Sorry this is so last minute but some folks in the L.A. area will pounce on it and have a great time.
Tomorrow, December 8, the superlative Stan and Hunter Freberg are doing a performance of their one-couple show, Two Funny Frebergs, at the Palms-Rancho Park Branch Library, which is located near the junctions of the Santa Monica Freeway and the San Diego Freeway in West Los Angeles. This is a wonderful hour of songs and anecdotes from two of my favorite folks, one of whom was — dare I say it? — an idol of mine when I was a youth.
It starts at 1 PM and there's no charge, no reservations. Just show up and enjoy. After the presentation, Stan and Hunter will be signing copies of their recent CD, Songs in the Key of Freberg, and Stan will be drawing pictures of Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent, the role he originated on the legendary Time for Beany puppet show. Here's a rare chance to meet Stan and Hunter and to enjoy their show.
The Palms-Rancho Park Library is located at 2920 Overland Avenue. Some of you may recall tales I've told in my writings of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, a group that convened back in the sixties with me as its president, meeting each Saturday at the Palms Recreation Center in West L.A. This is that place, though almost no traces remain of the buildings that comprised it back when we were there. We had one member who is probably still showing up there on Saturdays and wondering, "Where the hell is everybody?"
My pal Bob Claster just sent me a link to a treasure trove for fans of the Broadway stage. The late Dorothy Loudon was a major star of that stage and her personal papers and memorabilia were deeded over to the New York Public Library which has put them online.
I haven't had the time to go through much of it but there are some very interesting items…her contract for the 1983 smash hit comedy, Noises Off, for instance. It's always intriguing to look at something like that and see the kind of things that you wouldn't expect to find in such a document. There are scrapbooks of reviews and photos from her various projects.
Ms. Loudon was in a number of hits but also in several flops, the most notable of which was the 1969 show, The Fig Leaves Are Falling. The show was about the sexual liberation of that decade and it had a book and lyrics by Allan Sherman with music by Albert Hague. Some of you may know Mr. Hague from his on-camera role in the movie and TV show, Fame, but more of you know him for writing the music for a number of great cartoon specials including the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
And of course you know Allan Sherman from his famous song parody records. His one effort for Broadway folded after four performances and Sherman folded not long after that. The show was probably doomed from the moment the New York Times review by the notoriously inept Clive Barnes hit the streets. He said, in part…
There is nothing much wrong with The Fig Leaves Are Falling…that a new book, new music, new lyrics, new settings, new direction, new choreography and a partially new cast would not quite possibly put right.
Reviews don't get much worse than that. The cast featured along with Ms. Loudon, Barry Nelson, Jenny O'Hara and David Cassidy. Also in the cast was one of the top dancers of Broadway, the stunning Charlene Ryan, who is now married to cartoonist Sergio Aragonés. George Abbott was the director. They were all stunned and saddened when the show closed so rapidly but Sherman was especially depressed.
His life was already in turmoil as his marriage of 21 years had ended in '66, the divorce being a major point of inspiration for the Broadway show. His recording career was also pretty much over. In 1962, he'd had the fastest-selling record album of all time with My Son, the Folk Singer and a huge single hit in 1963 with "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." But by 1967, his records had stopped selling and his company didn't want him to make any more.
It was an amazing success story, the success coming as it did so sudden…and at age 39 after years of being an oft-fired TV producer. One day, almost out of nowhere, he suddenly became a major comedy star. And almost as suddenly, it all went away.
After Fig Leaves, he fumbled about, trying to turn himself into some odd combination of Frank Sinatra and Hugh Hefner. He wrote a book called The Rape of the A*P*E, which was just unreadable. If you ever want to show someone what it looks like when a male goes through a mid-life crisis and desperately seeks the sex life he wishes he'd had when he was younger, give them this book and ask them to imagine the person who'd write it. He died not long after its publication and failure in 1973. He was 48.
Why I mention all this is that I'd always wanted to read the book of The Fig Leaves Are Falling…and there it is online in the Dorothy Loudon collection: The entire script. When I get some time (ha!), I'll give it a read. I do have a demo recording of the score and some of the songs are quite good. We have here a video of one of them sung by, of all people, Pat Paulsen on his short-lived variety show…
Jonathan Chait on the problem Republicans have in trying to keep taxes low on wealthy folks. The G.O.P. strategy has been to not let anything pertaining to taxes pass, thereby preventing any tax hikes. But now if they do nothing, taxes on the rich go up…so they have to pass something to prevent or at least minimize the raise. Interesting dilemma, huh?
