Emergency!
We were watching Six Feet Under last night, and there upon the screen was Jenny Jefferson (Belinda Tolbert). I thought, man, you really don't see many of the surviving Jeffersons on TV anymore. You might catch Sherman Hemsley or Marla Gibbs doing TVLAND shows, like the new Back To The Grind, but that's about it these days. Oh, what I wouldn't give to see the second (phoney) Lionel in a Geico ad. Anyhow, it made me realize that I really haven't done a proper post on the Jeffersons. This is one of my all time favorite TV shows. Sure, I've seen all of the episodes numerous times - and I do mean numerous - but I feel that you reach a new dimension of enjoyment when you become that familiar with a piece of entertainment - or art, for you highbrows. So I don't want to just rehash the usual stuff that you see all of the time on "retro tv" sites, etc. I want to give you a glimpse of my, um, well, no, obsession is a bit strong, but, well, ok, maybe, but, you know, my interest in the show.
Sandra Dee was the original actress to portray surf-crazy teen, Gidget Lawrence, but my money's on Sally Field for making Gidget so, well, Gidgety. Dee was great in the movie, but Field gave us the most consistent and longest-running portrayal on the 32 episodes of the TV show. By the way, the actual Gidget is the daughter of the man who wrote the book, Frederick Kohner. If you have not read the book, you might give it a shot. It's not nearly as campy and bubblegum as the small and big screen adaptations. It was actually considered a bit salty for it's time.
Tomorrow evening, I am listing a rare copy of McCoy, a vintage television series tie-in book. The NBC series stars Tony Curtis (Persuaders, Some Like It Hot, Etc.). This is a very nice copy. Check out my Ebay store, Umbrella Shoppe Collectibles, for more vintage TV books.
Before he was 30, Mike Evans acted in two classic 1970s sitcoms and helped create a third.Evans, who played Lionel, Archie Bunker's and George Jefferson's unflappable foil in All in the Family and The Jeffersons and went on to cocreate Good Times, has died.
Evans succumbed to throat cancer last week in Twentynine Palms, California, his family told the Los Angeles Times. He was 57.
Evans was still a Los Angeles City College student when the young actor won a recurring role on All in the Family as Lionel Jefferson, the (black) next-door neighbor of the (white) bigot Bunker.
Evans appeared on more than two dozen episodes of the top-rated sitcom from 1971 to 1975, his character almost always managing to vex Bunker more with his point of view than with the color of his skin.
On The Jeffersons, an All in the Family spinoff that debuted in 1975, Evans was initially a series regular, Lionel's even-keeled nature required to contrast with the volcanic nature of his "honky"-spouting father, George Jefferson.
Evans left The Jeffersons after its first season, just as Good Times was embarking on its third.
Good Times, cocreated by Evans and Eric Montee, a writer friend from the actor's L.A. City College days, was an All in the Family spinoff, one generation removed. It focused on Florence Evans, the former maid on direct All in the Family descendant Maude, her family, their housing-project digs in Chicago and Jimmie Walker's "Dyn-o-mite" catchphrase.
Good Times was produced from 1974 to 1979. Even during its run, Evans continued to act, costarring on the short-lived 1976-77 Danny Thomas comedy The Practice.
After Good Times ended, Evans returned to The Jeffersons, replacing Damon Evans (no relation) who'd replaced him for four seasons.
Evans left the show again in 1981 after Lionel split with his wife, the daughter of the Jeffersons' neighbors, the Willises, but continued to pop up on the sitcom until its 1985 sign-off.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Evans had only one post-Lionel acting role, a 2000 guest bit on Walker, Texas Ranger. Of more recent ventures, the Times reported he "invested in real estate in Southern California."
Monte, Evans' Good Times cohort, was profiled by the Times this week for his efforts to pull out of a dive that left him living in a Salvation Army shelter. An earlier profile on Monte, published by the newspaper last April, briefly quoted Evans, who talked about how his partner got funnier "if he would start drinking cheap wine."
Born Nov. 3, 1949, in North Carolina, Evans also appeared on Love, American Style, The Streets of San Francisco and the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man.
i know amy's had some hardships...but she needs to settle down. matt and his cronies even remodeled a barn and called it the men's crisis center to have a break from her! and guess what? she griped about that! amy, just take a deep breath and relax, man (but discipline jacob already! he's horrible!)!
Jacob. Jacob. Jacob. Jacob.....
In a world where pancakes are reading material, we have a summer house in Hawaii. We grow all kinds of herbs and flowers in our tiki-laden backyard paradise. We take long trips in our 70’s style RV unit. Inside is all kinds of avocado green and television sets. A year-round Christmas tree stays on board. It really can be Christmas eve whenever you want it to be. We drink pepsi from glass bottles outside and taste the summer air in every swig. There are grass-carpeted ditches to play in. There are sidewalks that are their own worlds. There is plenty of daydreaming and night dreaming. The evenings hold the promise of a movie of the week. Make the best of your commercial breaks. There is no Tivo here. Only real time. Everything in real time. No computers or cellular telephones. No pagers. No DSL. No satellite television. Welcome to vhf and uhf. I’ll let you in on a secret: uhf is where it’s at.
