You have GOT to try this!

http://www.televisiontunes.com/

Your very own time machine!  This site has EVERY  TV theme song ever written, from Donna Reed and Perry Mason right up to current hit sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory (in case you think I was born in the Cretaceous Period. I was, but never mind.) It even has Apple's Way, a series from some time in the '70s that I thought I had hallucinated.

I remember only one scene from Apple's Way, and I don't know why. George Apple, played by Phgkdlslslmbbkb (who cares?), is the loving patriarch of a family that runs some sort of waterfall company, or maybe makes apples. The family is facing an aching crisis like Betty Jane losing her Brownie uniform. We see George and his wife (played by Blfhdkdkdk) in the bedroom. She's sitting up in bed with an angst-ridden look on her face, her brow puckered. George brings her a cup of tea. There follows a bit of dialogue that will be with me until the day I die:

Wife: How come you always know just what to do when things are not-so-good?

George: Isn't that what it's all about?

I  swear, I remember nothing else from the series, but that was enough.

http://www.televisiontunes.com/Apples_Way.html

                                                                                

  

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

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The best TV theme song of all time!

No doubt about it. Superchicken has it all over Quick Draw McGraw and Deputy Dawg and even Cool McCool for great theme songs, summing up all that was super-cool about that era in animation.

"That" era being the '60s, which immediately gives away my age. Good thing I don't give a rip about it.

It's not just the lightning-fast delivery, it's the split-second montage of images - not equalled or even approached until The Big Bang Theory - that makes this theme song memorable.

I found a clip of Jerry Seinfeld singing it once. I can't, but it's still fun to watch.

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

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Flicka!

http://tvclassicshows.com/free-tv-shows/category/my-friend-flicka/

http://www.myfriendflicka.com/home.html

Oh, how I remember this:  I'd be crouched on the floor in the den in our old house in Chatham, probably working on some project, plasticine or construction paper and glue. The TV would be on in the background, and I'd barely be paying attention to it: Fury was over, along with Sky King and Sea Hunt and all those other things that came on every Saturday morning.

Then I'd hear a familiar glissando on a harp, and a lavishly sentimental theme played by a schmaltzy orchestra. The title would flash on the screen, and I would be in ecstasy.

MY FRIEND FLICKA!

Flicka didn't seem to come on according to any sort of schedule. She was probably shoehorned in whenever there was a half-hour not accounted for by Bozo the Clown, Jingles the Jester, or Captain Jolly (the bizarre lineup of local kids' shows we watched from nearby Detroit). So that made her all the more special. I felt a kind of bliss when Flicka came on, and even though it was in black and white I could see the magnificent mare's sorrel coat burnished in the sun.

The show was all about Flicka, of course (in real life, a prize Arabian named Wahana), but it went deeper than that. This was a psychological Western, much soppier and more sentimental than Have Gun, Will Travel, but still full of significance. It was far more than just the story of a horse and the boy who loved her: it was a coming-of-age tale, sometimes painful, sometimes a little maudlin, but always fascinating to a horse-crazy girl like me.

Johnny Washbrook played Ken McLaughlin, a freckle-faced kid with an irritatingly high voice and a tendency to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. Since something awful was always happening to Flicka (she'd go blind, be stolen, run away, develop colic from a bad apple, or be wrongly accused of assault and battery), he cried a lot. His mother (Anita Louise, I think: a sort of cut-rate Dorothy McGuire) was constantly patting his shoulder and reasuring him, while his Dad, a sort of Dan Blocker stand-in who had played in too many generic Westerns, wanted to make a man out of him by subjecting him to all sorts of brutal trials.

Johnny may have been a soppy character, but he could ride, and he seemed as natural on that horse as a centaur. Flicka was one of those hypersensitive creatures who seems to know what you want before you do. Arabians can be mighty flaky, but also deeply devoted, an ancient trait from those nomadic desert days when a horse didn't dare lose track of its master (or vice-versa).

I knew this show wasn't recent: it had that muddy quality of something made in the mid-'50s. I sort of let it wash over me: I longed for horse shows, for horse books, for horse anything. And while I did finally own a horse for several years, a game and eccentric little trail horse named Rocky, the truth about horses never quite matched the dream.

For horses represented absolute freedom. Freedom from a family system that could be loving, then turn on a dime and be devastatingly abusive. Horses were a refuge for me, and I loved the sound of them, the whinnying and chuffing, the smell of their sweaty hides, the creaking of leather on a Western saddle.

There are strange gaps in my memory about all this, for I don't remember ever receiving any instruction in riding. To be honest, I had to pick it up myself. I was never told how to saddle or bridle a horse, how to curry it or look after its feet, but I don't remember not knowing. For a couple of years I went trail riding at a ranch called the Lazy J, and whenever I had the chance I rode a special horse who seemed to somehow teach me the basics. I never fell off, though Rocky had a tendency to dawdle on the way out and gallop on the way home.

This was a completely unguided trail. You were set loose after paying maybe $5.00. You could, in all honesty, spend hours on it, exploring its twists and turns, except that after a half hour or so the horses got fed up with all that and took off for the barn.

I suppose Rocky was no Flicka, but we knew each other well and were good companions. In truth, he was a replacement for the first horse my Dad bought me, a three-year-old mare who had no training at all. If I tried to mount her, she took off. She pulled like a train, and seemed to hate to have anything on her back. Dad knew nothing about horses and bought the mare for looks and status (his chief business rival had just bought HIS daughter a horse, a real looker named Apache). I was tearful and frustrated, my parents blamed me for not knowing enough about riding, it was touch and go as to whether I'd get a horse at all, and then. . .

