Monthly Archives: February 2023

It hasn't been a good week for glamorous actresses of the movies. I didn't write anything about Raquel Welch because I never met her, didn't see very many of her movies and didn't know any great anecdotes about her. I was going to write a little piece about how I admired how she'd gone from being someone who was hired mainly for her looks to someone who distinguished herself as a good actress on film and especially on stage…but then I saw that everyone else was saying that.

I did however meet Stella Stevens…not for long but on several occasions. We seemed to get invited to a lot of the same parties and we talked enough cumulatively for me to see that she was a genuinely nice person who was proud of her work.

At one event, we were talking about Li'l Abner, the 1959 movie in which she played the lovely-but-sneaky Appassionata Von Climax. Ms. Stevens, unlike most of the cast, had not appeared in the musical when it originally played on Broadway but a fellow who overheard our conversation didn't know that. He politely interrupted to introduce himself and tell her that Abner was the first show he ever saw on Broadway and to gush about how much he'd loved her in it.

An easy mistake. But when I started to correct the guy, she gave me a look that said "Let me handle this" and she thanked the fellow and was so sweet in the way she told him "That was probably Tina Louise or Deedee Wood you saw in that role then" that he wasn't the least embarrassed. I don't think I could have done that.

If you look at her IMDB listing, you may be stunned by how many TV shows and movies Stella Stevens was in. And if you read the New York Times obit, you'll see that she had a lot of struggles, including a certain amount of sexism when she tried to move from in front of the camera to the director's chair. That she overcame as many as she did tells you what kind of lady she was. And she chuckled when I congratulated her on surviving working with Jerry Lewis.

Two weeks from now, I turn 71 — an age which, when I was much younger, sounded like the age when you look like Burt Mustin and walk like Tim Conway's old man character. Some days, my knees do cause me to walk like the latter. But except around the knees, I don't feel that old and people who sound reasonably sincere tell me that I look years younger. Well, maybe two.

Something you don't think of until you pass 60 is that the longer you live, the more someone you know dies. You also increasingly see obits for folks who, even if they weren't friends, cause you think, "Gee, he was my age." Or worse, "Gee, he was younger than I am." We don't like things that remind us that we might not have as many years left as we once did.

And I think I've mentioned it before but I have a couple of friends who are getting on in years who can't seem to shut up about how death seems imminent. They might live a few decades more but every sentence out of their mouths lately is about death and dying and how they won't be around much longer. One in particular who passed a couple years back almost seemed to have willed himself into the grave prematurely. My philosophy is that I'll go when I go…and obsessing on it now can only get in the way of living.

So what does this have to do with what I was talking about, which was The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show? Just this: I'm really getting tired of people who have trouble with the concept that the world changes and it can't be like it was when you were 24. Or 32. Or whatever age you were when you really liked the music, the movies, the way people dressed, etc. All that stuff's supposed to change and you can't be part of the Target Audience forever.

I ran that old newspaper column the other day here — the one by Paul Jones, who I've been informed by many of you wrote for the Atlanta Constitution. I'm going to assume Mr. Jones was sincere in what he wrote that day and was not doing what some columnists and commentators do: Say something controversial just to get attention. If he didn't really believe what he wrote, others certainly did.

It's an attitude that I find increasingly common in folks my age…and I suspect it's always there when you hit 70 or so. It's that frustration that the world is changing and it doesn't revolve around your generation any longer. There are movies that aren't aimed at you. There are jokes full of references that you don't get. There are hit songs that are huge…but you never heard of the people performing them and what they have to offer isn't the kind of music you loved forty years ago.

Paul Jones wrote, of Ed Sullivan presenting the Beatles on his show…

In catering to the screaming teen-agers who find this group exciting, Sullivan has shown his contempt for the vast millions who used to find his program diverting.

Okay. That's one way to look at it. Another might be that Ed was getting one of the largest audiences in the history of television and extending the life of a TV series that had already been on the air for sixteen years. And it stayed on for another eight by booking acts like that, including The Beatles a few more times.

To the columnist from the Atlanta Constitution, it was showing contempt for the viewers. To others, it was staying relevant to changing times and giving the public what much of it wanted. Does anyone think that Ed would have stayed on the air for eight more years if instead of The Beatles, he'd booked Jerry Vale?

