Jackie Mason on The Ed Sullivan Show. This is not the infamous episode where he kinda/sorta/maybe gave "the finger" and one of his umpteen feuds erupted…
Like all of you, I don't fully understand what's going on with Simone Biles, nor is most of it any of my business. There are folks online who don't know either but they're not going to let that stop them from attacking her in all sorts of hysterical ways. "She let her team down," some of them said. Yes, because if folks are saying you're the best at what you do, you have to be at your best every minute. Being at your best 95% of the time won't do. I wonder how many of her critics are always as good at what they do as she is at what she does.
I find that as I get older, my eyes remain pretty good. I started wearing reading glasses occasionally about two years ago at the age of 67 — specs that have, literally, the lowest prescription you can get. And my knees are a problem. They don't bother me when I'm sitting down or standing up but they don't like when I transition from one to the other or go up or down stairs.
And lately, I've been having trouble with compartmentalization. I used to be able to deal with the worst-possible news or situations, then shift to another part of my brain and write something that someone might think was funny. It's gotten rougher and I'm not sure if it's me or the fact that the bad news — the climate, the virus, the Trumpiness — is so relentless. It's also stuff you can't do anything about except to try not to pay too much attention to it.
Which isn't easy. The Internet has become such a part of my life that I can't go too long without visiting certain sites, in some cases to order or track things I need. Other times, it's to look something up…but no matter where I go, I can't help but see clickbait headlines on matters I just don't want to think about right now. Yesterday's hearings concerning January 6 yesterday were one such topic. I think the insurrection that day was maybe the lowest point in the annals of Democracy in this country and the attempts now to sell it as some sort of tourist lovefest are lying of the highest order.
But me watching the hearings isn't going to change anything except my blood pressure, whereas me finishing a script might move along a project that should have benefits to many people, myself among them. And thanks to YouTube and other online services, I can watch the hearings next week when the script is done.
I think I'll post this and maybe, later today, a video link or two. And I'll spend all my other time on that script.
So…does anyone have any idea what this is about? Real answers only, please.
UPDATE, 25 MINUTES LATER: 42 of you (so far) have now informed me it's a joke relating to a video of Adam Driver running around with very little clothing on. The video is supposed to be part of the same tweet but they got separated somehow on my Twitter feed. Okay, everyone. Thanks.
Tried calling StubHub because of a ticket problem and a recording said their helpline had wait times of "up to 3 hours." If your business has wait times of over 1 hour, I don't need to call back later. You need more staff and more phone lines.
We need a day when we don't keep thinking, "Gee, I oughta put something new up on the blog." Hard to believe, I know, but there are other things I gotta do. This is such a day.
There will be new stuff here…but later and there won't be much. Hope you can find something else to read on the Internet. I hear there are forums where people who don't know anything about medicine or science will tell you all about vaccines with a certainty that will never waver no matter what happens. Or maybe you can find some adorable cat photos.
Hey, remember a few days ago when I linked you up to a song by Audra McDonald from a Stephen Sondheim birthday special? Well, here from the same special is Elaine Stritch with a show-stopping rendition of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here." He didn't write this song for her to sing but I think after she did, she kinda owned it…
Ah, Day 503. Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends. I continue to be very happy that they didn't have an in-person Comic-Con International in San Diego this past weekend, thereby sparing me the stress of deciding (probably) not to attend. Yes, I'm fully-vaccinated…or at least I am until Real Doctors, including mine, recommend a booster shot of Moderna. I still wouldn't have wanted to attend a convention that was all about COVID and where to wear a mask and who's vaccinated and who's not. Would we have spoken of anything else…say, about comic books?
Also, I've grown so accustomed to being home, dining in and seeing only selected, wisely-screened people that I'm not sure my system could have handled the shock of suddenly being amidst thousands in a place other than my house. I'll have to ease back to that when the time comes.
Sean Hannity — whose show you may be stunned to hear I never watch — shocked a few people last week by coming out, sort of, for vaccination. He must have gotten some horrified feedback from the same folks who think Hillary's still running that pizza parlor for pedophiles because he came back a few days later and said, "I'm not urging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine." But here is what he did say which sounds like what he's denying he said…
Please take COVID seriously, I can't say it enough. Enough people have died, we don't need more deaths. Research like crazy, talk to your doctor, your doctors, medical professionals you trust based on your unique medical history, your current medical condition and you and your doctor make a very important decision for your own safety. Take it seriously.
That makes a lot of sense except for the "research like crazy" part. Talking to medical professionals you trust is a great idea and if everyone had done that, we might not now be hunkering down due to a new wave of coronavirus and worrying about the next few. If you take "research like crazy" to mean looking health matters up on the Internet, I think you are crazy. Because if you wanna believe COVID can be kept at bay by eating an excessive number of Snickers bars and you google enough, you can probably find supporting evidence for what you wanna believe.