"Mom, Dad, can I have Rocky?"

I suppose the story should end with me winning all sorts of prizes and ribbons and stuff like that. I didn't. Rocky loved walking through mud, he pranced ridiculously around the pasture when I tried to put his halter on, he stuck his head in the grain bucket (and wouldn't take it out), making that coffee-grinder sound horses make when they eat.  A few years later he was slowing down - he must have been ten years old, at least, and had been ridden so much before I owned him, it was surprising he had any good humor left in him at all. The place where we boarded him with a lot of rangy Standardbreds closed shop, and everywhere else was far too expensive. My own interest was beginning to thin out as I entered high school and worried about a popularity that eluded me (and still does, I might add).

So we had to sell Rocky. Weirdly, I don't remember a tearful farewell, or any kind of farewell at all. Was that the end of my horse phase? Not really, for I still feel that kinship, and though I ride only occasionally, I always have a feeling of homecoming. A couple of years ago, feeling nostalgic, I tried to find some trace of My Friend Flicka on the net, and came up pretty much empty. There was some information about the lovely novel by Mary O'Hara, and a bit about the movies that were based on it. Nothing about the show. Even now, YouTube only has a horribly grainy, distorted picture of the opening theme, obviously taken by crudely filming a TV screen.

But magic things happen on the net. Suddenly there are entire sites devoted to this show, detailed lists of episodes (39 of them in one year: that was back when a "season" was more than 13 weeks), and all sorts of backstory, including what Johnny Washbrook is doing now (who cares??). Considering the show originally ran 55 years ago, it's amazing anyone's still alive. I found a site that offers streaming video of whole episodes, and that sudsy theme with the sliding strings gives me the same old feeling.

But I have to tell you, the show's a little slow. OK, a lot slow. When you watch so-called "classic" TV, you really do have to slow your brain down to a different pace of storytelling. There appears to be ten minutes or so of plot stretched over the 24 minutes or whatever it was. There's always at least one shot of Flicka galloping furiously, maybe to warn Ken that the mine has caved in (oops, that's Lassie), or to get away from the ubiquitous Bad Guys. There are also a lot of shots of said bad guys galloping furiously toward the bank, or away from the sherriff.

In other words, it's a normal Western except for that gorgeous Arabian, and the little boy with the irritating voice who never stops crying. But I'd watch it endlessly. It was a diamond unexpectedly dropped into my lap. It was my Saturday bliss. It was Flicka.

A moment in time

Tuscadera, wheel-a barra, some place in Mexico. . .

Did somebody say Tom Waits? Did somebody say Bob Dylan? This guy combined the best of both. I mean. . . "Wheeling, West Virginia, with everythin' that's in ya. . . " This was the first, and possibly last master of verbal jazz. (And he sang just as badly as both-a dem guys.)

Outside the Dakota

I wasn't expecting to actually find it. I have sheafs of old poems in a file drawer, probably hundreds of them, many handwritten or typed on an ancient portable typewriter that probably came out of the '50s. That's back when we ripped pages out, crumpled them up in frustration and tried to hit the waste basket on the other side of the room.

Now I just slam mice - not the real kind! Poor mices. I do go through a lot of them, but Martin Scorsese used to throw chairs, and look at him.

What I'm getting to in my usual circuitous way is: while I was writing the John Lennon poem in my last post, I thought of a poem I'd written not long after his death, meaning it must be 30 years old. And by the holy, after only a little rummaging, I found it.

The only common lines are "John, I" and "outside the Dakota". I seem to remember the poem differently. Thirty years will do that.

It was typed on a yellowed piece of three-ring white binder paper. Saved for posterity. Never published. In my life, I've only had about 12 poems published in "little magazines" (boy, are they little: no one reads them!), and the rest, I think, could be called a private collection.

I still feel the same about John. I feel like he's around, and feel foolish for saying so, for even thinking so. I just saw the PBS documentary, LennoNYC, and was both over- and underwhelmed by it, by the grainy home movies, his wicked wit, casually prodigious talent and unbearable sweetness. But he looked old at the end, older than he should, and gaunt. What happened?

Good n' chewy! Good n' chewy! Good n' chewy! Good n' (blplgfffggtfhhht)

Let's chew dem-dar caramels, shall we? Don Draper it ain't, but this is interesting copy reflecting the spirit of the times (maybe late '50s? I have a dim memory of this one.) Some ad exec somewhere must have thought that aggressive repetition (and inane comments about the wholesomeness of pure sugar) would drive home the urge to stuff your mouth with these things. They were worth exactly one cent, so you got a lot of them with your allowance (though not as many as jaw breakers, three for a cent, or those jaw-breaking coconut balls). Your little brown paper bag would be overflowing. Ah! I want a caramel, right now.

If you want to dive into the world of candy, nostalgic or otherwise, this is one of the best blogs I've ever found. You can get lost in it, and the candies are even rated. Great fun, and gorgeous photography.

http://www.candyblog.net/

Once upon a time, and long ago

Every year, around the time of my birthday, the anticipation began to build. For some magical reason, the Mary Martin stage version of Peter Pan would always be broadcast on TV, either on my birthday or the day before or after.

My next-door neighbor/on-again-off-again friend Ann Peet had her birthday the day before mine. In those days, kids didn't go to those big video-parlor/jungle-gym/Build-a-Bear-emporium type of places for a birthday. In fact, my own kids, raised in the '80s, usually celebrated with a few friends (and ancient home movies reveal that they were the same friends, year to year) and a bucket of chicken.

