I was fifteen when my friend Kathei Logue told me how, a mere seven years before then, she had met the Beatles.
You’ve read the blog post, now see the movie! 😉
Kat Claws Her Way In
Category: All Posts
‘Apeeling’ Bunch of Bananas
As someone who is disinclined to follow major league sports, I rely on friends to tell me what’s what. If my buddy Bismo hadn’t clued me into the Savannah Bananas two years ago, I wouldn’t have known about this wacky baseball-ish team until last Friday’s PBS Newshour.
Shooter’s Secret War
Out of nowhere on Monday, it was announced that comic book writer/editor/publisher Jim Shooter had died.
On May 7, Shooter’s summer convention schedule was posted on Facebook…
Jim will be appearing at the following shows!
Big Lick Comic Con – NOVA – May 31-June 1
Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find – June 20-22
GalaxyCon Raleigh – July 24-27
Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of FarleyCon Pop Culture & Comic Book Expo! – August 2-3
TerrifiCon ™ – Connecticut’s Terrific Comic Con at Mohegan Sun – August 8-10
Dragon Con – August 28-31
See you there!
… but after missing a couple of those dates, this appeared on June 18.
Shooter had said nothing that I’d seen about him battling cancer, and considering his optimistic convention schedule I have to assume his condition must have declined very rapidly. I waited to post something about his death until the NYTimes had an obit. It’s shared here paywall-free.
I met Shooter only once, at a Terrificon in Connecticut. Joe Sinnott was going to be on a panel when we heard one of the other panelists was a no-show. I forget who it was, but he was a writer. I’d chatted with Shooter earlier that day, and when I heard of the vacancy I asked him if he would be willing to fill in. I told Jim that Joe would be there, he immediately agreed, and he was great.
Welcome, Doug Pratt!
I was contemplating becoming a paying subscriber to Paul Krugman on Substack. Instead, I am very pleased to be a Substack paid subscriber to none other than Doug Pratt. For years, whenever I posted something online about LaserDisc video, people would assume I was that Doug Pratt, but I’m not him, and here he is.
Easter With… Shari Lewis?
Fifty-five years ago, Oral Roberts had an NBC-TV Easter special. Take it away, sweet Shari!
Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart has died at age 90. It’s easy to confuse him with Oral Roberts. I have a related story to tell. I call it “Coffee Darlin’.” It’s coming up.
Talk to the Hands
Watch this and fall in love with Shari Lewis.
The way the kids in the audience reacted was how I felt as a young boy watching Shari. A documentary celebrating the life and work of the late and very talented ventriloquist/puppeteer has some upcoming screenings.
I’ll take exception with the assertion in the trailer that, “In the early days of television, there really were no kids shows.” Howdy Doody began in 1947, as did Fran Allison’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie puppet show. Crusader Rabbit was pitched as a limited animation TV cartoon series in 1948. Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany puppet ensemble first aired in 1949. The 1950s brought a flood of TV shows for kids.
That quote in the trailer continues with, “for Shari to come along… have puppets… comedy… I just knew this was different.” Shari was certainly special, but I wouldn’t say her act was essentially different from other ventriloquists. Edgar Bergen and Paul Winchell used dummies. Señor Wences and Shari talked to themselves with hand puppets.
Blogger Tralfaz says, “She was like the nice older girl down the street.”
https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-six-year-old-who-loved-shari-lewis.html
Shari wasn’t just nice, she was sexy. She had appeal beyond the kiddie set that, unfortunately, never took off. The dads in the audience must have paused to take in more than a passing glance. Everything about Shari Lewis was, in a word, attractive.
Tralfaz has this quote from a 1963 news item, reacting to the cancellation of Shari’s NBC show:
Childhood’s loss, however, may well turn out to be a gain for adult audiences… It will undoubtedly come as a great shock to the summer theater audiences who go to see “Indoor Sport” to find Shari, the perpetual ingenue with pony tail hairdo, playing a young matron with divorce on her mind—and without a note to sing or a hand puppet named Lamb Chop or Hush Puppy to talk to.
So what happened? Why wasn’t there a big primetime network TV breakthrough for Shari in the Sixties? Her greatest success was entertaining kids, and yet NBC canceled her beloved children’s show, while CBS kept Captain Kangaroo going year after year. This conundrum is something I hope the documentary can explain.
The Shari Lewis Show replaced the long-running Howdy Doody. Robert Crumb thought Howdy Doody was creepy and unsettling, whereas Paul Rubens loved the show and he took inspiration from it when creating Pee-Wee Herman. Which reminds me that I need to revisit and rework my posts regarding my unintentional role in getting Morty Gunty’s WOR-TV show in New York canceled.