Hey, you know who that is? The guy, not the cat. That's Sid Krofft, the master puppeteer and showman…and my occasional employer over the last half-century. I worked for Sid and Marty a lot and whatever it was, it was fascinating. And fun. And there were many other perks, including the people I met and hearing about the people they'd met. Some folks think I know everyone who's ever been in show business. It is to laugh. Compared to Sid, I'm a friendless hermit.
He is much loved throughout show business and lately, he's had a lot of famous celebrities on the podcast he does live every Sunday afternoon at 3 PM on Instagram. Apparently though, everyone famous is busy for the holidays because his guest this coming Sunday the nineteenth will be me. I'll post more details before then if you want to tune in…which you should do every Sunday, even when I'm not his guest.
My longtime pal Jim Korkis is one of the foremost experts out there on All Things Disney. He saw I'd posted a link to the all-poultry production, A Fowl Affair, and he sent me this message. The connection honestly had not occurred to me…
For me, of course, the most interesting thing about that 1931 short you posted is that it predates Disney's Donald Duck by several years. A Fowl Affair done by Al Christie was part of the Gayety Comedy series and released April 20, 1931 and the live duck wearing a sailor suit was used prominently in the film poster and in advertisements for the film.
The sailor suit was the first popular children's fashion trend when Queen Victoria's decision to dress the four-year Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, in a scaled down version of the sailor suit of the Royal British Navy. The suit was used in stage musicals of the time because of its distinctive look.
British boys began wearing sailor suits in the 1860s. Prince Edward began dressing his own sons in sailor suits in the 1870s and, once again, the influence of the royal family helped to popularize the sailor suit for young children. The fashion trend really took root in the 1870s when advertisers began marketing it. By the 1880s, the sailor suit was a popular fashion trend for girls as well as boys. The sailor suit became so popular in the 1880s that few boys grew up in England without wearing it and, for some, was practically all they wore. The trend migrated to the United States and was popular when Walt Disney was a kid.
An interesting note. I can believe the notion Mr. Disney asserted about how dressing a duck in a sailor suit was an obvious idea, given the connection to water. I can also believe it was just because Walt (or someone) was influenced by all the kids around wearing sailor suits. And I can even sorta believe that Walt (or someone) consciously or unconsciously got the idea from A Fowl Affair or its poster. One of those "we'll never know" things, I guess.
Here's what appears to be a late interview with Mr. Sondheim, mostly about his days at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. This was probably conducted in conjunction with the school staging a series of events about his work in January of 2020 called Sondheim@90@Williams…
After reading this post here, Robert Rose sent in this late-night question just in case I happened to feel like taking it up…
In your post Sunday about West Side Story, you write (of the 1961 version), "It's one of those films where I find myself thinking, 'This is really well-made but I'm having trouble caring about those characters.'" I seem to recall your making similar comments about other musicals, of both stage and screen — that you often enjoy the production, the songs, the performances, but have trouble caring about the characters.
I wonder if you'd care to provide any counter-examples, particularly among the better-known musicals? Ones where you either identified with one or more of the characters, or they at least made you really care what happened to them, even if it was only because they made you laugh?
Just a random late-night question if you happen to feel like taking it up.
I could give you examples for days. I find myself caring about Mama Rose and Louise in Gypsy, about most of the cast in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, most of those in Follies, Guys & Dolls, Damn Yankees, How to Succeed…, Liza and Higgins in My Fair Lady, John Adams in 1776, Li'l Abner and Daisy in Li'l Abner, the two lead ladies in Wicked, and on and on.
And maybe "cared" isn't the proper word so much as "interested in." I don't necessarily "care" about Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett or the major players in Hamilton but I want to see what happens to them…even when, as is almost always the case, I know the ending.
My favorite non-musical moment in any musical may be in Music Man when Harold Hill, realizing he's becoming emotionally trapped in River City and having a rare (for him) moment of self-awareness says, "I always think there's a band, kid." There are a lot of sappy, contrived beats in that show but Harold Hill's turnaround always gets to me.
Different shows hit different people different ways…and different actors matter. I've seen Merrily We Roll Along with about five different casts and I'd say three out of the five caught me. The Superman musical never won me over…and that's quite a trick, doing a Superman musical and not getting a guy who loves Superman to care about Superman. None of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals except Carousel and South Pacific ever really won me over…but I'm thinking: Maybe it was the production, not the play. (Although I've probably seen Music Man eight times, including twice with Birthday Boy Van Dyke, and the above scene never fails.)
It's all a matter of individual choice, of course. Friends raved about Rent and most of it left me cold. Company, to me, is still a show where I sit through bloodless playlets masquerading as a coherent show in order to get to some great musical numbers. But I recognize a lot of people find it life-changing.
I don't know if this is any sort of answer to your question, Rob. It may be as simple as: A play either grabs you or doesn't. I think I'm highly grabbable but some shows — and West Side Story is so one of 'em — just don't do it. Ah…but the ones that do — to locate one of them — make the non-grabbers worth it.
