The Souplantation restaurant chain — known in some areas as Sweet Tomatoes — sometimes offers a dish I like called Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. Usually, it's only available there during the month of March but I just found out most of their stores will have it for all of September. Guess where I'm going for lunch tomorrow.
You can find out if there's a Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes near you over on this page.
One of the great things about having a blog is that you don't have to buy greeting cards. Yeah, I could go to the CVS Pharmacy, scour the aisles for a witty card, buy it and then mail it to Sergio to note his birthday today but that takes time and money. You don't need to buy gifts, either. Instead, I can just slap a photo of him up here on the ol' blog — and it isn't even one that I took. Bruce took it so it really doesn't represent any actual effort on my behalf.
I post it there and then I bat out some meaningless text to go with it…something about how I've known Sergio for 49 years now and he's been my best friend for most of that, at least in the category of male friends. I'll also tell you throughout almost five decades, if you added up all the time we've spent arguing or not getting along, it would equal about the time it takes to boil an egg — and not even a hard-boiled egg. More like one of those eggs where the white is kinda set but the yolk is still runny.
Anyway, I could write about that, I could write about the joy of collaborating with someone who's so innovative and funny, I could write about seeing how beloved and charming he is or about how even when he's angry — and believe me, I've seen him furious — he's still kinda beloved and charming. There are so many nice things I could say about this man that…well, praising him is a whole lot easier than going out and buying a dumb card or a present. And cheaper.
So Happy Birthday, Sergio! I was going to get you that new car you've been talking about but I decided that you'd be a lot happier with this blog post. Or at least one of us would be.
Not much to say about Trump's announcement that he'll revoke (or at least revisit) DACA in six months.
What I don't get is this idea that he'll leave it to Congress to decide the future of DACA. Hasn't Congress shown it's not capable to deciding the fate of a plate of spare ribs? And will Trump extend DACA if they don't act? Kevin Drum writes…
I'm a little puzzled about why anyone thinks Congress will act anyway. Back in 2010 every single Republican voted against the DREAM Act. Every one. Today a few of them are saying that DACA should be preserved, but how are we supposed to interpret this? As evidence that they've changed their minds? That they voted against it originally just because Obama proposed it? That they were OK with not enacting it in the first place, but not with taking it away once a million people are depending on it?
Trump is, of course, playing to his base, which is about all he ever does lately. His idea of how the nation should come together is that we should all pin on TRUMP IN '20 buttons and join his base. I guess it all plays well if you're a white guy who'd like to blame "those damn foreigners" for the fact that you're not doing better.
In other news, Trump has slashed the budget for advertising the open enrollment period for Obamacare. He could probably do even more damage if he handed the account over to the agency that did the promotion of Trump Steaks.
Trump reportedly told his people that advertising Obamacare was a waste of money because "everyone already knows about it." Since "everyone knows about Trump," I guess he won't waste a lot of cash on his re-election campaign.
When Bette Midler leaves the current Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! in January, she will be replaced by Bernadette Peters. But of course.
I'd rather see Bette but Bernadette Peters is not exactly chopped liver. Victor Garber will take over for David Hyde-Pierce.
During the original run, producer David Merrick kept the show going forever by casting one great lady of Broadway after another, eventually bringing in an all-black cast with Pearl Bailey as Dolly and Cab Calloway as Horace. Wonder if this one will run long enough for Audra McDonald to play Dolly with…I don't know…Ben Vereen as Horace? Today in the era of the race-blind Hamilton, they probably wouldn't bother making the cast all-black.
Hey, while I've got you here: Where did that "chopped liver" expression start? It's like a saying…"What am I? Chopped liver?" Who started that? Why isn't it "What am I? Tuna salad?" Or "What am I, a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich on pumpernickel toast?" Why chopped liver? It doesn't make any more sense than any other food.
Today, we have the Masters of Harmony and they're sittin' at the top of the world…
Tomorrow morning, Turner Classic Movies is running How To Murder Your Wife. Here's a message I posted when Showtime ran it ten years ago…
Showtime is running How To Murder Your Wife, a 1965 movie that Jack Lemmon, it is rumored, very much regretted making. It's kind of an interesting film because it has a good, fun feeling and a lot of great performances. Terry-Thomas is quite splendid as Lemmon's "Man" (i.e., butler-valet) and Eddie Mayehoff, a very underappreciated comic actor, walks off with every scene he's in. Lemmon twinkles, Virna Lisi is stunning, the music is great…and somehow, the whole thing falls apart from a stupid story with a stupider resolution.
