmother of 2 (at the time), who enjoyed her Christian life, personal time and family more than her music career and 'celebrity'. She expressed herself through painting, and kept her private life very private. She had said in interviews (and in her memoir) she moved to Nashville from LA, because she never felt at home in LA, but could hide outside of Nashville. She never seeked attention, and never felt comfortable with it - but it came with the territory. 
 
She had very few 'celebrity friends', but those she was 'friends' with, she had forever since the 70s - including David Foster, Bruce Springsteen, Sylvester Stallone, Sophia Loren, and Barbra Streisand. She had mentioned whenever she was in LA for business, she would get together for Italian cooking at Sophia Loren's home, where Stallone would join them and the three of them would have 'too much fun'. Then they'd invite their spouses to the dining room, where they would be fed a feast. And still, with this small circle of friends she knew she could share with and trust, she told no one of her cancer diagnosis or how ill she was at the end.  Streisand, Springsteen, Foster - they all expressed their shock over her passing, as they had all been in her company months before her passing and she never mentioned how sick she was, never wanting the attention on her.  She was a class act.  
 
(She explained in her memoir that she met Loren when she lived in Beverly Hills in the 70s / 80s - Loren was her neighbor. When her Italian in-laws would visit, Loren would host an Italian feast at her house, inviting Summer and the Sudanos. Stallone lived down the street from Summer and Loren, and was firendly with Loren - so she used to invite him from time to time, as well (and his mother and brothers if they were visiting).  That's how she became friends with Stallone. From time to time, she would just invite Donna and Stallone to her kitchen to give them 'cooking lessons' which they enjoyed).

When Donna Summer was feeling all the love from the world as the Queen of Disco in the ’70s, the suicidal singer hit rock bottom.
“The most dismal days of my existence were at the height of my career,” says the late legend in the new documentary “Love To Love You, Donna Summer,” which premieres on HBO and HBO Max May 20. 
In fact, while Summer was riding high from the success of her breakout hit, the orgasmic classic “Love To Love You Baby,” she was enduring an abusive relationship with artist Peter Mühldorfer. One severe beating even left her unconscious, with a black eye and broken ribs.
“I hit her, and I never could forgive myself,” says Mühldorfer in the doc.
And having grown up in a deeply religious household — her father smacked her for wearing red nail polish because “that’s what whores wore” — Summer was highly conflicted about her image as a sex goddess from hits such as “Love To Love You Baby,” “I Feel Love” and later “Hot Stuff.” In reality, she was more church girl than “Bad Girl.”
“You’re looking at me, but what you see is not what I am,” she says in the film, which is co-directed by her daughter Brooklyn Sudano and Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams. “How many roles do I have to play in my own life?”
Summer was also carrying around the pain and trauma of having been sexually abused by her pastor as a child.
“He did the devil’s work better than most,” says her brother Ricky Gaines in the doc. “It became a defining moment in her life.”
All of her mental struggles led to Summer almost jumping out of a window in her New York hotel room in 1976. But her foot became entangled in a window curtain as she approached the ledge, and at that moment a maid entered.
 
“Another 10 seconds, and I would have been gone,” Summer — who died at 63 from lung cancer in 2012 — later said.
“I felt God could never forgive me because I had failed him. I was decadent, I was stupid, I was a fool. I just decided that my life had no meaning.”
https://nypost.com/2023/04/28/new-doc-reveals-donna-summers-private-hell-at-height-of-her-fame/
Sad to read this about a woman who brought so much joy to so many people.



 
 
 

Even with a sunburnt back.

He looks good!