LEGEND: 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).  And I just realized something astonishing: he is now NINETY years old, still sprightly, and still dancing on this earth.

. . . and yes, I did see him perform live once, but it sure was a long wait from that time I first saw him 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 1973 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 devil doll dressed up like a human being who danced and pranced around like something weightless.  Who even came out in drag, making a quite plausible blonde floozie with hair under his arms, then turned his cloche hat around to look like a helmet and goose-stepped off the stage with a truly evil stage-laugh.

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.

Forgive me for being all over the place as I try to pin down the flying 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 all reason, they do.

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 of his native New York and has become  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. He has danced and capered with us for 90 years, after all. We shouldn't be surprised - some people do 90 very well (William Shatner is due to turn 91 and is hosting one of my favorite TV shows, The UnXplained, along with a ton of other stuff), 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.

UPDATE. Something, more than one thing prompted me to revisit this valentine to my old crush. I recently watched Cabaret for about the fifteenth time, and it was almost as astonishing as the first. Grey wasn't just brilliant, he was downright scary, embodying that dance with the devil which was Berlin in the 1930s. But then I re-watched Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and felt crushed all over again. He was just so CUTE! So enigmatic, so mercurial, yet unknowable, like all brilliant people are. There's more - though I haven't read it, he wrote a memoir called Master of Ceremonies in which he "comes out" - yes, he's gay, or I guess you could say bisexual, since he was devoted to his wife and family for decades before revealing this aspect of himself to the world.

I have to confess that at first I was miffed. I mean, why do this to your family when you have kept the secret for so long? But didn't we know? Of course we knew, and didn't want to know we knew. His daughter has come out to pay tribute to his honesty and integrity with her eyes full of tears. Ninety years old, my God, what does he look like now? I had a fantasy of meeting him, of almost wanting to kneel before him or lay my forehead down on the back of his hand. It won't happen, but it's funny how this comes back, all this, from 50 years ago - FIFTY.  And I have just turned 69. How does this happen? How can we know something and not know it at the same time? Such is life, such is the human condition. Such is Joel Katz, son of Mickey and father of Jennifer. Long may he wave.

ADDENDA! Yes, he's still growing, he's still glowing, he's still. . . you know the rest. The article I just found in a New York magazine talked about how he got through the pandemic by taking pictures of the flowers in his apartment. And he still looks elfin and cute and enigmatic, unknowable, ever enthusiastic. And I think I love him just as much as I did before.

Magic Gifs! Cats and stuff.

 

Watch a beaver eating cabbage!

It's the sound that's so relaxing. 

This is nothing short of a miracle!

 

I used to subscribe to this channel, then for some reason got away from it .Now I'm binge-watching all of them. Out of a single portait, this computer animation not only brings the 40-year-old Poe to eerie life, but extends his lifespan another 40 years to distinguished old age. And then, they make him a woman!

SON of MOTORMOUTH!

I have no words for this!

"Did you play any of these?" Bizarre games from back in the day

 

Monopoly, Sorry, Yahtzee, Clue. Some board games are classics and have been staples of family fun time for decades. Then there are those odd games where you simply crack open a bunch of nuts, or slowly murder a large mammal with gravity. We dug through some old Sears catalogs from the 1960s to remember the forgotten board games of the decade.

Did you play any of these?

LOVE

Twister is game already full of flirtation and suggestion, so it is suprising that a younger spin on the game blantantly called LOVE existed in the midcentury. "Use your hands and feet to spell L-O-V-E," the ad proclaimed. Our parents would have put the kibosh on this scenario immediately.

FEELEY MEELEY

Here is "the game that gives you a funny feeling." Players put their hands inside a box and fondle and plastic toy, trying to guess what it is. Once you've become familiar with the 23 little objects, the game was pretty much pointless. Of course, you could also just cut a hole in a shoebox and make your own.

GREEN GHOST

This glow-in-the-dark game looks pretty fun, with its little plastic snakes, bats, keys and spooky trees. Oh, and feathers! That being said, with all the tiny parts, there's no way kids weren't losing some pieces.

GRAB A LOOP

You wear a belt with rings attached to it. You run around. Your friends try to rip off the rings. Hours of fun!

BUCKET OF FUN

Bucket of Fun combines all the fun of cleaning up your toys with… well, that's it. Plastic balls erupt out of a plastic bucket. You gather them up. This is like selling a deck of cards just to play "52-card pick up."

BEE BOPPER

For a mind-numbingly simple game — you swat a bee — the description is rather long-winded: "Spin bee on spinning card. Watch closely where he stops. Spinner has 4 colors that correspond to Bee Launchers. If spinner stops on your color act quickly to get your bee up before he's caught on the launcher. If bee is caught before launch, catcher gets 2 points… after launch 1 point. Winner is the one with most points."

THE LAST STRAW

Hey, kids! Want to rupture the spine of an ungulate? Just overburden this poor Bactrian camel with wood and watch his back snap in two! Ha! Just because "the straw that broke the camel's back" is a common idiom, that doesn't mean it makes for a good game.

