Sid Caesar

            On Tuesday morning I only saw a few baby bedbugs on the old exit door at the head of my bed and one older one crawling on the carpet tape stuck to the head of my mattress. It didn’t look to be stuck and seemed to be moving fairly easily. There were also bedbugs stuck to the tape around my futon. They seem to have diminished in number over the last couple of weeks. 

            I posted “The Legendary Era”, my translation of “L’epoque légendaire” by Boris Vian on my Boris Vian Facebook page and on my personal Facebook page. 

            I finished comparing the transcript I’d made a few years ago of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg with the one I found yesterday online. The recent one seems to be correct. I started memorizing the first verse. 

            I weighed 91 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            I put some more two sided carpet tape in places along the edge of my mattress. I sprayed more diatomaceous earth along the bottom of my baseboards near the bed. 

            I weighed 92.15 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.45 kilos at 17:50. 

            I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a piece of roast pork while watching an interview with Carol Burnett that accompanied a mega collection of her shows on DVD. 

            When Tim Conway adlibbed it sometimes went four minutes over but it was so good they would just cut something else from that week’s show. 

            Harvey Korman had been for Danny Kaye what Carl Reiner had been for Sid Caesar. When they were preparing Carol’s show she said she needed a Harvey Korman and someone asked, “How about Harvey Korman?” 

            Carol didn’t want to be controversial. She wanted to be a clown. Political stuff becomes dated.

            Rick Hawkins and Liz Sage wrote the “Went With the Wind” sketch. Rick had done his thesis on Gone With the Wind. 

            They auditioned several male actors to be eye candy for some of their skits and it was Lyle Waggoner who impressed the receptionists the most. So they hired him but he also turned out to be very funny. He left in the 6th or 7th year to do Wonder Woman. 

            They were doing the Jaws takeoff and Tim was playing the shark hunter and tells the story to Harvey and Vickie of how his wife died. A great white got her but she would have been okay if she hadn’t been wearing her lucky ham. That wasn’t in the script. 

            The network was bound by contract to give Carol a variety show for 30 episodes if she wanted one but they had no faith that she could pull it off.

            It was the executive producer Bob Banner who suggested to Carol that she do a Q & A at the beginning of the show. She was terrified at first but then it became her favourite part of the show. The audience got to know her before they saw her do her characters. 

            Milt Kamen was Sid Caesar’s stand-in on the show Caesar’s Hour and a great comedian on his own. Carol became friends with him in New York. She told him she would love to see some of Sid’s rehearsals so he got her in on Saturdays and she sat in the balcony. She was living at The Rehearsal Club at the time, which was what the play Stage Door was written about. She would watch Sid, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris go through the dress rehearsal of their sketches. Then she would run home and watch the show to see what changes they made between rehearsal and show. One time they did a takeoff on Inherit the Wind and Sid was playing Clarence Darrel. Howie was the defendant and Carl was the prosecuting attorney. The foreman of the jury was supposed to say they find the defendant guilty and then Sid would get up and with a convoluted argument prove he was innocent. But during the show the foreman made a mistake and said they find the defendant not guilty. So Sid adlibbed and said, “You say he’s not guilty but I know you think he is!” then he was still able to do his monologue. The guy who’d played the foreman left and was running for the subway but during the commercial Sid left the studio and ran after him, grabbed him and told him, “It’s okay! You come back next week!” then Sid ran back to finish the show. Carol says, “That’s class!” 

            Carol was in summer stock in 1955 at a place called Green Mansions in the Adirondacks. At the end of the season the players got together and did a takeoff on the season. Years later at the end of The Carol Burnett Show’s first season, Carol got the crew to do a flip show and parody the season. In one skit three cameramen came out dressed in drag as Marilyn Horne, Eilene Farrell, and Carol. They were wearing the same dresses that had been worn by Carol, Marilyn and Eileen when they’d done “Hey Big Spender” and lip-synched the original voices. 

            Executive producer Bob Wright also did Lana Turner’s number in the same dress. It was especially funny because Bob Wright was the squarest person you could ever meet.

            The flip show became a tradition at the end of every season. The audience was full of CBS employees and ushers. 

            The salutes they did to various songwriters couldn’t be done anymore because the estates of those writers would charge enough money to sink the Titanic today. 

