Musical Comedy

            On Monday after midnight I lint rolled the top of my bed but only caught one bedbug probably because I vacuumed on Sunday. I added some more carpet tape to the edge of the head of my bed. I went to bed at around 1:30 and slept fairly well until the alarm went off at 5:00. After yoga I killed a few bedbugs that were stuck to the carpet tape on my bed and on the floor. I killed one that was wandering free on the floor at the foot of my bed. 

            I uploaded “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anyone) by Boris Vian to my Christian’s Translations blog and began preparing it for publication. 

            I almost memorized the last verse of “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have it nailed down on Tuesday. 

            I weighed 91.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the first of four sessions and it went out of tune all the time. It’s usually just the high E, the B, and sometimes the G string that are slightly off. It doesn’t take long to get them back in tune but it’s annoying because if the guitar is properly set up it’ll stay in tune for almost the whole session. 

            I weighed 92.7 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I saw a plain clothes cop giving somebody a ticket. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap but also a vest on top of his civilian clothes saying “Police”. 

            I weighed 91.65 kilos at 17:50. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:32. 

            I digitized an interview with me on CIUT radio about the launch of my first chapbook, Vomit of the Star Eater. I performed the title poem, then “The Princess and the Pea Happy Song” and “Sleep in the Snow”. Tomorrow I’ll digitize the other side, which has home recordings of rehearsals with Brian Haddon and Donna Bartkiw.

            I worked on digitally enhancing one of my old photos. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a heated up T-bone steak while watching two more videos about The Carol Burnett Show. One was a tribute to the writers and the other was about the mini musicals.

            Ken Solms and Gail Parent were signed as the first writers on the show fresh out of college. Tim Conway says nobody is funnier than Kenny Solms and Tim doesn’t know why he doesn’t perform.

            There were usually around 9 writers at a time. 

            Carl Reiner says when there’s a flame like Carol Burnett the moths gather. The same thing happened with Sid Caesar. Every good writer wanted to work on the Sid Caesar show and it was the same with Carol Burnett. 

            Carol says sometimes Laugh-In writers would get tired of quick jokes and wanted to write longer ones so they came to her show while some of her writers would go to Laugh-In. 

            Ken Solms says they got away with murder on The Carol Burnett Show because The Smothers Brothers down the hall were distracting the censors. 

            Carol says every Wednesday the writers would get together for lunch and they would show old kinescopes of variety shows like Jackie Gleason. Carol would usually come in at that time to talk to the head writer Arnie Rosen about script changes. One week she came in and they were watching a porno film. They’d set her up, knowing she’d be dropping by. Carol had never seen porn before and exclaimed, “That’s awful!” Arnie told her, “He’s doing the best he can.” 

            Ken and Mitzi Welch invented the mini musical. 

            Carol says Harvey had a good voice and Vicki adds, “Once he got the note”. 

            Kyra Thompson says they did what Broadway couldn’t do. They put together a Broadway musical comedy review in five days when on Broadway you’d rehearse that for six weeks. 

            Bob Mackie says a lot of Carol’s writers were Broadway calibre but they wanted to live in LA and have a weekly paycheque, and a nice home. 

            Ken Berry says Carol could fill a house with that voice. “It just sails!” 

            Musical Comedy can be traced back to ancient Greece as is evidenced by 6th Century pottery that depicts actors dressed as horses, satyrs, and dancers in exaggerated costumes. 

            In the 16th Century there were parody masses such as by Josquin des Prez and Palestrina, which were banned by the church. Comic opera developed in 17th Century Italy. 

           It spread to France where it became opera comique, then in the 19th Century French operetta, the master of which was Jacques Offenbach. 

           Victorian Burlesque came out of English Pantomime, which came out of Commedia dell’arte which has its roots in Greek Theatre. 