My celebration back in the early '60s was even more basic, but no less magical. Ann and I would always exchange presents which (our mothers decreed) had to cost no more than $2. One year, all unawares, we gave each other Cinderella shoes with high heels made out of clear pink plastic embedded with gold glitter. These were held on with torturous pink elastic bands that left deep welts on your feet. Mine broke on the first day, and Ann had a near-concussion from a bad fall.

My mother made spare ribs. That's what we called them then, not ribs, and decades before all those so-called falling-off-the-bone southern recipes. Through hours of slow baking, she turned out ribs that melted in your mouth. You didn't even have to pick them up. Then a cake, made from scratch, on a glass pedestal. Toffee Swirl, or Spice Cake with buttercream icing.

She baked as a sort of grim religion, and though most of her cooking was good, she was too tight-lipped to really enjoy it. She was dutiful. She didn't like me, wished she had never had me, and I knew it. Had always known it, without being told.

But every year, there was Peter Pan. I can't tell you how completely enchanted I was - how captured Ann Peet and I both were, leaning closer and closer to the set until we nearly fell out of our chairs. It's essentially a filmed stage play, with the staginess left intact, so you have to mentally translate it into the much more intimate medium of TV. But it works anyway, especially because of Mary Martin's magnificent, heartbreaking performance. She's over 40 in this version, her body still girlish - or boyish - and her face androgynous before the term was even known about. And her voice. Oh.

I defy you to listen to the melancholy little lullabye at the end of this clip without crying. A few minutes ago I was sobbing, tears splashing down my face. I was not a happy child. Ours was not a happy home, though we pretended it was. I pretended Dad didn't get drunk every night and abuse me and tell me he wished I had never been born. I had to. No one can let wounds like that show.

We pretended a lot of things: that Mary Martin was a boy, or else we just didn't care if she wasn't. The loudly-proclaimed theatrical lines didn't matter. And when Tinkerbell began to wink out and die, Peter turned to the audience and said in a voice full of urgency, "Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!"

Then we heard something. A faint spectral clapping behind us, slowly growing faster, and louder.

I turned. There was my mother in the doorway, my mother the grim un-nurturing one who looked after me as a mother cat might look after a kitten, except less warmly. And, incredibly, she was exclaiming,

"Yes, yes, I do believe in fairies. I do, I do!"

The Beatles - Rock & Roll Music

These blogs have a life of their own. This was going to be a serious treatise on "the writer's life" (or should I say, The! Writer's! Life!), but somehow it didn't happen. It's evolving into some sort of nostalgia column, which is a bit alarming on my part.

But oh, these guys.

I stumbled on A Hard Day's Night the other evening, and was quickly sucked in. It had that heady, exuberant feeling the Beatles exuded during the early years, before they lapsed into their jaded I'm a Loser/Baby's in Black/You've Got to Hide your Love Away period. This clip is one of the best compilations I've seen, complete with fluffy head-shaking (which drove the girls mad) and a kind of mad joy. They'd made it past the skiffle clubs of Merseyside and had gone on to (as John put it) "the toppermost of the poppermost!"

Pay attention to 1:18 in this clip: Paul absolutely cracks up at something John has played on the keyboard. These guys were brothers, and sometimes experienced the rancor and Cain-and-Abel rage of blood kin. Yet, separately, neither could write or perform in that same focused, fruitful way. The shock is that they almost never composed together: they wrote songs "at" each other, put them out there and said, "What do you think?", or even "Try and stop me." This jealousy and tension pulled genius out of them that never would have manifested any other way.

OK then, I've come as far as Mad Men and the Beatles. Do you know what I'm avoiding? I do. I am avoiding the welter of pain and residual anguish of being published for the first couple of times. It was a heady experience, to be sure, but at a certain point I fell through the ice. How on earth am I to comment on "the writer's life" without mentioning this? But if I make too much of it, I will be worse box office poison than I already am. Writers must never let on that their experiences have been anything but totally positive. Only ingrates complain.

The truth is, I have a manuscript that I believe is my very finest work, and I have no idea what to do with it, who to contact. I can't do this alone! I am turned away everywhere, before the thing has even been considered. Sorry, we're full up.

I feel as if I am recreating the cold shoulder I have experienced all my life, from every direction and in every area. Is there a way out? I have to pretend I don't need this, pretend it doesn't hurt and I am fine and I don't mind only writing about the past and writing about the Beatles.

This thing is going to die on the vine. In the words of the Beatles: "Help! I need somebody." After becoming a published author, after having my dream come true twice, it's an awful position to be in.

Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong. . .

I'm really sorry about this, but some evil seed in me made me post it.

This is what kids' TV was like in the '50s. I have dim memories of Miss Frances, but mostly I remember my older brother making horrible, hilarious fun of her.

She speaks in a dragging voice, repeats everything ad nauseam, and generally acts as if she's facing an audience of drooling subhumans. When I showed a bit of this to my 6-year-old granddaughter (no doubt the target audience back then, though it probably went up to age 10 or 11), her jaw went slack and her eyes glazed over. She looked at me doubtfully and asked, "Was this a real show?"

It does resemble satire, does it not? She must repeat the instructions for her fantastically difficult sandwich 5 or 6 times. "Bread, peanut butter, and. . . what was the other one? You can't remember?" I think this was originally a PBS show. Or something. It makes Captain Kangaroo look like he was shot out of a cannon.