            Carol Channing always ate to stay well and never missed one of the 5000 performances of Hello Dolly. When they invited her out to dinner she would bring her own food in a cooler and it was whale blubber. One time Channing missed a rehearsal but showed up for the next one and explained that she’d eaten some bad frozen elk in Vegas. She advised Carol that if she’s ever on the road, don’t eat just any frozen elk. 

            The Three Little Pigs sketch was written by Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos. 

            Nobody had ever asked Ray Charles to be in a sketch but he did it well and enjoyed it. 

            They depended on the audience for timing and so Carol wanted the show to be as live as possible. 

            The Dolly Sisters parody was written by Ken and Mitzi Welch all with original songs. 

            It took two hours to tape Carol’s one hour show. Carol has since then done guest appearances on 22 minute sitcoms and it takes them five hours to shoot. 

            Ernie Flatt could make it look like Carol could dance. He and his dancers took a risk and pulled up stakes to move from New York to Los Angeles to do Carol’s show. 

            When Carol sang “You Don’t Have to Say You Love” dressed in Spanish costume there was a whip artist who was supposed to flick off various accessories that Carol was wearing. He clipped her shoulder in the first taping and in the second stripped her down to her underwear. 

            After Carol parodied Rita Hayworth, Rita called and asked to be on the show. Carol was surprised at how tiny she was since she looks so tall on screen. She showed up by herself with no handlers. 

            Kenny Solms and Gale Parent created As The Stomach Turns. 

            Bernadette Peters was the first performer they’d ever asked to be on Carol’s show. 

            The Carol Burnett Show was like an old vaudeville show. 

            Tim Conway was a tumbler in college. He was so strong that he could fall downstairs in slow motion. 

            Sid Caesar at the age of 14 played saxophone in the Catskills for The Swingtime Six and also performed in skits. He studied saxophone at Juilliard. He played saxophone for the orchestras of Charlie Spivak, Shep Fields, and Claude Thornhill. He made his film debut in Tars and Spars in 1946. He made his Broadway debut in 1948 in the revue Make Mine Manhattan in which he sang, acted, double talked and pantomimed his original skit “The Five Dollar Date”. He made his TV debut on Texaco Star Theatre in 1948. His first series was The Admiral Broadway Revue in 1949. The show was canceled because it was too successful and Admiral couldn’t keep up the demand that the show created for their TV sets. He starred in Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954 and Caesar’s Hour from 1954 to 1957. He starred in The Spirit is Willing, He co-starred in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, A Guide for the Married Man, Fire Sale, Silent Movie, History of the World, Airport 1975, The Great Mom Swap, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, He hosted Saturday Night Live in 1983. He could double talk multiple languages but could only speak English and Yiddish. He said one can imitate any language by learning its rhythm and musicality. He once dangled one of his writers (Mel Brooks) from an 18th floor window. He won two Emmy Awards. He wrote Where Have I Been and Caesar’s Hours. He was married to Florence Levy for 67 years until she died.

August 14, 1996: I was the feature poet at the Art Bar reading series

                                      

Thirty years ago today

            On Wednesday night I was the feature poet at the Art Bar reading series and I performed with my guitar and accompaniment on the recorder by Brian Haddon. I sang my poem “Portrait of My Quicksilver Headdress". Features are asked to provide copies of one of their poems so that everybody could read it while they are performing so I copied the whole poem out by hand on a continuous accordion stack of old style continuous feed printer paper. I asked Dennis, who was sitting at the table next to mine to pass the top end of the paper to the next person once we started playing and so during the poem the text was snaking around the room like a paper dragon. In the end, features are supposed to answer questions from the audience. Brian stood there in dark sunglasses and a leather jacket and fielded the first question. We exchanged a whisper and then he told the audience in a mobster accent that, “Mistah Christian refuses to ansah that question on the grounds that it might incriminate him!” Someone asked my poetic influences and I said, “The Monkees and Dr. Strange comics”. I also did an impersonation of Mick Jagger at one point. I think people enjoyed themselves.