            Pantomime was musical theatre that depicted fairy and folk tales with cross dressing actors. Victorian Burlesque would turn popular operas into broad comic plays. The first was Olympic Revels by J.R. Planché in 1831. Music Halls started in England in the 18th Century. Again, these spread to France in the 19th Century and developed into the Folies Bergere and then The Moulin Rouge. 

            In North America the English Music Hall became the Concert Saloon. A North American form of Burlesque developed into Vaudeville.

September 8, 1996: My daughter and I played until her mother picked her up

Thirty years ago today 

            On Sunday my daughter and I played on the back roof of my place until her mother picked her up.

Jane Lynch

            On Sunday after midnight I lint rolled the top of my bed as usual and picked up several bedbugs. I put some more carpet tape on the less sticky edges of my mattress. I went to bed around 1:30 and didn’t sleep very well. I could feel bedbugs throughout the night. After yoga I checked and didn’t find any bedbugs stuck to the tape or really many crawling free except for one on the floor under the foot of my bed. 

            I ran through singing and playing “Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anyone”, my translation of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” by Boris Vian. On Monday I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to begin the process of preparing it for publication. 

            I memorized the third verse of “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) by Serge Gainsbourg, which is really just half a verse. There’s only one verse left to learn. 

            I weighed 91.35 kilos before breakfast. I played my Kramer during song practice and it went out of tune quite a bit during the first half, then settled into tune for the rest. 

            I vacuumed my keyboard, the area around my desk, my bed, and the bedroom floor. 

            I weighed 93.05 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the early afternoon since August 24. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

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

            I weighed 91.75 kilos at 18:10.

            I was caught up in my journal for the first time this summer at 19:13. 

            For the first time in a long time I returned to my cassette recording project. I digitized the cassette containing my first gig with Brian Haddon. It was our first and I think only feature together as Christian and the Lions at Fat Albert’s. It was also the only gig we did with Brian playing the recorder as opposed to the keyboard. We did “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” and “Megaphor” and then I had Brian entertain people with his recorder while I took a long time to repair a string. Then we did “The Next State of Grace”, “Me and Gravity” and only the last part of “Seven Shades of Blues” made it onto the cassette because it was on the other side and maybe the sound guy forgot to turn the tape right away. Tomorrow I’ll digitize a tape that contains one of my radio interviews and some home rehearsals with Brian Haddon and Donna Bartkiw. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with cream cheese, marinara, tomato pesto, wedge fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching a video about Mama’s Family and another about the TV parodies on The Carol Burnett Show. 

            The Family was written by Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon who also did some of the movie parodies. They wrote Mama for Carol to play and the plan was for a guest star to play Eunice. Then when Carol said she wanted to play Eunice they thought they’d get a guest star to play Mama because it wasn’t meant to be a continuing sketch. But Bob Mackie suggested they let him dress Vicki as the old lady. 

            Vicki says, “I used to hate run-through day because everybody was seated in front of us in folding chairs in a brightly lit room and we used to call it Judgement at Nuremberg”. Vicki and Carol used to almost always run into each other in the washroom having their last nervous pee before the run-through. So before the Family sketch Vickie went into the washroom and was sitting in the stall when she heard a voice in the next stall say, “Mama…” Vickie responded with “What the hell is it Eunice?” “Just wonderin if you got any toilet paper over there.” “I’m busy right now Eunice!” “Well I just need some paper!” “Well when I’m done doing what I’m doin, if I got any paper left I’ll give you yer damn paper!” “Okay, fine!” They came out of their stalls and high fived each other because they knew now it was gonna be great. 

            There’s an excerpt from a skit I never saw when Mama is going to the cemetery to visit her late husband and she doesn’t want Eunice to come because she doesn’t want her father to see how ungrateful Eunice turned out. Eunice says her father never did anything for her because he was too busy doting on her sister Ellen. Kyra Thompson says there were a lot of layers to the Family sketch. 

