Around the Arts

Cleese will give April Fool's lecture\nITHACA, N.Y. -- John Cleese will give an April Fool's Day lecture at Cornell University on the life and works of W.C. Fields.\nCleese was named a professor-at-large at Cornell in 1999. The school said the actor-comedian has titled his talk: "W.C. Fields: A Comedian for Politically Incorrect Times."\nHe will be joined by James Curtis, author of the new biography, "W.C. Fields: A Biography."\nCleese, who also will participate in several classes, said he decided to lecture on Fields because he has been neglected and forgotten.\nCleese, 63, starred in the TV series "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "Fawlty Towers." His films include "A Fish Called Wanda," "Die Another Day" and the upcoming "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle." \nProfessors-at-large make periodic visits to the Cornell campus during their six-year terms; they are considered full members of the faculty.\nBoston Symphony conductor dies\nBOSTON -- Harry Ellis Dickson, the violinist and conductor who was a decades-long fixture at the Boston Symphony Orchestra and father-in-law of former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, died on Saturday of a sudden illness. He was 94.\nDickson died at Faulkner Hospital, said Stephen Crawford, a family spokesman and former aide to Dukakis.\nDickson, was the former music director at the Boston Classic Orchestra. He began his career with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1938 and played with the orchestra for 49 seasons.\nDickson, a close friend of Boston Pops founder Arthur Fiedler, was named assistant conductor of the Boston Pops in 1958 and founded the Boston Symphony's Youth Concert series in 1959.\nDickson became associate Pops conductor in 1980 and was appointed the Boston Classic Orchestra music director in 1983. \nThe symphony named him Music Director Laureate in 1999 and paid tribute to his decades with the BSO last spring at the concert opening the Pops' 117th season.\n"I've been around so long that all the statues in Symphony Hall were little boys when I started," Dickson joked before the concert.\nDuring the program, his daughter, Kitty Dukakis, recalled how her father led the band in "The Waltzing Kitty" at her high school graduation. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, paid tribute, saying, "No one on this planet could wish for a better father-in-law."\nDickson was born in Cambridge and graduated from Somerville High School and the New England Conservatory of Music.\nThe city of Somerville honored Dickson by opening the Harry Ellis Dickson Center of Fine Arts and Humanities in its Winter Hill Community School in 1976.\nOno opens Lennon home to public\nLONDON -- John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, opened his childhood home in Liverpool to the public Thursday, and said the famously peace-loving former Beatle would have opposed the current war with Iraq.\n"I'm sure John would have been terribly upset. And he would have expressed his anger and told them (coalition leaders) off for how stupid it is to have to go through this," Ono said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corporation radio before the ceremony.\n"As (Mahatma) Gandhi said, 'An eye for an eye will make us all blind.' We just can't solve problems this way."\nLennon lived at 251 Menlove Avenue in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton from age 5 -- when his parents separated and he went to live with his Aunt Mimi -- until he was 23. He taught himself to play guitar in the four-bedroom 1930s house, and reportedly wrote "She Loves You" in the front room.\nOno bought the house, called "Mendips," for an unspecified price last year and donated it to the conservation group The National Trust, which has restored it to the way it would have looked when Lennon lived there.\n"When John's house came up for sale I wanted to preserve it for the people of Liverpool and John Lennon and Beatles fans all over the world," Ono said. "The house resonates with special atmosphere. It was, after all, where some of John's songs that we now hold so dear were born."\nLennon, whose other hits included the peace anthem "Imagine," was shot dead in New York in 1980.