I've seen the sort of thing Caitlin watches: Disney productions such as The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (male duos being inexplicably popular, along with females with special powers: hey, let's give the girls some good role models! Except that they're always princesses). They're snappy, every line a joke, incredibly fast-moving and full of silly, pie-in-the-face gags. They also feature washed-up character actors like John Schuck (the butt of every joke in the show I saw yesterday). There is an invisible line between Tree House (a Canadian preschool channel featuring Max and Ruby, Toopy and Binoo, and Dora the Explorer) and Disney Channel fare, but once you've crossed it, you'll never turn back.

Well, in MY day we did things differently. Until the advent of snappy shows such as Roger Ramjet, Bullwinkle, Underdog, Linus the Lionhearted, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Superchicken, we watched Captain Kangaroo, a show almost as primitive as Miss Frances' lunatic asylum fare. At least there were other characters involved: Mr. Moose; Bunny Rabbit; Grandfather (the clock, who only woke from his slumber if you said, "One, two, three. . . Grandfather!"), and the ubiquitous Mr. Green Jeans. There were little skits, usually ending with a thousand ping-pong balls falling on the Captain, and also little -what were they, anyway? Vignettes? If I could find a video, I'd post it, but most of these shows went out live and disappeared forever.

There'd be a pre-recorded song, with a disembodied pair of hands doing actions, or trains made of construction paper being dragged across a backdrop of green felt. One of them was about Four Little Taxis: "a yellow one, a green one, a blue one, a purple one!" One by one, the cardboard taxis drove away, until there were "no little taxis sitting on the curb. . . no yellow one, no green one. . ." It was heart-wrenching. But then the narrator would lift us out of our despair: "But wait! The taxis are coming back!" That's about as traumatic as the show got.

I only remember fragments, with fuzzy acres of oblivion in between. Binnie, the Magic Bunny. A song about Dallas (obviously, before the Kennedy assassination): "Big D, little-a, double-l-a/Big D, little-a, double-l-a". These soul-deadening little productions were enlivened by Tom Terrific and his pal, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog: cartoons made of line drawings that moved with all the sophistication of a flip-book.

And the crafts! We loved to make fun of the Captain's nasal, Brookly-esque accent as he talked about "cahhhd-bwwoaaaad" and making pumpkins out of paper that was "aaaaah-raaaahnge". He used paper fasteners on everything, especially things that were supposed to twirl around. We couldn't even find paper fasteners. They're lame metal things that sort of spread out, and they certainly don't allow for twirling. But sometimes we found a big "cahhhd-bwwoaaaad" box in the garage and began to cut windows in it with a steak knife, usually with disastrous results.

OK, so what did all this do to aid the developlent of the average kid-brain in that era? Not much. When the smart-ass cartoons of the mid-to-late '60s came along, they were more than welcome. Beany and Cecil always operated on two levels (like most kids' movies do today), and there were references only the adults would get. Supposedly. When we recently saw a show with a Chinese prince in it, I said, "Hey, maybe that's Prince Chow Mein." Caitlin laughed uproariously, immediately getting a joke that would have sailed over my head in l963. (As a matter of fact, I stole it from Beany and Cecil.)

Kids don't get to choose their entertainment. Some bigwig moguls up at Disney sit around a table, and maybe have focus groups/guinea pigs testing it all out. Is it "better", "worse", or just different? It's fast. Fast-fast-fast, and all sort of run together, so you won't notice there's no story.

Girls are reaching puberty when they're still in the Jolly Jumper these days, and no one knows why. If they weigh 200 pounds, it's genetic and nothing to do with the fact that they live exclusively on sugar and fat (but the Twinkies are fortified with Vitamin C). If they're exposed to Lady Gaga flashing her crotch every 2 seconds, it has no effect. If their parents are so preoccupied with hanging on to their second-rate, fading careers that the kids spend 11 hours a day sexting each other and planning to commit suicide on Skype, hey, that's just life in 2010.

If they're being raised by the TV, well, hey, wasn't I raised by the TV too? I think that explains everything.

*****************************************************

POSTSCRIPT. With my usual ferretlike curiosity, I dug up many more Miss Frances clips, incuding a whole episode in which she takes off her watch to fingerpaint. At the end of these sessions, she'd tell the kiddies to drag their mothers in to listen to her lecture on proper parenting (mothering, back then), while they ran outside to play. This one stressed the need for the children to "rest". They played so hard, Miss Frances claimed, that when they came back in the house, they just played some more and wore themselves right out!

We won't get into the fact that, with rare exceptions, kids weren't fat then because they were outside running their little legs off. In fact, the need to REST seems totally foreign today. "Make sure that the children lie down for a little while on the davenport," she said.

DAVENPORT?? What the hell is that? I had to look it up. I used to think "chesterfield" was out of date.

Jesus, that's funny!

This is the way my mind works, when it works at all.

I started watching a six-hour documentary about Monty Python. SIX hours. I couldn't believe I was sitting through it all, and at several points was going to ditch it for Dateline or Hoarders or something esoteric like that.

These guys just look so bloody old now, and one of them is dead. John Cleese is unrecognizable, as if he belongs in a home. Eric Idle looks like George Harrison if George Harrison had lived to be 100, Michael Palin and Terry Jones still look alike, ha ha ha. They gabbed and they gabbed like tiresome old men, which they are. There were a few welcome clips, but mostly it was people blathering on and on and on about what their favorite "bit" was. Half of them I didn't even know, but I guess their opinion mattered, or they were cool or something.

They all liked stuff like the parrot sketch, Lumberjack Song, fish slapping dance and Upper Class Twit of the Year. The ones everybody likes. Why was this show even made? Why wasn't it edited down to a nice pithy hour and a half?