TO BE CONTINUED SOME MORE

I don't watch The Masked Singer often. Too often when the mystery vocalist is unmasked, I have no idea who they are. But sometimes, it's someone I've heard of and it's fun to tune in and see the unmasking. That was the case with The Gnome, a character on the show's season opener this past week.

If by some chance you haven't heard who it was, watch a little of the musical performance and see if you can guess…

Then if you want to see the unmasking, go to this link. I'd embed it here but the thumbnail image would give it away. It's a very nice moment.

I was just placing an online order for groceries and I found these on the same page. Can no one in this world do math anymore?

A lot of people have sent me links to articles that say mask-wearing has been very effective against COVID and others have sent me to studies that say otherwise. I'm still sticking with the conclusion that it ain't settled yet and that no study has really proved anything. James Troutman sent me to this article that says pretty much that.

Folks wrote to ask me why, when I was writing about The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, I didn't link to a video clip of it. That's because the outfit that has the rights to Ed's show and posts clips on YouTube hasn't posted that material. Others have but they haven't so I decided not to. But here's an ad they did post for selling those shows on DVD. I'm sure a lot of people are buying it just for the Soupy Sales appearance. Me, I just wanted to see Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall…

On February 9, 1964 when John, Paul, George and Ringo first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, I was 11 years, 11 months and 7 days old.  I didn't think of it in these terms then but now, I think it was the second time in my life I witnessed the world around me changing. The first, of course, had occurred just eighty days earlier: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The Coming of The Beatles was, of course, not such a tragic jolt and no one at the time — but no one — imagined how important those four lads and their kind of music would become to the world.  It wasn't just surly adults like that columnist I quoted who didn't then see the significance of it all. It was everyone.

I remember feeling indifferent to the whole matter. I watched Ed's show that Sunday night and thought, first of all, that those teen girls in the audience screaming looked ridiculous. I also thought the way the show had cut to them was intended to make them look even more ridiculous. Someone on Ed's staff (maybe even Ed) thought the "show" was not those four boys with the then-freaky haircuts. It was the way those girls in the audience reacted.

But to me, it was all a big "So what?" The music itself was fine but unremarkable. None of us knew how much better they'd get and how their music would be so tethered to what was happening here, there and everywhere for years to come.

At Emerson Junior High the next day, there was some talk about The Fab Four but not a lot. There was a girl I sat next to in some classes named Marnie who was quite ga-ga over the whole Beatles thing.  She was unable to talk about much else except them their music, their outfits and which one of them she'd marry.

I think she finally set her sights on Ringo, not because she liked him best but because he seemed the neediest. Being way too logical for my age, I told her that, given the way record sales were going, not one of those four gents was ever going to be needy. She gave me an annoyed look and explained: "No fan of rock and roll ever chooses to sleep with the drummer." This was a thirteen-year-old girl telling me this.

Beatlemania did not sweep totally over the Emerson Campus but one day a few weeks later, amazing posters began appearing around the school. A group called The Girls' League occasionally staged events in the gym during lunchtime. It cost a quarter to get in and you could sit in there and eat your lunch while taking in a half-hour show, all proceeds going to charity. They'd had a folk singer there and before him, a classical violinist. I think between the two mini-concerts, they'd taken in about nine dollars.

But it looked like they'd shatter that record with the next show in the gym: That Friday, The Beatles would be performing. That's right. I said, "The Beatles."

I cannot tell you why anyone for one second thought it was even a skillion-to-one possibility. Not only were The Beatles not anywhere near Los Angeles but they usually didn't play in junior high gymnasiums for twenty-five cents admission. It couldn't possibly be them…absolutely positively couldn't possibly be them. Still, as the week wore on, it felt like whoever was performing there wouldn't be playing to empty seats. As my friend Kerry put it, "No, I'm sure it won't be the real Beatles…

"…but suppose, just suppose it is. Think how foolish you'd feel if you missed out your chance to see them perform live. And for a quarter!" Marnie was definitely going and she hinted that she had inside information that it actually would be John, Paul, George and that drummer no one wanted to sleep with. She seemed wired into the new-but-growing-rapidly Beatles Fan Network and I heard several students say, "Marnie sounds like she knows something."

