In my twenties, I used to dress up for Halloween. While I might pull out my Frankenstein mask now and then – I REALLY can’t breathe in that thing – I’ve lost my All Hallows Eve mojo.
But this year, the child is going to need an escort for her trick-or-treating; her costume is a ballet dress that lights up – I might just surprise myself by dressing
All I want to know:
Are you dressing up for Halloween? As what? Are you going to a party, or parties? Are you going trick or treating? Do you have a child to provide you cover? *** Top 10 Spooky Buildings *** My friend Fred Hembeck’s comic icon, Soupy Sales, died this week. One of the many things Fred taught me about Soupy is that he was a Motown artist. Really. And some of the songs, as Fred noted, weren’t half bad. A suitable tribute for Soupy. *** Scott from Scooter Chronicles answers my questions. *** I’ve seen this a couple places on the Internet already: the octogenarian war vet’s impassioned plea for gay rights.
My 81-year-old mother fell coming into her house last week. My sister who lives with her says she’s fine, and that’s good news, of course.
Even before hearing that news, I was thinking about the topic. On one hand, the fall is the lifeblood of physical comedy. Watch out for that banana peeeel! The role of the comedian, going back generations, perhaps millennia, was to take a tumble.
One of my all-time favorite TV shows was The Dick van Dyke Show. As you can see here, Dick would either trip over the ottoman, stumble over it, or neatly evade it.
And YouTube is chock full of people taking a tumble.
This brings me to LifeCall. From the Wikipedia: The motivation behind the systems is that subscribers, mostly senior citizens, would receive a pendant which, when activated, would put them in immediate contact with a dispatch service, without the need to use a phone or other household device…
So far so good.
In 1989, LifeCall began running commercials which contained a scene wherein an elderly woman, identified by a dispatcher as “Mrs. Fletcher” uses the medical alert pendant after having fallen in the bathroom. After falling Mrs Fletcher speaks the phrase “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” after which the dispatcher informs her that he is sending help.
Taken at its face value, the commercial portrays a dangerous situation for a senior, with perhaps dire consequences…
The “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” ad had the double misfortune of being unintentionally campy and appearing often on cable and daytime television. The fact that the commercial was a dramatization (as clearly stated in the beginning of the commercial) using rather mediocre acting also contributed to the humor. The combination made “I’ve fallen… and I can’t get up!” a recognized, universal punchline that applied to many comedic situations. All of these factors made the ad memorable, ensuring the line’s place in pop culture history.
Musing about the May birthdays of musicians, particularly musicians whose work I own, I noticed that any number of them covered Bob Dylan songs. Not a surprise there; Dylan’s put out over 40 albums.
What WAS a little surprising was that I couldn’t find the May birthday songs I own on YouTube; I’ve just started to expect it.
I first looked for the pair of songs from Pete Seeger’s We Shall Overcome album, a live 1963 recording. Pete did A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Who Killed Davey Moore; nope. Instead, here’s Paths of Victory
Then I sought out Poor Immigrant by Judy Collins from my beloved Who Knows Where The Time Goes album; no such luck. Here’s Judy singing Like a Rolling Stone
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons perform the amazingly goofy Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right, which simply must be heard to be believed. Not there. I foiund, though, the Jersey Boys doing Queen Jane Approximately
And now for something completely indulgent. Hey, it’s a blog; by definition it’s indulgent.
One of my sister sent my five -year-old daughter two one-use cameras, and I had no idea what she was photographing. The only instruction I gave her was to use the flash when she was inside. This is what she came up with, and I didn’t alter them in any way:
These first three items I believe are gifts she received for her birthday.
The ballerina costume – on the floor?
Most of her plushes have very unimaginative names. This is Unoicorn; I blame the TV shows Little Bear and Franklin, where most of the characters have likewise boring nomenclatures.
No Imelda Marcos here.
Not only did she take the picture, she laid out the blanket and arranged the subjects.
Difficult to tell here, but the piece on the right is a piece of her artwork; the item on the left is 1000 years of British monarchies.