Lemmon plays a comic strip artist who's a confirmed bachelor. His art imitates his life and vice-versa so when he accidentally gets married to Lisi, his comic strip character (Bash Brannigan) gets married in the strip. Both creator and creation undergo changes, not necessarily for the better, and the cartoonist finally decides to murder the wife in the comic strip…only this gets confused with murdering his real wife. When the real wife runs away, Lemmon is charged with her murder…and in order to make that part of the story happen, screenwriter George Axelrod and director Richard Quine have to just ignore how the actual judicial system works. For example, it is somehow decided that Lemmon can be charged with First Degree Murder even though there is no physical proof that anyone has been killed, thereby suspending habeas corpus years before anyone had ever heard of Alberto Gonzales.
Lemmon goes to trial — and I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending in the next paragraph because it's so lame, so consider this your SPOILER ALERT…
Lemmon goes to trial and decides that his only chance of not being sent to the electric chair is to (a) confess to a murder that never happened and (b) convince a conveniently all-male jury, in a five minute speech, that murdering your wife is a good thing. I was thirteen years old when I saw this movie and even I was sitting there going, "Come…on!" Easily one of the silliest scenes ever to appear on the screen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The whole film, if you think about it with the slightest bit of logic, is quite ridiculous and it's a testimony to Mr. Lemmon's charm (and Mayehoff and Thomas) that it's still almost worth watching…once.
Cartoonists love it, not for the plot but for the absurd life style of one of their own, and the occasional shots of comic strips and of "Lemmon's" hand drawing them. Obviously, a real artist had to be engaged to do this and when Mr. Lemmon was signed, he told the producers that as a kid, his favorite comic book was a strip called The Sub-Mariner and he wondered if they could get that feature's artist. They tracked down Bill Everett but he was then coping with too many alcohol-related health problems and he reluctantly declined the job.
Instead, they hired the great Alex Toth and his first assignment, which he did, was to whip up several newspaper-style strips that ran in the Hollywood trade papers to announce various signings and the upcoming commencement of filming. Toth was also supposed to "stunt double" Lemmon's drawing hand for some shots in the film until someone noticed a teensy problem: Lemmon was right-handed and Toth was a lefty. Alex also began arguing with the producers over something-or-other (Alex was always arguing over something-or-other) and he walked off the project. His replacement was Mel Keefer, who did all the artwork in the film and played Jack Lemmon's drawing hand.
More Barbershop. This is Zero8, the same group we featured yesterday…though this configuration has about half as many members as yesterday's. This is their "Acceptance Song" from the SNOBS Nordic Chorus Championships in Nyköping in April of 2013. I gather that when a group wins something over a certain level, they come on stage and perform another tune as a kind of "thank you" or victory lap.
Zero8 is based in Sweden and it is (they are?) very popular. On their website, it says…
Zero8 — A choir formed in 2007, directed by Rasmus Krigström, the Lead singer of Ringmasters, the 2012 World Champion Barbershop quartet, has since then consisted of 20-50 of Stockholm's best choir singers and shaped world-class Barbershoppers in double digits. Having merits such as placing Top 5 in the International Barbershop Chorus Competition, winning the Rimini International Choral Competition, having produced several full-length A Capella CD's and being on Swedish National Television multiple times, Zero8 proudly stands out as one of Sweden's best and most versatile male Choir. Concerts are hosted at least twice every year, and gigs are accepted on demand. Zero8 can, upon request, deliver world class quartet performances as well as the full experience of the whole powerful choir.
Yesterday's video was at a competition in Las Vegas in 2014. I'm curious as to why their membership doubled and about the finances that get fifty singers plus any family members and entourage to Las Vegas. Maybe someone can enlighten me. In the meantime, here they are…
Some folks on Facebook asked if the fires ravaging Southern California are anywhere near me. Thanks for your concern, some folks on Facebook, but I'm a good twenty miles from the nearest one. The fire would have to burn down about two-thirds of Hollywood, including Universal City, to get to me.
