Barely Live with Kelly and Ryan

 

Confession.

Since I have been working at a home office for the past seven or eight years, I have relied on the morning "Live with Kelly and Whoever" to keep abreast of pop culture.    Because it was current and live, I depended upon the show to let me know what the hot TV show or movie was.   Admittedly, I enjoyed it more when you had the snarkiness of the late Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa was simply the appendage.   But, still.

I also enjoyed the fact that the show steered clear of political view points.   Oh, you can easily guess the opinion of Kelly.  I mean, after all, her best friend in the world is that ignoramus Anderson Copper.  But, still, there was an evenness and a balance to the show.   Truth be told, I never watched more than the first segment which is all conversation.   But that was enough for me to know what was going on in the world on the entertainment front.

About two years, it all changed.   And went to shit.    I noticed that every Friday featured a "previously recorded" sticker.    Several months ago, you began to see the same thing on every Thursday.   So much for spontaneity when you watching something that might have been taped months ago.    Combine this with the fact that most of the summer shows are in the can and you realize that this show is "infrequently live."

To throw more chicken shit at the fan, their "really live" edition the other day featured as guests First Lady "Dr." Jill Biden and "Dr." Anthony Fauci doing a victory lap on the defeat of COVID-19.   Well, with the expert softball hands of Kelly and Ryan, there wasn't a single hard-hitting question the whole morning.  Dr. Jill, who is as much a doctor as Patrick Dempsey was on "Grey's Anatomy," was wearing some dress that looked the label on a bottle of olive oil.   And Fauci continues to be one of the biggest media gluttons in television history.

You would think that, given all the press about Fauci's ineptitude over the past fifteen months, there would be at least one query to that effect.  Nope.   I guess Anderson wrote those questions for Kelly, too.

The worst part about this is that the show, for me permanently, has now completely fallen off its axis.  No balance at all.  Regardless of whether the show is live....or recorded in April.

It sure was nice knowing you in the past.   And Regis, you are missed one more time.

Dinner last night:  Leftover chicken parm.

This Date in History - June 9

 

Happy birthday to Michael J. Fox.  A courageous guy.

53 AD:  ROMAN EMPEROR NERO MARRIES CLAUDIA OCTAVIA.

And...

68 AD:  ROMAN EMPEROR NERO COMMITS SUICIDE.

Coincidence?

1856:  FIVE HUNDRED MORMONS LEAVE IOWA CITY FOR THE MORMON TRAIL.

That's a lot of Osmonds.

1862:  STONEWALL JACKSON CONCLUDES HIS SUCCESSFUL SHENANDOAH VALLEY WITH A VICTORY IN THE BATTLE OF PORT REPUBLIC.

He'll get a statue for this.   And it will be torn down.

1870:  AUTHOR CHARLES DICKENS DIES.

This is the worst of times.

1891:  COMPOSER AND SONGWRITER COLE PORTER IS BORN.

Anything goes.

1910:  ACTOR BOB CUMMINGS IS BORN.

I never got this guy's appeal.

1926:  NELSON'S WIFE, HAPPY ROCKEFELLER, IS BORN.

There's a legendary joke that I won't even bother to share here.

1930:  A CHICAGO TRIBUNE REPORTER, JAKE LINGLE, IS KILLED DURING RUSH HOUR IN CHICAGO ALLEGEDLY OVER A $100,000 GAMBLING DEBT OWED TO AL CAPONE.

Should have taken the points.

1931:  COMIC JACKIE MASON IS BORN.

I never got his appeal either.

1944:  DURING WORLD WAR II, 39 CIVILIANS ARE HANGED FROM LAMP POSTS AND BALCONIES BY GERMAN TROOPS IN TULLE, FRANCE.

Well, that's a little excessive.

1954:  JOSEPH WELCH, SPECIAL COUNSEL FOR THE US STATES ARMY, LASHES OUT AT SENATOR JOSEPH MCCARTHY DURING HEARINGS, GIVING MCCARTHY HIS FAMOUS REBUKE, "YOU'VE DONE ENOUGH.  HAVE YOU LEFT NO SENSE OF DECENCY?"

The original Judge Judy.

1961:  ACTOR MICHAEL J. FOX IS BORN.

I bet he wishes now he could go back in time.

1961:  DIRECTOR/WRITER AARON SORKIN IS BORN.

Let the overwriting begin.

1967:  DURING THE SIX DAY WAR, ISRAEL CAPTURES THE GOLAN HEIGHTS FROM SYRIA.

