Paul Efthemios Tsongas ( /ˈsɒŋɡəs/; Greek: Παύλος Ευθύμιος Τσόνγκας; February 14, 1941 – January 18, 1997) was a United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1979 to 1985. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1992 presidential election. He previously served as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts's 5th congressional district (1975–1979) and held local political office.

Tsongas was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, along with a twin sister, Thaleia, to a working-class family. His mother, Katina (née Pappas; originally Panagiotopoulos), was of Greek descent, and his father, Efthemios George Tsongas, was a Greek immigrant who worked as a dry-cleaner. He attended Dartmouth College, graduating in 1962, Yale Law School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard before settling in Lowell, Massachusetts.

He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia from 1962–1964, and as Peace Corps Country Director in the West Indies from 1967–1968.

In 1967 Paul Tsongas, then an aide to Congressman Frank B. Morse, met Niki Sauvage, then spending the summer in Arlington, Virginia. In 1969, she married Paul and they had three daughters: Ashley, Katina, and Molly.

Nicola Dickson "Niki" Sauvage Tsongas ( /ˈsɒŋɡəs/; born April 26, 1946) is the U.S. Representative for Massachusetts's 5th congressional district, serving since a special election in 2007. She is a member of the Democratic Party.

She is the widow of U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas, who represented the 5th district in the 1970s. She became the first woman from Massachusetts elected to Congress in 25 years.

Tsongas was born Nicola Dickson Sauvage in Chico, California, the daughter of Marian Susan (née Wyman), an artist and copywriter, and Colonel Russell Elmer Sauvage, an engineer in the United States Air Force who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her mother was born in Mexico to American parents. Tsongas' ancestry includes French, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Swiss, Prussian, and Bavarian. She is a 1964 graduate of Narimasu American High School in Japan, where her father was stationed at Fuchu Air Force Base and then spent one year at Michigan State before attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Smith in 1968, she moved to New York City, where she took a job as a social worker for the Department of Welfare.

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Many of his policies have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance.

Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton became both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009 and was a Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state's education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.

William Melvin "Bill" Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, satirist, and musician. His material largely consisted of general discussions about society, religion, politics, philosophy, and personal issues. Hicks' material was often controversial and steeped in dark comedy. In both his stand-up performances and during interviews, he often criticized consumerism, superficiality, mediocrity, and banality within the media and popular culture, describing them as oppressive tools of the ruling class, meant to "keep people stupid and apathetic".

Hicks was 16 years old when he started performing stand-up comedy at the Comedy Workshop in Houston, Texas, in 1978. During the 1980s he toured the United States extensively and performed a number of high profile television appearances. It was in the UK, however, where Hicks first amassed a significant fan base, packing large venues with his 1991 tour. Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. In the years after his death, his work and legacy achieved acclaim in creative circles. In 2007 he was voted the fourth-greatest stand-up comic on the UK's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups on Channel 4, and appeared again in the updated 2010 list as the fourth-greatest comic.