Consulting a Real Doctor should be all you have to do…and if you don't trust your Real Doctor enough that it is, you have the wrong Real Doctor…or maybe the wrong idea of what they're for. I decided to get the vaccine the instant it was recommended to me by my primary care physician. And if I'd had any doubts he was right, they were dispelled by e-mails and personal advice from my gastroenterologist, my dentist, my orthopedist, my urologist…I've typed this list before here…who all weighed in before I was even able to get the first jab.
Sure. If I wanted to, I could find contrary advice from unknown, possibly anonymous people on the World Wide Web but why would I do that? Only if I wanted to believe that expertise is worthless and that my hunches are just as good as anything. I'm waiting for the political candidate — and we seem to be getting close to this — who will tell his supporters, "…and I promise you I will never listen to anyone on any topic who claims to know more than I do!"
This is going to take a while. A few times in the distant past on this blog, I've written about a TV series that ran here in Los Angeles back in 1967. It was called Groovy and here is what I wrote about it on this blog back in 2007…
The other day, I was telling a friend of mine about a memorable show that ran on Los Angeles TV in the late sixties. It was called Groovy and it was an afternoon "teen dance party" show on KHJ, Channel 9. What made it unique from dozens of other knock-offs of American Bandstand (and many such shows that preceded that one) was that when it debuted, Groovy was done from the beach in Santa Monica.
The following is not any sort of official history. It's what I remember and some of it may be incorrect. I'm putting it up here mainly to see if I can jar any other memories (or photos or — dare I dream? — videos) loose. I recall the show premiering around March of '67 and ping-ponging back and forth between the 4 PM-5 PM time slot and 5 PM-6 PM, Monday through Friday. I believe it was done live when it started and then, for reasons that will become obvious as I tell you more about it, its producers began taping it an hour or so before it was broadcast. Once or twice, it got "rained out" and a slapdash broadcast was assembled in the KHJ studios over on Melrose.
Michael Blodgett
The show went through several versions but its first and most notable period was when it was done from the beach and hosted by the gent seen in the above photo. His name was Michael Blodgett and he had a nice little acting career, which included the unforgettable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (from which that is a still) before he moved on to considerable success as a novelist. He was a pretty good host on the Groovy show but I suspect even he would admit that he wasn't the main appeal of the show. The main appeal was young ladies in very tiny bikinis — and by "young," I mean sometimes fifteen or sixteen years of age, if that old.
Much of the show was, of course, teens dancing to records. There was one real musical act each day…usually a group that would come on to pantomime/lip sync to their current record, which made for an odd sight. There would be these musicians acting like they were playing on the beach…with their amps and electric guitars plugged into absolutely nothing. Most records of that era ended with the track fading out and I guess the acoustics out there weren't great insofar as hearing the playback was concerned. As a song drew to its close, you could see the performers become unsure if it was through so they'd keep "playing" and then one guy would stop and maybe another. And then you could tell someone had yelled, "It's not over! Keep playing!" And they'd scurry back into mime mode. Very odd stuff.
But the real "treat" — the reason thousands of depraved Southern California males tuned in — was the daily Bikini Contest. Blodgett would do short interviews with five or six young ladies selected not for their loquaciousness but for the elegance of their figures and the brevity of their swimwear. You got the idea that whoever was picking the contestants was rating them by subtracting their I.Q.s from their bust measurements. Blodgett would ask each where she went to school, what she liked to study and if she had any hobbies, and the lasses would giggle through their replies. Then each would parade down a little runway to show off her physique to hoots and hollers from the crowd. That day's musical act would be the judges and they'd select the victor. Usually, whichever lady looked the sluttiest would win passes to Gazarri's on the Strip or the Cinnamon Cinder or some other local dance club.
Other things I remember about the show: The cameras were always panning the crowds who were there to watch the proceedings. At least once per show, someone would either flash or moon or give the finger. (This, I assume, is why they stopped broadcasting live.) At the very least, you'd see an awful lot of young teens smoking and/or brandishing bottles of liquor. One person who worked on the show told me that they got very few complaints about the flashing or the mooning or even the 14 year old girls popping out of their microscopic bathing suits…but there were constant objections to the smoking and drinking.
I also remember a corollary to something I'd already formulated by then, which was the Cheap Movie Swimming Pool Scene Rule. That's the rule that says if you're watching a cheap or even medium-budget movie and there's a scene by a swimming pool, someone is going to fall or be pushed in with all their clothes on. There was no pool on Groovy but there was an ocean…so at least once per show, someone who wasn't dressed for it would get carried out against their will and thrown in the water. You can just imagine the hilarity of that.
I have a few other memories — including the story of a girl from my high school and her travails in the Bikini Contest — but I'll save them for a follow-up posting which, I hope, will contain additional info that someone reading this will send in. One thing I'm really not clear on is how long the Blodgett/Beach era of Groovy lasted. I do remember tuning in one Monday and discovering that with no advance notice, it had turned into a different show. Groovy was suddenly shot indoors at KHJ with all the dancing teens fully clothed. This version — which was quite ordinary and therefore inferior to The Lloyd Thaxton Show. a dance party series over on Channel 13 — was hosted by local deejay Sam Riddle. Later, Riddle was replaced by another local radio guy, Robert W. Morgan. By then, it was well on its way to becoming one of those shows that is watched by so few people that when it's cancelled, no one notices.
