Since those strange and tawdry days of Charlie McCarthy and (shudder) Jerry Mahoney, ventriloquism seems to have gone underground. It still shows up on novelty shows like America's Got Talent (or Britain, or Ukraine, or Mongolia or wherever), an update of the old vaudeville show glorified in the '60s by Ed Sullivan.
Though the ultimate ventriloquist was Senor Wencez with his "hand puppet" (literally, a puppet made out of his hand, which is a device that still delights toddlers), I found a particularly juicy sub-genre of the art in Christian ventriloquism. Perhaps dogma sounds better coming out of the mechanical mouth of a wood-carven mutant.
Most of these poses are from record albums that enjoyed huge popularity (I nearly said "pup-ularity") in the 1950s and '60s. No doubt these were small labels, for how else would "Do You Know Jesus?" starring Uncle Les and Aunt Nancy Wheeler (Featuring Randy) find an audience? Quite a few of these acts proclaim family relationships, mostly uncles and aunts who somehow produced a ball-jointed wooden robot with their contribution of DNA. And I have never been able to figure out how it is that a ventriloquist's dummy would work on a record album. It wouldn't matter if you moved your lips, for sure.
I can't help but notice that all these dummies look suspiciously alike. Creepy, I mean. That mausoleum look on the puppeteer's face is mighty strange, as if she's taking a day off from Madame Tussaud's. Both dummy and "manipulator" (the technically-correct term) seem to have the same hairdresser. (By the way, like harness-makers in the early 20th century, did the dummy-maker go into decline when audiences became more sophisticated? Or did they all flee to Bible camp?)
Then we have squicky little Marcy, who has so many albums that I had to pare it down to a couple. I can imagine she had a squeaky irritating voice as she prattled on about Jesus and salvation. The manipulator has perfect helmet-like Mary Tyler Moore hair, placing this somewhere in the early 1960s. I wonder if these records were discounted at Bible camp. I know they still show up in garage sales and thrift shops, eagerly snarfed up by collectors, else why would we be enjoying this display right now?
Marcy sings some more. Yikes. We see her standing up here, which is odd for a dummy, but I'm not sure the puppeteer has so much skill as to make her mouth move without any physical contact. That WOULD be squicky, if not downright supernatural.
Obviously a bargain basement record, with an incomprehensible cover. Why is it that all these things exude so much guilt? I guess because that's what religion is all about. There are many red arrows that say "AND" on them, and many grainy b + w photos of dummies, plus choirs. And, as it says in the upper left corner, it is all FUN.
Maybe the ick factor never even occurred to anyone back then, but the thought of Uncle "D" with a girl on one knee and a boy on the other, a huge Bible in front of them and stained glass in the background is alarming today. The "D" seems to indicate a suspicious anonymity, like something from an AA meeting where people are afraid to give their last name.
Oh, rapture! Grace and Wilbur Thrush have a whole family of gaudy dum-dums, not to mention furries such as you'd see in one of those bizarre conventions (and you can't tell ME that funny business doesn't go on in those). What's that on the left, a chess game? I'll have to blow this one up and try to get the details.
Woah.
This is a very odd kind of biker ventriloquist act, with Butch and Suzi (both girls, I assume) sitting on Maralee Dawn's lap. This is an obvious pseudonym to hide her Angel Mama past. They all sit precariously atop a cardboard-cutout Harley, with the caption Featuring The Country Ridin' Preacher, which I won't even try to explain.
It's Sunday School pageant time, with a man dressed in his wife's bathrobe and a kitchen towel. His little disciple is no doubt meant to represent a shepherd boy of some sort. The title is hard to read, but it goes (as they say) something like this: Dan Butler and Louie tell the Bible Classics, Volume III.
No shit, VOLUME III! Volumes I and II must've been hot sellers at Bible camp, or maybe they gave them away free. I must try to track some of these down on YouTube. I need some religion about now to salvage this bizarre day before it sinks in a quagmire of wretched depravity.