                                        

Portrait of My Quicksilver Headdress 

So here I'm again with my writing 

That illusive nomadic Muse 

that comes charging from the unconscious frontier 

like a ravaging horde of Mongols 

to lay waste the card-house empire 

of my conceptual Mind 

is back now to dance on the damage with me 

well at least for one more clumsy time 

But nowadays I have to venture 

deep into its sweet resting place 

drag it kicking & screaming from out of its bed 

& then slap it till its wide awake 

just to nail down its dancing convulsions 

like Christ on my high forehead's cross

Oh, but make no mistake from the shape of this mask 

Know my Muse it is always the boss 

Each one of my comatose projects 

that had lain there so dumb on their backs 

half-formed, like thalidomide babies so long 

are now spread like a thousand card hand 

of poker dealt out by the dealer 

who is my sweet imprisoned Muse

But I'm beguiled by all the wild jokers I find 

in this deck that I've so much abused

All the brutalized, ink-blackened pages 

that had crunched themselves into soft balls 

in the killer womb inside my frustrated fist 

& to warm smoky freedom had rolled 

away on the underground railroad

conducted by garbage truck crews

well they're back now to fight through my Memory's court 

for their forty pages & a Muse 

Yes I'm back once again with my Baby 

that had swum for so long in the womb 

& the ultrasound films of that boring process 

are continuous echo-reruns 

on the nightmarish Walt Disney channel 

that plays in my Subconscious Mind

providing the vaguest reflection of me 

that my ego could Hope to design

It’s my fantasy's one-sided quarrel

I won't have to avert my eyes

& there's no counter-wit here I must circumvent

There's nobody to tell me I lie

So I'll lie in here all by my lonesome

just soaking up in my own brew 

that’s so warm & so deep I just might go to sleep 

in this alphabetic-stupor-stew

I use this typewriter to hammer 

a hole for myself in the wall 

of the towering mountain of purposefulness

& my voice as a beckoning call 

to call you all out of your caverns

so I can then investigate

& comparatively determine the size 

of my own spread of surrealestate

If you've all been knocked on your asses 

in as many good & bad ways

then you're fattened by Memory like I have become

& writing is one way to lose weight

Cause experiencing & teaching 

are two halves of one breathing process

& those of us holding a lungful of Life 

can now pass on that Eventful breath 

But our tiny Minds can't seem to handle 

Sensation's chaotic crossfire 

that charges the electrical circuitry 

of each Moment that challenges time

So that’s why we cause them to mutate

& bleed into Future & Past

diluting them into a thin "Lady's Drink"

who's tall volume might cushion their blast

Then we sip with the greatest of leisure

Hope & Memory's candy cane straws 

reweld them back into a plastic Moment

merely flawed by some surgical scars

that run like a railroad track border 

between these two Nations at war

whose dividing line is as hard to define

as the one between ocean & shore

Yes we tend to keep our lives separate 

from Reality's smashing sea 

with dams made of bones from our clinking closets

& amnesia: the sealant between

Then we prick that dyke-wall with pinholes

to let just a little bit through

But its high where the wall's thin enough to be pricked 

& the footholds are so very few

& most of us are far too lazy

to climb up to where its that thin

& less of us have the digestive system 

that will hold that effulgent-juice in 

long enough so that when we do spit it 

deep into some young thirsty Mind

it won't be so rich as to make the kid sick

or go down as more grape-juice than wine

But in my Life the gray knotted tapeworm

that is my excuse for a Soul

keeps me stealing that blood that’s been barely tasted 

from that foaming-toothed vampire’s hole

that serves as the garbage disposal of prayer

& of blessing of curse & of sigh

from who's lips we read the equations of Time

& who's nickname is simply "The Sky"

Sometimes it takes years of rewriting 

to translate one Moment in Time

& though the translation is never complete

it might unveil a piece of my Mind

& almost just might count for something

in writing as in hand grenades

which though they fall short of the targeted mass

they still manage to blow it away

But I write cause I don't have the courage 

to sit or to stand or to walk

in peace so I mirror these black fireworks

inside me with a crude voodoo-doll 

that shields me from most of my Demons

but is also a fisherman’s net

to catch them to serve as the ingredients

in my diet of Dark-Angel flesh

Its a parachute serving to soften 

my descent through solitude's space 

that bottomless Mind-shaft of boredom & fear

that I tumble through from day to day

& I fall through these out of Time Moments 

with or without pen in place

wrapped up in a mirror-lined crystal cocoon 

that will give me illusions of space

But what sails me away from one island 

of boredom becomes one in kind

So even though I get a sense of focus

lining up with a Moment in Time

its too bad it isn't the Moment 

my body is feeding upon

but a Moment that hangs in the perilous air

no momentum to carry it on

I can't seem to hold my attention 

when ideas fly in large flocks

but the counterbalance of this difficulty 

is my flexible method of thought

& a talent for seeing the order

that lies in Perception's "Outback"