I liked the one about the fatal joke, but it wasn't just a sketch, it was a whole episode that brought in World War II (the group was obsessed with World War II) and Hitler with funny subtitles:

Hitler: I cut my dog's nose off.

Crowd: How does he smell?

Hitler: Terrible!

Mostly the six-hour endurance test made me realize how much time had passed, and how uneven the several Python movies were. There were some really disgusting passages I'd forgotten about, such as the Holy Grail scene where Sir Whatsisname got his arms and legs chopped off and was hopping around gushing blood. Blecccch. The Meaning of Life was the worst, though, with someone's liver being carved out, and then that scene with the fat man exploding, just about the worst thing I've ever seen.

But I did like Life of Brian. I thought Life of Brian was profound, and at times bordered on the reverent. I don't think they were dissing Jesus so much as dissing all the pompous assholes who pretend to know what he was about (if he existed at all: might he have been just the distillation of all our most aching desires?).

That got me going on a post I did on a former blog, the blog where I was chased out of town. It was all about drawings and paintings depicting the Laughing Jesus. There are dozens of them, seemingly, all along the same lines, as if the artists traced them.

Then I started wondering about St. Margaret and the Dragon. When I looked up St. Margaret, there were about 14 of them, so I got discouraged and quit.

Eric Idle still goes around milking Python with a show called Spamalot, though the rest of them don't seem to mind (maybe he bought them out). He must be a fucking millionaire by now, so this must be an attempt to recapture his glory days.

I think Graham Chapman had the right idea.

An Ethiopian in the fuel supply

I don’t know what got me onto this. My Dad used to sit at the dinner table, soused, and monologue by the hour. As his captive audience, we were expected to listen. If we didn’t, we risked his wrath.

We listened.

He kept talking about a comedian from the 1930s, his favourite, who spoke in a nasal drawl and made the English language do back-flips and double-twists. He was constantly hooking his top hat on his cane behind his head. He juggled. He had some negative traits that my Dad loved, and was known to mutter, “Can’t stand kids and dogs.”

Along with maxims like “never give a sucker an even break” and “you can’t cheat an honest man,” his legend included bizarre pool routines (in which the cue somehow ended up twisted like a corkscrew) and card games where he held five aces. But most of all, this man drank. And drank. Until at age 68, heart, liver, lungs and even mind gave way, and he died of rampant alcoholism.

W. C. Fields had a Dickensian childhood, which was perhaps why he was so superb at playing Wilkins Micawber in the movie version of David Copperfield. (I saw this just the other day on TCN. The potential for semi-dramatic acting in this role was almost heartbreaking. He could have been so much more than a crabby old drunk who knew how to juggle.) Fields ran away from his drunken lout of a father (do drunken louts run in families, I wonder?) at age eleven. Cadged his way through the slums of Philadelphia like the Artful Dodger, until one day when he attended a sleazy circus and saw someone throw so many balls in the air – and catch them – that they blurred together.

So the lad started practicing. First with two lemons, probably stolen. Then other fruits (casaba melons? Let’s not get too literal here). He would balance a large stick (like a pool cue) on the end of his toe, toss it up in the air, and attempt to catch it on his toe, raking his shins open in the process.

Oh all right, let’s skip all this garbage and go on to his spectacular career as a master juggler at the Ziegfeld Follies, where someone “discovered” him for the movies. His silents weren’t much, just displays of dexterity and tomfoolery. But in his first talkie, audiences sat up. No one had ever spoken like that before, and never would again.

Fields kept a mistress for fourteen years, one Carlotta Monti, a “dusky beauty” (in his words) whom he nicknamed Chinamen for her vivid style of dress. He was constantly derailing her infant career as a singer and actress, foreshadowing I Love Lucy by decades. Monti was as dependent on Fields as he was on her, but for different reasons.

She left behind a ghostwritten memoir which has no sense of her voice, but which is packed with anecdotes, some of which might even be true. This was later made into a movie with Rod Steiger and Valerie Perrine called W. C. Fields and Me.

I can only serve up a slice of Monti, before sharing my own rather eccentric Best of Fields list.:

“Woody (her name for him: rhymes with ‘moody’) didn’t drive too many women to distraction, but among those he did were the script girls – through his ad libbing. The script for one scene in Poppy called for him to say, ‘I will now play the Moonlight Sonata.’ It was a simple line, but, instead of delivering it, he mumbled, ‘I will now render the allegro movement from the Duggi Jig Schreckensnack opera of Gilka Kimmel, an opus Piptitone.’

The script girl gasped, and asked how to spell the words. Sutherland (the director) wanted an interpretation. Woody shrugged, and admitted, ‘I don’t know myself what it means. To tell you the truth, it just popped out. But leave it in, Eddie, it’s got a nice lilt to it.”

Eddie left it in.”

This man practiced a form of spontaneous, convoluted verbal jazz, almost impossible to reproduce here. One of the first Fields movies I ever saw was a little-known classic called Mississippi, ostensibly starring a very young Bing Crosby in magnificent voice. But Fields, as the riverboat captain, easily stole every scene he was in.

The movie not only included one of his best card game scenes ever (including the astonishing statement “the man who holds the first four aces wins”), but featured rambling, probably mostly improvised reminiscences about his youth as a dauntless Indian fighter.

“Grabbing my bowie knife, I cut a path through a solid wall of human flesh. . . dragging my canoe behind me!” In another version, he has “my canoe under one arm and a Rocky Mountain goat under the other.” By the end of the movie he’s scared to death by a cigar store Indian, and quickly recants: “I would no more think of harming a hair on a redskin’s head than sticking a fork in my mother’s back.”