            Carol became less dependent on her ability to do prat falls and started exploring characters with more depth. Carol understood Eunice because there was a little bit of her mother in her. Jane Lynch thinks Eunice was cathartic for Carol because she got to be the pain in the ass she didn’t allow herself to be in real life. 

            Vicki says at the time Mama was just another old lady that they got her to play because she was the supporting female. When Carol was Little Orphan Annie Vickie was the mean old school marm; Carol was the leading lady and Vickie was the housekeeper; and so on. Carol says Joanne Woodward had a ball guesting in the Family sketch. 

            Vickie says at the end of the 9th season Joe Hamilton came to her and said they were going to do a spin-off and do Mama’s Family. Vickie said, “No”. Joe said, “Whaddaya mean no? We got a commitment!” Vickie had just had her baby and wasn’t sure she wanted to play an old lady every week. Vicki asked, “What about Carol and Harvey?” he said, “You don’t need them.” Vicki said no and Joe was pissed but Carol was happy because it meant they could still do it on the show. It was after the Burnett show ended that they did the Eunice special for CBS. Then they asked Vicki again to do the series so she gave in. 

            Carol was upset when ABC canceled All My Children. Gail Parent one of Carol’s writers was addicted to soap operas and she wondered what would happen if a soap opera wrapped up everything in every episode. After the first one Carol wanted to do it as a regular feature. 

            Jane Lynch used to secretly cross dress as a child. She earned a Bachelors degree in Theatre from Illinois State University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University. She spent 15 years with The Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and then was picked to join Second City. She made her film debut in Vice Versa in 1988. She co-starred on Glee from 2009 to 2015 for which she won an Emmy Award. She co-starred in Dropping the Soap for which she was also an executive producer. She had a recurring role on The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel. On Tv she co-starred in Final Space and Harriet the Spy. She co-starred in Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration, Role Models, Another Cinderella Story, Wreck it Ralph, and Escape from Planet Earth. She made her Broadway debut in Annie in 2013. She hosted Hollywood Game Night from 2013 to 2020. Since 2020 she has been the host and executive producer of the US version of The Weakest Link. She wrote and starred in the play Oh Sister My Sister. She hosted the 2011 Emmy Awards. She hosted Saturday Night Live in 2010. She knew she was gay at 12 but didn’t tell her parents until she was 31. She published the autobiography Happy Accidents in 2011.

September 7, 1996: I read comic books for my daughter's bedtime stories

Thirty years ago today

            On Saturday Nancy brought our daughter to my place to stay for the weekend. It rained heavily so we played inside. I read her a comic book for her bedtime story.

Kid Creole

            On Saturday after midnight I lint rolled the top of my bed several times and picked up all the bedbugs that were waiting for me there. Then I put some fresh carpet tape on the outside edge of the mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I went to bed around 1:30 and slept fairly well but did pick up and kill a couple of bedbugs while lying there. I got up at 5:00 and after yoga checked the bedroom where I found quite a few bedbugs stuck to the tape and only one baby on the wall. 

            I finished revising my translation of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian. On Sunday I’ll run through singing and playing it in English. 

            I memorized the second verse of “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) by Serge Gainsbourg. That’s more than half the song and there’s only a verse and a half left. 

            I weighed 91.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice. That guitar tends to go out of tune during the first half and then stay in tune later. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where I got four bags of red grapes, one bag of green grapes, two packs of Canadian blueberries, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of Montreal smoked meat, a tub of buttery margarine, a basket of Canadian peaches, a jug of lemonade, a jug of orange juice, two containers of skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie's chips. I did a price match on the grapes with the Metro price of $5.49 which is half of the No Frills price but the cashier Kalila with the face tattoo and the weaponized eyelashes put me through the ringer. She looked it up on her phone to find the date and it took about ten minutes. In my experience they take flyers down if they aren’t current. 

            I weighed 92.25 kilos at 14:30. 

            I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. I took a siesta and woke up too late to take a bike ride. 

