REMEMBERING GRETCHEN: Local playwright Gretchen Dyer died over the weekend as a heart condition she had had for 20 years finally took its toll. She was 50. Those are the cold facts. In response, another local playwright, Vicki Caroline Cheatwood, has written an incredibly warm appreciation of her friend on TheaterJones.com. Most recently, Dyer made headlines for her work on Project X’s One in 3 in January. She spoke with KERA for a radio feature about the piece.

DSO ON PERFORMANCE TODAY: The classical music program Performance Today will broadcast a pair of Dallas Symphony Orchestra performances during today’s show. Scheduled for the show’s second hour are Joaquin Turina’s Orgia, conducted by Eduardo Mata, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67, conducted by Jaap Van Zweden. Performance Today isn’t broadcast in North Texas, but through the miracle of the Internet, you should be able to find a station that airs it. This map should help you find one.

OBAMA AND THE ARTS: Now that President Obama has picked former Iowa congressman Jim Leach to lead the National Endowment for the Humanities, his cultural team is set. Leach joines Rocco Landesman, who heads the NEA. So what do the picks say about the direction for those two organizations? David Smith writes in The Wall Street Journal that Obama played it fairly safe with the picks, meaning that there’s a good chance that the status quo in those two organizations will prevail. Smith is a senior lecturer at Baylor and the author of Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy, the book that inspired a pair of recent essays from Jerome, which you can read here and here.