Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

July 26, 2025

A hush quieted the noise and bustle of a summer evening in Lake George, N.Y., when vacationers and local people paused to honor the memory of Melina Frattolin during the Kelly’s Angels Summer Lovin’ Fun Fest at Shepard Park.

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

An unfathomable crime unfolded in Upstate New York last weekend.

On a beautiful summer day full of promise and joy, a nine-year-old girl was murdered. Her father is charged. Why Melina Frattolin was killed and how anyone could do it remain mysteries at this stage.  But the tragedy has precipitated the intense scrutiny it deserves from the Capital Region news media, of course, and from news organizations across the United States, Canada and abroad, including the Montreal Gazette, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Hindustan Times and the Mereja Forum.  Melina lived with her mother in Montreal. Her father spent most of the year in Ethiopia where he was ostensibly involved in several businesses. What is emerging is a picture of a man facing legal, financial and tax troubles.

COUNTRY MUSIC TO OUR EARS: It didn’t feel real to South Glens Falls native Ginny “Rogers” Brophey that she was being inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame—until the flowers from Taylor Swift arrived. Over her four-decade career, Ginny played a pivotal role in launching the careers of numerous artists, including Kenny Chesney, who introduced her at the Hall of Fame dinner in Nashville on July 21. She was instrumental in establishing country radio in the Boston market. “Ginny didn’t just work in country radio—she helped define it,” said Christine Sieks, Townsquare Media New Hampshire Regional VP/Market President. A standout on-air personality and expert programmer, Ginny got her start in 1984 at Rock 101.5 WPDH in Poughkeepsie, NY, and went on to spend most of her career in New England. She had a 23-year run in Boston radio, where she served as assistant program director and music director alongside her husband, program director Mike Brophey. Since February 2022, she has led WOKQ and plans to retire next month. “It feels like the right time to pass the mic,” Ginny said. Cowboy hats off to a career that sent some strong soundwaves through the industry.

PINCH HITTER: The Philadelphia Orchestra begins its summer residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center August 6, and Wicked superstar Cynthia Erivo was scheduled to join the fabulous Philadelphians on stage on August 22 for what was the most highly anticipated concert of the Orchestra’s 2025 summer residency. When she had to cancel, the ever-resourceful team at SPAC booked the popular and critically acclaimed Jon Batiste, winner of seven Grammys — including 2021 Album of the Year for We Are — from a whopping 22 nominations. Saratoga Dispatch reports that Batiste is married to New York Times writer and best-selling author Suleika Jaouad, who’s from Saratoga. The A-list couple met during a summer music intensive at Skidmore College.

The country music community honored South Glens Falls native Ginny “Rogers” Brophey this week as she was inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame in Nashville.:

 JOEL TO THE MAX: HBO Max is out with a new, very watchable two-part documentary on Billy Joel. Daughter Alexa Ray watched with her mom Christie Brinkley, who was married to Joel from 1985 to 1994, and told People the documentary is a “fearlessly raw, reeling, and shockingly intimate portrait of my Father.” Joel announced in May that he’d been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus, a treatable brain condition that can affect hearing, vision and balance. He says balance has so far been his biggest challenge — and was what first alerted him that something was amiss. “I know a lot of people are worried about me and my health, but I’m okay,” he says. “I’m doing my best to work with it and to recover from it.” 

PURLOINED PEACOCKS: Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Elizabeth Taylor found comfortable accommodations at the historic Hollywood hideout called the Ryde Hotel in California. For the last 14 years, so did 40 peacocks and peahens. They were loved and pampered. There were dinners of salmon, steak, prime rib and vegetables. Some of the peacocks even joined the guests for coffee in the morning. Last Sunday, someone stole the majority of the birds  — more than 30 in all. “We’re not sure why anyone would do anything like this, but the staff is absolutely heartbroken,” said general manager David Nielsen, who reported a hotel guest saw two men load some of the animals into a cage in the back of a pickup truck. The theft is being investigated as a property crime , with the peacocks valued at $2,000 each and the peahens at $1,000.

