Wednesday, April 11, 2012

The man with no strings





Joel Grey. Legend. First crush (almost: there was Maynard G. Krebbs on Dobie Gillis, and the robot on Lost in Space).  It's his birthday, he's 80 years old today. . .




. . . and yes, I did see him perform live once, but it sure was a long wait from that time I first saw him, in 1972 I think, in Cabaret: one of the best movies ever made and still near the top of my all-time-fave list along with Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce.

Nobody knew what he was doing up there in 1972 because there was no name for what he was doing. But there he was on film pretending to be live onstage, this ferociously sweet, snide, horrible, wonderful thing, this thing that dressed up like a human being and danced and pranced around.  Who even came out in drag, making a quite plausible blonde floozie with hair under his arms.











It was no surprise at all when he won an Oscar for this: he had already won the coveted Tony. I fell in love with Joel Grey watching Cabaret in 1973, became totally obsessed with Joel Grey for years and years, chased down whatever information I could find about Joel Grey (and in those days this necessitated lurking about in library stacks with a sharp razor - I must have looked like a maniac - so I could steal his picture). I compiled him, I filed him, I watched him on The Mike Douglas Show and I often wondered who he really was.

I didn't get to see him doing what he really does, dancing and prancing live onstage in the manner to which he seems born, for another 15 years or so, when a road company of Cabaret stopped in Vancouver. He seemed tiny up there, though his dancer's legs still worked like springs. I remember a song that never appeared in the movie (and the stage version is radically different, the movie having been converted into a Liza Minnelli vehicle): it was called I Don't Care Much, and at one point his disembodied white carmine-lipped face was suspended in the air like some nightmarish ghost balloon.



What did I like about him, enough to stay on that decades-long bloodhound trail?  For the thing is, I never really stopped being obsessed with him. I had memorized his birth date from an LP of his night club act, in which he stepped out from a giant trunk and sang and danced. I knew it was April 11, 1932. Back then he looked almost ridiculously young, more like 25 than 40. 

Over the years I kept following the thread: I saw, sitting in our car at a drive-in, a very strange movie he did with Cliff Robertson in which he played a clairvoyant. A suspiciously diffident, shifty sort of guy given to sudden blasts of rage. I wondered if this was the real Joel Grey. Then I saw an even stranger movie he made with Paul Newman called Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or Sitting Bull's History Lesson), directed by Robert Altman. Notable to Canadians because it was shot in Calgary. He looked dishy in this, with a very Biblical beard that I was sure was real because he appeared on Front Page Challenge, an embarrassing Canadian panel show, and brought the beard with him.






There's no order to this, not really. Forgive me for being all over the place as I try to pin down the popcorn of memory. When the internet came in, Joel Grey was suddenly very accessible again. But in the meantime he had done a jillion things, a quadrillion things, and always seemed to be active. He'd pop up in the coolest and most cutting-edge TV shows. He never seemed to go away.  "Old" didn't seem to stick to him: he was even more than ever like a blob of mercury made flesh.

I couldn't add it all up because it was like one of those Chagall panels made of stained glass. You don't stir those colors together, you leave them to be what they are. Saturated and strange, they should clash and conflict, but they don't. The images: menorahs, flying bulls, violins, Christ on the cross, lovers sailing through the air in sexual rhapsody - they couldn't possibly work together, but against reason, they did.





Joel Grey was Petrushka, he was Pulcinella, he was a little clown being yanked on a string, but when I got rare glimpses of the real person, he was surprising, a real person, almost quiet. I paid attention to everything about him because that's what I do, I extract people, I make essence of them, cook them down. I saw kindness.

It didn't surprise me to find out he takes photographs and has become very famous for them. I remembered that book, I Am a Camera,  Christopher Isherwood's memoir which became the basis for Cabaret. He is an eye.




For quite a while, thinking only of his Oscar-winning keynote performance (I refuse to say iconic!), people began to think of him as "Jennifer Grey's father". Jennifer Grey has had a strange career, a good one, mind, but strange: perhaps peaking too early in Dirty Dancing, altering her appearance for some reason, then becoming kind of obscure. But popping up again in Dancing with the Stars, her famous parents commenting on her performance like the seasoned pros they were.

This is all over the place, I can't get it all in and I shouldn't try. It's 80 years, after all. We shouldn't be surprised - some people do 80 very well, thank you very much, and in spite of his apparent frailty I don't think Joel Grey is frail at all. Petrushka isn't frail, even when the puppetmaster drops him on the stage and cracks his head. Those strings have always been translucent anyway, and he is powered by something quite else.







From what I've been able to gather, all the bits and pieces of recent interviews and performances on YouTube, his main art has been living. I love this clip from Dancer in the Dark: I watched the bloody thing on a rented DVD about six times just to see his dance number, which he did when he was well into his '60s. He was still on springs, still striking sparks with his tap shoes and smiling at the audience in that slightly fierce, slightly vulpine way.





