IRIS RAINER DART, the award-winning best-selling author of Beaches and eight other novels and books, will be honored as the sole female, along with five male distinguished alumni of Allerdice High School as Inaugural Inductees into the school's new Hall of Fame.
Jeff Rosenthal, President of the Taylor Allerdice Alumni Association said today, "I am proud to announce the First Annual Taylor Allerdice Hall of Fame Awards Night. Our first class will be inducted on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 7:00 p.m. in Allerdice Auditorium in Pittsburgh, PA. The prestigious list of inaugural honorees includes:
Marty Allen ('40 - Comedian); Myron Cope ('47 - Broadcasting); Dr. Bernard Fisher ('42 - Medical); Robert Geminder ('53 - Humanitarian); Herbert Douglas (Track and Business); and Iris Rainer Dart ('62 - Entertainment)."
The awards ceremony and reception is free and open to the general public to attend, although reservations are required. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. Event attendees must pick up their tickets at the Will Call table on the evening of the event by no later than 6:30 p.m., one half hour prior to the beginning of the program. Early reservations are highly recommended, due to limited seating. To make reservations, please call 412-422-4828. To learn more about this event, please visit the website,
www.allerdicehs.pghboe.net.
Iris Rainer Dart of Pebble Beach, CA is a best-selling novelist, whose work includes: The Boys In The Mail Room, ‘Til The Real Thing Comes Along, I'll Be There, The Stork Club, Show Business Kills, When I Fall in Love, Some Kind of Miracle and Beaches, which was made into a film starring
Bette Midler. Her co-authored children's book Larry: The King of Rock and Roll was released from Putnam in January of '07.
The daughter of Russian immigrants, Iris Rainer Dart was born in Pittsburgh, PA where her father was a social worker in a settlement house. Dart took up an acting career at age six at The Pittsburgh Playhouse. While attending Allderdice she worked in Ratner's, her brother Elliot's hardware store on Murray Avenue.
In 1966 she received her degree in theater from the
Drama Department at
Carnegie Mellon University, where she won the BMI awards for the libretto and lyrics she wrote for the varsity musical. Upon graduation she moved to Hollywood where she survived on small acting parts. Discouraged, she turned to writing as a career.
She wrote episodes for many situation comedies and was hired in 1975 as the only woman writer to write The Sonny and Cher Show. It was during this time when Dart had the idea to write a woman character loosely based on "the no holds barred outrageous person" that she found in Cher. The character became Cee Cee Bloom in her best-selling novel Beaches later made into the iconic film of the same name starring
Bette Midler.
Dart was a Governor
Peter Wilson's appointee to the California
Arts Council, which she served for eight years from 1991 - 1999. She was also a teacher of the first grade in the religious school at the congregation Beth Israel in The Carmel Valley for several years. She was the keynote speaker for four years running at the Governors Conference for Women in California sharing the bill with
Sherry Lansing, and
Betty Ford.
In 1999, Dart was the commencement speaker to 10,000 people at her alma mater,
Carnegie Mellon University. Currently Iris Rainer Dart is working as the librettist and lyricist of a new musical, entitled Laughing Matters, with her collaborators, Grammy Award-winning composer and Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Famer,
Mike Stoller, and Grammy Award-nominated composer and renowned music arranger,
Artie Butler.
She is married to Stephen Dart, a California businessman, the mother of Greg, who is 39 and Rachel, who is 24 and the grandmother of Jonathan Stephen who is six and Maya Suzanne who is four.
Taylor Allerdice High School is the largest of the Pittsburgh Public Schools' 10 urban high schools. The school has been consistently recognized as one of the best urban high schools in America. During the 1994-96 school years, Taylor Allerdice High School was recognized with the Blue Ribbon School Award of Excellence by the United States Department of Education, the highest award an American school can receive. Taylor Allerdice has also been recognized by Newsweek as one of America's top high schools, as well as by the state of Pennsylvania as one of the best schools in the state.
