On Thursday after midnight I was running the lint roller over the curtains between the bedroom and the living room to catch bedbugs when the wooden bracket that holds up the right end of the curtain rod fell off. Inside the wall where it had been attached was a bedbug nest. I covered the hole with carpet tape to trap the monsters inside and then I propped up the right end of the rod with a camera tripod. I finished lint rolling the curtains, the top of my bed, and my pillow. I shook out my top sheet and the comforter on the deck and went to bed around 2:05. I didn’t sleep very well before the alarm went off at 5:00. After yoga I didn’t find any bedbugs around my bed.
I finished translating “Les bienfaits de la pratique” (The Benefits of Practice) by Boris Vian. Since there’s no audio and I can’t work out the chords, tomorrow I’ll just post in on my Christian’s Translations blog and then move on to the next Vian song.
While I was typing a yellowjacket was landing on my keyboard and I paid close attention so my hands didn’t get too close. Later though I put my left hand on my leg and I guess the yellowjacket had moved to that spot and I got stung on the inside of my pinky. It really hurt.
I worked out the chords for three-quarters of the first verse of “La fille aux claquettes” (The Tap Dancing Girl) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have that and maybe the chorus finished on Friday.
I weighed 90.75 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Martin during song practice for the second of four sessions and it went out of tune on every song. My little finger still bothered me while I was playing but not enough to impede my chording.
I weighed 91.35 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride and on the way back stopped at Freshco where most of the grapes were too soft but I managed to find one bag of firm red ones and two of the green. I also bought bananas, a pack of blueberries, half a brown sugar ham, a small tub of I Can’t Believe It’s not Butter, a jug of orange juice, a large can of Full City Dark coffee, some two-in-one shampoo, and a lint roller. I price matched the grapes to Walmart’s price of $6.47 a kilo.
I weighed 91 kilos at 18:40.
I was three days behind in my journal and worked on catching up.
I cut up a whole chicken into legs, wings, breasts, and spine and grilled the parts. I had a leg with a potato and gravy while watching a video of Carol Burnett Show Show Stoppers from 2001.
It starts with short clips of bloopers. Like one where Carol says, “I said to myself, Blossom Butterworth” then she pauses and repeats the start but obviously has forgotten the line so she says, “You’ve had it, Carol Burnett!”
Carol comes out to the same stage where her show was filmed to a live audience and a standing ovation.
She takes questions from the audience. Someone asks Carol how she would like to be immortalized. She says she’s having a rose named after her.
A guy named Scott says he’s been in love with her since he was small and one of the sexiest things she’s ever done is the Tarzan yell. Carol says, “You think the Tarzan yell is sexy? Are you all right?” She does it for him.
Carol says she has Harvey, Vicki, and Tim with her and then starts a song about what a perfect team they were. “With our golden throats we hit all the notes” then she shows clips of them fumbling their songs. Vicki goes off key; Harvey loses his note on “King of the Road”. Carol continues that “Nothing could break up our perfect team” and then shows several clips of sketches where broke up.
Carol says most of the clips they’ll be showing have never been seen.
There’s a clip of Harvey and Tim cracking up during an Old Man sketch, then Carol brings Harvey and Tim out. Tim shuffles out very slowly in his old man wig to a standing ovation.
Someone asks if they always did the series live. Tim says, “A couple of us were dead at the time.”
They show the clip of Tim playing a superior officer drumming Harvey out of the service and it’s the first time Tim used the accent that would later be that of Mr. Tudball. The accent causes Harvey to crack up. He tells Harvey he left his men in a ditch to get knots on their heads “while you went into town to sing. I like to sing myself but there is a time for singing and there is a time for duty. When you’re on duty you shouldn’t sing.” He starts on listing places he can sing and then the clip stops.
Carol, Harvey, and Tim are now sitting down. Referring to the clip, Harvey asks if anyone could have stood up to that kind of torture? He says he tried and he’d even lie awake nights thinking of ways to get Tim but he’d always turn it around.
Harvey shows a clip where Tim got himself. It might be a parody of Jaws. Tim tells a story of how he lost a girlfriend to the sharks. He says they were in a sailboat off Hawaii when she tried to swim to shore. She’d have made it too if…” Tim starts to laugh and totally cracks up as he says, “She’d have made it if she hadn’t been wearing her lucky ham!” Harvey says they had a betting pool all week on whether Tim would get through it.
Carol says she got Tim once when he was playing a man pretending to be a mannequin in the window, Carol comes out in a housecoat and dances like a stripper in front of Tim. Then she opens her coat and he starts laughing. She turns to the camera to show she’s wearing prosthetic breasts. She also got him in the sketch where she’s giving him a sponge bath while singing “You Light Up My Life” but she also cracked up.
Carol brings out her mother, sister, and friend, Vicki Lawrence.
