In the good old pre-1950s ‘Golden Age’ of aviation, the slang word for airplanes was ‘ships’. No matter the size, be they trainer, passenger plane, warbird or dirigible, the ‘ship’ was the commonly used term and I wish it were still in use; something about it conveys a hearty respect
For our end of the week musical enjoyment we have a lovely video of Count Basie and Oscar Peterson sitting at duel Bousendorfers and conversing about piano playing. Basie is as sly and monosyllabic as his playing, while Oscar is as voluble and hyper-articulate as his playing. There are any
Yesterday I posted a clip of a pissed-off Burt Lancaster at a press conference. Today we’ll temper that a bit by looking at a much more cordial Burt in a 1963 interview, done shortly after the release of ‘The Leopard’. He talks about directors, a species he was notably hard
Boy, did Burt Lancaster not want to be in the room with the reporters asking him questions as seen in the above video. What was the occasion? I’m not sure but the year is 1989, which is when “Field of Dreams’ was released and Lancaster had a bit of a
Here’s a ten-ish or so minute clip of John Huston being interviewed by Dick Cavett sometime in the early 70s. It’s always a pleasure to listen to Huston’s mellifluous baritone and marvel at his magnetism. And Dick, as usual, is erudite, goofy and quick in a very Ivy-League sort of
All week I’ve been posting the dance/vocal stylings of William Frawley aka Fred Mertz. Monday’s post was from the mid-1930s. Today’s is a little over twenty years later but Frawley’s style remains impeccably his own. I don’t recall the story of this particular ‘I Love Lucy’ episode but judging by
On Monday I posted a lovely song-and-dance number featuring William Frawley before he was Fred Mertz. Today we see an example of what used to happen when you became a big TV name; you got to make a record. Yes, William Frawley made an LP for Decca in 1957 called
In ‘I Love Lucy’ Fred Mertz–played by the inimitable William Frawley–protrayed an ex-vaudevillian turned East Side landlord. The backstory was that he and his wife Ethel (Vivian Vance) were once a husband/wife act who wised-up when vaudeville died in the mid-thirties and invested their hard-earned savings in a brownstone that
If you’ve never seen the duo dance act of The Nicholas Brothers, you’re in for an astonishing surprise. And if you have seen them, you’re once again in for an astonishing surprise. Nothing about their style of dancing had ever been seen before or has since been replicated. The brothers–Fayard
When I was a young-ish (read: adolescent) fellow in the early 1980s, I began to explore Manhattan’s old school bars and lounges on my own, despite not being of drinking age. Actually I didn’t drink so it didn’t seem to matter, though in those days pretty much nobody in New