What I did last night was to attend a party celebrating the release of the new book, Betty Boop's Guide to a Bold and Balanced Life. It's subtitled "Fun, Fierce, Fabulous Advice Inspired by the Animated Icon" and it would appear to be an attempt to establish the lovely Ms. Boop as a woman of today, not of the thirties. If that's the authors' goal, I'd say they're doing a good job of it.
It's nice to see Betty doing well, especially since she quit that job she had working for Hooters. She's certainly remaining popular in merchandise and t-shirts and not long ago, I even met a lady in her twenties who had an honest-to-God, permanent Betty Boop tattoo on her thigh. (I tried to teach her the name of Grim Natwick, who designed Betty, but the young woman wasn't interested.) Betty's had a good career for a woman who doesn't really have a profile.
The book looks like a great thing to give someone who loves Betty…and that's an amazingly large group given that she did her most memorable work from 1932 to 1939 and it hasn't been that easy to see it for about the last three decades. Here's a link to order said book.
Speaking of lovely women who never age, I ran into my friend Judy Strangis at the party. A whole bunch of guys roughly in my age bracket are reacting right now, remembering her from her Barbie commercials, her role on the fine TV show Room 222, her performances as Dyna-Girl on ElectraWoman and Dyna-Girl, her turning up on so many other TV shows, etc. I introduced her to my pal Jerry Beck, who was also there, and he — being a guy roughly in my age bracket — immediately rattled off much of her IMDB listing without consulting IMDB. Here's a pic of the three of us…
The party was full of interesting people who, like 90% of such parties, was in a room too small for the number of people in it so I couldn't get over to some of the folks there I wanted to talk to. But I did have a lovely conversation with George Chakiris, who has been in dozens of movies and stage productions, and who seems to be aging at about the same sluggish rate as Judy. He was quite surprised at what I wanted to talk to him about.
In 1956, an actor named George Kerris appeared in the film Meet Me in Las Vegas and did a wonderful dance scene with the film's ingenue, Betty Lynn. They rehearsed for many weeks and worked hard on it. This took a certain amount of patience on Kerris's part because he was an accomplished dancer (two years later, he was playing Riff in the British production of West Side Story and he later played Bernardo in the movie) and Ms Lynn was not.
But they got through all the rehearsing and filming, only to see the dance go unseen when it was cut from the movie. As we discussed here, it has been partially restored for the DVD release. They put in what leads up to the dance and what follows it but not the dance itself.
As you know, I'm close with Betty Lynn, who is now retired and living in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, delighting locals and tourists who want to meet Thelma Lou from The Andy Griffith Show. And as you've guessed, George Kerris became George Chakiris.
His face lit up when I mentioned Betty and he asked me to please give her a hug from him, which I'll do next time I get back to Mt. Airy. But I just called Betty and told her and she couldn't have been happier. She said, "He was so sweet and so nice and so patient putting up with me having to learn the dance." It's kind of fun to reignite a happy memory from 60+ years ago.