When the lunch bell rang that Friday, a mob of students stampeded for the gym, quarters at the ready. I wanted to go just to see what the show would consist of but since I stopped at my locker to get my lunch, I got there too late. It was sold out. A lot of kids didn't get in and I was standing with several of them as we experienced a moment — just one brief over-in-two-seconds moment of total unreality. From inside, we could hear the sound of The Beatles — the real Beatles — playing "She Loves You," complete with all the yeah-yeahs.

But after those two seconds of shock, I announced, "It's the record" and everyone else who was jerked back to sanity said, "Of course! I recognized it right away!" A few students from inside who'd apparently thought it was really going to be The Beatles, walked out grumbling. One of them told us, "It's four girls in black suits and Beatle wigs. They have these old, beat-up guitars and a kid's drum set and they're just pretending to be The Beatles and mouthing the words to the record." Like it could have been anything else.

I felt bad for Marnie, thinking how disappointed she had to be…but later, I found out that she was not crushed. Quite the contrary, she was the one who had organized the concert…organized it and she was the one portraying Paul McCartney.

TO BE CONTINUED

Some time ago here, I linked you to videos of some great American musicals performed — sometimes translated, sometimes not — in Korea. Here's another one. It's Sweeney Todd and I'll bet someone suffered long and hard to translate all these songs but especially the first one in this video…

I have so far gotten through The Pandemic without getting COVID.  The main reason for that probably has to do with how much of the last few years I've spent not going anywhere.  Apart from a few days in San Diego for last year's Comic-Con, I haven't traveled far…and when I've left the house and been around others, I've usually been masked.  Some combination of those two things and prompt doses of Moderna have done the trick…I guess.  But we'll never know for sure.

We may also never know for sure how necessary or effective all that masking has been.  Liz Highleyman reviews a lot of the studies on this matter and comes to the conclusion that you can't come to a conclusion.  The surveys are all over the place and this looks like one of those questions where the one most folks will believe is definitive and matter-settling is whichever one gives them the answer they want to believe.  One friend of mine who masked but hated it is way too quick to believe this is settled law.

I masked because my doctor told me to mask.  As I think I've written here more than once, I don't think my doctor is infallible; just that on matters of medicine, he's way less fallible than I am.  Actually, 100% of my doctors — and I have, I think, seen twelve of them since this thing started — are still all pro-masking. A few months ago when I went to a big medical building for an MRI, there was a sign on one wall that just said, "There's a reason doctors wear them around sick people or in surgery."

I'm wearing them less often now but I ain't throwing mine away. I'll probably mask up at WonderCon whenever I'm not on a stage or dining. If anyone tries to tell me that's over, I'll tell them I'm cosplaying as a time traveler from March of 2020. What I probably won't do is ever assume the question of whether masking has lessened COVID or just been a waste of paper and elastic has been settled beyond a shadow of a doubt.

This is going to be a long post. Among the many components I've always loved in MAD magazine were the poems and song parodies, most of which were written by either Frank Jacobs or Larry Siegel. For decades, those two men were among the magazine's most prolific contributors. I used to tell folks I know who worked at MAD that they had to get a recording studio and a batch of singers and musicians and record an album of these tunes.

No one has ever done this but I recently did find the video below that was recorded years ago at a gathering of F.R.U.S.O.P., which stands for "Free Range Ukulele Society of Oak Park." That's Oak Park, Illinois and the performers here are two folks whose names I believe are Laura and Mike. They sing five song parodies from the pages of MAD and the audience not only sings along but many of them are also playing ukuleles.

I'm thinking it would be neat to have everyone doing that at my funeral. You don't have to dress up but you're required to bring your ukulele.

The first three numbers are "Hello, Deli," "Ground Round" and "Chopped Liver," all from MAD #110. "The Bluefish Lie Dead in the Ocean" is from MAD #135 and "The Alfred E. Neuman Anthem" is from MAD #151. The Bluefish one was written by Larry Siegel and the others were penned by Frank Jacobs. Let's watch that video and then I'll have more to say…

Here I am with more to say. The gent I think is named Mike got the history of MAD's legal battle a bit wrong. He said it was spawned by their parody of "Moon River" and they were sued by its composer, Henry Mancini and others. The suit was actually over the song parodies in Sing Along With MAD, a special insert in More Trash From MAD #4, an otherwise-reprint collection that came out in 1961. The parodies in it were written by Jacobs, Siegel and members of the MAD editorial staff, which mainly meant Nick Meglin and maybe Jerry DeFuccio.