which renders me so much more beautiful 

than the rest of you cloven-brained hacks

My acrobatical circus-boy Mind

keeps on seeping through all of the cracks

in conception & emerges triumphantly 

as a glistening penis-head buck

Yes I'm raking the sky with my antlers

& their explosion frozen in Time

a quicksilver ejaculation that sprouts 

from a well at the core of my Mind

My thoughts are slowed down by my writing 

just long enough to be shocked 

by their image reflected inside of the page

& for one fleeting Moment be caught 

like deer staring into car headlights

just long enough to be pulled 

back inside myself to become the soundtrack 

of my dance for the Calendar Girl

They go back in myself orchestrate the striptease

of my Internal Calendar-Girl 

Noël Coward

            On Monday morning I only saw three live bedbugs. One was an adult near the baseboard at the foot of my bed and it was black and greasy inside. The other two were on the wall above the head of my bed and they were babies. I think I saw that a few more babies had been caught on the carpet tape. 

            I published “L’epoque légendaire” (The Legendary Era) by Boris Vian on my Christian’s Translations blog. I looked for and found some photos of Vian that I hadn’t seen before. 

            I listened to “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg while comparing the transcript I’d made a few years ago with the one I found yesterday online. I’ve gone through about half of both transcripts and so far the recent one seems more correct. 

            I weighed 91.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            I weighed 92.8 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.55 kilos at 17:55. 

            I was three days behind in my journal and worked on catching up. 

            I had a potato with margarine and a piece of roast pork while watching an interview with Carol Burnett that was included in the DVD of her shows. 

            Carol says Vicki Lawrence was very shy and they didn’t give her too much to begin with. But she learned her craft in front of 30 million people a week. Harvey Korman took her under his wing and mentored her. he taught her how to do accents and how to not just listen for her cue but how to listen to the other actors. 

            Carol started out being kooky and crossing her eyes but over the years her comic delivery became more mature. She says it was probably only 7% of the time that they broke up during a skit.

            Carol could see the production staff in the glass booth often making comments and laughing during her Q & A with the audience. She wanted to know what they were saying so she wore an ear piece and had Bob Mackie design a dress that would conceal it. When she heard their jokes in response to audience questions she would repeat them in her answers and the directors thought she must be wearing a wire. They had the cameraman move behind her but they couldn’t see it. On the way home her husband the producer Joe Hamilton asked her if she’d been wearing a wire but she pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about. She never admitted it until this interview. 

            “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” was the only song James Stewart could play on the piano. He’d gotten to Carol’s last show early and they were hiding him from her. When Carol ended the series as the Charwoman they surprised her by having a lot of her favourite guest stars file past her, such as Bernadette Peters, Betty White, Alan Ludden, Roddy McDowell, Jim Nabors, and even Harvey Korman was there. 

            Mel Tormé, Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera were also very good comic sketch actors. A lot of people known as singers liked to come on the show because they would be included in sketches. 

            Carol wants to see more classy humour on TV. 

            Placido Domingo told Carol her show helped him learn English. 