            I weighed 92 kilos at 17:35. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with cream cheese, marinara, tomato pesto, potato wedges, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching a compilation video with commentary of the first appearances of what became regular sketches on The Carol Burnett Show. 

            There’s a promo in which Carol stands with her cast and her first guest Jim Nabors to promote her first show. 

            They show Tim Conway’s first “Old Man” sketch when he falls down the stairs in slow motion in real time. 

            When they did the Funn Family musical it was the first half hour sketch on any variety show. There was a “Heaven” number that Buz wrote. Ken Solms still sings whenever he calls Buz, “Hello mother how are things in heaven?” 

            Carol says some people objected to The Old Folks sketch but a lot of old people loved it because it showed that they could still get it on. 

            The George and Zelda sketch started out as a parody of A Place in the Sun when Shelly Winters is nagging Montgomery Clift in a rowboat but instead of Zelda falling in the lake and drowning like Shelly, Harvey jumps in to escape. Carol says she made the mistake over time of trying to improve Zelda. She became so obnoxious that she wasn’t funny anymore. 

            It ends with Carol and Lucy as charwomen singing about having “Hutzpah”. 

            I’ve been listening to as much as I can find online of Kid Creole. My ex-girlfriend turned me on to him back in the late 80s but the only full CD I’d ever listened to is You Shoulda Told Me You Were…, which I really like. He’s a good singer, the backup singers are good, the music is funky, the songs are catchy and the lyrics are sometimes interesting. 

            August Darnell was born in August in the Bronx but there is a fictitious back story for his Kid Creole character that he was born in Montreal. He started in a band called The In-Laws with his half brother in 1965. He studied English and Drama at Hofstra University and then became a middle school English teacher. He started his music career because he was a frustrated actor. In 1974, again with his half brother, he formed Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band for which he played bass and wrote the lyrics. They combined Swing and Latin music with Disco rhythms. Their self-titled album was in the top 40, was certified Gold and was nominated for a Grammy Award. Their biggest hit was “Cherchez la Femme”. In 1979 he joined Machine and co-wrote their best known song, “There But For the Grace of God Go I”. 

            In 1980 he formed Kid Creole and the Coconuts with his wife Adriana Kaegi. His Kid Creole persona was a flamboyant and exuberant big band leader clearly inspired by Cab Calloway. Their first album was Off the Coast of Me, which I haven’t been able to find. Their second was Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places (which I’m waiting to download). I’ve just listened to Tropical Gangsters, which is his most popular album and it has some songs I recognized. In Praise of Older Women has the song “Endicott”. In 1983 he formed Elbow Bones and the Racketeers, which had a hit with “A Night in New York”. He appears as a singer in the movie Against All Odds. He’s lived in England, Sweden, Denmark, and Maui. His Coconuts are now European.

September 6, 1996: An attractive woman invited me for coffee but I turned her down

Thirty years ago today 

            On Friday I busked on Bloor street. Mark Critoph’s girlfriend Banu stopped to chat and invited me to go for a coffee but I said I needed to make some money. Maybe I should have gone with her.

Jack Jones

            On Friday after midnight I lint rolled the top of my mattress until no bedbugs were stuck on the roller. Then I put more carpet tape around the edges of my mattress where the old tape had become less sticky. I went to bed at 1:30 and didn’t lie awake feeling any bedbugs on me but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. I was more deeply asleep than usual when the alarm went off at 5:00 because when it finally did penetrate my unconsciousness I didn’t recognize the sound. After yoga I found a few bedbugs stuck to the tape and a few crawling on the walls. 

            I translated the first two verses and the first chorus of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized and translated the first verse of “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 91.95 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since August 20. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune constantly. 

