I've written several times on this page (here, for instance) about the local, live re-creation of the old What's My Line? game show. Last evening, the folks behind it did their final show — at least for a while — at the Game Show Congress that's currently in progress at the Hilton out in Burbank. I was there for it and so were quite a few readers of this weblog…and we all had an enormously good time.
Hosting the proceedings — and doing a damn fine job of it, I might add — was J. Keith van Straaten, who kept things rolling along with great, professional expertise. Someone ought to snatch this guy up and give him a televised game show to host because he's really good. Assisting him as prize model, and getting some enormous laughs, was the lovely Teresa Ganzel, Johnny Carson's one-time Matinee Lady.
The four members of the panel were as follows: There was Stuart Shostak, a friend of mine who among his many endeavors does warm-ups for TV tapings. There was Sarah Purcell, who is probably best known for the years when she was a host of Real People on NBC. There was comedian Frank Nicotero, who hosted the game show, Street Smarts. And there was Betsy Palmer.
Ah, yes…Betsy Palmer. The lovely panelist from the original I've Got A Secret. She was beautiful and funny on that show and she's still, at age eighty or thereabouts, both those things. As a game player, she didn't advance the ball very far down field but the audience loved everything she said. A guy behind me was just sitting there, muttering to his companion, "That's Betsy Palmer."
The first contestant was one of the models from the current version of The Price is Right. The panel had to guess (and they didn't) that her "other" job is that she runs a chain of tanning salons. The second contestant was a woman who'd appeared on the original What's My Line? with her then-occupation of Girdle Tester. The third contestant was a gent who played the musical saw…which he did for us after the panel failed to guess his line of work. And then came the Mystery Guest…
It was Shirley Jones, star of The Partridge Family, The Music Man, Elmer Gantry and so many other movies and TV shows. The audience, of course, loved her. They especially loved when the blindfolded Betsy Palmer, having established that the Mystery Guest had done a lot of things over the years, blurted out, "Gee, you're old." The panel failed to guess who it was (Stuart Shostak looked like he wanted to commit Hara-Kiri for having dishonored his expertise in the area of vintage TV) and after they unmasked, J. Keith conducted a great interview with Ms. Jones and her hubby, Marty Ingels.
I wish you could have seen it, especially if you're the kind of person who thinks game shows are dumb or can't be wildly entertaining. It was all real and spontaneous in a way that no current "reality show" ever is. In fact, if you never got to see J. Keith's What's My Line? Live, you missed out on a wonderful bit of theater. I hope they do more someday.