Pittsburgh Symphony gets $5.5 million gift

Pittsburgh Symphony
gets $5.5 million gift

PITTSBURGH — The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra will receive $5.5 million from a charitable foundation to bolster its international tours through 2011. Symphony officials say they are receiving the gift from the Henry L. Hillman Foundation in $1 million annual installments. The industrial heir’s foundation will contribute another $500,000 to supplement the orchestra’s endowment income. The first tour to benefit from the funding begins next month. That tour commemorates the 250th anniversary of the naming of Pittsburgh. The symphony will perform in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Croatia over three weeks.

A Spice Girl reveals
her choice of sleepwear

NEW YORK — Victoria Beckham goes to bed naked. And she’s got a very good reason — her husband. “You don’t sleep with David Beckham,” the 33-year-old Posh Spice tells Elle magazine in its January issue, on newsstands Tuesday. “I’m going to be naked if I’m getting in bed with him every night!” The Beckhams and their three young sons moved to Los Angeles this summer when her soccer-superstar husband signed to play with the Los Angeles Galaxy. “I’m very proud to be British, but here it’s a lot more relaxed,” she says. “It’s the happiest as a family that we’ve ever been. I just love America.” She is now on tour with the newly reunited Spice Girls. “I wanted my children to see that Mummy was a pop star,” she says. “It was the last opportunity for them to stand in a crowd full of people screaming for the Spice Girls.”

Today’s birthdays

Actor Eli Wallach is 92. Actress Ellen Burstyn is 75. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., is 70. Baseball Hall-of-Famer Johnny Bench is 60. Country singer Gary Morris is 59. Singer-songwriter Tom Waits is 58. Basketball Hall-of-Famer Larry Bird is 51. Former “Tonight Show” announcer Edd Hall is 49. Actor Jeffrey Wright is 42. Actor C. Thomas Howell is 41. Country singer Sunny Sweeney is 31. Actress Shiri Appleby is 29. Singer Aaron Carter is 20.