Noble Beast

I heard a story once about a woman in Britain who was going blind. She went to the agency which trains seeing-eye dogs, and requested one who had flunked. "I'm not so very blind," she explained, "and I'm not so good at taking tests myself."

I admire that woman. She simply wanted someone to muddle along with her. I admire that dog, too. I bet they made a good pair.

Lately, I've been examining my own reluctance, throughout my adult life, to own a pet.

I've watched others in my life struggle with the declining health of their beloved pets, which is one reason I'm such a coward about owning one myself. I know, for all my surface impatience with animals, I have the capacity to fall in love with one. My sister Joan has three or four animals in her life at all times, and of course, she's fully aware that her life span will extend beyond theirs. It does not stop her from investing in those pets with full emotion, though she knows the pain which will come for her at the end of their lives. She's not a coward.

Heart ache is the worst pain in the world, for me. And I know I've tried to avoid it throughout my life, by refusing to let others in. There can't be real heart ache, you see, if you never give up your heart to others. And with a pet, you have to give up your heart. You just have to.

I'm thinking about this a lot lately, as several people in my life have been struggling recently with the loss of their pets. My sister lost her Golden a few years ago, Abby, a dog which I believe was her soul mate, if there can be such a thing among different species. More recently, another of her dogs, Murphy, was suddenly taken from her by a quick decline in health. Joan soldiers on, and still has four animals in her life.

My friends Scott and Drew recently experienced the loss of their beloved dog, who had been in their lives for many years. They freely claimed her their daughter, and transferred any innate parental feelings to her. Her life was checkered with substantial health issues, including what I think was a cancer scare years ago. After much soul-searching, Scott and Drew decided she should undergo treatment (I can't recall if it was chemo or radiation or both, but I imagine it was as toxic as such treatments are for humans). Afterward, they decided they would not force their daughter to undergo another such round, no matter what. Blessedly, though the dog was not predicted to live a long life, she ultimately did, despite her health issues. I should say, she not only lived a long life, she surely lived a happy one, with two doting parents treating her as their child. Of course, you can see the end of this story. This summer, her health issues took over, and my friends lost their loved one. The pain and sorrow they are currently feeling will eventually be tempered by time, but it will not go away. And right now, they are feeling a palpable, physical pain.

Is it any wonder I have always hesitated to go down that road?

You've heard of The Year From Hell? My friend Ann is actually living it. Her recent life has been so fraught with unbelievable sorrows that if you saw it onstage in a play, you would leave at intermission muttering, 'Who wrote this?" It's been a terrible time. This week, her beloved dog Sandy, about whom I wrote a few months ago during the worst period, had to be released from her pain. Ann has said that the final culprit was liver cancer, though I think Sandy suffered from diabetes, too.

The dog now has peace, but her survivors don't.

I had a dog as a kid, a mutt named Chris, given to me for Christmas one year, but he was really a family dog. We had many cats over the years, but my only other experience as a dog owner came as a surprise. My family had moved from Georgia to L.A. , and my mother came home from shopping one day with a hairy little creature in her arms. He was a silly little dog, a mixed-breed (I guess that's the upscale term for mutt) called a "Pommie-Poo." Boy, did he live up to those expectations. I carry the distinction of having named him Ashley (I've already confessed to being a Gone With the Wind kook), and the dog remained with our family for quite a while.

Ashley annoyed me a lot, with his constant (and I mean CONSTANT) insistence on fetching things. You could not speak to the dog without his grabbing a slimy old tennis ball, or a plastic bone, or a squeaky shoe, and bringing it to you, to be thrown in his direction. This dog was a maniac about it.

Another annoying habit Ashley had was to chase the water in the pool. This may be the oddest thing I've ever seen a canine do. Whenever we turned the faucet on, to refill the water in the swimming pool, the dog would race round and round and round the pool, barking like a banshee. This would continue until the pads on his feet started to bleed from the concrete.

