Friday Dance Party: Britney and Jamie Lynn's Mom Would Be Proud

I had every intention of devoting this week's Dance Party to Lena Horne, but that will have to wait. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Lena will still be dead next week.

But this clip caught my eye yesterday, and in the past 24 hours, has gone so viral that it's been yanked from youtube. It's popped up on news programs and has ignited a debate about how sexualized our young folk have become. Yes, somebody actually thought this clip was something of which to be proud. Even worse, somebody thought this dance routine was a good idea, flattering and educational to the children involved, and worthy of rehearsal, costuming, the works.

What do you think? Keep in mind that somebody gave consent to this routine. It's a tribute to every brainless parent who ever thought this kind of experience would be good for their kid.

The song is instantly recognizable, you couldn't get away from it last year. The original video has been parodied countless times, including that hilarious version from Saturday Night Live starring Justin Timberlake and the gang.

But this version is no parody. If you thought the tune gnawed at your brain before, take a gander at this monstrosity. You won't be able to look away:

These girls are seven years old.

Friday Dance Party: Hey There, Gaynor Girl

I ran across this clip earlier this week, when I was researching the sad story of Lynn Redgrave's death. Lynn's big film break came early in her career, with her starring role in Georgy Girl, a film which I never saw but which is now #1 on my Netflix queue. Apparently, it's now on everybody else's list, too, as Netflix tells me it has a "very long wait." I bet a week ago, I'd already have it in my mailbox.

Whatever. This week's Dance Party is the title tune from Georgy Girl, written and originally performed by an Australian group called The Seekers. It was their biggest international hit, and was also their final recording before they disbanded. The tune was nominated for the Oscar for Best Song, and in the clip below, is being performed by Mitzi Gaynor.

Ms. Gaynor is still with us, and still performing, but is not really on anybody's radar these days. She appeared in a few movie musicals in her heyday, the best known of which is surely South Pacific, in which she played the leading lady, Nellie. She swiped the role from its stage originator, Mary Martin; the film was a popular hit but not a critical success; Gaynor made a buttload of money on the soundtrack album.

In her long career, she has appeared, on stage or on film, with the biggest names in show biz. Frank Sinatra, Donald O'Connor, Gene Kelly, David Niven, and Yul Brynner are just a few of her co-stars. She was basically a dancer who could sell a song, and in the 60s and 70s, she headlined a string of television specials which are still admired today (back then, musical stars who were not interested in weekly series often presented TV specials; Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Andy Williams, and Julie Andrews all produced more than a few specials during the period. And of course, the most prolific of these folks was Bob Hope).

Our Mitzi's specials were well-known for her dance routines, and for her glamorous costumes (Bob Mackie got some Emmy love for his designs). So, though Gaynor is not nationally recognized today, she was a big enough star in the late 60s to be invited to perform on the Oscar broadcast, singing one of the nominated songs.

The clip below is a bit blurry, but is clear enough to showcase Gaynor's over-the-top charm, as well as her ability to sell a song. And you gotta love the very 60s moves and garb. As I said, this clip came to my attention as I was writing my entry about Lynn Redgrave, who, along with her entire family, was seated in the audience watching the title number from her film being performed live by Mitzi Gaynor.

"Georgy Girl" was a huge hit for The Seekers, but they did not win the Oscar that night in 1967. The award went to John Barry, and his title tune, "Born Free."

Helen Wagner

1918-2010

Wagner's death last weekend at the age of 91 brings an end to the era of the Moral Matriarch of the Daytime Soap. (I just invented that name, but did not invent the phenomenon.)


Born in Lubbock, TX, Wagner was performing some summer stock in St. Louis when Oscar Hammerstein saw her, and advised her to move to New York. She had a small role in the original production of Oklahoma for a time, but actually did not spend much of her career on the stage. She was with Guiding Light when that radio soap made the transition to television in 1952, but left soon afterward. In 1956, she was cast in the role of a lifetime, and that's no exaggeration; she spent the rest of her life (over 50 years) playing matriarch Nancy Hughes on As The World Turns.
She described her character as a "tentpole" role, someone around whom the rest of the drama swirled. I wrote a bit about this type of character a while ago, when Frances Reid, who played a corresponding role on Days of Our Lives, died. Wagner's character on ATWT was never confronted with long lost children, evil twins, or kidnapping plots. Instead, her function was to provide a moral sounding board to the other, more dramatically interesting characters on the show.
Helen is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having played a single character on television the longest time. She uttered the very first words on ATWT ("Good morning, dear") when the show debuted on April 2, 1956, and played the role more or less continuously until her death. She took two breaks from the show, one voluntarily, and one not. About six months into the show's run, creator Irna Phillips fired our Helen, but after several months, rehired her when no one else could be found who could pour coffee on camera quite so lovingly. In the mid 80s, Helen walked away from the show to protest the producers' insistence that the senior members of the ensemble be pushed aside to make way for younger blood. She was back with the show a year or so later, in time to celebrate the show's 30th anniversary on the air.