            I’ve been listening to Noel Coward who wrote some great songs with some very clever lyrics. He was actually better than the most renowned lyricists of his era like Sondheim, Mercer, and Porter. He made his stage debut by the age of 6. At 14 he became the protégé and probably lover of Philip Streatfield. He wrote his first play at 16. He attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Art. The earliest known recording of a Noël Coward song was “Peter Pan” in 1918. He made his film debut in Hearts of the World. His first two co-written plays were Ida Collaborates and Women and Whisky. His first solo play was The Rat Trap in 1918. His first West End play was I’ll Leave It To You in 1920. His early writings in the 1920s were short songs and sketches for revue shows. In 1920 he started the turtleneck fad. His first musical review was London Calling in 1923. His first critical and financial hit was The Vortex in 1924, which was shocking for its use of drugs and sex and attracted large audiences. He wrote Hay Fever, Private Lives, Present Laughter, and Bitter Sweet. In 1925 he had four plays running at the same time in the West End. By 1930 he was the highest earning author in the western world with an income of the modern equivalent of 3 million pounds a year. He thrived during the Great Depression. His plays made into movies were Cavalcade, This Happy Breed, In Which We Serve (which he co-directed), Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter, Design for Living, He was also a composer, painter and comedian. He was the first British pop star. He worked under cover for British intelligence during the war. He ran the British propaganda office in Paris. He toured the world to entertain British troops. He was on Hitler’s hit list of British celebrities who would be executed if Germany conquered England. After WWII he reinvented himself as a songwriter and cabaret singer with songs like “Mad Dogs and Englishmen”, “I’ll See You Again”, “I Went to a Marvellous Party”, “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans”, and “London Pride”. . Paramount offered him $500 a week for 23 years if he would make three commitments for them either as a writer, actor or director. He turned them down because he thought that his fans in England would call him a sell-out. In 1954 he did a season in Las Vegas, performing for two nights a week for what he would later call “Nescafe Society” and earning $35,000 a week (which was like almost half a million now). It was recorded as Noël Coward at Las Vegas. He starred in the Ford Star Jubilee TV series in 1955. He became a tax exile in Bermuda in 1956. He starred in The Scoundrel. He co-starred in The Italian Job, Surprise Package, Our Man in Havana, Boom, . He wrote the novel Pomp and Circumstance in 1960. He was close friends with Marlene Dietrich. He was knighted in 1970 and was the first tax exile to receive that honour. He wrote 140 plays and hundreds of songs. The character of Beverly Carlton in The Man Who Came to Dinner was based on Coward. When Gertrude Lawrence married Richard Aldrich he sent her a telegram: “Dear Mrs. A. Hooray Hooray! Finally you are deflowered. I love you now as always. Sincerely Noel Coward.” He preferred a cup of cocoa over Hollywood. The Queen Mother attended his funeral service “Because he was my friend”.

August 13, 1996: At my open stage I promoted my Art Bar reading series feature

Thirty years ago today 

            On Tuesday night as always I hosted my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage in the Art Bar of the Gladstone Hotel. I promoted my Wednesday night feature at the Art Bar reading series in the Csarda Hungarian restaurant on Elm Street. I also announced that I would be doing a feature at my open stage next week.

Stephen Colbert

            On Sunday morning before getting up I felt and smelled some bedbugs. When I checked, some babies were stuck on the tape and a few more than yesterday were on the old exit door at the head of my bed. Some of them had my blood inside and some didn’t. I’ll put some more tape down today and some more diatomaceous earth under the baseboards. There are certainly fewer bedbugs now than there were a couple of weeks ago so maybe I can diminish them further.

            I uploaded “L’epoque légendaire” (The Legendary Era) by Boris Vian to my Christian’s Translations blog and since there are no chords to place, it will be published tomorrow. 

            I published “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg and my translation “Pirate” on my Christian’s Translations blog, then I posted my translation on Facebook. I searched in my 1974 Gainsbourg document for the next song that I didn’t translate before because I didn’t have the audio. The first two songs are “Lili t’a pas d’sosie” and “Y’a Bon” as sung by Lisette Malidor but there is no audio. Next after those is “Docteur Faust” and there is audio for that and I did a few years ago try to transcribe the lyrics but probably got it wrong. I found another transcript and copied it, so tomorrow I’ll start learning “Docteur Faust”. 

            I weighed 91.3 kilos before breakfast. I played my Martin during song practice for the last of four sessions and as usual it didn’t want to stay in tune. 

            Around midday I put some more two-sided carpet tape in places along the edge of my bed and sprayed some more diatomaceous earth under the baseboards. 

            I weighed 93.15 kilos before lunch, which is a record high in the early afternoon of any time since I’ve been weighing myself. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            I got up from my siesta too late to ride my bike downtown but not too late to take a ride to Ossington and Bloor. 