So does anyone have any stills or footage from the beach/Blodgett version of Groovy? Does anyone else at least remember it? Come on. Someone must have been in Los Angeles in the late sixties and watching TV besides me.
I heard from a lot of people who remembered it but no one who had any footage from it. Then in 2015, someone on YouTube posted not footage of the show but some 8mm home movies that were shot on location. It begins, of course, with someone getting dragged out and thrown in the water…
Also in 2015, I told the story of a girl from my high school who kept turning up on Groovy, trying (and failing) to win its daily bikini beauty pageant of (mostly) underage young ladies. You can read that story here. If you go do that now, come back here afterwards to read the rest of this post.
Those home movies were all we had…until now. Someone else has come up with some actual video of the show. It's not much but it's the only video of the show I've seen since it was on the air back when I was in my first year of high school. Actually, it's some sort of demo reel of Mr. Blodgett as a host and also as an actor so you'll see snippets of him on Bonanza and other programs. I'm guessing the absence of any clips from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is because this was compiled before that movie existed.
In this video, you'll also see several moments from Groovy. None of the bikini girls in this clip are the one in the story to which I just linked…
Rabbi-turned-stand-up-comic Jackie Mason has died at the age of 93. He had a strange career — up and down, up and down — full of fights and feuds and wacky business ideas that crashed and burned. But at the core of it all was a really great act. In the mid-eighties, he had a major "up" when he mounted a stage production on Broadway and elsewhere called The World According To Me. It was basically just him on a stage doing the best of all the material he'd been doing on stage the previous thirty years and it was hysterical.
I took my father to see it in Los Angeles and you would not believe how funny Mason was. He followed it with a series of other shows, some of which I saw. But the first show was kind of like "The Best of Jackie Mason" and the others were more like "The Rest of Jackie Mason" and not very good. For a time, he kept turning up in and around Broadway with new productions. When some show closed and the theater would otherwise have been dark for a few months, Mason would run in and rent the place for bargain rates. Then he'd stand outside the theater for much of the day, chatting with tourists and persuading them to buy tickets to his show.
For a long time, I think I saw him somewhere on every trip I made to Manhattan. He'd either be outside the theater where his latest show was playing or he'd be sitting in the Carnegie Delicatessen, holding court and telling people to go buy tickets to his current show or the next one. Some of the shows ran quite a long time but in 2003, he produced a musical comedy and here's what I wrote then…
As we predicted here, Jackie Mason's new Broadway show is closing in a hurry. It opened on November 19 and the last performance is November 30. Reviews ranged from bad to really bad. William Stevenson over at Broadway.com, for instance, wrote: "Charging Broadway prices for this comic catastrophe is truly criminal. It's only worth paying if you want to be able to say you've seen the worst musical comedy on Broadway in recent memory." For some reason, when I came across that, I had a mental image of Mason reading the notice and saying, "Well, it could have been worse…"
There are all sorts of stories about Jackie Mason…feuding with Frank Sinatra, feuding with Ed Sullivan, feuding with reporters who wrote about the field of comedy and didn't give him what he felt was his due. He was perpetually at the center of trouble. For a while, he was rabidly right-wing and in 2009, I wrote this here…
Once in the Carnegie, though he was several tables away, I had to suffer through an extended monologue about how it was a foregone conclusion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were heading for prison. There was so much evidence, in fact, that they were already secretly plea-bargaining for reduced sentences. Shortly after that, Hillary became the junior senator from New York, which I guess was part of the plea bargain. On that same trip, a "friend" took me to see Mason's then-current Broadway offering…and I put "friend" in quotes because real friends just don't do things like that to you. I once loved seeing Jackie Mason on stage but that night, his humor was about as sharp as his political reporting.
Two other things I want to say about him before I go: Back in 2013, my cousin David did a really good interview with Mason and you can read it here.
Also, if you ever come across the comedy record at the top of this post, get it. It's solid evidence that Jackie Mason was once a great, great stand-up. And if any of it seems familiar to you from other places, that may be because he was one of those comedians that a lot of other comedians stole from. I'll even give you what's probably an example here…
This is a brief audio link from that record, I'm the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet. It came out in 1962 and this was part of his opening…
And here's a clip from the opening of Don Adams…Live?, a comedy record that the star of Get Smart recorded in Las Vegas in 1967…
I can't guarantee that Jackie Mason didn't "borrow" the joke from somewhere else. But I suspect Adams got it from Mason's act — and probably that record. Mason was so good that other comics couldn't resist helping himself to his material. It wouldn't surprise me if more did now because a lot of it was timeless and he's no longer around to object.
Sergio Aragonés, Thomas Yeates and me (Mark Evanier) discuss the new Groo Meets Tarzan comic books series which should be at your local comic shop any day now…