One of these days, you may need a role model to show you how to function at an age most would call "old" without acting like you are. If you do, I highly suggest this guy who is, the calendar would have us believe, 96 years of age today. If he is, he hasn't told his body. He still moves and gets around and even dances like a much younger man…and I don't mean a much younger man of, say, 92. I mean way younger than that.
He would also be a good role model for anyone who needed to learn to be incredibly nice. This might be especially important if you were famous and beloved and everyone wanted to tell you how much they adored you in this movie or that TV show. To be honest, that's not likely to happen to either of us but just in case you surprise me…
In my lifetime, I have been with two celebrities who were astoundingly nice to strangers who approached them in public. It was a constant occurrence but they always acted genuinely pleased and surprised by a moment of such adoration, even if the previous one was less than ten minutes earlier.
Dick was one and the other was Jimmy Stewart. I was unable to tell whether it was good manners or good acting but either way, they sent the fan on their way with a happy memory to last a lifetime or two.
I had at least three "encounters" with Dick Van Dyke before I got to know him well enough that I could expect him to recall my name. All of those encounters were joyous exceptions to the advice that you should never meet your heroes.
I hope he has a wonderful day with his terrific wife Arlene. And I hope he's around long enough that we can look back and think of 96 as when he was middle-aged.
This is A Fowl Affair, a 1931 short comedy from Educational Pictures. Educational was kind of the low rung of the studios back then. Most of the comedians who starred in their films were either on the way down or on their way to nowhere but there was the occasional gem…and the occasional "What was someone thinking?" film like this one.
I hesitated before posting it because it contains some antiquated racial stereotypes and also because I don't think all of its performers were treated well. Then again. it was a long time ago and no one to my knowledge makes pictures like this one anymore. Maybe it's useful to remember the kind of thing that became unfashionable and why.
And it is, you have to admit, weird enough that it has genuine curiosity value. The Library of Congress must have spent serious money to preserve it. Pardon the odd framing but it was apparently scanned that way as part of its preservation.
One of the main characters was voiced by Billy Bletcher, who was a short guy with a deep voice heard in many films. He was the Big Bad Wolf and many villains in Disney films. He voiced the character who has the last line in the movie — just in case you make it that far…
There's much talk on the 'net today about why the new Spielberg-helmed remake of West Side Story seems to be — to use the nicest possible term — underperforming at the box office. I've seen about twenty-five explanations offered, several of which are in this article by Owen Gleiberman and I suspect there's some merit to all of them. There are so many reasons, you wonder why anyone is shocked.
I sure dunno why they aren't lining up for it. I haven't seen the film and probably won't until it's on my home video screen. I'm not as huge a fan of the original as some people. It's one of those films where I find myself thinking, "This is really well-made but I'm having trouble caring about those characters." The one time I saw the musical staged live, I admired the heck out of the dancing, the singing and the music but, again, didn't get deep into the story. That's my vote for why the movie is, as they say, "underperforming." But I'm sure it isn't the only reason and maybe not even the main one.
Since it probably won't get the attention it deserves, I'd like to note the passing of actress Cara Williams at the age of 96. She was a movie star, best known for pictures like Meet Me In Las Vegas and The Helen Morgan Story. She co-starred with Danny Kaye in The Man From the Diner's Club and was Oscar-nominated for her work in The Defiant Ones.
Like a lot of movie stars of her day, she then went into television and while she guest-starred all over the place, she was best known for starring in two TV series — Pete & Gladys (1960-1962) and The Cara Williams Show (1964-1965).
Pete & Gladys was a spin-off from and successor to the long-running series, December Bride, in which Harry Morgan had appeared as Pete Porter, the "wacky next-door neighbor." On it, he was always talking about his never-seen-on-December-Bride "wacky wife," Gladys…and after that show went off, Pete and a few other characters on it were joined by Gladys (played by Ms. Williams) in this new series.
This was in accord with some law in the television industry that apparently said that Harry Morgan always had to be on a series. He went from December Bride to Pete & Gladys and then on to The Richard Boone Show, Kentucky Jones, the revival of Dragnet, The D.A., Hec Ramsey and then on to M*A*S*H, followed by AfterM*A*S*H…and even that wasn't his last series. He was also on Blacke's Magic and You Can't Take It With You. If he hadn't died in 2011, he's probably be a regular on Fleabag. Never mind that he'd be 106 years old.
Pete & Gladys was one of the better ones owing largely to the great chemistry he had with Ms. Williams and the fact that she was a terrific comic actress. Comparisons to Lucille Ball were inevitable even without the same hair color but I thought Cara Williams deserved to be respected as a gifted comic actress in her own right.
I remember nothing about The Cara Williams Show other than that she co-starred with Frank Aletter, Paul Reed and (occasionally) Jack Sheldon…and that it wasn't as good as Pete & Gladys. But she was probably great on it and there are several episodes of each series on YouTube if you want to decide for yourself.
She was a really good actress who had a fine, though maybe not long enough career.