Be around, Joel Grey; be around for a long time, for as long as possible, because we like you, need you, want you. You are a slice of humanity and we find you interesting. You don't embarrass us by flailing around in your success. You are real, even while trying on all sorts of different people, then letting them slide off your shoulders because something else has suddenly come up that is a whole lot more interesting.





http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

The worst Polish joke ever!





Backstory? OK. Lots of us (of a certain age) remember the kind of late-night TV that gave rise to satires like Monster Chiller Horror Theatre on SCTV.  But in the '60s, it wasn't satire: there really were late-night shows like that, with hosts much funnier than the lame movies they hosted.

Living in Chatham, which is near Windsor, which is near Detroit, which is sort-of-near Cleveland, we could at least get scratchy versions of Cleveland radio (WKYC, eleven-double-oh!), and eventually, these guys. Hoolihan and Big Chuck had rattled around in the broadcasting biz for years, doing this n' that, the weather, filling in for sick people. By accident they started doing comedy bits together, and somehow the chemistry was right for some very lame, very funny late night TV. So they kept at it for years and years. Big Chuck went on even longer after Hoolihan left, taking up with a dwarf, but that is most definitely another story.


Every so often I'd be allowed to sleep on the pull-out bed in the den and stay up as late as I wanted, and when that happened, I always watched these guys.
It was plain that they stole shamelessly from Ernie Kovacs (and don't get me started on Kovacs, because I periodically begin to write about him and can't stop: at one point I really, really, really wanted to write a novel about him but couldn't because he doesn't seem to be around any more to be "tapped": did too many people steal from him, I wonder?). Their collapsing cardboard sets and the props that fell to pieces in their hands weren't much better than the paper-and-black-marker that Kovacs was allowed in his meagre budget. Hoolihan and Big Chuck weren't geniuses like Kovacs, but they had a blast doing this show and communicated their laugh-your-ass-off style to a very loyal audience. They were wacky and insane and satirized the Polish culture in and around Cleveland (such as Parma: I remember a long-running soap opera called Parma Place) in a way you'd never get away with now.


I stumbled on this one - don't know if I actually saw it or not, maybe not coz this skit came on a few years after we moved away and I couldn't get Cleveland TV any more. (Or anything else.) But it's one of their best, or, at least, it's pretty good, or, um, OK or something, pretty cheesy actually, but funny as hell.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

You might as well squeeze the cow



I'm not a million years old, but in many ways I might as well be.

I live in an era of tablets, social networks and i-this-and-i-that, and I have (very) imperfectly adapted. But I grew up in something else.




This was the kind of thing I heard, and saw, when I was a child. This is how we got our milk every day. Yes, this way.

Cloppa, cloppa, cloppa down the street every morning, very early. Snorting and whinnying. It was a little girl's paradise. Every morning I'd rush out the front door with a carrot.



Oh that smell, that I love to this day, the smell of horses!

I used to try to tell my children about this, and they rolled their eyes and said I was lying. Surely horse-drawn wagons ended some time in the 1890s.




But they didn't. They delivered milk, not to mention fruits and vegetables, well into the 1960s.

 This is a wagon from Bracebridge Dairy. All these wagons have a three-digit phone number on them, incomprehensible. I remember the name Bracebridge - somewhere in Northern Ontario, I think (a name I haven't heard in so long, like the old street names in Chatham, that it gives me an odd sort of thrill). We had Silverwood Dairies, mostly in southern Ontario but also, I believe, in parts of Alberta out west.



I just thought of something! My first real job was in the purchasing department of Silverwood Dairies in London, Ontario. My job had nothing to do with the milk, but I do remember filling out endless requisition forms for various ingredients. I was also on the taste panel for new products, one of which was artificial ham.




Supposedly, this is the very last Silverwood's wagon in existence. A picture both beautiful and sad. Accounts vary as to exactly when they were phased out: some say 1960, others 1964. If it was '64, I'd have very clear memories of it. But it seems incredible we got our milk this way right into the Space Age.

Bottles were still clinking together then, but no longer had the cream-top bulge that you skimmed with a little dipper. Later when I lived in Alberta, our post-war bungalow had a little cabinet at the back, the place where the milkman left the bottles and picked up the note for next day's order. Without the cabinet, the milk would freeze in the 40-below weather and the bottles burst open.




This is one of my favorites. By the look of the cars, it seems to have been taken in the early 1950s. The horse, looking intimidated, is completely surrounded by traffic.  I wonder how everyone managed. Did the horses have the right of way? What about the road apples?

Did any of them ever spook and take off at a gallop? Horses will be horses, after all.

More to the point, I wonder why everyone seems to have forgotten all about this. Like the elusive, mysterious Skeezix bird, it belongs to a past that now seems more like a mirage.




People collect dairy memorabilia now the way they collect old weather vanes or butter churns. I suppose back then, men with cold hands milked those cows every morning. It would be bottled by some primitive method, sealed with a cardboard cap. This was before the days of "homo milk", milk that had magically been homogenized so that you could no longer skim the rich yellowy cream off the top.





