IN: Mary Christine Brockert (March 5, 1956 - December 26, 2010), better known by her stage name Teena Marie, was an American singer-songwriter, and producer. She was known by her childhood nickname Tina before taking the stage name Teena Marie and later acquired the nickname Lady Tee (sometimes spelled Lady T), given to her by her collaborator and friend, Rick James. She was known for her distinctive soulful vocals, which caused many listeners to believe she was African-American. Her success in R&B and soul music, and loyalty to these genres would earn her the title Ivory Queen of Soul.

Mary Christine, or Tina as she was called, was the daughter of construction worker Thomas Leslie Brockert and his wife, home renovator Mary Anne. She spent her early childhood in Mission Hills, Calif. Her ethnic heritage was Portuguese, Italian, Irish, and American Indian. In 2005, while visiting Louisiana, she had discovered that her paternal ancestors once lived in New Orleans. She took to singing naturally, performing Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song by age two. She also developed a fondness for singing Motown songs, and her self-professed "gift from God" would become fine-tuned as the years progressed.  When she was eight years old, her parents began sending Tina on auditions which, among other things, netted her an acting role on The Beverly Hillbillies, credited as Tina Marie Brockert. She also sang at the wedding of Jerry Lewis' son when she was 10 years old. Reared in a Roman Catholic household, she learned to play the piano under the tutelage of two nuns, and later taught herself the guitar, bass, and congas. She would go on to form a semi-professional R&B band with her younger brother Anthony and their cousin.  In the early 1970s, after the family moved to Venice, Los Angeles, Brockert spent her adolescent years in the historically black Venice enclave of Oakwood, nicknamed "Venice Harlem". There, she would acquire a strong spiritual influence from neighborhood matriarch Berthalynn Jackson, a black woman who would become her godmother.  While attending Venice High School, Brockert joined the Summer Dance Production and was the female lead in the school's production of The Music Man. She also fronted a local Venice rock band "Truvair" in 1974-1975; the band's members were her high school classmates. Following graduation, Brockert juggled auditioning for various record companies with studying English Literature at Santa Monica College. She credited her love of reading with helping her to write lyrics.

When did she become involved with singing?

OUT: She took to singing naturally, performing Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song by age two.


IN: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (; 24 July 1878 - 25 October 1957), was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist; his work, mostly in the fantasy genre, was published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than ninety books of his work were published in his lifetime, and both original work and compilations have continued to appear. Dunsany's oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as plays, novels and essays. He achieved great fame and success with his early short stories and plays, and during the 1910s was considered one of the greatest living writers of the English-speaking world; he is today best known for his 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland's Daughter Born and raised in London, to the second-oldest title (created 1439) in the Irish peerage, Dunsany lived much of his life at what may be Ireland's longest-inhabited house, Dunsany Castle near Tara, worked with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin, was chess and pistol-shooting champion of Ireland, and travelled and hunted extensively.

Edward Plunkett (Dunsany), known en famille as "Eddie," was the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853-1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax, nee Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Burton (1855-1916).  From a historically wealthy and famous family, Lord Dunsany was related to many well-known Irish figures. He was a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh, whose ring and crozier head are still held by the Dunsany family. He was also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist, and later nationalist / Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett, and George Count Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Rising.  His mother was a cousin of Sir Richard Burton, and he inherited from her considerable height, being 6' 4". The Countess of Fingall, wife of Dunsany's cousin, the Earl of Fingall, wrote a best-selling account of the life of the aristocracy in Ireland in the late 19th century and early 20th century, called Seventy Years Young.  Plunkett's only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he was estranged from around 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother's will, was the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another, younger, brother died in infancy.  Edward Plunkett grew up at the family properties, most notably Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also family homes such as in London. His schooling was at Cheam, Eton College and finally the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he entered in 1896.

did he have any siblings?

OUT:
a younger brother,