Broadway performer Greg Hildreth performs "Buddy's Blues" from Follies. He's accompanied by Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band and some talented (but unidentified) ladies. I like this performance because, for one thing, it's quite unlike the way Mandy Patinkin did the number in the concert album…and therefore, the way most singers try to do it since. I believe Mr. Hildreth is in the new, just-opened revival of Company…
This post is largely about the time stamp on it. As (basically) a freelance writer for (approximately) 52 years and five months, I occasionally slip into a lifestyle of being awake when everyone else I know can be presumed to be asleep — like now, for instance. Some people, I'm sure, are awake — I see a number of them apparently online on Facebook at the moment — but my phone isn't ringing, there's very little traffic noise on my street and it feels like I'm the only one conscious on the planet. This can be very good for a writer and it's often when I get my best — or maybe just my most writing done.
But you have to make sure you treat it as temporary; that at some points, you get your life in sync with the rest of the world. There are calls I must make and calls I must take…and especially during The Pandemic, orders I must make and deliveries I must receive. Some of those calls are ZOOM conferences so I have to make at least a token attempt to have about the top quarter of myself look presentable.
Leaving ZOOM out of it, this is roughly how I have lived for much of those 52+ years. There have been extended periods when I've had the kind of writing jobs that require one to report to an office almost every day. There have been periods when I had two or more such jobs. But basically, I think of myself as a guy who works at home. When people ask me, "When do you write?" I usually say, "All the time" or sometimes "When I have to in order to get the work in to them when they need it." Another good and true answer sometimes is "Between other obligations."
I feel like during The Pandemic, more and more people are living this way. Certainly, more of them are working from home and/or waiting for Grubhub to deliver. And this is going to sound odd but I occasionally think that if there had to be a Global Pandemic — and there didn't — it could certainly have come at a worse time for me. Like when I had to spend so much time at hospitals because my mother was in them (as she often was) or my lovely and loved friend Carolyn was in an Assisted Living Home battling the big "C."
Carolyn was in one for eleven months and I occasionally look online to see reports on how COVID has infested that particular home. It seems stable now but for much of the first Year of the Coronavirus, they were losing patients and medical personnel at a ghastly rate. She would likely have added that to the long list of things wrong with her…and I would have been in danger every time I went in to see her, which I did almost every day.
I'm also fortunate to have a very good doctor who has given me — and his other patients, one presumes — very sound advice based on a pragmatic assessment of What We Know and What We Don't Know. I've usually had good doctors but there were periods when I didn't…when I'd lost one good doctor and was searching for another. You know the old saying about how a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client? I've come to feel that way about laypersons who think they know all about medicine.
If all this sounds self-obsessed…well, it's easy to slip into that mode when you feel like the only conscious human being in the world. I'll finish an article I'm writing after I finish this, then I'll go to sleep, then tomorrow — whenever it feels like "tomorrow" begins — I'll start working my way back to "normal" hours.
And I do understand that others are awake. Checking back on Facebook, I see several other friends apparently online and I wonder what day it is for them where they are. Are they up late on Saturday night or up early on Sunday morning? Or do they, like me, not know the difference…or care? There's one there I need to talk to about something but it can wait for a time when it's today for both of us.
Here's a somewhat new video of a somewhat old song from the somewhat changed (I think) group of singers called Voctave. It's "The Trolley Song," a tune I like a lot and I like their interpretation…
Sympathies and good thoughts — including the hope that they receive as much aid as can humanly be given A.S.A.P. — to the people in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee affected by that big swarm of tornadoes. The news footage looks horrendous.
Wanna help? Every time something like this happens, my mind goes back to another natural disaster — I don't even remember for sure which one — when the lady then in my life said, "We've got to do something to help those poor people." She was talking about rounding up canned goods and blankets and medical supplies and then shipping them to the scene of the tragedy many states away…
…but when she called a rescue agency to ask how to do that, she was told, "Honestly, the best thing you can do is to send money. We don't have to stop and figure out how to transport crates of supplies, some of which we might not need or figure out where they're needed. With money, we can purchase exactly what's needed nearby…or give vouchers to the victims so they can get what they need."
Everything I've read about disaster relief since has convinced me that's the best way to assist. Money. Whatever you can spare.
I send what I can spare to a group called Operation USA. I know some of the people involved in it and I've investigated and found that almost all of what you give them goes to the people in need, as opposed to bureaucratic salaries and fancy offices. They are non-political and quite dedicated to helping victims in any country, including this one. There are other good charities but I doubt any do more good with what you send them.
…a few hundred comedians…had their albums taken down by Spotify the night before Thanksgiving, according to Spoken Giants, a publishing-rights company that represents the likes of Mike Birbiglia, Tiffany Haddish, Lewis Black, Jeff Foxworthy, the Bob Hope and Lucille Ball estates, and many other comics you know and love.
The dispute between Spoken Giants and Spotify dates back a few months, when the former company approached all the streaming services, as well as SiriusXM and terrestrial-radio outlets, to point out that comedians deserve royalties on their written work, not just the audio of their performances. Spoken Giants — which represents people who perform spoken-word entertainment, including podcasters and poets — is asking that its clients be compensated in the same method as the music world.