The lawsuit was Berlin v. E.C. Publications, Inc. and it was filed in 1961 about songs written by Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. Henry Mancini was not involved. His song "Moon River" was first heard in the 1961 movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the MAD parody of it — "Chopped Liver" — wasn't done until 1967, long after the legal battle was over.

After the suit was filed, MAD continued to do song parodies, though less often and when they did, they usually omitted the footnote, "Sung to the tune of…" In their famous parody of West Side Story in MAD #78 in 1963, Jacobs wrote his versions of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics but you had to figure out which tune in the play to sing each one to. It wasn't difficult.

There were 57 song parodies in Sing Along with MAD. Many of the parodied songs were in the public domain and I think a few composers declined to sign on to the legal action so the lawsuit was just about 25 compositions. The court decided that while the lyrics in two of the MAD rewrites were too close to the originals, the other 23 fell clearly into the realm of parody and protected speech.

The songwriters should have quit there but they appealed to Second Circuit which ruled that all 25 were fine. Then they appealed that adverse (to them) decision to the U.S. Supreme Court which in March of 1964 refused to hear the appeal so that ended that. MAD immediately began running more song parodies and resumed telling you which song was being parodied. As Mike noted in the above video, the magazine did indeed make history.

One other thing I should mention: Years ago at Comic-Con in San Diego, I moderated a MAD panel with Frank Jacobs among the panelists. I asked each of several MAD contributors there which piece they did for MAD got the most reaction and Frank, after a little thought, have this answer: He said that it was the parody he did of the song made famous by Petula Clark, "Downtown." His version was "Ground Round" and he said that for some reason, long after it had appeared in the magazine, people were still singing it to him.

Whereupon I dug into this silly memory of mine and recited the lyrics, recalling them somehow from MAD #110, which at the time was at least thirty years earlier. The lyrics can be found on several webpages on the Internet but all the ones I've seen get some of the words wrong — obviously, the result of someone doing them from memory, not looking them up. I looked them up…

When you eat meat / but hate the meat that you're eating / Then you've surely got
Ground Round!

It's so unnerving / when they're constantly serving / in an eating spot
Ground Round!

It may be called a Chopped Steak, a Salisbury or Beef Patty!
No matter what it's called, it's always overcooked and fatty!
What can you do?

Sound off to your waiter there / And loudly pound on your table
Stand up on your chair / And shout Ground Round!
Piled on my plate I see / Ground Round!
Always you're conning me! / Ground Round!
Why must it always be? / Ground Round! Ground Round! Ground Round!

I quoted these lyrics before here and back then, I said that if someone would make a video of them singing Frank's parody and would post it on YouTube, I would feature that video here. No one, as far as I know, did. The only time I've seen his parody on YouTube is the one from our friends above at the ukulele society, plus I've heard (but have not found) that somewhere there's a video of Drew Carey singing it. My offer stands.

Back in this message, I posted a link to a medley of Hal David/Burt Bacharach songs performed by The Carpenters. A lot of you wrote in that you really enjoyed it so perhaps you'll enjoy what's basically the same medley performed by The Carpenters on The Ed Sullivan Show for November 8, 1970. This episode was shot at at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Washington, D.C. and the audience was mostly wounded soldiers. In addition to The Carpenters, the lineup included Freda Payne, The Four Tops, Hank Williams Jr., Rodney Dangerfield, Ron Carey, the comedy team of Skiles and Henderson, and magician Dick Ryan…

By the way! I run a lot of clips here from Mr. Sullivan's show. Though a few episodes of that series no longer exist, most of them were preserved and moments from them have been quite available in syndication and on specials. Much credit for that should go to producer Andrew Solt, who in 1990 acquired the rights to that library and has taken very good care of them.