            I weighed 92.25 kilos at 17:50.

            I was still four days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I made pizza on Ethiopian bread with marinara, tomato pesto, oven wedge fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching four short interviews of Carol Burnett. 

            The first was in 2017 by Stephen Colbert.

            It’s the 50th anniversary of The Carol Burnett Show. 

            Her first job in New York was as a hat check girl in a women’s tea room. Women don’t check their hats but there was an oyster bar downstairs that men went to and she would grab them and check their coats. She would then cut the tag off the collar and resew it. Then when they came for their coats she would tell them they’d repaired their coats and they’d usually give her a bigger tip. She says she was a con artist. 

            Stephen Colbert’s show was shot in the Ed Sullivan Theatre, which before it was given that name was also where Carol performed as a Garry Moore Show castmember from 1959 to 1961. 

            Stephen asks Carol if there was anything the CBS Standards and Practices censors told her she couldn’t do. She says there was the sketch in which she was a nudist being interviewed by Harvey Korman at the fence that surrounded a nudist colony. The fence concealed her below the shoulders and above the thighs. She told Harvey they had dances on Fridays and he asks how nudists dance, She said, “Very carefully”. The censors thought that line was risqué. So Carol changed the answer to “Cheek to cheek” and that was fine. 

            There was a special coming up to celebrate the anniversary and Stephen says he’ll be in it and that he’ll be singing. Carol says he has a great voice. 

            The second interview is from 2018 by Paolo Presto on an internet show called A Spoonful of Paolo. 

            He says that he started his show seven years ago and he had a vision of having Carol Burnett as a guest. 

            He asks Carol if she can take being called a living legend. She says what it means is “you’re old because if you live long enough and you’re still working you get that label.” 

            He asks Carol about her new show A Little Help with Carol Burnett. She says she has a manager she met through Julie Andrews and he asked her if she’d like to do a show that’s something like Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darndest Things. She loves to work with kids so she was all for it. The age range is between 5 and 9 because at that age they don’t censor themselves. They say what they are thinking. Each episode has a panel of five kids and a grownup guest who has a dilemma they want the kids to help them solve. They show a clip of Carol asking, “Why should people get married” and one kid answers, “So the human population doesn’t go to zero”. 

            Carol says the humour of her old show still holds up better than a lot of current shows because it wasn’t topical or edgy. Edgy comedy is too easy. 

            About all the opportunities that suddenly opened up for her, Carol thinks that if you put out energy you get it back. 

            He asks Carol what was her biggest dream moment of her career. She says the 11 years of her show. There was also when she got the lead in Once Upon a Mattress and when she joined The Garry Moore Show. She says the award that means the most to her was the Most Promising Newcomer Award that she got back at UCLA because it was her first award. Paolo gives her a Most Promising Legend Award in the form of a glass prism and it has a quote by her late daughter Carrie: “More than anything wee are remembered for our smiles. The ones we share with our closest and dearest. And the one we bestow on a stranger who needs it.” Carol says it’s one of the nicest things she’s ever received. 

            The third interview is from a few weeks later on The Today Show by Al Roker. The interview takes place at the Ed Sullivan Theatre. Carol says she used to change costumes in the elevator. 

            The fourth interview is from about three weeks later on The Daily Blast by Tory Shulman. 

            Tory asks if she felt responsibility as a woman when she got her show. She says she didn’t. 

            The junior writer on The Garry Moore Show was Neil Simon who they called “Doc Simon”.

            Referring to Carol’s landmark lawsuit against The National Enquirer, Tory asks Carol if it’s easier to fight for the truth now. Carol says it’s harder because there are so many lies that get repeated so much people believe them. 

            Tory starts crying as she thanks Carol for answering her calling. 