MR. SPIN-HEAD

Feed a clown marbles.

OH, NUTS!

Pick open a bunch of plastic walnuts, looking for marbles. At least with real nuts, you can eat them.

DON'T SPILL THE BEANS

More proof that all you needed to make a game in the 1960s was some plastic food and an idiom. Though, technically, isn't the goal of the game — dumping beans into a pot — "spilling the beans"?

SCARNEY

What more could children want than a cold, ultilitarian, multi-purpose game from "gambling expert" John Scarne. Okay, maybe on second thought we'll play with that plastic camel.

NBC-TV NEWS GAME WITH CHET HUNTLEY

Another thing kids love: the tragedy and politics of the evening news!

TALK TO CECIL

"Cecil is a hand puppet that really talks… He directs the game." Obey the dragon!

http://www.metv.com/lists/13-wacky-forgotten-board-games-from-the-1960s

Have Gun, Will Travel: Paladin's Seduction

 

I've been watching Have Gun all over again, and as usual, I am struck by how much it has changed. I have mixed feelings about Richard Boone, finding him both sexy and a little too craggy and world-weary to be truly appealing - oh, those long, long sighs that seem to indicate he's actually a little bored to be doing Season 7 of this thing - though he does have a diamond-sharp intelligence mixed with alpha-male swaggering that was, maybe, ahead of its time. He was something of an anti-hero, and an antidote to Chuck Connors, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood, the other major players in this wildly-popular '60s genre. Have Gun was sometimes called the "thinking man's Western", and Paladin was surely a thinking man who sometimes thought with his pistol. Take that whatever way you wish.

This man wore ruffled shirts and paisley smoking jackets, murmured sweet somethings to the multiple fancy ladies in his hotel room in San Francisco, and then got called out to go and kill somebody. We knew it was coming when he flashed his card with the knight on it and we heard that unforgettable four-note theme that meant TROUBLE. BTW, I haven't confirmed this yet, but I have heard that it was written by the genius composer Bernard Hermann, who also scored Psycho, Taxi Driver and countless other classics.

In essence, that was the show. Ladies, card, travel, gun, oops, BANG, dead.  It was only a half-hour show, meaning the plot, characters and story arc had to all be accomplished in the space of 23 minutes. Sometimes I get lost in these intricacies which are introduced and developed so quickly that it can be hard to follow. Boone slows the pace down with his gravitas, his pacing lion's stride and centaur presence on a horse (though he DOES bounce a little too much, revealing that he's really a city slicker at heart). 

There's always a woman, often in some sort of dilemma, and always a longstanding grudge, sometimes a prisoner with his hands shackled together, a few tussles in which we obviously see Stunt Paladin at work, and then - always always - the gunfight. This is where the cobra strikes. And his fans all know that even if he has had to lay down his enormous horse pistol, he has another little gun secreted in the palm of his hand which, at close range, can blow a man down in a second. And then there's that thing he does with his hat, the quick jerk down over his eyes followed by a gentle pat on top. Aside from Humphrey Bogart, no man has ever worn a hat so well.

THIS particular scene is hotter than I expected. Paladin is getting over a fever and lying prone in the wagon - an erotic scenario to begin with - and this Mexican spitfire, whose husband is puttering around just outside the wagon, climbs in, climbs on and seduces him. He is more than willing to be seduced, and is that rare, rare thing - an actor who knows how to kiss convincingly. None of this Anthony Perkins flinching and wincing. He looks like he enjoyed doing this scene, and his little crooked smile at the end seems to say, "Ah. Another conquest." 

COME BACK, DYLAN THOMAS! All is forgiven.

 

Poem on his Birthday    

      In the mustardseed sun,
   By full tilt river and switchback sea
      Where the cormorants scud,
   In his house on stilts high among beaks
      And palavers of birds
   This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
      He celebrates and spurns
   His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
      Herons spire and spear.

  
      Under and round him go
   Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
      Doing what they are told,
   Curlews aloud in the congered waves
      Work at their ways to death,
   And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
      Who tolls his birthday bell,
   Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
      Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

      In the thistledown fall,
   He sings towards anguish; finches fly
      In the claw tracks of hawks
   On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
      Through wynds and shells of drowned
   Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
      In his slant, racking house
   And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
      Herons walk in their shroud,

      The livelong river's robe
   Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
      And far at sea he knows,
   Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
      Under a serpent cloud,
   Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
      The rippled seals streak down
   To kill and their own tide daubing blood
      Slides good in the sleek mouth.

      In a cavernous, swung
   Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
      Thirty-five bells sing struck
   On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
      Steered by the falling stars.
   And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
      Terror will rage apart
   Before chains break to a hammer flame
      And love unbolts the dark

      And freely he goes lost
   In the unknown, famous light of great
      And fabulous, dear God.
   Dark is a way and light is a place,
      Heaven that never was
   Nor will be ever is always true,
      And, in that brambled void,
   Plenty as blackberries in the woods
      The dead grow for His joy.

