TMZ is reporting that disco legend Donna Summer has danced her last dance, having lost a battle with cancer. She was 63.

We just happened to be listening to "Last Dance," Summer's 1978 hit, when we read the news on Twitter.

We already knew it was going to be quite a Pride celebration this June for New York's gay community, given the one year anniversary of the Marriage Equality Act and President Obama's recent endorsement of same-sex marriage. With the passing of one of Pride's most revered divas, it's going to be all the more bittersweet as people sing, "I need you, by me, beside me, to guide me/To hold, to scold me, 'cause when I'm bad, I'm so bad."

Thanks for that last chance for romance tonight, Donna. Dance in peace, in that big, disco hall in the sky.

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Brooklyn born writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak has died. He was 83-years-old.

Sendak was the author of Bumble-Ardy, In The Night Kitchen, and, of course, Where The Wild Things Are.

We just went back and listened to Sendak's interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in September of 2011. It's almost 20 minutes long, but we highly recommend you take the time to listen to it yourself. It's an example of a master interviewer letting a master story teller reveal the important life lessons of love, loss, laughter and death.

Gross speaks to Sendak by phone from his home, when he is too weak to go to a studio. She speaks to him about his life as a gay man who never raised children, the death of his partner of 50 years, and the death of recent friends, including his publisher. Facing his own mortality himself, Sendak tells Gross, through tears:

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Mike Wallace, veteran broadcast journalist known for his contributions to CBS' 60 Minutes has died. Wallace, 93, died at Waveny Care Center in New Canaan Saturday night, Conn. Wallace, who was known for his hard hitting interviews with controversial public figures, had said in interviews following his retirement that he wanted his epitaph to read "Tough But Fair," the New York Times reported. Wallace was born in 1918 as Myron Leon Wallace, he began developing his style, asking tough questions on the television show "Night Beat." He was one of the original 60 Minutes hosts when the show began in 1968.

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The meme of the moment has turned on itself, eating its own shit tail, if you will. Here, from Tripp Crosby, Tyler Stanton, and others who could be co-opted into the making of this video, are "Phrases you will often never hear," in YouTube form.

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Violet and Bobby in happier times.

Yesterday, it looked as though Violet the NYU hawk mother and star of the Bobst library hawk cam was doing OK apart from her cheating husband. She had been captured and was receiving treatment for her injured leg. Now, City Room reports that Violet has died. She was thought to be around five years old.

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Following the announcement of Christopher Hitchens' death at the age of 62 very early this morning, Twitter has been awash with thoughts about the man. #ChristopherHitchens is trending throughout the U.S., though not, currently, worldwide [update: now it is], and not in the U.K. But what about #GodIsNotGreat, Hitchens' 2009 book and a phrase many equate with him?

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Less than an hour ago NPR reported that Christopher Hitchens had finally succumbed to his battle with cancer.

Tomorrow, at a decent hour, I will search through the Voice archives for some of his pieces. At one point he wrote the Press Clips column, but whether it was before or after Alexander Cockburn wrote it escapes me at the moment. Fuck it. This sucks.

The best I can do right now is reprint the one piece he seems to have written for us in the Internet era, and which is in our digital archives. It's a sweet little deconstruction of Al Gore during the 2000 election, and a review of the book Inventing Al Gore: A Biography by Bill Turque.

Just a little Hitch, in the dark of the night, while we down a drink to Hitchens, a man with no equal. -- T.O.

SOFT GORE
By Christopher Hitchens
February 29, 2000

Not just for fun, I once tried to arrange a meeting between the vice president and his fairly distant cousin Gore Vidal.

The attempt was less than a success: Vidal intoned beautifully that he would not socialize with any client of Mr. Martin Peretz, and had in any case "met enough vice presidents already." Gore himself declined on the surreal grounds that he had to go and greet the Pope at the Baltimore airport. (I didn't tell Vidal that this was the excuse, deeming it too shockingly insulting for his surprisingly tender ears.)

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Following up on the awful elevator incident yesterday at 285 Madison that caused the tragic death of Suzanne Hart, director of new business at Young & Rubicam, the daily papers share portraits of her life and what she had accomplished in her 41 years, as well as a further look into what actually happened. As for what happened: As we explained yesterday, what was initially reported as an elevator "fall" was not a fall at all -- Hart was getting on the elevator on the ground floor of the building when, the Post reports, "suddenly it shot upward like a bullet" with the doors still open and two other passengers, a man and woman, inside. The reports are upsetting.

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60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney died yesterday in New York at the age of 92. Rooney retired from 60 Minutes last month after 33 years of closing out the show with short, observational essays. Over the years he recorded 1,097 of the segments, which often focused on small gripes about the mundane aspects of daily life. CBS News reports Rooney "died after complications following minor surgery." [CBS]

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Mathieu Lefevre

Gothamist has an interview today with the mother of Mathieu Lefevre, the 30-year-old Brooklyn artist from Canada who was hit by a truck and killed in East Williamsburg while biking last week. Lefevre's mother, Erika, said that the family was told to go to the NYPD Accident Investigation Squad, and the detective there never returned their phone calls. Police decided there was no criminality in the incident, but didn't directly tell the family:

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