            Stephen Colbert is the youngest of 11 children. He was an altar boy for 11 years. He studied acting, voice and ballet at Northwestern and performed with the No Fun Mud Piranhas improv group. He became a member of Second City in Chicago. He made his TV debut in 1993 in Missing Persons. In 1995 he co-created and co-starred in the sketch comedy show Exit 57, which ran for two seasons. He spent six months as a writer and castmember of The Dana Carvey Show. He was half of Robert Smigel’s Ambiguously Gay Duo on Saturday Night Live. He co-created and co-starred in Strangers With Candy. He made his film debut in the short film Shock Asylum. From 1997 to 2005 he was a correspondent on The Daily Show. He then became the host of The Colbert Report. He coined the word “Truthiness”. He co-starred in Bewitched and Company. In 2006 he hosted the White House Correspondents dinner in which he criticized President Bush and the press. In 2007 he ran for President. In 2009 he co-starred in Monsters Versus Aliens. In 2014 he replaced David Letterman as the host of The Late Show. He co-created and co-wrote Our Cartoon President. He was the voice of the Dean of Students on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. He co-produced Fairview, Tooning Out the News, Tha God’s Honest Truth, and After Midnight. He co-authored America: The Book, which was #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list for 15 weeks. He co-authored I Am America and So Can You, which was also #1. He co-authored the novel Wigfield: the Can Do Town That May Not. He teaches Sunday school every week. He is an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church Monastery. He’s deaf in his right ear. He’s an 8th or 9th cousin of David Letterman. Ben and Jerry’s has an ice cream flavour called Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream.

Ken Howard

            On Saturday I went to bed a little after 2:00 and didn’t notice any bedbugs on me during the times I was awake. After yoga I checked and saw a few babies crawling on the old exit door and most of those were dark inside with no fresh blood. A couple did have blood and so I assume that they’d made it across the sticky carpet tape to feed on me while I was sleeping. I noticed one baby actually moving on the tape while some had gotten stuck. 

            I finished translating “L’epoque légendaire” (The Legendary Era) by Boris Vian so tomorrow I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            I continued editing “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication. I should have it posted tomorrow. 

            I weighed 91.25 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the third of four sessions and as usual it was chronically out of tune. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where I bought five bags of Canadian cherries, a basket of Canadian peaches, two packs of Mexican raspberries, some bananas, a sack of Canadian potatoes. a salmon fillet from Chile, cinnamon-raisin bread, mouthwash, a jar of tomato pesto, a jug of lemonade, a jug of orange juice, two containers of skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 92.5 kilos at 14:25. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            I took a siesta and for the first time in several Saturdays woke up in time to take a bike ride downtown. On the way back, since I’d forgotten to buy five-year-old cheddar at No Frills I thought I’d stop at Loblaws at Portland and Queen because since it’s the No Frills parent company I figured they’d have the same things. I hadn’t been in that store since the early days of Covid. They have a Starbucks in the store now. I looked for cheese and found they have cheese in five different sections. They have the processed cheese in one part, the shredded cheese in another and then three cheese locations in the deli section. It would be so much more convenient if they put all the cheese in once place. I finally found five-year-old cheddar in a fancy wooden fridge cabinet with sliding doors. They didn’t have the kind that No Frills sells but rather Agropur so I got two packs. It’s not as good as Balderson's five-year-old cheddar but it’ll do. 

            I weighed 91.95 kilos at 18:25. 

            I was still four days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, potato wedges, and five-year-old cheddar with a glass of Creemore lager while watching an interview with Carol Burnett by Screen Actor’s Guild and American Federation of Radio and Television Artists President Ken Howard. 

            He says Carol is their 52nd Life Achievement Honoree. 

            He says he knows where the bodies are buried and wants Carol to talk about Tamiment. She says it was a resort area in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They hired actors and writers to come for the whole summer. Each performer would get room and board plus $1000 for the whole season. They would write and perform an original musical comedy every week. People would come in on buses and spend a week there. They were usually single people looking to hook up. The shows were free and so they had to be good to capture the attentions of these guests who were really there to pick someone up and take a ride in a canoe. When Carol was there in 1957 Artie Johnson was there and so were the creators of Once Upon a Mattress. They had to learn things and put them together very quickly and it was a great training ground. Once Upon a Mattress was created at Tamiment in 1958. They kind of wrote it for the brilliant Nancy Walker and she said she’d love to do it. But then they got George Abbott to direct it and he said he’d like to have a brand new face star in the show. 