Let me tell you about a man named Bill Ash, a genuine American hero. In 1939, this then-young Texan decided Hitler had to be stopped. Since the U.S. hadn't yet joined the war effort, Ash hitchhiked to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. They trained him and sent him to England where he flew Spitfires on some of the most daring missions.
In March of '42, he was shot down over France on one of those missions. He survived the crash landing, then evaded capture for months with the help of locals. Eventually, someone betrayed him to the Gestapo and he was captured, tortured and sentenced to death, only to be saved from execution by the Luftwaffe which moved him to one of the most severe Prisoner of War camps, Stalag Luft III. From there, he became the man they could not hold — a master escape artist who broke out of that camp and many others.
Any of this sound familiar? It does if you recall the Steve McQueen movie, The Great Escape. It was based on Ash's life.
Mr. Ash turns 95 years old this week. His incredible story is told in Under the Wire, a British best-seller being released as an e-book in honor of his birthday and the 70th anniversary of some of his more spectacular escapes. You will enjoy this book tremendously.
As an e-book, it's free for members of Amazon Prime. If not, you can order a copy for $9.99 here. You can get it on good, old-fashioned paper here. It would make a great gift for anyone…especially any 95-year-old war heroes you know.
I was always a big admirer of Danny Kaye, an amazing entertainer. I'm sure he was in something bad at some point but I can't recall what it might have been. He was funny. He could dance. He could sing. A lot of folks who worked with him didn't get along with the guy on a personal basis but even they acknowledged his talent and watched him as fans.
When I was around ten or so, my parents took me to see him perform one evening at the Hollywood Bowl. The place seats more than 17,000 people, it was pretty full that night…and from the seats we were in, Danny Kaye was about the size of a Rice Krispie. Still, he managed to make a personal connection with every single person in that amphitheater as he told stories and sang every single song for which he was ever known. We all came away dazzled.
In the sixties, he did four seasons of a variety show for CBS that I remember fondly. Some of them are coming out on DVD and the first release, which features two Christmas episodes, is now out. Click here to order one from Amazon.
The debut was celebrated tonight with an event at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills and I was there, courtesy of panel moderator Leonard Maltin. The panel consisted of Tony Charmoli (choreographer on Danny's CBS series), George Schlatter (producer of Laugh-In and other shows on which Danny appeared), Michele Lee (two-time guest on the series), Carl Reiner (occasional co-star) and Deena Kaye (Danny's daughter). Deena is spearheading and guiding the DVD project and others related to her father's legacy.
Good chat, followed by a nice party. My favorite moment of the party was congratulating Michele Lee on getting a better intro than she got the last time I saw her and us discussing what I wrote here about that night. I hope I made clear how good she was in that film. It was about as good as she's been in everything she's ever done, which is a pretty high bar. I also got to talk briefly to Julie Newmar and Vin Scully who were there and like Ms. Lee, handily defying age.
Also spoke with Karen and Kat Kramer. Karen is the widow of the great Stanley Kramer and we talked about a forthcoming deluxe DVD of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's still being assembled and I've volunteered to help in any way I can. Kat is her daughter, a very talented singer who I raved about back in this message and this one. And I went there with a superb comedy writer friend, Ron Friedman, who among his many other credits was a writer on Danny's CBS series. I'm leaving a few other people out.
Getting back to the program, they showed some wonderful clips, including a powerful scene with Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kaye in the TV-Movie, Skokie. The closer was a duet with Louis Armstrong from the CBS series which I believe was so popular that they had Armstrong back on a season or two later so they could do it again.
I think what they showed at the museum last night was the first time they performed it and what I've embedded below is the second but it's still great. If you don't love this number, you'll never "get" Danny Kaye and there's no point in trying. If you enjoy it like I do, you're going to want the DVDs…
I enjoy posting a link to a video, then hearing from someone who was involved in the creation of that video. Here's a message from Steve Winer…
My partner and I were the two writers for Robert Klein Time and I can tell you for a fact that, thanks to hardball negotiations by our agent, the budget for the show was actually more like fourteen dollars.
You picked a clip that means a lot to me. I know you've written often here about Soupy Sales and your devotion to his work. Well, I was a great fan as well and that night I finally got the chance to talk to him and tell him of, among other things, how I was in the audience on the day he re-opened the Paramount Theater. He was gracious and charming and full of wonderful stories.
I told him how it always seemed as if he were talking directly to us on his show, and he explained that was very deliberate. He talked of the artificial distance a performer is supposed to keep from the television camera. He made a point of breaking that distance at the beginning of each show by walking directly up to the camera and' kissing the lens. Then he would step back, but not as far as tradition called for. Thus he created an intimacy between himself and the viewers.