An audience member asks for Vicki’s origin story again. Vicki asks, “Doesn’t everybody know this story?” Carol says she’ll tell it anyway. Tim sits down and Harvey wanders off and shouts stage right, “Could you order me a tuna fish sandwich on rye?” Tim and Harvey sit on the couch while Carol continues the story. Tim asks Harvey, “Do you use Viagra?” Harvey answers, “That would be like putting a new flagpole on a condemned building!”
Carol shows the famous scene when Mama is insulting Eunice’s sanity and ad libs some that crack Carol up. Then she shows a clip of the other insults that never aired from the same scene: “I think you done sprung a leak in your dingy! Is it yer time of the month or somethin?” Eunice is turned away to laugh and Mama grabs her to say, “Look at me!” before Mama cracks up too.
There’s another family sketch when they are playing Sorry and Mama is supposed to say, “gosh dern” but she says “God damn”.
They show the clip where Tim is improvising a story about Siamese elephants joined at the trunk. Eunice tries to move on to mama’s line when Mama says, “You sure that little asshole’s through?” and everybody falls to the floor laughing.
Vicki’s first character that she developed for the show was the high voiced bimbo. She asked Harvey, “How come when I play her I’m stupid for the whole week?” Harvey answered, “Any character you do well is truly a part of you.” To which Vicki responded, “Then how come you’re so good in drag?” She says she never got an answer but Harvey now puts on an effeminate voice and says, “I haven’t the faintest clue!”
They show the first time Harvey ever appeared as Mother Marcus in the As the Stomach Turns soap opera parody. Carol as Marian is sitting with Marcus and she reaches over to squeeze Marcus’s big boob. Then Marcus says, Turnabout is fair play” and reaches for Carol’s boob but Carol turns away and says, “If you can find it!”
They show a clip from when Charo was a guest on the show and Carol played Charo’s mother in a similar skimpy costume but with sagging and swinging breasts. Carol says Bob Mackie would put raw rice in the boobs. Vicki remembers having a whole rack of different sized boobs fitted for her in the costume department: “Small, medium, large, little push, medium push, over the top push, down to the knee, raisins, no raisins…”
They show a clip where Carol says she’s going to go down the pier and fish for sea bass” but she pronounces it like “bass guitar”.
In a commercial parody Harvey plays a minister being served something by Carol as an elderly housekeeper or wife. Harvey says he doesn’t want it because it tastes fishy’ She shoves some in his mouth and he says, “It doesn’t taste fishy! I wonder why!” Carols says, “It’s a veal cutlet you asshole!” Then in the next take Harvey says, “This doesn’t taste fishy asshole, I wonder why!” In the next clip Harvey says, “It doesn’t taste fishy, I wonder why!” Then the crew shouts in chorus, “It’s a veal cutlet you asshole!”
They show a clip of Tim as the old man in an out of control electric wheelchair. It’s supposed to go out through the window but after several tries he just stands up and shuffles through.
They show the clip of the old man sketch in the butcher shop with Tim behind the counter and messing up Harvey’s order. Harvey was a nervous wreck because Laurence Olivier was in the audience. Harvey’s pants were supposed to fall down and when your pants fall down in a sketch you are supposed to wear boxer shorts but Harvey forgot to and wore briefs instead.
There is a clip of Carol dressed as her character Stella Toddler and she strips down to the padded undergarment and the swinging breasts to show what goes into a sketch.
Carol has Bob Mackie wave from his seat.
Carol and Vicki dance and sing a song called “The Mackie Rag” describing costumes that make you feel like a queen, or slightly obscene, cute as can be. Vicki sings “You’ve seen some hot mamas but you never seen a Mama like me”. “Formal, informal, or drag (and they show Harvey the fairy godmother Markus) Wonderful or wacky, elegant or tacky, gimme gimme gimme, gimme a Mackie rag”. They bring Bob on stage. Then Tim comes out in drag and struggling in platform shoes to kiss Bob’s hand.
Carol sings the full version of her theme song. Thetn the cast and Bob come out and stand together to join arms as usual and sway from side to side as the music plays and the credits roll.
Charo’s native language was Spanish but she also spoke Italian, French and English. She started playing guitar at the age of 9 and at 14 she won a scholarship to learn guitar from Segovia. She was discovered by Xavier Cugat when she was 16 and he brought her to the US. He later married her. She won a court case proving that she was born in 1951 but that would have made her 15 when she married Cugat at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. She was the winner of the Guitar Player Magazine poll of Best Flamingo Guitarist for two years in a row. Her trademark phrase “Cuchi Cuchi” came from her talking to her dog Cuchillo. Later she would say it and wiggle her hips. She said, “Around the world I am known as a great musician but in the US I am the cuchi cuchi girl.” She made her film debut in New Friendship in 1963. She made her TV debut on the Danny Kaye Show in 1965. She co-starred in Tiger By the Tail, Thumbelina, In the late 60s and 70’s she made frequent appearances on several popular shows such as Laugh-In, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat (ten times), Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and The Mike Douglas Show, which she co-hosted at least once. She was a semi-regular on Hollywood Squares. Her son Shel Rosten played drums for the heavy metal band Treazen.