LOVE IN A TIME OF WAR: Alex deGrasse is a combatant in the round-the-clock ideological and media combat zone that is Washington and New York politics. His job is to provide strategic advice to U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik and speak on her behalf to often-critical members of the media. He is a practitioner of political hand-to-hand combat, weaponizing words designed make Ms. Stefanik’s critics pay a price. Somehow, in the midst of all the madness, love flourished when Mr. deGrasse and NBC White House reporter Katherine Doyle found each other. After a two-year courtship, they were married on Martha’s Vineyard in June.  The New York Times reported that he “wooed Ms. Doyle by sharing his niche interests with her. He showcased his knowledge of Ancient Greek and Roman history during one of their earlier dates to the Dumbarton Oaks museum in Georgetown. There they browsed through relics from the Byzantine Empire and marveled at displays with ancient coins and tapestries. For Ms. Doyle, learning new sides of Mr. deGrasse every time they saw each other drew her closer to him.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO SACAGAWEA? The expedition 220 years ago of Merriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Louisiana Purchase and find a route to the Pacific Ocean gave us the story of Sacagawea, the brave and resourceful young woman who accompanied them and acted as a communicator and negotiator with Native American tribes. Now, members of three tribes say the story told to generations of American school children was nonsense.

HOT, DRY AND THIRSTY:  Across the Mediterranean, the dry climate that produced olives for centuries is growing hotter, making olives and olive oil scarcer than at any time in recent memory.  In Afghanistan, meanwhile, Kabul is on the verge of becoming the first modern capital in the world to run completely dry due to population growth, the climate crisis, and over-extraction of groundwater.

BRACE YOURSELF: The skulls of our ancient ancestors were strikingly different from our own. Early hunter-gatherers had large, powerful jaws built for chewing tough meats, fibrous vegetables, seeds, and nuts. But around 12,000 years ago, things began to change. As humans traded hunting for farming, their diets changed too, incorporating more grains and cultivated produce that were softer, more processed, and required far less chewing. Their straight teeth gave way to our crooked smiles.

BRING YOUR DOG TO WORK: Dozen of studies over the last 40 years have confirmed that dogs help humans relax. Dog owners also have been shown to have a lower risk of death from heart attacks.  A new study placed participants in two particularly high-stress activities -- public speaking and oral math in front of a panel of expressionless people.  The study found lower levels of cortisol and the enzyme alpha-amylase in the blood samples of the participants who were accompanied by their dogs.

HOW’M I DOING? Employees who receive meaningful feedback once a week are better, more engaged performers and report higher levels of job satisfaction, research shows. But when is the best time for the conversation? Mornings when alertness, mood and health are optimal and when many people have a higher tolerance for physical pain. As the day wears on, our ability to process and respond to complex information deteriorates. Judges, for example, are more likely to deny parole later in the day, when their cognitive resources are depleted.

GREAT IDEA, BOSS!  CEOs are expected to set the agenda in their organizations, but the best ones know when to let others do the talking. Bosses who do not invite input from others before voicing their own ideas and opinions often discourage their employees from asking questions, providing dissenting views or pitching ideas of their own, says CEO coach and leadership speaker Sabina Nawaz. “If this dynamic becomes the norm—with you speaking first and/or the most during meetings—your employees are likely to disengage and perhaps even multitask their way through meetings, mindlessly agreeing with everything you say.”

LISTENING TO YOUR EVERY WORD: Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that puts AI on your wrist. Bee makes a Fitbit-like device that listens in on your conversations while using AI to transcribe everything you and the people around you say, allowing it to generate personalized summaries of your days, reminders, and suggestions. You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to help inform its AI-generated insights, as well as create a searchable history of your activities.

THE KING AND AI: King Charles has been captured in a handsome new portrait created by a female "robot artist" named Ai-Da. The creative humanoid used advanced artificial intelligence algorithms and a robot arm to create the painting on canvas.

PEELED OUT: Remember the artist Maurizio Cattelan’s piece known as the “Comedian?” That’s the one that features a real banana duct taped to a wall. The original recently fetched $6.2 million at auction at Sotheby’s in New York. A French museum has been exhibiting a version of the piece. A few days ago, somebody swiped the banana.  

GET YOUR BASS THERE: Upstate New York has two of the nation’s best bass-fishing waterways, according to Bassmaster magazine: The St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands and Lake Erie.  Both made Bassmaster’s 2024 ranking as well. Bassmaster said its team reviewed tournament results from the last year, polled thousands of anglers and consulted with biologists to determine the rankings.

WORK IT OUT: Your workout may be a clue to your personality. New research shows that extroverts enjoy greater intensity exercise. Those who score high in neuroticism tend to enjoy lighter exercise and at-home activities. People with high levels of openness tend to be willing to try new experiences and may also have high levels of curiosity and imagination. 