My other favorite, which I watched on late-night TV in 1965, was The Big Broadcast of 1938, one of a series of mediocre, wildly popular “Big Broadcast” films. There was something of a Fields revival going on then, and I saw most of the better-known ones like The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee (in which he and Mae West outdrawled each other). But there was something that grabbed me about this movie, in which Bob Hope played his first starring role as an insecure host on a cruise ship. Just witnessing Bob Hope fumble and fail, all his lame jokes falling flat, was gratifying enough, but he also sang Thanks for the Memory (NOT “memories”) with the delightful Shirley Ross (NOT DorothyLamour, who played one of his several ex-wives).

But Fields, oh, Fields! Before he lands on the deck of the ship in a flying golf cart, he plays a round in which the ball behaves like one of his juggled objects. When he pours sand out of his golf shoe at the end of the scene, various objects like live frogs drop out (“Hmmmm, so that's what happened to that tongue sandwich”). It’s the humming and muttering and fiddling and “drat”s and "Godfrey Daniels" that make this scene, and I swear I can’t begin to reproduce them. Then, delight of delights, he does his infamous poolroom scene, once again dominating a picture which has such dismal clangers as a performance of Wagner by Nazi sympathizer Kierstan Flagstad (wearing horns and a breastplate and brandishing a spear), and an awful love song called Don’t Tell a Secret to a Rose by a clearly-gay non-Latino called Tito Guizarre.

My brother, who was drunk at the time, came in halfway through the movie and we guffawed through the rest of it. I recorded the soundtrack on our old Webcor reel-to-reel with the five-pound microphone, and listened to it endlessly. I had become a Fields fan for life.

Then I promptly forgot all about him.

I started to think he was kind of offputting, which he was. I had read a couple of biographies, and his self-destructive drinking and the horrifying collapse of his once-athletic body at the end of his life was beyond disturbing. His “friends” sneaked alcohol into the sanitarium as he lay dying, hallucinating that vultures were coming to get him. Carlotta Monti, aware that the sound of rain was one of the only things that helped him sleep, stood outside his room with a hose and kept up a continual light patter on the roof.

So he died, passed into legend, and – what? What got me onto this bizarre topic? One day I tried to get a DVD of Mississippi, and found that it had disappeared. It was never shown on TV, perhaps due to cringe-inducing black stereotypes. After much sleuthing, I found a crummy bootleg copy on eBay. Someone must have held a movie camera in front of a TV or something. But it was barely watchable, and I began to understand my fascination.

This tough, lonely, cynical, oversensitive, supremely gifted man, this curmudgeon whose friends didn’t understand him but still loved him lavishly, was one of a kind. No one could have invented him: he would have been completely implausible. But my favourite thing about Fields is this: in Robert Lewis Taylor’s early Fields bio, he tells this heartwarming story.

“Many supporters of Chaplin have long resented Fields’ notoriety. Perhaps the best testimonial to Chaplin’s greatness is the fact that Fields was incapable of watching him perform for more than a few minutes. The virtuosity of the little fellow’s pantomime caused Fields to suffer horribly. One evening, a few years before Fields’ death, he was persuaded to attend a showing of early Chaplin two-reelers. At a point in the action where Chaplin suffocated a 300-pound villain by pulling a gas street lamp down over his head, the laughter rose in deafening crescendo, and Fields was heard to cough desperately.

‘Hot in here,’ he muttered to his companion, who was fortified against the cooling system with a heavy tweed jacket. ‘I need air.’ Fields left the theatre and waited outside in his Lincoln. Later, asked what he thought of Chaplin’s work, he said, ‘The son of a bitch is a ballet dancer.’

‘He’s pretty funny, don’t you think?’ his companion went on doggedly.

‘He’s the best ballet dancer that ever lived,’ said Fields, ‘and if I get a good chance I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Up north

My mother had a funny way of saying things

she'd pronounce them a little off,

and when she'd start talking about "going up north"

we knew she meant "up at Bondy"

her name for our paradise.



I don't know if the perceptions of children are
compressed because of their short time on earth,
or infinitely vast, as yet unimpeded by "you can't" and "don't".

"Up at Bondy" meant Nancy and Brian
and a couple of weeks of unlimited freedom
and running around in our bathing suits
jumping off the dock


the magic of July nights
of bullfrogs booming like bassoons

of lying face-up on the swell of the hill
and staring at stars ripped free of all veils,
with the eerie music of loon-flutes quivering.


I can't tell you about the smell of small-mouth bass
in a pail, fishy and sandy
and fried up in butter
and heady smells of bacon
and burnt coffee
and the perpetual barbecue.
Great slabs of meat, porterhouse steaks
and kippers for breakfast
I don't remember eating anything else
but potato chips and brandy snaps.


Bondi was playing horses with Nancy
(we wanted a horse so bad we could die)
we knew it would never happen
so we would BE horses
prance like wild things on the ridge,

not knowing we'd never
be this carefree again


I can't express a summer in my mind,
the smell of lakewater, Noxzema cream
on burnt skin,
and a Camelot built from wet sand.
I can't express a memory
of a red bathing suit
and a baby kingbird
somehow, impossibly sitting
on my outstretched hand

like some Bondi falcon.

I learned lore from Nancy
whose grandfather was an opera singer
and when it rained, we'd
climb up the shelves of the linen closet
into a hole, an attic trove
of old things, dusty costumes
and dried-out makeup kits
from Gilbert and Sullivan productions


a gramophone you had to crank
and impossibly old records:
Keep the Home Fires Burning
My Little Grey Home in the West
(and our favorite)
A Cornfield Medley
which was shockingly racist:
"Some folks say dat a nigger don't steal. . . "
We saw that the record
thick like a slab of slate
had grooves on only one side
No one had thought to record on the other side
and I was later to learn it was made
in the 1800s

when sound in a bottle was still a miracle.