I was never the primary caregiver of this dog, others in the family did that. Though my sister and father played with him often, Ashley was clearly my mother's dog, so when her health declined, his behavior quieted. During the last weeks of her life, which she spent upstairs attached to the oxygen machine, the dog did not see her much. Ashley was not allowed upstairs, and obeyed the rules as much as possible. Instead, he sat at the kitchen door, impatiently waiting for my mother to come downstairs. I recall a time or two, when my mother had a particularly bad mid-day nightmare or vision, and would cry out in her sleep. Ashley bolted through the den and up the stairs before anyone could stop him, to see what was wrong.

I didn't add it all up back then, but I now realize that my mother brought that dog home to help her get through the terrible cancer treatments she was undergoing. Ashley outlived my mother by several years, but after her death, he wasn't really the same.

As I said, I've lately been watching from the sidelines as so many of my friends and family have struggled with the death of their cherished pets. Ann and Scott and Drew and Joan are all suffering mightily with their loss, but I doubt any of them regret having shared their lives with their pets. As for me, I'm not experiencing those losses. Not getting those joys, either.

All those pets were so very different, as different as the personalities with whom they lived. But from where I sit, those animals shared something in common.

They were noble beasts.

S' Newz

...an occasional series mentioning current events which held my interest this week...

Everybody's weighed in on this grotesque development adding to the sewage of the presidential campaign. For those under a rock this week, a (white) college student claimed to have been robbed at her ATM, then subsequently beaten and mutilated when her attackers saw her McCain bumper sticker. Her story fell apart at once, when security cameras failed to find her at the scene, and forensics determined that her mutilation was inflicted with a butter knife, not a very effective weapon for threatening victims. This loser didn't even realize that the "B" she cut into her cheek was backward. Take a look at her, and you can tell she doesn't spend enough time in front of a mirror to know that she is looking at a reversed image:






I believe this story received national attention as well. When the Tysons Corner Mall sacked their long-time Santa (after 18 years!), the community decked the halls with boughs of emails. It was all a miscommunication, claimed the mall. The company which supplies the annual Santa (and other seasonal attractions) changed hands, took a look at the current Santa's contract, and dumped him (without notifying him, though he had a contract through 2012. This guy did not find out he had been fired until he called to ask when he should show up for work). They had no idea he was a local icon (or didn't care to find out. Christmas is business, after all.) After the mall received hundreds of emails, a petition, and threats of a boycott, they issued a statement in which they promised to find Santa a job. Someplace.





Hey, this guy has spent so many years in a mall, perhaps the RNC could hire him to help Sarah Palin shop for clothes which are not quite so expensive.








The big news in the theatrical world this week was the debunking of a rumor which has been circulating for a while. Everybody knows that Daniel (Harry Potter franchise) Radcliffe is currently doffing his clothes 8 times a week on Broadway in Equus. The show is such a hit that the producers are on the hunt for another box office draw to replace him when he moves on. Zac (High School Musical franchise) Efron has been pursued, or so the Internet buzz says. Not so, say his people (I wonder what it's like to have people?); no one has approached Efron. Jeez, does anyone care if this guy has the chops to handle such a role? Nope.











I myself shouldn't judge. I hesitate a bit to admit this, but I've never seen any of the High School Musical things. In my defense, I'm an old phart and have no interest in Disney's factory produced products. Hey, the writers haven't even bothered to name their project, they just call it by its genre: "high school musical."






But I have an even more shameful confession. I've never seen any of the Harry Potter things, either. Don't kill me. I have them all on my Netflix queue, I promise. But I've resisted them for the same simple reason that I avoided the books. I absolutely hate books which introduce their own language. You know, made up words. I don't like made up words. I like the words we already have.





For that same reason, I hated A Clockwork Orange, too. I don't want to learn all those new words just to read a book. But that gives me an idea. Zac Efron as Alex, in the remake of A Clockwork Orange. That I might want to see...

Mr. Blackwell

1922-2008

He started out as an actor in the late 50s, and was the understudy for a Broadway play called Dead End. He played the role exactly once. Apparently, that was enough to convince him that he should change careers.

