The Pitch: It's like Billie Holiday meets Donald Barthelme!  

It's the birthday of jazz singer Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1915). As a child she ran errands for women at a local brothel near her home, and in return the women let her listen to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith records.

It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer Donald Barthelme, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1931). He grew up in Texas with his family. His father was an architect and designed their family home as an exotic work of modern architecture. Barthelme said, "It was wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. We had a routine, the family, on Sundays. We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks." He worked as a cultural reporter for the Houston Post, covering everything from piano recitals to acrobat performances. When he was thirty he became the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. A year later, he moved to New York and began regularly publishing short stories, satires, and movie reviews in the New Yorker magazine. His fiction is known for its absurdity and humor. He said in one story, "The death of God left the angels in a strange position."