The two weeks "up at Bondy" blew by too fast
Nancy and Brian went back to being
the owner's kids,
and even on this day they own it,
still own Bondi:


it exists in an unchanged form
that seems like time suspended.

Humans hang on to Paradise, to a
place or state of mind eternal
as if it represents the ultimate reward,
finally, finally letting down the burden
of constant change.


I would go back to Bondi,
I will go back to Bondi,
and I know I will find it pristine,
with a few things added, a horse arena here,
an indoor swimming pool there,
so people don't need to rely on the weather;
Nancy and Brian still live there, but they
aren't the Nancy and Brian of old,

nor can they be,

any more than I am that child who dreamed
she was a ridge runner

and held a bird in her hand.

http://www.bondi-cottage-resort.com/

Rocky, run

Like almost every girl I knew, I longed for a horse of my own. I'd read all the Marguerite Henry stories, Misty of Chincoteague, King of the Wind, and Walter Farley and Black Beauty, so I knew I understood them.

But I also knew I stood a fat chance of actually getting one: they cost too much money, my Dad kept saying; we'd have to board him; I'd never really had riding lessons and couldn't handle much more than an easy tourist trail.

All true.

So what was it that changed his mind? His business rival bought a horse for HIS daughter, and suddenly the race was on to find a tonier, more expensive

one.

How I ended up with Rocky (who was neigh-ther) was this. Dad got me a very beautiful but semi-wild two-year-old palomino mare named Pot 'o Gold. I discovered the first time I tried to ride her that she hated anyone getting on her back. When I put my foot in the stirrup, she took off.

Dad thought this was my fault. He had the vendor's daughter work with me, but the thing is, she was much more experienced, practically a trick rider, able to achieve a flying vault, catching Goldie just before her hindquarters faded off into

the sunset.

Finally we had to admit defeat. I couldn't have a horse. I was desolate. I kept nagging and whining and saying we could buy a better horse, a tamer horse. A horse I could handle, a horse I knew personally! Suddenly the light bulb went off over my

head.

At the Lazy J Ranch, where I spent most of my Saturdays riding the trails and helping the staff groom and muck out, I had a favorite, a strawberry roan named Rocky. I couldn't say exactly why I liked him so much: he wasn't much to look at, a bit stocky, Shetland pony genes poking through the one-quarter Quarter Horse of his

heritage.

Maybe because he was a rent-a-horse ridden by dozens of non-riders a day, he was stubborn. He did weird things. He pawed at streams until the water flew. He also pawed at mud.

He had a ridiculous whinny, sort of a show-off whinny, and when I chased him around the pasture with a bridle, he arched his neck and did a ridiculous takeoff of a show horse high-step. Just to annoy me, he pretended to spook at harmless things like gum wrappers.

He had a rubbery pink-and-grey nose, perfect for kissing. He was a shade over 14 hands, small enough for me to just hop on.

"I want Rocky," I told my Dad.

"You want Rocky? Can't we do better than that?"

"No. I'm used to him. He knows me."

My Dad was naive enough to offer the same amount for Rocky that he had paid for

Goldie. Horses were horses, weren't they?

It was the beginning of several years of idyllic moseying along beside the railroad tracks (and I have no idea how we handled the trains). Of picnic lunches in the fragrant grass, my girlfriend Shawne sitting behind me and hanging on tight as we bumped along.

Time stopped when I was with Rocky. I groomed his white-mottled red coat until it (sort-of) shone. I cleaned his feet with a hoof pick, tenderly removing stones. I would have braided his mane, but someone at the stable kept shaving it off so he looked like a merry-go-round horse.

There were a couple of hair-raising episodes with Rocky that were at odds with his implacable reputation. Once in a while in the summer I rode him the two miles or so from the stable where we boarded him (along with a bunch of tall Standardbred race horses: he became the stable mascot) to my house on a quiet street in

Chatham.

Neighbors were a little disconcerted by the sight of a horse on their street. Silverwood Dairies had stopped delivering milk by horse and wagon several years earlier; what was this nag doing on the street, leaving great steaming deposits to step over?

It was grand to promenade the street like that. Once I even took him to my high school, and he was an instant hit. It was the one time I felt popular.

Anyway, this particular time, he seemed to be perfectly content in our back yard mowing the lawn while my dog sniffed around his heels and (disgustingly) ate some of his poo.

As we had dinner, with the usual genteel classical music playing in the background, I suddenly heard a sound like coconuts being hit together. Buddle-up, buddle-up. We saw a reddish blur out the window.

My mother exclaimed, "Oh dear Lord, it's the horse."

Rocky had somehow broken free, and was high-tailing it back to the barn. Literally! His tail was held as high as an Arabian's, his head thrown back

majestically.

We jumped in the car in a panic, trying to stop him or at least get him to slow down. He was galloping flat-out in the exact centre of the road, getting more and more lathered. My Dad tried frantically to swerve him over to the shoulder so he wouldn't be hit.

When he saw the big barn full of Standardbreds, he immediately checked his pace. Threw up his massive head and let go with one of those ridiculous whinnies. Then trotted elegantly through the gate.

The other episode is not so funny, one of those things that ended well, but only just. I had a bad habit of riding Rocky in unusual places (railroad tracks?). One afternoon we clopped our way through a cow pasture where a gorgeous Jersey named Bambi lived. The mud was maybe an inch or two deep, no

big deal.