I know it's been a while since we had a new post. Power failures and flat tires slowed me down a bit. So, to ease us back into The Umbrella Fonzie Experience, here are some old friends.
Vintage Science Fiction Television At The Umbrella Shoppe!
I hope all of you out there in TV Land are doing well. Exciting things are on the horizon! NBA playoffs begin today. GO SPURS GO! Spurs face the Nuggets in round 1, starting tomorrow evening on TNT.
Actress, singer, 'To Tell the Truth' starThursday, April 19, 2007
Kitty Carlisle Hart, the supremely elegant actress, singer, arts advocate and TV personality who enjoyed one of the longest and most varied career runs in U.S. arts history, died Tuesday in New York at age 96. She had been ailing since a bout with pneumonia in December, according to her son, Christopher Hart. A scheduled San Francisco appearance in March had been canceled.
Hart, also known as Kitty Carlisle, is remembered for her role as the romantic musical heroine of the 1935 Marx Brothers film "A Night at the Opera" and she sang in the 1948 U.S. premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera "The Rape of Lucretia." Her long run as a panelist on the CBS game show "To Tell the Truth" made her a regular presence in the country's living rooms from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Hart's great talent, however, was not her own performing skills, but rather a faultless instinct for making the most of her own radiant charm, formidable intelligence and impeccable sense of style. Like an expert director or accompanist, Hart made everyone and everything else shine more brightly in her reflected light. She turned personality and her own glowing personal magnetism into an art form, most notably as an arts funding official and activist.
"She was always charming and very tough and very engaging," said San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, who had been a friend for decades. "I don't think Kitty Carlisle Hart was upstaged ever, by anybody, in spite of the huge personalities who surrounded her." Thomas said he knew only two other women who could "plant" themselves in a room with the same authority that Hart did. "One was Ethel Merman, and the other was Pamela Harriman."
"I can't think of anybody left who really knew the great creators of the 20th century," said Michael Strunksy, trustee of the Ira Gershwin estate and nephew of Ira Gershwin's wife Leonore. "She was the lifeline to the Gershwins, to Rodgers and Hammerstein and everyone right through to Steve Sondheim."
Kitty Carlisle married playwright Moss Hart in 1946, after turning down a proposal, as she repeatedly said, from George Gershwin. The couple had two children. When her husband died in 1961, Kitty Carlisle Hart was just getting started. She spent 20 years (1976-96) as chair of the New York State Council on the Arts and received the National Medal of Arts in 1991.
She appeared in the self-referential role of a society dowager in the 1993 film "Six Degrees of Separation" and in her 90s, took to the cabaret circuit. Her touring one-woman show of song and reminiscence, "Here's to Life," played the Plush Room in San Francisco in 2006, when Hart was 95. In that 70-minute act, she sang tunes by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and others and remembered an encounter with Harpo Marx when he was wearing only a towel.
One of Hart's greatest and most sustained achievements came as an unflagging lobbyist for government arts funding. Gracious and gifted with a perpetual museum-quality smile, she could also be blunt. "The funding problem has always been difficult," she told The Chronicle in 1996. "Now it's become impossible because the climate of the country has changed. And I don't understand it. The rich people have more money. Now we're turning into a country of yahoos. It's very distressing."
Born Catherine Conn in New Orleans on Sept. 3, 1910, Kitty Carlisle found her stage name in a phone book and studied singing in Paris and acting in London. She made her Broadway debut as Prince Orlovsky in "Die Fledermaus" in 1933. She appeared in three films, including "She Loves Me Not" with Bing Crosby, the following year. By the time of "A Night at the Opera" in 1935, her brief Hollywood career had already peaked. Hart first sang at the Metropolitan Opera in 1967, reprising her "Die Fledermaus" debut, and spent two decades as a regular panelist on "To Tell the Truth." Hart, who never had a styled hair out of place, looked as fabulous in a blindfold as she did in full-dress evening wear. Thomas said she was "one of the great party-givers in New York. No door was ever closed to her."
In addition to her son, Christopher, a Los Angeles theatrical director, Hart is survived by a daughter, New York physician Catherine Carlisle Hart, and three grandchildren.
Chronicle news services contributed to this report. E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Ok, who out there watched Romper Room? I am curious, because I really never saw this program very often, but heard about it all of the time. That seems strange to me, so I thought I'd take an informal survey....
Does anyone remember Marvin Zindler, newscaster? I do. And he haunts me every now and again. His voice was kind of Muppety and loud, I believe....
join us!