For the first ten years that Solt's SOFA Entertainment controlled those shows, much of the editing and caretaking was done by a lovely and wonderful lady named Susan F. Walker, who wrote, directed and/or produced a great number of excellent documentaries on show business. I believe she received at least two Emmy nominations and she certainly had the love and respect of all who knew her. She died way too young in 2000 and any time I see one of these clips, I think about her.

An anonymous person — anonymous to you but I know his name — wrote…

I'm expecting your usual infallible Super Bowl prediction that you won't be watching but I'm curious why. You're an American Male. How can you not be interested in football?

I'm just not and I don't think that's as rare as you probably do. I'm not much of a spectator of spectator sports…and to the extent I do watch, it's a smidgen of baseball — and a smaller one since Vin Scully stopped broadcasting. I also like to watch gymnasts from time to time but not even live. I like to watch clips of past excellence. I can't tell you the last time I watched an entire sporting event and cared about its outcome. Most likely, Sandy Koufax was pitching.

I was trying to think of a good reason to give you, my anonymous friend, about why I have so little interest in football. At first, I thought it might be because of my father. He had no interest in football but he loved baseball. Maybe the fact that I have even that teensy interest in baseball comes from the fact that he loved it and it was a father/son bonding thing once in a while. Then again, he loved basketball almost as much and I know as little about that sport as I do about football.

Or hockey. Or golf. Or any other sporting event. I never "got" how people could get so head-over-heels ecstatic when "their team" won. I always think, "Unless you had money on the game, you didn't win anything!" And clearly most folks' love of sports is not based wholly on wagering.

Later today when the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles square off — and yes, I just had to Google to find out what teams were playing — I can see no reason to root for one over the other. Even if there was an L.A. team in there, I couldn't gin up a gram of caring. And approaching the age of 71 in this country, I still haven't paid enough attention to football to know how it's played.

This is not intended to lessen anyone's enjoyment of the game today and I'm sure it won't. I don't care about the game and if you do, you don't care that I don't care, nor should you. I'm just trying to answer the question for my anonymous-to-you correspondent and maybe for myself as to why I don't care. And I think the answer is that I simply don't…nor do I care why I don't. Enjoy the game if you might.

The Beatles made their big splash on American TV the night of February 9, 1964 on, of course, The Ed Sullivan Show.  Two days later, the following article appeared in some newspaper written by someone named Paul Jones.  Read it and we'll discuss it…and if you need to see it larger, click on the image below and it should magically grow in size…

I have no idea who Mr. Jones is but I would guess that he was astonished at how popular enduring the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo has been. It may have been garbage to him at the time but to folks of my generation — I was on 2/9/64, less than a month from turning twelve — The Beatles were and remain pretty darned important. Still, to be fair to Jones, he was hardly the only member of his generation who at the time felt that way.

I came across this article online and I thought I'd post it here to preface a number of pieces I'll be posting here in the coming weeks. They'll be about something that bothers me more than it probably should. And what this thing is that bothers me is this…

A lot of friends who are my age, give or take about ten years — folks who revere The Beatles and other groups of their era — are starting to sound a lot like this guy.

They're dismissive and sometimes even contemptuous of the music of today, the movies of today, the television of today…anything created by folks of the current generation. And they're aghast and sometimes outraged that "These Kids Today" don't know and love everything that we knew and loved back when we were in our early teens.

I shall have more to say about this topic in the coming weeks.

Having seen it on streaming video, I'm sorry I never got to see the Broadway musical of Mr. Saturday Night on Broadway…and we've heard nothing about any future productions anywhere. An awful lot of you wrote me, back when we were talking about it here, to say you'd seen it and that it deserved to run longer than 116 performances.

Here is a video of the curtain calls on its closing night with speeches by Billy Crystal and a few other folks…

When I was learning how to play Blackjack the "right" way, I often came across the name of Persi Diaconis in the books I was reading. The first few times I saw that name, I wasn't sure why he kept being cited as an authority but I eventually learned, he was the world's greatest expert on card shuffling. He's a magician-mathematician who, among other accomplishments, determined the number of shuffles it takes before a deck of cards is thoroughly randomized. If you shuffle cards the way most people do, that number is eight.

Roger Green sent me this link to an article about Mr. Diaconis and his amazing work. Thanks, Roger.