Wagner got the chance to stretch her chops upon her return, when the show teamed her with an aging police detective (the actor who had played Helen's husband on the show had died, so of course, his character died too. Roles such as Nancy Hughes do not go through multiple marriages as other soap characters do; if they marry more than once, it is because they have been widowed). The writers gave Wagner's new husband Alzheimer's, a first in daytime, and the plotline played out over a two year period (at the time, ATWT had a reputation for moving at a glacial pace). They finally killed the guy off, and Wagner's character remained a widow until her death last week.

If you've never seen a daytime soap in your life, it is likely you have still seen a snippet of Helen Wagner's performance as Nancy Hughes. A clip of one of her scenes is enshrined in the Museum of Television Arts, and in other museums of note, as it was her program which was interrupted by Walter Cronkite on November 22, 1963.

CBS was the only network broadcasting nationally at that particular moment, both NBC and ABC having given the early afternoon hours to their affiliates to program locally. Whenever you see that very famous clip of Cronkite interrupting "regularly scheduled programming" to announce the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it is As The World Turns which is being interrupted, and that is Helen Wagner onscreen at the time. She later reported that the show, which was performed live in those days, continued without the actors being informed of the drama unfolding in Dallas.


Wagner's screen time diminished dramatically as she aged; she appeared only sporadically in recent years. In 2004, along with other long-time players in daytime, she was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Television Academy (she never won nor was nominated for the Emmy). Her most recent (and now final) appearance on the show was April 5 of this year.

There is no doubt ATWT will address Wagner's death at some point before going off the air in September (it was announced several months ago that the show has been cancelled). It would have been a nice touch to have her Nancy Hughes utter the final lines of the series, bringing the 54 year-old show full circle, but Helen Wagner's death last week will make that symmetry impossible.

This Is Living

I bet Vanessa Redgrave has had a lot of memories flooding her brain the last few days. Only a year after losing her daughter in a freak skiing accident, and only a month after losing her only brother, she now has to face the loss of her only sister. This theatrical dynasty can't catch a break.

Lynn Redgrave

1943-2010

I have a hunch one of the memories Vanessa might be cherishing right now is of April 10, 1967. On that night, in Santa Monica, CA, she sat with her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, her mother, Rachel Kempson, her brother, Corin Redgrave, and her little sister, Lynn Redgrave, at the Academy Awards. The show almost didn't go on, or at least, almost was not televised, as AFTRA had gone on strike against ABC two weeks before. It was only three hours before the telecast began that the strike was settled. The whole Redgrave clan was in attendance because both Vanessa and Lynn had received their first Oscar nominations. The elder was up for Morgan, and Lynn was nominated for the title role in Georgy Girl.

I imagine it was a pretty special night, and not just because the phenomenon of two sisters competing for Best Actress had only happened once before (in 1941, when Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine duked it out for the award; Fontaine won). It was a rare glimpse of the theatrical family together in public; in later years, the sisters would have a major falling out over Vanessa's political mouthiness, and Lynn's devotion to her adopted country.

(By the way, neither sister won the Oscar that year; Elizabeth Taylor took it for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf).

Lynn confessed that, in her early life, she felt like the forgotten child of the family, ignored by her parents and excluded by her siblings. Vanessa had the star quality, and Corin the brains. It was only after an equestrian career ceased to be an option that Lynn joined the family business, making a splash as a company member in the first season of the Royal National Theatre in 1963. She was directed onstage by Laurence Olivier and Franco Zefferelli, and Noel Coward cast her in his own Hay Fever. Her fellow company members included Peter O'Toole, Maggie Smith, and her father. Her brother-in-law Tony Richardson gave her a cameo in the film Tom Jones, an appearance which led to Georgy Girl.