I've saved the best until last: the inimitable Erick on the Rainbow label, which (believe me) does not mean the same thing now as it did then. Or maybe it did, who knows. Erick's routine is called Pastor Pickin', which sounds so sinister I don't want to go into it.
My personal favorite. The seeming eroticism of this, the way their foreheads touch, the way they lean into each other, suggests a love that dares not speak its name, because it's not just interspecies, it's - well, what DO you call having a thing for a ventriloquist's dummy? I'm not sure there is even a word for it. It took me quite a while to realize that Erick and his manipulator Beverly Massagee are PRAYING together, that's all. I mean it. And it's on the Rainbow Label, too.
The Wallendas and the queer melancholy that trails behind the circus performer seem to be a recurring obsession. I hate circuses. As a child I hated them, and was thought odd. It was that smell, the smell of shit and failed animals. Living in a small town, the circuses I saw were moth-eaten and tawdry, which is perhaps what it's all about anyway. Elephants tied up. Lions waiting for a lunge that never happens. Mean alcoholic clowns. Oh, the clowns especially - they are a nightmare.
There is YouTube footage of Karl Wallenda falling to his death from a tightrope suspended between two high-rises in Rio de Janiero or somewhere, I mean the real thing - it couldn't be faked, he falls. It's the end for him. And his grandson or great-grandson Nik Wallenda keeps on trying for it. One wonders at the symbolism. Trying for a fall, or, like a compulsive gambler, going on and on until he loses everything. Craven cowards that we are, we still risk death each time we walk out the door. Or don't walk out the door. We don't test it, don't push the risk, unless you count too many sour-cream-and-onion chips or hours spent sitting in a chair.
"Fails" are great tests, tests of character I mean, and most of us fail them. It's just too painful, everybody watching. Everybody has their own particular bag of fails. Mine is my writing. After years and years of refining my craft, publishing hundreds of book reviews and thousands of newspaper columns, my dream "came true" and I published a novel - then two - then three - and then - they didn't sell. Nobody told me, you see, that the novels had to SELL, because part of the dream for every writer I know is automatic Fame and Fortune. Surely this just happens all by itself?
Fail.
It's sad, and infuriating sometimes, but it's not going to happen for me - the movie version, I mean, because luck just does not stick to me. Like Peter Pan's shadow, it keeps coming unstuck just as I start to get somewhere. Real trauma is something quite else, and I am able to put this aside and enjoy my life to a degree I never thought possible a few years ago. So is the fail entirely a fail?
Nothing can take away from me the bizarre and ongoing discovery, the process, the burrowing in. Now that I have YouTube and Wikipedia and cool things like that, it's unending. It's labyrinthine, and more odd than the human condition itself, which I both love and loathe. I am drawn to those on the fringes, because I have bloody well given up on being acceptable to anyone but myself (so there), even while seeing that other people's oddness, like mine, might be offputting. As Steinbeck used to say, it's shrimp ice cream.
I saw someone's blog the other day - God, it was beautiful and elegant, like the rooftop penthouse of some gleamingly expensive apartment building in Manhattan, all sort of skyline-y, and the entries were all so gracefully ordered. It just had Professional written all over it. The screaming harridan in me, the rotten mother I carry around in my head, began yammering, "WHY CAN'T YOU BE MORE LIKE YOUR SISTER?", or words to that effect. In other words - your blog sucks, Margaret, stop pretending, start writing like a grownup and maybe THEN you will sell a few copies.
Oh really?
29 rather than 24?
I might as well do whatever the hell I want. Yes, and while still admiring someone else's truly stunning masterpiece of a blog, full of beautifully polished entries on topics of major interest, instead of quirky things on circus accidents and other stuff that usually involves making a lot of gifs.
You shouldn't go on YouTube late at night and watch circus accidents. It's not fun for all ages. It's not fun for anyone. You'll find falls and wipeouts and awful cat maulings (serves them goddamn right, I'm for the cats). You'll find some where you're not sure the person even survived. After one particularly awful motorcycle crash, the emcee pleads in a nakedly urgent voice that if there is a doctor in the house, PLEASE, come forward NOW. "This is not part of the show." Then he dismisses the crowd, who are almost completely silent.