So I'm not worried for me. I'm worried for friends who live much, much closer including a few who've been evacuated. One called to ask if they could house their dog with me if they had to. I said yes and I'd come out and get it…but then they found someone closer. Last I heard, the fire made a left turn and their home was no longer threatened but others still are. Scary stuff.
I've been collecting comedy records as long as I can remember. There was a time when if you went to the Comedy section in any record store — this is back when there was such a thing as a record store — you found albums by Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Stan Freberg, maybe Lord Buckley…and Shelley Berman. This would be a record store in a mostly-white neighborhood. In mostly-black areas, you also found a lot of "party records" and a ton of Redd Foxx.
Freberg was my favorite but he was singing and doing musical numbers. For just funny talking, I loved Shelley Berman, especially that first record of his, Inside Shelley Berman. Here, on a TV show of the sixties, he performs one of the best cuts from that album…
This is so good…every word, every inflection is just perfect. It's all the more impressive though when you consider that when Shelley first began doing this routine on stages, there was almost no one else doing acts like this. Performers had done this kind of thing, though not as well, in vaudeville. Shelley was the guy who modernized it and introduced it into his generation. Others, most notably Newhart, picked up on it…and yeah, there was some bitterness there. Newhart had greater success and Shelley was always rankled when someone would mention the two of them in the same paragraph without noting who'd imitated who.
Shelley was a sweet man but a nervous, paranoid man. There's a joke about two psychiatrists passing each other in a hall. One says, "Good morning" and the other thinks to himself, "Hmm…I wonder what he meant by that." Shelley always made me think of that joke. You could tell him how good you thought he was and absolutely mean it (as I did) and you could almost read the comic book thought balloon form over his head. It said, "Does he really mean that or does he want something from me?"
I got to know him through a comedians' social group I'm part of called Yarmy's Army, and also because I had him in once to do a voice on a Garfield cartoon. Yarmy's Army sometimes does shows for charity and they learned to put Shelley on stage last. There were two reasons for this. One was that he was so funny, no one could follow him. The other was that if the show ran long (or even if it didn't), Shelley would get pissed-off at having to wait so long to go on…and he was even funnier when he was pissed-off.
His peers — to the extent he had peers — worshipped him. Whereas he sometimes accused others — Newhart, especially — of stealing from him, no one ever accused Shelley of stealing from anyone. He was an absolute original with an act that clearly built out of his own worries and frustrations and angers and inability to understand why some people do some things he thought were so insane.
The New York Times obit on him is quite good and I'm going to quote a few paragraphs from it…
In 1963, at the height of his success, Mr. Berman was the subject of an NBC-TV documentary, "Comedian Backstage," which portrayed him as excitable and demanding and captured him losing his temper after a telephone rang backstage during his "Father and Son" monologue. The reviews were mostly favorable (although Jack Gould of The Times called the documentary a "portrait of disagreeableness"), but Mr. Berman nonetheless said that the unflattering picture painted by "Comedian Backstage" made him a "pariah" in the industry, and that his comedy career never fully recovered.
That documentary — which one dared not ask Shelley about — might not have harmed him ten or twenty years later when America got more accustomed to seeing the dark side of stars. In '63, when celebrities came packaged with carefully-controlled images, it was a jolt, though not as big a one as some recalled. Folks who saw it claimed they'd seen him — with their own eyes! — rip the phone right off the wall when it rang, interfering with his performance. He did not rip it off the wall. He merely took it off the hook but people remembered what they remembered. Comedy writer Pat McCormick once told me, "Shelley was a pain-in-the-ass to club owners and other people who booked him because he was always worried about the sound and the lighting and every little thing that could go wrong on stage. His complaining got exaggerated like he was way crazier than he actually was, and then the documentary validated the exaggeration."
His focus shifted back to acting. He appeared in numerous regional and summer-stock productions and played Tevye in a 1973 touring production of "Fiddler on the Roof." In the 1960s he was in movies like "The Best Man" (1964) and "Divorce American Style" (1967); from the '70s through the '90s he was on numerous TV shows, including "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," "St. Elsewhere" and "L.A. Law."
Shelley was a superb actor. He also appeared in numerous productions of The Odd Couple, sometimes as Oscar, sometimes as Felix. He got rave reviews as both and you have to be a real good actor to manage that.