Lynn made her Broadway debut in Peter Schaffer's Black Comedy in 1967, and she returned to the stage often throughout her career. She earned three Tony nominations (losing them all), and two Oscar nods (Georgy Girl and Gods and Monsters, thirty years apart), losing those as well. But she won the Golden Globe for both those film roles, as well as kudos from various critics groups along the way. She was nominated twice for the Emmy, and once for the Grammy (for narrating the children's book The Witches; she lost to Marlo Thomas). One of those Emmy nods, for the sitcom House Calls, was bittersweet, as she had already left the show when she was not allowed to breast feed her child in her dressing room on the set. The incident resulted in a lengthy lawsuit.

Lynn did not achieve the superstar status of her sister Vanessa, but she was surely the most "American" of the Redgraves, and not just because she became a naturalized citizen. Vanessa called Americans "imperialist pigs," a slur which so angered Lynn that it caused their estrangement. Lynn loved the States, and her yeoman-like work here made her attractive and accessible to American audiences. She did Shaw on Broadway (I saw her St. Joan, and wrote about it here), and took over for Carol Burnett in Moon Over Buffalo, but she was just as likely to be seen on Fantasy Island or Ugly Betty. She was a working actress, she explained, and she needed to work. A whole generation of Americans know her from her long association with Weight Watchers in the 80s (she was open about her struggles with bulimia); the famous tagline of her numerous commercials for the diet program became a national catchphrase.


I felt very very sad when I heard of Lynn's death a few days ago. She was not only extremely talented, she was also exceedingly brave. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy in 2003, which put her into remission for a bit. In recent years, her cancer returned as Stage IV, when cancer has moved from the original organ and metastasized throughout the body. From that point, the end is clear. Redgrave wrote a book about her medical journey, and included graphic photos of herself (taken by her daughter)undergoing treatment. I can barely look at those pictures, they remind me so strongly of my mother's battle scars.

In recent decades, Lynn turned her complicated feelings about her family into art. She became a playwright, offering several solo shows about her relationships with the other Redgraves. Her most recent, Rachel and Juliet, concerned her mother, actress Rachel Kempson, and her fascination with Shakespeare's teen aged heroine. Nightingale, which Redgrave performed in Los Angeles and New York, grew from a few snippets of information she had about her maternal grandmother. And of course, Shakespeare for My Father, which Lynn wrote and performed in the mid-90s, concerned her distant relationship with Sir Michael.

Ms. Redgrave was still working on Shakespeare for My Father when I had the privilege of meeting and working with her. Lynn loved teaching, and for several years, she offered a Master Class to the younger actors at The Shakespeare Theatre Company. This class was a bit unusual in that the major patrons and donors of the theatre were invited to watch the workshop. On a Monday night in 1995, Lynn met our gang of 8 in the green room of the Shakespeare Theatre, about an hour before the class was to take place. She glanced at the monologues we each had chosen to work on, and raised nary an eyebrow at my edited version of a Cassius speech from Julius Caesar. She understood both the fear and the exhilaration of undergoing an acting class in front of 450 strangers, and did her best to put us at our ease.

Before we moved upstairs to the stage to begin the class, Lynn gathered us all into a huddle. She produced a small book of Shakespeare which had belonged to her famous father. It was a well-worn, cloth-bound book, and she explained that she never went onstage without first handling this memento of the great Sir Michael Redgrave. She offered us all the opportunity to indulge in her own private Redgrave ritual, and, one by one, we passed the book around and stroked its textured cover for luck. Lynn is holding that very book in the photo at left, from the Broadway production of Shakespeare for My Father.

Lynn was a consummate performer and teacher, and turned what could have been an awkward evening of tentativeness into a class in which we each shined. I had a great time working on my piece with Lynn; she was an expert at making her points clear and accessible, and somehow, the presence of the audience only enhanced the experience for me. That evening remains one of the most memorable of any I have had on a stage.

In addition to seeing her in the Broadway St. Joan, I also saw her as Joanne in Sondheim's Company at the Kennedy Center. I wish I had seen one of Lynn's self-written shows (and secretly wish she had had the time or inclination to write one about her sister. THAT would have been volcanic!)

From Joan of Arc and Lady Bracknell to sitcoms and game shows, she never allowed the Redgrave name to inhibit her choices. The clip below is a great example of Lynn's sweet, down-to-earth attitude toward her work; as much as I admire Vanessa, I can't see her spending much time performing with a puppet.

At 7 PM yesterday, I was thinking about that exhilarating workshop at The Shakespeare Theatre years ago. At that moment, all the marquee lights on Broadway were dimmed for a minute, to honor the memory of Lynn Redgrave.