            I called the City about the bedbugs. The message at first said there were ten callers on front of me and so I put down the phone for a few seconds to do something and when I picked it up again there was already an agent on the other end speaking to me. She was very nice and quite sympathetic with my situation. When I told her the landlord said he couldn’t afford to deal with the bedbugs she said, “That’s his problem!” When I told her he always blames me for the bedbugs she said, “That’s what landlords do!” She set the wheels in motion and within man hour or so I got an email telling me that a bylaw officer had already been assigned to my case. I guess they’ll call me on Monday. From past experience I assume that as soon as he calls the landlord he’ll agree to call pest control. There’ll be one treatment but that won’t be enough and so I’ll have to call the City again and then maybe again, again until the bedbugs are gone. 

            I had planned on taking my Targus Voyager II backpack to the laundromat to run it at high in the dryer for 30 minutes as AI had suggested last night. But then I thought I’d double check and asked specifically if I should put the backpack in the dryer. This time the response was “No” because the heat would reshape the molded foam. It had suggested carefully steaming but when I asked again it said “don’t steam the backpack”. It had suggested putting it in the freezer for four days but then also said not to do that. Since I wear the backpack all winter in colder temperatures than the freezer I decided to go with freezer option for now. When I asked AI why it contradicts itself the answer was that sometimes AI hallucinates. Now I just imagine when we put AI brained robots in charge of things and they are all stoned on LSD. I sent that to AI and it thought it was funny. It explained that AI can make statistically plausible guesses that are completely wrong. 

            I weighed 92.8 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco because I’d forgotten the day before to buy Sponge Towels. I got a pack of three and a lint roller. I also checked to see if they had any better grapes than the day before and they did so I got five bags of red ones. 

            I weighed 91.65 kilos at 18:40. 

            I grilled two T-bone steaks and had one with a potato and gravy while watching a video about improvisation on The Carol Burnett Show. 

            Harvey as a supermarket cashier asks Carol if she has everything. Then points to her chest and asks, “What about those lemons”. Then he apologizes. 

            Jack Jones says Tim and Harvey were the modern day Laurel and Hardy. 

            Tina Fey says that on SNL some people broke more than others. “Jimmy Fallon, I’m talkin to you!” 

            Alan Alda says the harder you try not to the more you laugh. “That used to happen to us on M.A.S.H. a lot. Especially at the end of the day when you’d spent the day in a small area when the lights are burning up all the oxygen anything can get you going. The more the director tries to get you to calm down the worse it gets… Tim Conway is deeply and inwardly funny and he knows how funny he is.” 

            Buz Kohan says 99% of the time Tim’s improvizations are better than what we put on the page.

            Don Rickles is a painter and Harvey and Carol have hired him. Don says they don’t need the walls painted but padded and Carol should be a in a hot tub with a duck. 

            Carol sneezes and knocks Harvey’s toupee off. He says, “You just blew my career! 

            Jack Jones made his professional stage debut on stage with his father Allan Jones at the Thunderbird Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in the 1950s. In 1959 he was signed to capital Records and his first album was This Love of Mine. But it flopped and he was dropped by Capital. He was signed to Kapp Records in 1961. He won two Grammy Awards for Best Male Vocal Performance for “Lollipops and Roses” and “Wives and Lovers”. He co-starred in Jukebox Rhythm. His 1964 album Dear Heart was his best charting album. His version of “The Impossible Dream” was #1 on the adult contemporary chart in 1966. Between 1961 and 1967 he recorded 2- albums for Kapp. His 1972 album Bread Winners featuring songs by Davis Gates reached the top 10. He starred in The Comeback. In the movie Love with the Proper Stranger he sang the title song on the radio during certain scenes. He sang the theme song from “The Love Boat”. In the 60s and 70s he was a frequent guest on the many variety shows that were popular at the time. he appeared multiple times on Password. He sang the theme song “The Kind of Girl She Is” for the sitcom Funny Face. From 1973 to 1978 he hosted The Jack Jones Show on the BBC. In 2014 he sand several of the songs for animated series Over the Garden Wall. He placed 17 albums in the Billboard 200. Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet is a fan of Jack Jones.