Speaking of Jerry Lewis — as I was in the wee small hours of the morning — his annual Labor Day Telethon is this weekend. As usual, it'll be different lengths in different cities. I'll be receiving two separate feeds on my little DirecTV satellite dish. KCAL, the Los Angeles affiliate, is running it from 6 PM Sunday night through 5 PM on Monday for a total of 23 hours. WGN in Chicago is running it from 8 PM Sunday night (L.A. time) 'til 9:30 AM when they stop for a baseball game. They resume with Jerry whenever the game ends, which TiVo says will be 12:30 PM and then it runs 'til 5 PM. Assuming the game is three hours, that's 18 hours. The San Francisco station, which I can't get on my satellite, is only running eight hours.
The P.R. handouts seem to have stopped describing the telethon as being any particular length. Last year, they said it was 21 and a half hours but KCAL ran a 23 hour version and WGN aired 18. Since large chunks of the overnight programming are reruns from earlier in the telethon, it can be almost any length, and I have no idea how many hours they actually do.
Announced as performers are Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Tony Orlando, Charo, Wynonna, Train, Bo Bice, Terry Fator, George Wallace, Lee Greenwood, Three Dog Night and many more. Betcha Dolly, Reba and maybe a few others aren't there on stage but instead pre-taped special numbers as part of concerts they were doing somewhere. There will be a tribute to Ed McMahon which will be repeated several times during the show.
A friend of mine tells me that this year, Jerry doesn't want any men on the stage with him; that all his co-hosts will be women like Nancy O'Dell and Jann Carl. But all the publicity still mentions Tom Bergeron as a co-host so I don't know what that means.
I'll tune in. I'll send some money. But I'll probably find myself waxing nostalgic for the day when it was a much bigger show with much bigger guests.