Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for September 8th: https://ko-fi.com/post/September-8-International-Literacy-Day-E1E812SM6D
French Republican Calendar day name (22 Fructidor): Noisette (hazelnut)
Bummer September 8
September 8, 1965: Cleveland-born actress/dancer Dorothy Dandridge, the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, dies at the age of 42, either from an accidental overdose of the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine or a fat embolism that broke free and entered her bloodstream due to a fractured bone in her foot, an injury she’d sustained in a fall a few days before.
September 8, 1985: Cuban-American ecofeminist installation artist Ana Mendieta falls from the window of her apartment on the 34th floor of a building in Greenwich Village. Mendieta’s husband, sculptor Carl Andre, insists that her death was accident. Andre was acquitted of any legal responsibility in Mendieta’s death, but witnesses heard them arguing just prior to her fall from the window, and Andre had scratches on his face. Andre’s exhibitions are frequently protested by Mendieta’s fellow feminist artists.
September 8, 2016: 59-year-old performer The Lady Chablis, who’s featured prominently in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt and played herself in the 1997 film based on it, dies of pneumonia at Candler Hospital in Savannah, Georgia.
September 8, 2017: Kenneka Jenkins, age 19, attends a party at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare hotel. The next day her body is found inside a latched freezer belonging to the hotel’s kitchen; she appears to have frozen to death after entering the freezer for an unknown reason.
Footage from the hotel’s cameras show her wandering the halls with a small injury on one foot. Authorities speculate her unusual behavior may have resulted from the combination of alcohol and a migraine medication, possibly not prescribed to Jenkins (sources vary), found in her system; this combination may have also hastened the effects of hypothermia.
