Fred Kaplan says that the only way our Army is able to keep its recruiting numbers up is by lowering its standards. Pretty soon, you'll be able to get into the Army if your I.Q. is higher than your inseam measure. Just as long as you aren't gay.
Scott Dunbier calls my attention to what may be the last chapter in the saga of Gary Coleman's pants.
On January 17, the auction ended with a winning bid of $400,000 placed by an eBay member named dfwgixxer. There were actually two bids for that price but dfwgixxer got his or her in first. Several other bidders went well into the six figure amounts.
So now, what did we think the odds were that anyone would actually pay $400, let alone a thousand times that amount for a pair of Mr. Coleman's old sweatpants? I'd say about the same as the chances of a grassroots "Mike Gravel for President" movement cinching the nomination for him.
It doesn't come as a huge surprise but on January 24, the pants seller posted the following negative feedback for dfwgixxer...
Scammer!!! NEVER RESPONDED!!! RISKY EBAYER!!! NON-BUYER!!!
What's funny, of course, is that the seller expected a response. Also, that despite this, dfwgixxer still has a 99.2% positive feedback score...and especially that eBay, which previously declared all six and seven figure bids "bogus bids" and cancelled them allowed this one to get to 400 grand. Like maybe that might be a real offer.
One of the best DVD sets you could possibly spend your cash on is the collection of Robert Klein's HBO Specials. He appears so infrequently these days that you forget how good he was and is, and how a whole generation of stand-up comedians learned so much of what they did from the guy.
You won't see it in this clip, which is of the "I Can't Stop My Leg" musical numbers which became a required part of this later specials...but this stuff's fun to watch, too. And you can order the whole DVD set for a bargain (I think) price by clicking here.
And one more stage appearance by Tony Curtis! (I hadn't meant for this to become a topic on the blog, honest. But if we're going to talk about it at all, let's exhaust the topic.) B. Baker writes to tell me...
Since you mention it, the actor's ill-fated stint in Simon's I Ought To Be In Pictures wasn't actually Tony Curtis' first attempt to crack B'way. In the early '70s, Curtis opened in Detroit in an odd Broadway-bound comedy first called Turtlenecks and later re-titled One Night Stand. The play, by Bruce Jay Friedman and Jacques Levy, was in a considerable state of flux during its Detroit run. The reviews were not kind, but to be fair, Mr. Curtis wasn't seen as the show's principal problem — the show's basic structure and lack of laughs were judged as faulty. The show, which also featured William Devane and the always welcome Sammy Smith, was closed by producer David Merrick in Philadelphia a month later before reaching NY; I'm not sure Curtis was still with the play by then.
You're probably always asking for trouble when you title a play One Night Stand.
I actually like Tony Curtis quite a bit. I saw him in the Neil Simon play before his meltdown and he was quite good in it. So was Dinah Manoff, who played his daughter. (I've always liked her, too. My first week on Welcome Back, Kotter, she had a very brief role — one or two lines — and she showed enough talent that there was talk of bringing her character back. They didn't but it was astounding that anyone noticed her at all, given how small her role was.)
Curtis was great, of course, in Some Like It Hot and films of that calibre. I always thought he showed his worth when he was cast, as he so often was, in something that would have been an utter turkey without him...like Houdini. It's not at its core a very good film but something about Curtis makes it sorta watchable. And I thought he was the best thing in The Great Race, though that isn't a huge compliment. We don't have a lot of that kind of movie star these days.
Several of you have reminded me that Tony Curtis made at least one other stage appearance. In 2002, he toured for a time in Sugar, the musical comedy adaptation of the movie that made him famous, Some Like It Hot. In this case, he didn't play his old role. He played Osgood Fielding III, the role Joe E. Brown had played in the film. As one person wrote me, "He got star billing even though he was only on stage about fifteen minutes." Since the script was already frozen, he only had to learn the role once.
And since we're talking about Tony Curtis, let's mention his memorable performance as Stoney Curtis in an episode of The Flintstones. A pretty good episode, I should say.
Earlier this week, I wrote a post about how the weather forecasters usually do a great job but, regarding the storms that have affected Southern California this past week, they didn't have much of a clue. The above radar map, which is from about fifteen minutes ago, is a good example of how capricious this can be. The red arrow, which I added, shows the approximate direction in which all this weather is moving.
We are presently under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch in Los Angeles — where at the moment, it isn't even drizzling, let alone thunderstorming. We had a lot of rain overnight (a lot for us) but it's been pretty much light showers for most of the day.
That's here. As you can see, there's been a ton of stormy weather moving through Long Beach and into the area just east of L.A. The red dots represent the most intense storms, the orange are close runners-up and the yellow is moderate rain. We have a little cell of possible light showers — indicated by the green — about to move through parts of L.A.
That Severe Thunderstorm Watch isn't wrong. It's just wrong for right this minute in right this area. The folks at the National Weather Service don't predict for your block and even if they did...well, take a look. A couple good gusts of wind and all those warm colored dots could have been over us here at the moment or even down in Oceanside. It's too much a crapshoot out there for them to know precisely where all this weather is going to go. We could still get lightning 'n' thunder later this evening.
