Friday, November 21, 2003

Lunch Today

This afternoon, my pal Earl Kress and I attended a luncheon staged by the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters. The P.P.B. is an organization of men and women with at least 20 years of professional employment in the fields of Radio and Television Broadcasting or allied fields. Five times a year, they stage luncheons to honor someone and today we had a lovely gathering with rotten food to honor Tom Bosley. Those present to fill the dais and speak of their friend and/or co-worker were Marion Ross, Anson Williams, Donny Most, Erin Moran (all from Happy Days), Tracy Nelson (who co-starred with Bosley on The Father Dowling Mysteries), plus Ernest Borgnine, Barbara Eden, David Nelson and Hal Kanter. My favorite moment was when Borgnine got up, pulled out a printout of an Internet database listing on Bosley, and proceeded to quote trivia from it. Later, Bosley took the page and read an advertising banner for Botox.

Speaking possibly of Botox: The main discussion topic among the attendees seemed to be Barbara Eden. Ms. Eden is just shy of 70 and could pass for half that age. Ordinarily, older glamour girls achieve this via some combination of plastic surgery and Industrial Strength Make-up that renders the subject about 60% android. Not Barbara Eden. She either has the greatest genes in the world or the best surgeon...or maybe she has a portrait at home getting extremely decrepit. I was about three feet from her at one point and if I didn't know who it was and someone made me guess the lady's age, I'd have said 40...and not been surprised if the correct answer was 30. This may sound gawkish or frivolous but, geez, it was what everyone was thinking and whispering about. She was there because she lives across the street from Tom Bosley and she described how every morning, she goes outside in a shabby robe and is embarrassed to be spotted by Bosley, out walking his dog. She said she looked like a mess then, and I could hear an unamused lady at the table next to us mutter, "Yeah, right."

Lunch was a miserly ration of processed turkey arranged on a scoop of stuffing to make it look like more. Whenever I eat at a restaurant that does that, I always think of leaving a bad tip and putting the stuffing under it to make it look like 15%. But the show today more than made up for it.

• Posted at 8:55 PM · LINK

New Tiger Theory

Siegfried Fischbacher has begun advancing a rather surprising theory about the incident that seriously injured his partner, Roy. It was initially reported that the tiger got out of control, mauled Roy and that this triggered a stroke and other damage. Siegfried now says it was the other way around.

• Posted at 5:38 PM · LINK

Jackie Mason Gets The Finger

As I predicted here, Jackie Mason's new Broadway show is closing in a hurry. It opened on November 19 and the last performance is November 30. Reviews ranged from bad to really bad. William Stevenson over at Broadway.com, for instance, wrote: "Charging Broadway prices for this comic catastrophe is truly criminal. It's only worth paying if you want to be able to say you've seen the worst musical comedy on Broadway in recent memory." For some reason, when I came across that, I had a mental image of Mason reading the notice and saying, "Well, it could have been worse..."

I ordinarily do not believe in reviewing something I haven't seen, and certainly not before it comes out. I wince a bit when a movie or TV show is announced and the Internet Experts chime in and declare it hopeless, just based on a one or two sentence precis. But some projects have such a kiss-o'-death air about them, it's hard to adopt a wait-'n'-see attitude. Just about everything Jackie Mason has touched in his professional career has flopped except his pure stand-up act, and even that's long since lost its potency. It's not that he's getting up there in years...Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart are both older and still very fresh and funny. It's that like a novelist with only one great book in him, Mason has just so much to offer and no more. Some friends of mine and I once put all three of those gents on our list of The Top Ten Stand-Up Comedians of all time. When I discuss it with folks, I need to underscore that Mason is on there for what he was doing twenty or thirty years ago.

Anyway, Mason will go off and tour with his stand-up and eventually come back to Broadway with another one-man show. The last time I was in New York, I walked past the theater where such a show was playing and, about an hour before his performance, Mason was out on 45th Street, urging passers-by to come see him. I admire the longevity and the perseverance. But based on the last Jackie Mason show through which I suffered, he'd need a loaded revolver to get me in there. And manacles to keep me.

• Posted at 4:19 PM · LINK