Is it something Roman about us, a colosseum leftover, something untamed, do we like a thrill, do we like to watch a thrill, THEIR thrill, or do we secretly hope in the most shameful part of ourselves that something in fact will go terribly wrong? For in a circus, it's hard for things to go just a little bit wrong.
Then there is the sideshow. These still exist in the small backwoods circuses that probably operate on the fringes of the law, though they supposedly emphasize feats of strength or daring rather than freakish characteristics. If we see someone walking on his hands now, our response is likely to be, "Wow, that's pretty amazing," marvelling at the fact that his disability really isn't very disabling after all. But back then. . . back then, when "abnormal" children were generally not allowed to draw their first breath, when people afflicted with "madness" were "put away" so we wouldn't have to see them, the freak show must have been a visceral nightmare.
This is two or three seconds of Todd Browning's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks. For years I avoided it because I was put off by the title (which makes better sense once you've seen it - it's more of a quote, something screamed at the performers by the prima donna aerialist) and was a little frightened of the whole concept because it starred REAL circus performers, "human oddities" - but then one day curiosity got the better of me.
When you see Freaks, you enter a strange world. Fully half an hour was edited out, or censored out, so as rich and strange as it already is, it might once have been much more rich and strange. You have to see it more than once to really appreciate the fact that it's about a community, a very tight-knit one where there is solidarity and protectiveness and intense loyalty to one another. All the things we're lousy at in today's fragmentary society. There's oddball humor, scenes which are not so much meant to shock as to inspire a headshaking wonder, and - as with most great movies, up to and including Gone with the Wind - a love triangle.
I could do a whole post on Freaks, in fact I might at some point, and I was not even aware until just now that my recent viewing of it on TCM probably triggered this whole awful doomed circus search. Unlikely as this seems, the movie isn't "dark" or "disturbing" or "macabre" - none of those terms apply, as most of the troupe are good-humoured and seem to enjoy their work and each other. I will say though that it is plenty weird and a little crazy, demonstrating an over-the-top exuberance unfettered by any bounds of propriety. Only the ending turns dark, terribly dark, and only because somebody dared to mess with one of their own.
I've been trying very hard NOT to write about Jian Ghomeshi, but it's been difficult, bombarded as I am by Facebook links and such. But this Toronto Star piece from 2009 now resonates in a whole new way. Back then, Ghomeshi was the darling boy of the CBC, supposedly rescuing it from its loyal and longstanding audience of unhip boomers (horrors!) and attracting a whole new crowd of multi-pierced-and-tattoed hipster doofuses. In fact, so long as they were younger, it didn't really matter what they looked like.
It just wasn't cool to diss Ghomeshi. Everybody loved him. You HAD to love him, or you looked unhip. I'd say "nobody knew what an asshole he was behind the scenes", but the truth is, plenty of people knew and kept their mouths shut in craven cowardice. Everyone was afraid of him. He was a serial grabbist, assault artist and head-puncher/choker who terrified women into keeping silent for fear of losing their jobs or, worse, losing their credibility forever.
So Billy Bob Thornton was reviled for calling Ghomeshi an "asshole", but I cannot think of a better description of the man. Billy Bob recently made a surprise guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory, which many call the coolest thing on TV, while Ghomeshi is cowering under a bed somewhere, maybe in a BDSM club in some anonymous basement in Etobicoke.
Stick to your guns for long enough, and eventually you just might win out.
By: Raju Mudhar Tech Reporter, Kenyon Wallace Published on Fri Apr 10 2009
Billy Bob not done with the barbs
Billy Bob Thornton elicited boos and catcalls last night at Massey Hall as he attempted to explain his bizarre behaviour during an interview on CBC Radio on Wednesday.
Referring to Jian Ghomeshi, the host of CBC Radio's Q, as an "a--hole," the Oscar-winning actor turned musician interrupted his band's set three songs in to give his side of the story.