I'm missing the fashion gene myself, so I never saw the point of his annual Worst-Dressed List. But nobody could argue with him the year he placed singer Bjork on the list, after her hilarious gown worn on the Oscar broadcast:

Blackwell commented, "She sings in the dark, and dresses there, too."

Ellen DeGeneres did not land on his list when she spoofed the dress at the following Emmy awards.






Blackwell's role as purveyor of all that is fashionable has long since been obliterated by the catty red carpet dwellers of current award ceremonies. Nobody really cares when he slithers out of obscurity once a year to take aim at celebrities. I'm remembering Anthony's remarks about him on that Designing Women episode:

"Where does this guy get off calling Liz Taylor the worst dressed woman in the world? Hasn't this dude ever been to the bus station?"

Appropriately, Mr. Blackwell's first name was Dick.

My Mother's Music

My mother was a musical soul, having played the piano since she was a tot. Throughout my childhood, I recall flipping through her album collection. She was attracted to jazzy, upbeat tunes, and our records included Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66, and the Ramsey Lewis Trio.

But when she was in mellow moods, she preferred melodious male voices. We owned several albums by the likes of Andy Williams, Jack Jones, and other crooners of the 50s and 60s. (My father's taste mirrored hers, with favorites like Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, and Andy's homicidal wife, Claudine Longet).

A particular favorite of my mother's was a trio called The Lettermen, who gained some fame in the 60s and 70s, recording melodious covers of current popular songs. The album most embedded in my memory was a live recording of one of their concerts, filled with upbeat numbers sung in close harmony. The Lettermen closed this concert (I think they still close concerts this way) with an acappella song called "I Believe." We were not an overly-religious family, but I like to think that we were a spiritual one, though we did not show it often. This song reflects that spirituality, and was my mother's favorite song.

In the early pages of this blog, I wrote a letter to my mother, and followed it up with another a year later. Of course, those letters were mostly for me, as I try, a quarter of a century after the fact, to make sense of her death.

If my mother had lived, she would be turning 80 years old today. In her honor and in her memory, the entry below contains a short slide show of her younger years, and the years in which I remember her.

I Believe

Edie Adams

1927-2008

Adams led a prolific and widely varied career on stage, screen, television, and the nightclub circuit. A graduate of Julliard's music department, she burst onto Broadway playing Rosalind Russell's sister in the musical Wonderful Town. Three years later, she brought comic strip character Daisy Mae to life in Li'l Abner, a role for which she won the Tony. By then she had met and married television pioneer Ernie Kovacs, and appeared frequently on his program.

Though she lost her role in the film version of Li'l Abner to Leslie Parrish (go here for that Dance Party!), she appeared in many other films of the 60s, including The Apartment, The Best Man, Lover Come Back, and Under the Yum Yum Tree.

In 1963, she held her own among what may be the largest gathering of first-class comics ever to appear in a single film, when she played a dentist's wife in Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Here is a still from that now iconic film, where she is surrounded by Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney, and Peter Falk:

Adams may be best remembered as the voice, and body, for Muriel Cigars. Her glamorous image and knock-out figure did not hide the fact that she was a gifted mimic, and her trademark slogan, delivered as a salute to Mae West, became an American catchphrase for over 19 years:

"Pick One Up and Smoke it Sometime..."

It's been estimated that while Adams starred in their commercials, Muriel increased their sales ten-fold.

Adams endured more than her share of personal sorrow, as she lost her first husband (Kovacs) in a car accident in 1962. She was left with a staggering debt to the IRS, which she struggled to repay. Twenty years later, she lost her daughter Mia in another car accident.

Yesterday, she passed away from pneumonia and cancer.

Adams created a bit of television history in 1960, in a guest starring role which has since become quite famous. Along with her husband Kovacs, she appeared in the final episode of the I Love Lucy franchise (at this point it was called the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour). The Arnaz's marriage had crumbled, and divorce papers were filed at the completion of this episode. In it, Adams, accompanied by Vivian Vance on the piano, sang a simple, delicate rendition of an old standard.

It was said that the crew taping the episode was in tears.

That's All