HULK HOGAN was born Terry Gene Bollea on Aug. 11, 1953, in Augusta, Ga. His father was a construction foreman; his mother, a dance teacher. He attended the University of South Florida but dropped out to start wrestling in 1977. “Hulk” fit his stature – he was 300 pounds and 6 feet, eight inches tall – and CBS at the time was airing “The Incredible Hulk.”  Early in his professional career, Hulk was a long-haired “bad guy” – so bad, in fact, that he threw Sylvester Stallone out of the ring in a scene from the movie “Rocky III.” Over time, Hulk became one of professional wrestling’s good guys, an American patriot who did battle with the likes of the Iron Sheik. He was not unfamiliar with scandal: He won a multi-million dollar judgment against a media organization that posted a tape of him having sex. He was caught making racial slurs and apologized. He remained one of wrestling’s most recognizable and popular figures, filling stadiums and arenas around the country, including here in the Capital Region. In doing so, he transformed professional wrestling from a low-budget regional attraction into a multibillion-dollar industry. He was 71.

JOHN MICHAEL OSBOURNE was born in Birmingham, England, on Dec. 3, 1948, the fourth of six children of a toolmaker dad who worked nights at a power plant and a mom who worked the day shift at an auto-parts factory. The Osbournes were crammed into a small working-class home that in its early days lacked indoor plumbing. He was an indifferent student with undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit disorder who dropped out of school at 15 and had a series of short-lived jobs, including 18 months at a local slaughterhouse and a brief career as a burglar, for which he spent three months in jail. He dreamt of being a rock singer and, with three local musicians, formed the band Black Sabbath, which largely created heavy metal music with “huge hymns of doom.” Black Sabbath fired Ozzy in 1977, and he went on to a spectacular solo career in music and reality television. He overindulged in everything, bit the head off a dead bat during a concert, pelted audiences with raw meat, once snorted a line of ants and, when he was barred from riding his lawn mower to a local tavern, switched to riding a horse. He was 76.

CHARLES FRANK MANGIONE was born on Nov. 29, 1940, in Rochester, N.Y. His father worked for Eastman Kodak, and his mother at Samson United, the Rochester-based home appliance manufacturer, before the two of them opened a grocery store attached to the house. Chuck’s music-loving parents enrolled him in music school when he was 8. His older brother, Gaspare, a budding pianist, became his at-home performing partner. Mr. Mangione’s father took his sons to the nearby Ridgecrest Inn, where jazz luminaries like Miles Davis, Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie played and sometimes let the boys sit in.  Dad invited the jazz greats back to their home for spaghetti, and Dizzy Gillespie became Chuck’s mentor. His 1977 hit “Feels So Good” made Mr. Mangione a superstar and brought jazz to a vast music-buying public that had been focused almost exclusively on rock ’n’ roll. Mr. Mangione wrote music that underscored two Olympics:  the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal and the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., where he performed live for a globally televised closing ceremony that won him an Emmy. He continued to live in Rochester until the end, teaching at the Eastman School of Music and performing locally — including in what he called “Cat in the Hat” matinees for children. He was 84.

MALCOLM-JAMAL WARNER was born on Aug. 18, 1970, in Jersey City, N.J., and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was 5. He began acting as an after-school activity, and when Bill Cosby announced a national search for an actor to play Theo Huxtable, he thought his big break might be at hand. A botched audition almost scuttled the opportunity. Mr. Cosby gave him advice and a second chance and Mr. Warner became the sometimes mischievous, always well-meaning third child of the Huxtable family. Millions watched his character negotiate the pitfalls of adolescence and the awkward teenage years. The show became a cultural touchstone for many in generation X, especially young black people. He drowned in Costa Rica on a family vacation at 54.

“Hulk understood a very old-fashioned wrestling concept: To be seen, it’s better to be outrageous. To be heard, you need to be loud.  If it earns you love, great. But even if you are hated, you are still noticed.”
— Jason Gay of The Wall Street Journal on Hulk Hogan, who died Thursday at 71.

DINGHY IN FULL VIEW: At a Manhattan marina this week, a naked man jumped into a small dinghy and took off in the Hudson River. With police in hot pursuit, he climbed aboard a moored catamaran. The NYPD Harbor Unit made its way to the catamaran, climbed aboard and arrested the man, who was hospitalized.

Some of the linked material in Facing Out requires a subscription to read.

Principal Author: Mark Behan.

Contributors: Amanda Metzger, Ryan Moore, Bill Callen, Jim Murphy, Troy Burns, Kristy Miller,
and John Brodt.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com