After commenting on the beautiful theatre and the legendary performer they were opening for (Willie Nelson), Thornton said, "It seems as if when I say something it's in the news."
When that drew boos, Thornton continued: "Boo all you want, but I want to say something.... We're really happy to be here, but I need to say something. I talked to this a--hole yesterday.
"I sat down and talked with this guy. He and his producers say, `We promise you we won't say that' (meaning references to Thornton's acting career). The very first thing they said was that.
"I don't really like sensationalism," he added. "If you look someone in the eyes and promise them something, and you don't do it, you don't get the interview. That's the way it goes."
The explanation was met by further boos and catcalls of, "Here comes the gravy," a reference to Thornton's description of Canadian audiences as "mashed potatoes with no gravy" during his interview with Ghomeshi.
Before the show, Thornton told a Star reporter that he "loves Canada." When asked what he meant by the mashed potatoes comment, Thornton, wearing a thick layer of skin-tone facial makeup and sucking on a cigarette, said: "I was talking about the guy who was interviewing me."
The interview, which featured Thornton claiming he didn't know what some of Ghomeshi's questions meant, responding to others with non-sequiturs, then chastising Ghomeshi for referring to the actor's film career, has gone viral.
More than 600,000 viewers had watched the clip on YouTube by 8 p.m. yesterday, while a CBC spokesperson said the network had received roughly 3,700 blog responses and emails. Before last night's show, the second in which the Boxmasters opened for Nelson and Ray Price, several fans were miffed at Thornton's radio performance.
"He's an a--hole," said Nick Goodman of Aurora. "He was probably drinking backstage or something."
Danny Duckworth of Toronto said he likes Thornton as a comedian and actor, but "I couldn't care less what he thinks. If I want to get up and dance, that's my choice," he added, a reference to Thornton's comment that Canadians just sort of sit there.
"If Billy Bob doesn't like it, he should quit."
Ghomeshi could not be reached for comment last night. Earlier yesterday, he said it was one of the most difficult interviews he's ever done and he was taken aback at Thornton's strange responses (sample: when Ghomeshi asked when the Boxmasters were formed, Thornton answered, "I'm not sure what that means").
Ghomeshi also said it would have been irresponsible to his audience not to mention Thornton's acting past during his introduction (he did not ask any questions about acting during the interview).
"Our policy is that we don't allow anybody to tell us what we can and cannot say," said Ghomeshi. "Beyond that, it was this notion and the language that he used during the interview that I thought was unfortunate, that we were `instructed' to say this and that. And I think that does raise interesting questions about ideas around how much journalism is to be controlled, especially when it comes to arts and entertainment and culture, and I think that that's a concern.
"The reality is, and I tried to explain this in the interview, these guys have only been together for two years. You just don't get the kind of national press they are getting without the incentive being something like his career past.... And I think if he could graciously accept that and say, `Hey, I want to focus on the music, but I get that the reason we're here is because I'm a movie star that's won an Oscar.' There's not a lot of people who can say that."
Ghomeshi felt like he was "in the middle of a tsunami" yesterday. He was being interviewed by media around the world. "The nice thing is the reaction that I'm getting from journalists around the world that is really kind of sweet, but it is all very odd ... and a lot of people, especially in this country, seemed to support the way I did things," he said. "Maybe it was a little Canadian to be polite, but I can live with that."
Thornton's interview was being compared to the recent Joaquin Phoenix appearance, in which the actor turned rapper sulked through a chat on Late Show With David Letterman.
In this magical age of YouTube, everything comes around again. These Children's Record Guild rediscoveries are recordings I thought I'd never hear again. As a kid, they were epic tales that seemed to go on forever, so I'm surprised to see how short they are, some of them having only three or four minutes per side. Though I didn't post it here because it's in four parts, the Children's Record Guild version of Cinderella is full of the music of Prokofiev. It wasn't familiar to me then (for in spite of my classical music upbringing, the only Prokofiev I knew was Peter and the Wolf), but many years later I discovered, or rediscovered the ballet and got the strangest prickly feeling all over: yes, I had heard this music before, embedded in a story, or was the story embedded in the music? It took me a while to put the pieces together, and when I hear it now I realize how cleverly Prokofiev was adapted and spliced together with a minimalized version of one of the world's oldest fairy tales.
