Village Inn is a casual dining restaurant chain in the United States. Its restaurants are known for their breakfast menu items, including buttermilk pancakes, skillets, crepes, omelettes, and eggs. In additional to their breakfast offerings, they also feature a variety of salads, sandwiches, burgers, melts and dinner items. Their pies have won numerous awards from the American Pie Council (APC)^{[citation needed]}.

Village Inn's parent company, American Blue Ribbon Holdings, is based in Denver, Colorado.

Village Inn was founded by Colorado natives James Mola and Merton Anderson, who opened the first Village Inn Pancake House in Denver in 1958. They incorporated as Village Inn Pancake House, Inc., in December 1959, and began franchising in 1961, with Dow Sherwood opening the first franchised locations in Tampa. In 1982, Village Inn became the publicly-traded VICORP Restaurants, Inc. VICORP acquired the Poppin' Fresh Pies chain from Pillsbury in May 1983, renaming it Bakers Square.

In 1984, VICORP acquired 71 restaurants from Ralston Purina's Continental Restaurant Systems division and 175 former Sambo's restaurants in California, Florida, and Arizona. The California locations were converted to Bakers Square restaurants while the Florida and Arizona locations were converted to Village Inn, but the conversions led to a decline in profits for the company and 15 of the converted Florida locations would close by 1989.

Enrico Nicola "Henry" Mancini (April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor and arranger, best remembered for his film and television scores. He won a record number of Grammy Awards (20), plus a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in 1995. His best-known works include the jazz-idiom theme to The Pink Panther film series ("The Pink Panther Theme"), the Peter Gunn Theme from the television series, and back-to-back Academy Awards for the songs "Moon River" from the Blake Edwards film Breakfast at Tiffany's and "Days of Wine and Roses" from Edwards' film Days of Wine and Roses. He also composed the score of famous films such as Charade, The Great Race, Wait Until Dark or Silver Streak.

Mancini was born in the Little Italy neighborhood of Cleveland, and grew up near Pittsburgh, in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His parents emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Mancini's father, Quinto, (born March 13, 1893, Scanno, Italy) was a steelworker, who made his only child begin piccolo lessons at the age of eight. When Mancini was 12 years old, he began piano lessons. Quinto and Henry played flute together in the Aliquippa Italian immigrant band, "Sons of Italy". After graduating from Aliquippa High School in 1942, Mancini attended the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1943, after roughly one year at Juilliard, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the United States Army. In 1945, he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp in southern Germany.

Lawrence Welk (March 11, 1903 – May 17, 1992) was an American musician, accordionist, bandleader, and television impresario, who hosted The Lawrence Welk Show from 1955 to 1982. His style came to be known to his large number of radio, television, and live-performance fans (and critics) as "champagne music".

In 1996, Welk was ranked #43 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.

Welk was born in the German-speaking community of Strasburg, North Dakota. He was sixth of the eight children of Ludwig and Christiana (Schwahn) Welk, ethnic Germans who emigrated to America in 1892 from Selz, Kutschurgan District, in the German-speaking area north of Odessa (now Odessa, Ukraine, but then in southwestern Russia).

The family lived on a homestead that today is a tourist attraction. They spent the cold North Dakota winter of their first year under an upturned wagon covered in sod.^{[citation needed]}

Welk decided on a career in music and persuaded his father to buy a mail-order accordion for $400 (equivalent to $4,641 as of 2012). He promised his father that he would work on the farm until he was 21, in repayment for the accordion. Any money he made elsewhere during that time, doing farmwork or performing, would go to his family.

Franz Liszt (German: [fʁant͡s lɪst]); Hungarian: Liszt Ferencz, in modern use Liszt Ferenc) (October 22, 1811 – July 31, 1886) was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.

Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age. In the 1840s he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time. He was also a well-known composer, piano teacher, and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Alexander Borodin.

As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony. He also played an important role in popularizing a wide array of music by transcribing it for piano.

Robert Earl Keen, Junior (born January 11, 1956) is an American Texas country music and folk guitarist and singer-songwriter from the southern state of Texas. He is popular with fans of various musical genres including traditional country, alternative country, folk, Americana, and college radio. Keen currently resides in Kerrville, Texas, and maintains a ranch in Medina, Texas.

Growing up in Houston, Texas, Keen was interested in music, sports, movies and writing. Keen graduated from Sharpstown High School in 1974.

Keen attended Texas A&M University, where he majored in English. Disappointed in the College Station music scene, he began playing guitar and learned to read and write music, basing his style on folk, country, blues and rock roots. In 1974 he rented a house from landlord Jack Boyett, where his neighbor was a then-unknown Lyle Lovett. The two became fast friends and performed together on the front porch many evenings. This eventually grew into inspiration for a song entitled "The Front Porch Song", which both would add to their repertoire.