      There he might wander bare
   With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
      Or the stars' seashore dead,
   Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
      And wishbones of wild geese,
   With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
      And every soul His priest,
   Gulled and chanter in young Heaven's fold
      Be at cloud quaking peace,

      But dark is a long way.
   He, on the earth of the night, alone
      With all the living, prays,
   Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
      The bones out of the hills,
   And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
      Rage shattered waters kick
   Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
      Faithlessly unto Him

      Who is the light of old
   And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
      As horses in the foam:
   Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
      And druid herons' vows
   The voyage to ruin I must run,
      Dawn ships clouted aground,
   Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
      Count my blessings aloud:

      Four elements and five
   Senses, and man a spirit in love
      Tangling through this spun slime
   To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
      And the lost, moonshine domes,
   And the sea that hides his secret selves
      Deep in its black, base bones,
   Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
      And this last blessing most,

      That the closer I move
   To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
      The louder the sun blooms
   And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
      And every wave of the way
   And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
      With more triumphant faith
   Than ever was since the world was said,
      Spins its morning of praise,

      I hear the bouncing hills
   Grow larked and greener at berry brown
      Fall and the dew larks sing
   Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
      More spanned with angels ride
   The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
      Holier then their eyes,
   And my shining men no more alone
      As I sail out to die

Don't stop smoking! SMOKE SPUDS!

Without a doubt, this is the most bizarre ad compilation I've ever seen. And I've seen some doozies! This is from the video description:
Have you ever heard of SPUD cigarettes? Why is their mascot a SNOWMAN? Why is that guy smoking Spuds in the shower? Why is that weirdo trying to hypnotize us? And what the futz is "mouth happy"? The answer to these and many other questions cannot be found in this bizarre ad compilation. And friends - DON'T STOP SMOKING! Switch to New Spuds! 

NEWS FLASH! There is a Wikipedia entry explaining Spud: "Menthol cigarettes were first developed by Lloyd "Spud" Hughes of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in 1924, though the idea did not become popular until the Axton-Fisher Tobacco Co. acquired the patent in 1927, marketing them nationwide as "Spud Menthol Cooled Cigarettes". Spud brand menthol cigarettes went on to become the fifth most popular brand in the US by 1932, and it remained the only menthol cigarette on the market until the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company created the Kool brand in 1933." 

NOTE: This explains a LOT, from the bizarre name to the "cooler than KOOL" (i. e. far superior to that OTHER menthol cigarette). I believe this campaign was last-ditch, as the guy smoking in the shower says, "SAY! I used to smoke Spuds years ago, but they sure didn't taste like THIS!" This is an admission that they used to taste like crap. The reference to "new Spuds" is misleading, if the cigarette was first marketed in 1927! Makes you wonder how many times they "rebranded" these things to try to make them successful. The fact that nobody has ever heard of them is telling. These ads look like 1950s-'60s, especially that last, really creepy one, so "old Spuds" from the 1920s were probably pretty atrocious. But at least you can smoke them when you have a cold!)

CLASSIC! Perry Mason opening theme

 

I never watched this show, but the opening theme scared the hell out of me! I wasn't allowed to watch it because it was "too adult" (and, no doubt, too boring anyway). But from my bedroom, where I lay straining my ears while I was supposed to be asleep, I could hear the gaunt, stark opening trills on the strings, followed by the DUM! DUM! - then the dark, bluesy, film noir-sounding theme, like something from an old Warner Brothers movie with a score by Max Steiner. Max Steiner didn't write this, but he could have.

POP goes the COMMENTS SECTION!

 

Is BLOGGER dying? Who knows, at this point. For some reason, when I was having problems with Google, the page suddenly changed and many features were dropped, and I have not been able to get them back. My son the techie said Google probably isn't supporting Blogger any more BECAUSE IT'S SO OLD! I resented that, mainly because I too am "so old" and not technically proficient at all. 

At the moment, I can only use workarounds. The comments will no longer be visible under the posts, which INFURIATES me because I used to love the long threads of comments which were easy to see. Now you have to click on "comments" and a box comes up. Oh yes, you CAN see the comments, kind of, sort of, but it looks like shit. I don't know yet if I will get an email copy, so I may not even be able to monitor them. Worst of all, I can't edit or delete comments that may be dangerous to leave up. 

It takes something away from the blog that you can't just view the conversations, which sometimes have gone on for years and years. The rare posts that got over 100 comments now don't display them at all. It is all supposed to be there somewhere, but it won't show. A big chunk of Blogger has been cut off and thrown away. If Google does in fact bail on this, it will be the end of a 12-year experience - nay, an ODYSSEY taking me from the callow optimist of 2011 to the cynical, world-weary, but far more realistic person you see today.

SO, if you want to leave a comment and see all the pre-existing comments, click "comments" at the bottom of the post and a box will come up. I hope. I think you have to fill in some idiotic thing like "I am not a robot" (OH REALLY?? I was certain you were!). But for now, that's the best I can do, and the other features missing will have to be worked-around as well. So, beloved readers, hang in with me and I will try not to have a nervous breakdown over all this. Phoooey!