Just a model now, but I remember when it creaked and clopped and smelled like horses.

I wonder if there's still such a thing as "homo milk".


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

Monday, April 9, 2012

Oh my hormones.



Separated at birth, Part 576. . .



Contenders: the new Mad Man at Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce, one very cute but pushy Bronxy Jewish guy named Michael Ginsberg, played by an unknown (to me) named Ben Feldman.

Ferris Bueller! Matthew Broderick when he was still young and dishy.

I'm going to mix these up. You decide.






Brothers? Cousins maybe? Who knows.

















OK, then, at least a stand-in. . .







They're both pretty dreamy. . .





. . . but only this guy is still young.




Bueller?. . . Bueller?. . . Bueller?. . .Bueller?. . .

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Walk Like a Man (with very tight shorts)





Oh my oh my, the things you find on YouTube while looking for something else! After watching a searing episode of Mad Men tonight (it took the first 2 episodes for the current season to really get off the ground, but my scalp was on fire throughout this one), I heard the end theme, was shocked all to hell and had to see if it was a real song. It was called He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss), sung by a group called The Crystals (Da-Doo-Ron-Ron and a few others). The song seemed to echo all the convoluted sadomasochistic dynamics of this sphynx of a show. I was astonished to find out that Carole King wrote the words and that the song was essentially censored for decades and got no air play.

But then one thing led to another, and then this bit of '60s orgiastic glee fell into my lap. It's from an afterschool teenybopper program of the early '60s called Where the Action Is. I remember it. "It's so neat to meet your baby where the action is." The camera pans across the crowd (and who's the guy with 2 broken legs? I don't know), and we see glimpses of Mark Lindsay - wasn't he Paul Revere or something? - and the Supremes, complete with hair bands, kind-a-like I useda wear. 

The dancing deserves its own post, but I'll sum it up by saying that it resembles a vast parade of Scandinavian sweaters, with a lot of blonde hair flying around. Someone (Alexander Pope?) once described dancing as the vertical expression of a horizontal wish. This especially applies to The Jerk, which is what they appear to be doing. Or else they have forgotten their medication. Picture them on the floor in pairs; need I elaborate?
But then comes the main act, which for some reason takes part high on a balcony as if the group is infected with something catching. The Four Seasons kicked ass and were even sexy in a real low-class, skunky kind of way, a knife in your shoe way. Frankie Valli is a god. I forgot what a fox he was, even with his greaser attitude. Who else can sing "walk like a man" in descant soprano and get it across? Most of their hits came out when I was prepubescent and really had no idea what any of it meant. That Cole Porter song "I've Got You Under my Skin" was especially nonsensical to me. Under my. . .?

I had no idea then of the itchy hot screamy jump-off-a-building sensations that were soon to surge through my endocrine system, changing me forever (and I confess that it is not over and that they still surge today). I know now that sex is essentially an itch you cannot scratch. It's like saying, I'll eat this meal here and be done with it, be "full". A musician friend of mine once said that all music is about sex, the essential drive, whatever that is. The pollen-ruptured flower pistil exploding in slow motion, the follicle-stimulating hormones spurting and spraying like something out of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Music tries, it really does, and sometimes it almost gets it. But what is "it"?


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

Bunnies from hell


It's Easter. A time of fun. Of frolic. Of hollow chocolate chickens and marshmallow thingies covered with yellow dye.

But something is wrong here. Very wrong. Someone, somewhere must have a horrifying concept of what the Easter Bunny really looks like.  These photos are documented proof.



Little children understand. This isn't really the Easter Bunny. It's a predatory beast who shows no mercy to sweet little girls who only want a few jelly beans to take home with them.

(This experience was permanently stored in the traumatic memory bank.)



The grafted-on head of molded plastic is a nice touch, but where did it come from? And what's that thing in his hand? It's either an explosive device or a 40-pounder of vodka.



I wouldn't bring this thing out at Halloween. I'd burn it. The little girl seems to have given up hope.



NOW IT CAN BE REVEALED: Peter Cottontail's allegiance to the KKK!



Bringing Easter joy to every girl and boy.


Saturday, April 7, 2012

Walk on water




You shall cross the barren desert,
but you shall not die of thirst.
You shall wander far in safety,
though you do not know the way.









You shall speak your words to foreign men,
and they will understand,
You shall see the face of God and live.





Be not afraid,
I go before you always,
Come follow me,
and I will give you rest.






If you pass through raging waters
in the sea, you shall not drown.
If you walk amidst the burning flames,
you shall not be harmed.








If you stand before the pow'r of hell
and death is at your side,
know that I am with you, through it all





Be not afraid,
I go before you always,
Come follow me,
and I will give you rest.




And blessed are your poor,
for the Kingdom shall be theirs.
Blest are you that weep and mourn,
for one day you shall laugh.



And if wicked men insult and hate you, all because of me,
blessed, blessed are you!




Be not afraid,
I go before you always,
Come follow me,
and I will give you rest.



http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html