The Emperor's New Clothes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, Build me a House, Grandfather's Farm, Pedro in Brazil, Slow Joe, Let's Have a Party, and. . . the immortal Travels of Babar, that one was the best of all:
"I am an elephant actor." (Trumpet fanfare)
Greek chorus: "This elephant actor is going to make believe he is the brave King Babar."
"I am an elephant actress." (Trumpet fanfare)
Greek chorus: "This elephant actress is going to make believe she is the beautiful Queen Celeste."
These weren't just records, they were things to hold on to, companions, a means to get away from the hell of school and the scorn of my so-called friends. They come around again now in this unlikely form, something I couldn't even have imagined ten or fifteen years ago, and they're different somehow - they changed somewhere along the line. The character of Puss, once beloved, is now a smart-ass con with a thick, nasal accent, perhaps working-class Boston or New Yahhk. The cleverness of the songs and the way the stories move right along (they HAD to, at 3 1/2 minutes per side) are more apparent to me. I'm now the storyteller, not the "tellee", so I know a thing or two about the craft.
(Next day. All this seemed familiar, as if I had written about it before. And lo, when I went digging, I found this:)
There is another association with articulate animals: the Children's Record Guild recording of a very strange, adulterated version of Puss in Boots. We had a number of these recordings, which originally came through the mail as a sort of record-of-the-month subscription. But this set of maybe thirty or forty records was bequeathed to us by someone who didn't want them anymore. Obviously they hadn't been played much: there was hardly a scratch on them. We soon took care of that.
Through the wonders of the internet, I've found some of these records and listened to them again for the first time in more than (blblblpphhht) years. The Travels of Babar, Slow Joe, Build Me a House, Robin Hood, etc. I even found a bizarre version of Pinocchio with Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney which we played half to death (though my recent posting about the hellscape of Winchell-Mahoney Timeexpresses my abhorrence of that particular entertainer, who always struck me as a son-of-a-bitch).
These reborn-through-the-internet kiddie records are miraculously pristine, with no World War III going on in the background. Someone must have preserved them in a vault somewhere, or found some way to remove all the scratches. Anyway, the one I most happily happened upon was Puss in Boots, the strangest re-imagining of the story I've ever heard. Puss, a cheeky little feline in seven-league boots, adopts this person named John and somehow renders him into a Prince by wangling an audience with the King. Sort of like that. But first of all, John is totally gobsmacked by the fact that THIS CAT CAN TALK!
Here is the Ballad of Puss, which we used to sing to each other endlessly. I just listened to it again (I had to convert an unplayable MP4 file into an MP3 for this, which took some doing), and made an effort to transcribe it: for you, precious reader, the gardenia that blooms in the innermost Eden of my heart, deserve to share it with me today. When I was just a teeny-weeny kitty Everyone told me that I looked so pretty They said, 'beautiful eyes' They said, 'lovely fur' But all I could answer was 'meoowwww' or "purrrrrr"
My coat was black, my eyes of course were yellow People always said 'what a charming fellow' I wanted to thank them, but I didn't know how For all I could answer was 'purrrrrrr' or 'meow'
Then one fine day as I was lying sleeping A great idea into my head came creeping A pussy cat that could learn to say 'meow' Could say just 'me', by leaving off the 'ow!'
So I said me, me, me, me, me, Then as you plainly can see From me to he to she to we Was just as simple as it could be I practiced daily for a week And that is how I learned to speak! Then I thought that I would try Slipping off from me to my From me to my to sky to why Was just as easy as eating pie I practiced daily for a week And that is how I learned to speak!
Soon I was no longer a beginner, When someone asked 'how would you like some dinner?' If I wanted to answer, I could say 'yes sir!' Instead of replying just, MeOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW-wow-wow-WOWW Or purrrrrrr. Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
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