It is said though that the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show originally wanted him for the role of Lou Grant, and when they called his agent to try and arrange an audition, Shelley's own agent talked them out of it. He then guested in one of the early episodes of the series and after that week of rehearsals and filming, the producers called the agent and said, "Thank you for talking us out of making him a regular." Finally…
A few years later he began teaching a course in humor writing at the University of Southern California, which he continued to teach until 2013.
That sentence exaggerates how long he taught at U.S.C. and when he did stop doing it, the person who replaced him was me. Several students the first semester I did it had signed up for Shelley's class and quit before they completed it because, they said, he was becoming snappish and too critical when they asked what he thought was a foolish question or handed in a writing assignment that he did not understand. Some of that was because he increasingly felt out-of-sync with the current world of entertainment.
We talked about it once and he told me, "I made a mistake. I taught the class as the Shelley Berman who performed 'in one' [as a solo performer] all those years. I should have taken the toupee off and taught it as the comic actor on Curb Your Enthusiasm. That guy was more in tune with young people and their comedy today."
I don't think Shelley was ever truly out-of-sync with comedy. He may not have known all the current references but I saw him performing many times up until Alzheimer's slowed his timing and he knew it was time to stop. He was always funny and his work was so organic and built on common human foibles that it reached across all generations. Just check out any record or any video of him talking to an audience. You'll agree.
Do you miss watching the Jerry Lewis Telethon over the Labor Day weekend? Well, there is a telethon today. It's the annual Chabad Telethon…the one with the dancing rabbis, the charismatic Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, and a bevy of guest stars, many of them gentiles who don't know how to pronounce "Chabad." I don't know who's hosting it this year but it can't possibly be anyone who's as good as the late Jan Murray. If it's Dennis Prager, just turn the set off and go do something else.
The telethon runs six hours and it starts on my TV at 5 PM, airing on the Jewish Life TV Network. You can find out where it's running on your set — or even watch it online — at the Chabad website.
Barbershop Week rolls on! This is a group called Zero8.
I like this music in an odd way but I also just like the fact that these people do this. I assume it is almost wholly out of love for performing…at contests like this, if nowhere else. This group, as I understand it, performs from time to time in its native Stockholm and they have a few CDs out.
I'm a little unfamiliar with this sector of the entertainment world but I'm guessing the fifty or so people in a group like this do it in their respective spare times. It no doubt requires a lot of rehearsal and I wonder about the finances. Do the singers themselves have to come up with the funds to buy the costumes and to transport themselves to, in this case, Las Vegas?
This is not the kind of Show Biz someone gets into because he's seeking personal glory and fortune. Even the fans of the group probably don't know who most of these guys are.
A few years ago when I first started posting videos from these competitions, I got an e-mail from someone who was involved in one of them. They wanted to know if I was interested in being a judge at their next convention/contest. I gave them an immediate "No thanks" because I was dealing with my mother's final days and didn't pause to ask myself if I really wanted to do that. If I'm ever asked again, I'll have to decide. On the one hand, I enjoy this music and I wouldn't mind learning more about this world…
On the other, I enjoy it listening to one or two videos at a time. I'm not sure how it would be to hear dozens upon dozens, back to back. One of the funniest half-hours of television I ever saw was an episode of Car 54, Where Are You? in which comedian Jan Murray has to judge a Barbershop Quartet contest and after hearing way too much of it, went crazy and had to be hospitalized. You can watch the entire episode here. Do I want to risk that happening to delicate li'l me?
While you ponder that, here's Zero8 improving on Billy Joel and Elvis…
Who needs Jerry Lewis when we can watch this guy?
Lastly: I continued to be fascinated that the worst insult in Trump's repertoire — the one he hurls at almost everyone he doesn't like — is that their business is "failing" or "their ratings are terrible." He almost always uses it against targets whose businesses are doing better and better or whose ratings are going up…but even if they were going down, there's that odd logic there: If your business isn't successful, you must be wrong about everything you say. How many failed businesses has this guy had now?
There's a comic book convention in San Francisco this weekend. I don't know a thing about it but some magazine just printed this little squib…
Is it really featuring artists, writers and celebrity guests in the comic world such as Jack Kirby? If it is, I'm heading for the airport! Wow, do I miss that guy!
MAD magazine editor Joe Raiola has some thoughts on when satire crosses the line to become offensive. I don't think there's an easy answer to this question. It has way too much to do with who your audience is and rarely are you reaching a homogeneous audience.