            When she was a small child she saw Jimmy Stewart on the screen and declared that he was her friend. Sure enough years later they became friends. When Carol was in her 20s she was a guest on a Dinah Shore summer replacement show and Mervin LeRoy the director called and invited her to lunch at the studio. She wore her only pair of high heels and took a bus to the studio. He was shooting The FBI Story and invited her to watch a scene before lunch. She was surprised to see James Stewart in the scene they were shooting. Mervin asked her if she wanted to meet him. When he spoke to her she couldn’t hear it because her heart was beating so loud. All she could think of to say was, “I guess we’d better put on the old feedbag” then she turned around to step off he stage but stepped directly into a bucket of whitewash with her right high heel. She was too embarrassed to let on that it was a mistake so she pretended that she’d done it on purpose and walked off the set dragging the bucket with her foot. Years later she went for dinner with George Kennedy and his wife and he’d also invited James Stewart and his wife so that’s how they became friends. Carol invited James and his wife Gloria to a party once and Gloria apologized in advance because they would be leaving early so they could get to bed. Among the guests were Jo Stafford, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and Mel Tormé. After dinner they all got around the piano to sing. James loved to sing and so he didn’t leave until 1:00. 

            The Mama’s Family sketch was written by Dick Clare and Jenna McMann. They were writing about their own dysfunctional families back in Chicago. At the reading Carol decided to do Eunice with a southwestern US accent and so Harvey and Vicki did the same. Dick and Jenna were horrified. They said you can’t do it that way because you’ll alienate the entire south. They tried it once without the accents and got no laughs but then when they brought back the accents the same sketch was funny.

            When her show went into syndication they did half hour shows with the musical numbers cut out. Steve Lawrence was a frequent guest and in addition to being a singer he was a brilliant sketch comic. He told the story of being approached by teenagers at an airport who only knew him as a comedian and had no idea he was a singer. 

            Carol has just finished writing her fourth book. This one is called In Such Good Company.

            One week on The Garry Moore Show the guest was Ed Wynn. He told them the difference between a comic and a comedic actor. A comic like Bob Hope says funny things while a comedic actor like Jack Benny says things funny. 

            Ken Howard studied at the Yale School of Drama and made his Broadway debut in 1968 in Promises Promises. He made his TV debut in 1969 on NYPD. He originated the role of Thomas Jefferson in the musical 1776. He won a Tony for his performance in Child’s Play. He made his film debut in Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon in 1970. In films he co-starred in 1776, A Numbers Game, Such Good Friends, The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie, Second Thoughts, and Better Living Through Chemistry. He co-created and starred in the TV series The White Shadow (based on his own experience as a basketball star in school). He starred in the series Adam’s Rib and The Manhunter. His first Emmy was for Facts For Boys. He won an Emmy Award for his performance in Grey Gardens in 2009. He taught master classes at the American Repertory Theatre Institute and Harvard University. He wrote Act Natural in 2003. His second wife was the daughter of Ann Landers. August 9 – On Sunday morning before getting up I felt and smelled some bedbugs. When I checked, some babies were stuck on the tape and a few more than yesterday were on the old exit door at the head of my bed. Some of them had my blood inside and some didn’t. I’ll put some more tape down today and some more diatomaceous earth under the baseboards. There are certainly fewer bedbugs now than there were a couple of weeks ago so maybe I can diminish them further. I uploaded “L’epoque légendaire” (The Legendary Era) by Boris to my Christian’s Translations blog and since there are no chords to place, it will be published tomorrow. I published “Shylock” by Serge Gainsbourg and my translation “Pirate” on my Christian’s Translations blog, then I posted my translation on Facebook. I searched in my 1974 Gainsbourg document for the next song that I didn’t translate before because I didn’t have the audio. The first two songs are “Lili t’a pas d’sosie” and “Y’a Bon” as sung by Lisette Malidor but there is no audio. Next after those is “Docteur Faust” and there is audio for that and I did a few years ago try to transcribe the lyrics but probably got it wrong. I found another transcript and copied it, so tomorrow I’ll start learning “Docteur Faust”. I weighed 91.3 kilos before breakfast. I weighed 93.15 kilos before lunch, which is a record high in the early afternoon of any time since I’ve been weighing myself. I weighed 92.25 kilos at 17:50.

August 12, 1996: Brian and I rehearsed for our Wednesday show

Thirty years ago today 

            On Monday I rehearsed with Brian for our gig in two days at the Art Bar reading series.