Do all only children refer to their stuffed creatures as their sisters?
Chomper
I’m assuming this is the ABC-TV program Dancing with the Stars. I don’t watch it; the child watches it with the wife.
Deerie. (Not to be confused with the late Blossom Dearie.)
There are a whole bunch of self-portraits. Lot of them are just strange mixes of colors. She also took some headless photos of her mother, and one of my back.
I took this one: the photographer. *** Ringo Starr – Photograph, written by George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Lydia’s pediatrician has a real antipathy about children watching television or videos. While most guidelines suggest avoiding kids watching TV before the age of two, we waited until she was three.
Most of the first programs were actually videos – programs on something called VHS – which we acquired from my now-18-year-old niece, all circa 1994. Surprisingly, given the fact that Alex was obsessed with him in the day, there was only one Barney video. (I remember specifically being chastised by my parents for NOT buying her a Barney thing in the day; it wasn’t my antipathy for Barney, it was “What do you buy someone who seems to have everything already?” It’d be like buying me Beatles stuff until they put out new product.)
I DO have antipathy for this Barney DVD I got from my in-laws, a “live-action” game show with a studio audience of kids and adults. My wife said that I might applaud if I were in the audience; maybe, but I just don’t want to SEE grown-ups getting all excited about the antics of a purple dinosaur.
Another batch of videos features “the Magic School Bus.” Voiced by Lily Tomlin as The Frizz, and occasionally Malcolm Jamal-Warner in the ending segment, they were so successful with Lydia that she now has over a dozen books and a DVD.
Not much else really stuck, other than Arthur, the aardvark, though she was briefly enamored with this funky 15-minute (in English, followed by the same in Spanish) home safety tape with the catchy tune, “Code Red Rover, grown-up come over.”
Ultimately she found there were shows on TV for her. Her first great love was Little Bear, based on the Maurice Sendak-drawn books from a half-century ago. She was onto Little Bear, and Emily, her doll Lucy, Cat, Duck, Hen, Owl, Mother Bear and Father Bear every day for about eight months until we were seeing the same episodes for the third time. Still we read the books, which are direct sources for some of the episodes.
Lydia’s current favorite TV show is Franklin, which again has but one character with a name other than Bear, Fox, Skunk, Mr. and Mrs. Turtle and so on. She likes calling Franklin Frank; she thinks this is wildly hysterical. The theme song is by Bruce Cockburn of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” (“some [s.o.b.] would die”) fame.; actually have a half dozen Cockburn LPs.
But she has branched out: Angelina Ballerina: on once a week, has fueled her need to dance. Not to take lessons, mind you, just to twirl in front of the set. Ni-Hao, Kai-lan, Blue’s Clues: doesn’t actually watch unless it’s on in real time. Jack’s Big Music Show: a program I’d almost watch without her. Dora the Explorer: she watches relatively little of this, but she has Dora pajamas, Dora Band-Aids, several Dora books and she got a Dora DVD for her birthday. Why does she, and her cousin Diego, seem to YELL all the time. “WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE PART OF THE STORY?” And they are so damn earnest, too.
Her upcoming favorite is the Wonder Pets. a hamster, a turtle and duck get in their flyboat and save other animals. There’s always a costume change relevant to the location and some difficulty before they get going that turns out to be useful later on.
It was my wife, though, who noted the operatic stylings of the introductory piece:
Imagine if you can that, instead of Linny, it is a basso profundo singing: “The phone, the phone is ringing.” That octave descent alone would be stunning. Then a tenor, not Tuck, singing the second, a non-lisping contralto, rather than Ming-Ming, on the third. There’s a certain drama in the presentation.
The rest of the music is tied to the situation or the geography. Recently, WP saved the Rat Pack (three rats, one named Blue Eyes), a fiddler crab on the roof and a bluesy Louisiana bullfrog. This is award-winning stuff against stiff competition.
I figure that I’d better record this stuff now before she heads for school, for while I think I’ll “always remember”, chances are that I won’t. ROG