Friday Dance Party: Backwards, And In High Heels

You may not believe this, but Ginger Rogers and I have something in common. We both won Charleston contests. Her win, in 1926 in Fort Worth, Texas, snagged her a spot in Eddie Foy's vaudeville act, which toured the country for several years before landing her in New York, where she was pegged to star in Girl Crazy, along with another unknown named Ethel Merman. MY win, in 1976 in Canoga Park, CA, snagged me 75 bucks and a t-shirt. We're practically twins.

Ginger Rogers met Fred Astaire during her Girl Crazy gig, but did not appear with him until their first film together, 1933's Flying Down to Rio. She was to make a total of 10 musical films with Fred, and they became the preeminent dance team of the 30s musical genre. When interviewed in 1986, Astaire was blunt about Rogers's ability: "Ginger had never danced with a partner before. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong."

Fred was right. Although he partnered with far better dancers than Ginger, he never looked so good as when he was gliding across the floor with Rogers. It may have been that, as an actress who danced (rather than a dancer who tried to act), she recognized that characterization did not stop once the music started. She had an ongoing non-musical career before, during, and after her decade with Astaire. She held her own opposite Katherine Hepburn in Stage Door in 1937, and won the Best Actress Oscar for her dramatic work in Kitty Foyle in 1940. (Here's a fun fact: Rogers portrayed the role of Roxie Hart in the film of the same name in 1942, a role which would later be played by Gwen Verdon, Liza Minnelli, Ann Reinking, Brooke Shields, Melanie Griffith, Bebe Neuwirth, and Renee Zellweger, among many others, in the musical version, Chicago.)

In her later life, Ginger was a prominent Hello, Dolly! replacement, once Carol Channing left the role, and she spent almost two years playing Mame in London, earning more money than any other stage actress had, at the time. She was beloved by Hollywood, despite her Republican leanings and background; her mother, screen writer Lela Rogers, named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Rogers herself remained a staunch Reaganite until her death in 1995.

Our favorite Commie-hater was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1992, but Astaire's widow demanded more money than CBS was willing to cough up for the rights to include film clips of their work together, so her televised tribute noticeably lacked her most famous dance sequences. Fred and Ginger made nine movies together in the 1930s, and one more a decade later, and those ten films constitute a trove of dancing gems. The clip below, from 1936's Swing Time, is one of my favorites. Our Ginger is a dance instructor in danger of being sacked; Fred comes to the rescue, and shows off a bit for the boss. The sequence is not cluttered up with elaborate sets or costumes, and allows the duo's smooth simplicity to shine.



It was Texas governor Ann Richards who is credited with the famous line regarding our gal: "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels." The quote became a motto for a generation of feminists; a musical version of Ginger's life, called "Backwards in High Heels" is currently making the regional rounds.

Ginger Rogers died 15 years ago this week.

Most Sincerely Dead

Meinhardt Raabe

1915-2010

You probably heard of this guy's death a few weeks ago. His singular claim to fame was as the munchkin coroner who proclaimed the Wicked Witch of the East's death by falling house. He was born and raised in Wisconsin, and headed to Hollywood when he read there was work for midgets there (yes, I know we are now inflicted with the term "little people" to describe the pint-sized folk, but Raabe always referred to himself as a midget).

He was cast as the coroner in The Wizard of Oz on the basis of his reading of that all-important death announcement:

"As coroner, I must aver
I thoroughly examined her
And she's not only merely dead
She's really, most sincerely dead! "

His performance lasted only 13 seconds in the finished film, but then, Ellen Burstyn won an Emmy nomination for a 14 second performance in the TV film Mrs. Harris, so what the hell? In fact, Raabe's voice is not heard in the final cut of the film; the munchkin voices were dubbed by other actors and then accelerated in the editing room.

Our boy had a long career on the road, as Oscar Meyer's spokesman, where he was known as "Little Oscar, the World's Smallest Chef," and in 1936, two years before pronouncing Wicked's Nessarose dead on film, he had been the first passenger in the Oscar Meyer weinermobile.

After filming Oz, he served with distinction in WWII, and earned a graduate degree in business administration. His marriage to his wife Margaret Marie lasted 50 years, until her death in a car accident in 1997, in which he was also injured.

Raabe always remained available to attend Oz commemorative events, and was present when the Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz received their own star on the Hollywoood Walk of Fame.

The coroner of Munchkinland died last week at the age of 94.

I don't usually note the passing of sports figures, but this one caught my eye:

George Nissen

1914-2010

He was a gymnast and a diver in high school, and a trip to the circus started him a-thinkin'. He wondered if the net the trapeze artists used could be adapted to help him in his own training.