People often moan that the forecasts are wrong, ignoring that the forecast was correct for most of the covered area. The N.W.S. and the private meteorologists do get it wrong, of course. They say it's going to rain and then there isn't a storm within a thousand miles of you. But sometimes — most of the time when the forecast seems to be wrong — what's happening is that the forecast is right for the area it covers. It just isn't right for the part of it that you're in at the moment.
We're fans here of the musical based on Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner and elsewhere on this site, you'll find articles that I wrote some time ago about that show as it played on Broadway and also as it was turned into a movie. I consider myself a bit of an expert on it, and have briefly been involved in some aborted attempts to revive it. Amazingly, though it was rather successful when it first played The Great White Way, and it's constantly produced around the country, it has yet to have a full-scale Broadway revival. Gypsy is about to have its seven-thousandth (or so it seems) but Abner has been represented on stages only by an endless stream of regional, college and high school productions.
Its popularity in those venues makes sense. It's a very easy show to mount. The costumes are mainly hillbilly garb and you can do most of them just by rummaging through a few closets or thrift shops. The sets can be pretty simple and cartoony. Most of the songs do not require great voices. The dances just have to be energetic. Most of the roles can be filled by college age performers. In fact, with a little make-up (and it doesn't have to be convincing), they can all be filled by college age performers. Also, the cast is very large and can be just about as large as you want it to be.
A large cast is a liability for a professional production where everyone must be paid but, as a director of such shows once explained to me, it's an asset at the Community College level. Since people aren't being paid or aren't being paid much, you might just cram that stage full of as many bodies as you can. It will be impressive and all those performers will get their friends and family to buy tickets.
But it's never been back to Broadway, though there have been talks and even options. One such attempt I know of was some time ago. Elliott Caplin, brother of Al Capp and manager of some of the Capp estate's affairs, helped me with my articles and it led to a casual friendship by telephone. Soon after, he called to see if I'd be interested in helping revise/update the book for a producer who was trying to arrange a new Broadway production. In ways that I did not fully understand and probably never will, Tony Curtis was somehow involved. I'm not sure if he was a producer or what but the effort seemed to revolve around him, which struck me as very odd.
Mr. Curtis was great in many movies but his total experience on the legit stage, as far as I know, was confined to one disastrous experience starring briefly in the debut of Neil Simon's play, You Oughta Be in Pictures. As the story is told, Simon cast Curtis, who'd never done a play before and never had to really memorize any more lines than was necessary for one day's filming of a movie or TV show. With enormous effort and insecurity, he learned the role in the new play for an outta-town tryout in Los Angeles and did well on opening night. Then Mr. Simon began rewriting (as playwrights always do on a new play) and Curtis couldn't unlearn the old lines and learn the new, at least not as rapidly as was necessary. He wound up exploding in the middle of one performance, unleashing a torrent of vulgar ad-libs, then getting dressed and going home at intermission, leaving a puzzled audience in the hands of an understudy who didn't know the lines, either. Ron Leibman eventually took over the lead and played it in New York.
Elliott Caplin told me that Curtis, despite the above — and also the fact that he's not exactly a singer and this is a musical — would appear in the proposed revival of Li'l Abner. I asked, of course, "In what part?" "Well," he said, "That's what they haven't figured out yet." I'm not sure of all that it takes to get a show up and running on Broadway, but I would think that deciding what role your star will play is high on the list. Elliott continued, "I think they're figuring that he'd play a lot of non-singing cameo roles, like the Mayor or the Newscaster." It all sounded quite unlikely so I told Elliott that if the deal did proceed, of course I was interested, but I'd bet him a thousand dollars it would never happen. Being a smart guy, Elliott declined the wager and then passed away before I could even call him for an "I told you so." (A few years later, I met Tony Curtis, asked him about it and he did not seem to ever have heard of Li'l Abner or, for that matter, Broadway.)
Later on, another producer — one with some actual credits in this area — contacted me about participating in a revival. Again, I was interested and again, the deal fell through. This guy couldn't even get together enough funding and elements to obtain an option. In 1998, the Encores group that mounts "staged readings" (actually, stripped-down productions) at New York's City Center did a four-performance revival which I attended and which was quite wonderful. There was some brief talk that it might morph into a full-scale production — the City Center version of Chicago did and is still running — but Abner Yokum wasn't so fortunate.
Opening this week in Los Angeles is another stripped-down production. The Reprise! group, which stages wonderful shows up at U.C.L.A., is doing Li'l Abner with a preview performance on February 5 and a grand opening on the sixth. The show runs through February 17 and stars Eric Martsolf as Abner, Brandi Burkhardt as Daisy Mae, Michael Kostroff as Marryin' Sam, Cathy Rigby as Mammy Yokum (which probably means Mammy will be turning backflips), Robert Towers as Pappy Yokum and Fred Willard (!) as General Bullmoose. Fred Willard is an intriguing choice for that role and I'll bet Kostroff will be superb.
I have nothing to do with this production other than helping its publicists with a little history, but I'll be there and all indicators are that it'll do the show justice. Here's a link to an article with a full cast list and some photos. I believe tickets are becoming scarce but if you'd like to try and score a few, this link should do it. If you'd like to wait until I see the show and post a review, that's of course your right but don't be surprised if the entire run is sold out by then.
January 28, 2008