Then - I will never forget this, a feeling like an elevator dropping away beneath me. My horse slid down into an invisible bog, and was instantly mired up to his belly. I had no idea what to do but hold on as he bucked and heaved, trying to pull himself

out.

I wondered if I should try to get off, try to get help, get a rope or something, but no, Rocky insisted on lurching ever more violently to free himself. My heart was in my throat. I was sure he'd break his leg and have to be put to sleep.

Then, with a great shuddering heave and a sucking sound such as you've never heard, he was out. We both stood there trembling. He had his head down and I gasped with fear, wondering how he could have come through such a thing

unhurt.

Then, beginning at his nose, he began to shake himself, the great wave travelling from his head to his shoulders to his whole body to his tail. He must have taken shaking lessons from a wet dog. Remarkably, he seemed to be OK, though coated with glistening brown as if he had been dipped in chocolate.

I carefully hosed him down, though it took an hour, since he stopped me several times to shake everything off. I was so proud of him, so relieved, and my, didn't he look handsome, all wet, his sorrel coat glistening in the summer

sun.

Feeling that a reward was due, I turned him loose in the pasture. He walked around with his nose to the ground until he found a suitable patch of mud.

Carefully lowered himself down.

And rolled until he was so upholstered that I could barely tell he was a horse at all.

Hey, if you're not cool enough to know what Mad Men is, why are you reading this?

Let us now praise famous men. Famous men like Jon Hamm. I don't care if he has a silly name. Where has he been all my life?

Jon Hamm is one of those actors who was sleeping in a pupa for 10 years before finding the role that not only defines him, but a whole era. The show's executive producer Matt Weiner has been quoted as saying, "Mad Men IS Jon Hamm."

Watching the show is like the Time Tunnel or something. I step across the thresshold into the wonderful land of Ahhhhhhhs. Period details don't just leap out at me, they jab me: the "Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy" TV campaign jingle I hadn't heard since I was five; the "High Flight" TV signoff while Pete Campbell was screwing an anonymous sweet patootie (with her elderly mother on the other side of a folding door); Don Draper's little kids running around with dry cleaning bags over their heads.

I could go into all the machinations and intrigues of the advertising agency Sterling Cooper, but let's not, shall we? Recently they canned art director Sal Romano, my next-to-Don favorite, maybe for being gay or too nice or something. Meantime, Don trudges on. At the end of the third season, his company has disintegrated, his wife has run off with some ugly-looking Senator whom she doesn't love, and he has run out of Lucky Strikes for the third time today.

There is a weirdness about Mad Men (i. e. Robert Morse as the eccentric company Zen master, Bertram Cooper: where have we seen him before? He starred in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the early '60s, perfect period timing, not to mention Mad Men irony), a sense that, in spite of all the deja vu, we've never quite covered this territory before. A man can get his foot run over by a John Deere tractor during a drunken office party (causing the cynical Roger Sterling to quip, "It's like Iwo Jima out there"). A thick-headed husband can get brained with a vase. But most of all. . . most of all, we can spend some quality time with Don.

Don has many faces, the hardened masked face of the office, the creased-brow expression during the numerous boyhood flashbacks (the only part of the show I really detest), the softer face when he is with his kids (and in spite of being emotionally crippled, he really does love his kids), the roughed-up, carnivorous, rrrrrrrrArrrrrrw! face when he's in bed with some woman (a different woman every week). Yes, in bed he's a whole 'nother guy. Every once in a while, he even screws his wife. God, what a body, and he has that good man-smell that somehow mysteriously comes across on the screen. (Men either smell good - George Clooney, Harrison Ford - or they don't - Matthew McConnaghey, Brad Pitt). Just enough hair, and a build that is devastating but somehow doesn't call attention to itself.

So what would it be like to have sex with Don Draper? Has he read the Kinsey Report? (I don't mean that loser guy in the office.) Does he know what a clitoris is? Does he, "you know"? Do "everything", as Elaine used to say on Seinfeld? They can't show too much, of course. But it's implied. "I might scream," one of his conquests, a naive young school teacher, gasps. "Don't," Don replies. Another time, well, he ties someone up, but she deserves it because she's such a slut.

And what is Jon Hamm reallyreally like? The photos I see show a goofier person, his smile a little too broad. A person who can't quite believe his good fortune at being famous, at having a really juicy and challenging part at last (and according to legend, he spent a whole decade as a waiter). I think he's probably pretty hyper. But seems to have one steady girlfriend, un-Draperlike. He gave a long interview for the Advocate, and for a moment I was heartbroken, afraid it was maybe Sal he loved all along. But then they mentioned the girl friend, and everything was all right again.

Maybe. (But who is she?? I'll scratch her eyes out!)

The thing about Jon Hamm is that he is a somewhat more rugged version of Anthony Perkins in his youth. Perkins had a sort of supernatural beauty before age and AIDS withered him up into an old walnut. Hamm naturally has a sort of GQ look, that "I was born to wear a tux" aura that is so rare in men. Cary Grant had it, but I've never felt any sort of attraction to him (in spite of the fact that he was probably also a good-smelling man, if gay).

So how does JH smell? A hint of warm sandalwood; some aftershave remeniscent of Old Spice; a neutral deodorant we can't name; a soupcon of bourbon, but maybe from yesterday; Lucky Strikes, not the smoke but the unburned shreds of tobacco with its golden, molasses-y scent; fine quality wool; leather jacket worn earlier today; clean shirt, with the man-smell just barely sifting through.

Sheer torture.