He was with his then new wife and as my compliments continued he turned to her, and with his trademark chuckle, said "See? And you thought you married a flop!" She in turn prompted him to tell me other stories. "Tell him about Hippy!" she said. "Do you know what Hippy was?" he asked. "Hippy is just Pookie turned inside out!"
And so it went — an evening I treasured and I'm glad to see it here. Of course, since it's posted without consent, my partner and I make nothing from it, so perhaps you could suggest to your readers that they go into their parents' rooms late at night, reach into their wallets and…
Thanks, Steve, and I apologize for underestimating your budget. (Note to self: Tell the story here soon about the budget on The Stanley Siegel Show.)
As I said, that talk show of Mr. Klein's was enormously entertaining. I recall one episode with Robin Williams in which Klein apparently decided to treat Robin the way Robin treated other comedians when he was on stage with them, stepping on their punch lines and not letting them say much. Wish someone was rerunning things like this…or some of the really odd specials that graced HBO and Showtime in the first year or three of their existence.
Back in the early days of Basic Cable, Robert Klein hosted a weekly talk show that looked like it was done on a budget of about eleven dollars…but it was as entertaining as any talk show I've seen. Here's eighteen minutes he spent one evening with Soupy Sales. It's in two parts which should play one after the other in the player I've embedded below.
Soupy starts the festivities by telling the tale of the time on his New York kids' show when he was suspended for asking his young viewers to take currency from their parents' wallets and mail it in to him. I heard him tell this story about nine different ways over the years — sometimes, he said they got no money; sometimes, he said it was all Monopoly money, etc. — so I don't know what the truth was. Later in the chat, he tells one of the many and varied stories of how he got his stage name…but it's a good conversation between two funny men so it may be worth eighteen minutes of your life.
There was a second chapter to the story of Soupy asking kids to send in the contents of daddy's wallet. On a convention panel a year or two ago, I got Chuck McCann to tell that tale. Here's a link to the last few minutes of that panel when he told that part.
In light of our Fiscal Cliff problems in Washington, a number of Congressfolks are putting together new "Flat Tax" proposals. We see these from time to time and I thought it would be a good idea to come up with my own Flat Tax proposal. Here it is…
People like me pay less taxes or if possible, no taxes. People not like me pay more to make up the difference.
That's it. It's the same Flat Tax proposal as everyone else's but stated more honestly.
Steve Kornacki has a good overview of the last few decades of tax hikes and tax cuts and what they meant for the economy. I think we're seeing the demise of the theory that if you lower taxes for rich people, all will benefit. Not that some folks will ever turn loose of it. I suspect if I asked Steve Forbes what I should do about the sewage leak in my garage, he'd insist that it could be solved by eliminating all taxes on capital gains, inheritances and people who never blink.
Carolyn and I were in a store the other day and they were playing Christmas music. I think it was November 29th which is at least within a month of the holiday. They played some odd arrangement of "Jingle Bell Rock" and they played that Andy Williams recording of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and then they played "Linus and Lucy." You know "Linus and Lucy," though perhaps not by name. It's the song that goes something — no, make that exactly like this…
I find it interesting that this is a Christmas song and I'm not saying it isn't. It definitely is. But it's a Christmas song for a different reason than all other Christmas songs. Most Christmas songs are about Christmas for one of three reasons….
Its lyrics are about Christmas. I mean, if they're singing about Christmas, that makes it a Christmas song, right?
It's an instrumental but it's such a familiar song that you know and mentally supply the lyrics…and in your head it becomes a Christmas song since those lyrics are, after all, about Christmas.
It's full of jingle bell sounds.
Simple enough. The unique thing about "Linus and Lucy" is that it's a Christmas song for a reason all its own…
You recognize it as being in that great TV cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
That's its sole relevance to Christmas. It reminds you a TV special you love and that special is about Christmas. There's no other connection. You don't know the lyrics because they're aren't any lyrics. There's nothing about the tune that says "Christmas" because it wasn't even written for a Christmas project. Vince Guaraldi wrote the tune for a documentary about Charles Schulz and Peanuts that was done some time before A Charlie Brown Christmas. There are also no jingle bells in it.
This is the only point I wanted to make here about it. I said it on a special feature on one of the DVD releases and I thought it was an intriguing thing so I wanted to mention it here. I make so few wise observations that I have to rerun the ones I do have from time to time.