He crafted some canvas and pieces of rubber from old tires, and by the time he reached college, he had a prototype. He took it to a YMCA swimming camp, where he suspected he had something special when the kids stopped swimming completely and clamored for turns on what he referred to as "the bouncer." He teamed up with two fellow gymnasts and toured the country as the Three Leonardos, performing what he called "rebound tumbling."

He found a permanent name for his invention from the Spanish word for diving board. He had created the trampoline, and he staged a series of exhibitions and photo ops to introduce the invention to the world. His favorite publicity photo was taken in Central Park in 1960; he rented a kangaroo for the occasion:
Nissen was in the front row in Sydney in 2000, when the trampoline became an Olympic sport. He died a few weeks ago at the age of 96.

This guy's death brought back a flood of memories for me, of my early teen years:

Peter Haskell

1934-2010

He was an actor who spent his career in episodic television, and the occasional feature (he was in the Childs Play series of horror films). The list of programs in which he guested includes (are you ready?) The Outer Limits, Dr. Kildare, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Ben Casey, The Fugitive, Charlie's Angels, Garrison's Gorillas, The Big Valley, Mannix, Medical Center, Barnaby Jones, Vega$, Matlock, Frasier, Columbo, JAG, The Closer, and Cold Case. He also spent time on the soaps Search for Tomorrow and Ryan's Hope. Back in the early 70s, I was personally thrilled when he starred in a Movie of the Week (that's what we called TV movies back then, ABC presented one every single week). This flick was also a pilot, called The Eyes of Charles Sand, and he teamed up with my favorite Dark Shadows alum Joan Bennett. That film did not go to series, for good reason, it was lousy.

Haskell first came to my attention as the star of another lousy series, though I did not know how crummy it was at the time.

When I was in the 8th and 9th grade, whenever there was a home game for the North Springs High football team, I would attend the Friday night event. Don't raise your eyebrows, I went only for the social aspect, I really couldn't have cared less about the actual game. But once the game was over, instead of joining the gang at Bella Pizza, I dashed home, mixed up a mug of hot chocolate, and settled in front of the TV to watch Bracken's World.
Never heard of it? Not surprising, as it struggled through only a season and a half before expiring. It was a melodramatic look at the lives of movie makers. Shot on the lot of 20th Century Fox, which doubled as "Century Studios," where the action took place, the ensemble series was headlined, initially, by aging film star Eleanor Parker, who played the executive assistant (read: secretary) of the studio head Bracken. Bracken himself remained unseen, though we occasionally heard him on the intercom or the phone. There were three young starlets in the series, including one played by Linda Harrison, who had married the head of Fox Studios, Richard Zanuck, and was thereby getting some help with her career (at the time, she was also starring in the original Planet of the Apes, as the mute hottie who mates with Charlton Heston).

I was enamored of all things show-biz back then, and had no idea how inaccurate this portrayal of life on a studio lot was, so I loved Bracken's World. The show was not a success, though somehow it survived into a second season; the writers tried to save the show by bringing the studio head onto the canvas. Parker left the show, and Leslie Neilson, back when he was a dramatic actor, was cast as the long-absent Bracken. It didn't do much to improve the ratings, and the show died before completing its second year.

Peter Haskell played my favorite character in the show, a womanizing film director with an alcoholic wife and a determination to make great movies. He interacted with most of the guest stars of the show, including Lee Grant (playing a lesbian gossip columnist), Ann Baxter (playing an aging film star), and Lois Nettleton (playing an actress faced with a nude scene...shocking!...) and a host of others. One of the fun factors of the series was the steady stream of cameo appearances by stars, playing themselves. Apparently, anyone who was on the Fox studio lot at any one time was fair game to be snagged by the Bracken's World team, to contribute a ten-second walk-on. The show also gave opportunities to the younger guest actors on the scene, including a pre-Waltons Richard Thomas, who played a fundamentalist nutcase who kidnapped one of our starlets, and Sally Field, post-Flying Nun and pre-Sybil, playing a left-wing activist with a penchant for publicity.

Can you tell I remember this series quite well? I have purchased a handful of episodes on EBay, all very poorly recorded on ancient video. The series itself may never be released on DVD, considering it was not a hit, and it contains so many appearances by the rich and famous. The studio system which the series portrayed was already dead and buried by the time the show aired in 1969, and some of the plotlines are pretty laughable, but I still hold Bracken's World close to my heart.

Peter Haskell died last week at the age of 75.