And the hits just keep on coming.

1968:  US PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON DECLARES A NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING FOLLOWING THE ASSASSINATION OF SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY.

Given their strong friendship.

1973:  IN HORSE RACING, SECRETARIAT WINS THE US TRIPLE CROWN.

I remember how historic my dad said this was.

1978:  THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY DAY SAINTS OPENS ITS PRIESTHOOD TO "ALL WORTHY MEN" ENDING A 148-YEAR-OLD POLICY OF EXCLUDING BLACK MEN.

Meanwhile, is there such a thing as a Former-Day Saint?

1981:  TV HOST ALLEN LUDDEN DIES.

Forty years later, his widow is still alive.

2014:  BASEBALL PLAYER BOB WELCH DIES.

Long remembered for striking out Reggie Jackson in the World Series.

2017:  ACTOR ADAM WEST DIES.

Pow!

Dinner last night:  Leftover chicken marsala.

Bada Bing

 

Well, the long hiatus is over.   I ventured into a movie theater for the first time since March 2020.   And, oddly enough, what propelled me there was not a hot, new movie.  I went primarily to see a three-part documentary on TV's "The Sopranos."

Go figure.

Grouped under an umbrella title "Celebrate the Sopranos," this movie is still three documentaries stitched together.  It's not getting a wide release.  Instead, it is rolling out on these "one-night-only" showings.   Hence, my return to the cineplex.  It was "go now or not at all."

Having already made three passes through the entire series, I was a prime target for these film makers.   And boy, did it land a bulls eye with me.  I loved every minute.  And, oddly, these three parts were nothing more than long interviews.  But, oh, so compelling.

The first installment was "My Dinner with Alan."  Two guys who were TV critics for the Newark Star Ledger (the newspaper that always winds up at the bottom of Tony's driveway) reunite over onion rings and Taylor Ham sandwiches (another shout out to yours truly) at Holsten's, where the final scene of the series played out.  We go through their entire meal in real time as they talk all things Soprano.  Simple talking heads couldn't have been more interesting.   And even the most avid fan got some new information from this conversation.

Indeed, Soprano fans know that the last season was divided up into two parts...Season 6 and Season 6A and separated by about a year.   The two critics indeed say that there were really seven seasons.  So why the bizarre labeling?  Well, it is revealed that HBO would have needed to renegotiate the cast's contracts if there was an official seventh season.  So they opted to simply call Season 7 an extension of Season 6.   How diabolical.

While the critics were fascinating, I was not prepared for how mesmerizing the second part was to be.  "The Last Supper" was filmed in a Little Italy restaurant that used to have show parties for whenever an actor was "whacked."  And it reunited the actors who played Johnny Sack, Big Pussy, Carlo Gervasi, and Furio.  We followed them right through a four course meal from antipasto to dolce.  Their stories and memories, particularly of James Gandolfini, were amazing.   PS, stories about how cheap HBO was continued with this quartet.

For the last documentary of the evening, the two critics came back for a half-hour chat with show creator David Chase.   Primarily because of his reserved and sometimes elusive nature, this was the least interesting of the evening.  But it did help to set up for the release of the prequel in September.

At the very least, that means I'll make one more visit to a movie theater in 2021.

LEN'S RATING:  Three-and-a-half stars.

Dinner last night:  Leftover Chinese food.

Monday Morning Video Laugh - June 7, 2021

It was more fun when graduations were in person.

 

Dinner last night:  Chicken Marsala.

The Sunday Memory Drawer - Career Pre-Planning

 

I just might be thinking about that question in this vintage photo.  Do kids get asked that anymore today?  I was regularly pummeled with that poser.

"So what do you want to be when you grow up?"

Go away, please, you inebriated relative, you.

Truth be told, I did have some answers to that query.  And they changed over time as I grew up.

Catch me at the age above and I think I know what I might have said.

I wanted to be a projectionist at the RKO Proctors movie theater in Mount Vernon, New York.

Oh, I wasn't that specific.  I would have gladly settled for the same job at a variety of theaters.  The Loews in Mount Vernon.  The Kimball Theater in Yonkers.  The Wakefield on White Plains Road in the Bronx.  I didn't really care.  

I just wanted to be in a place where I ran movies all day and all night.  So I could watch them all.  I had motion pictures on the brain.  Let's face it, I could read the New York Daily News movie listings at the age of four.

A few years later, I started to be a bit more practical.  If you asked me at the age of seven or eight, the response was definitive.

I wanted to be a veterinarian.

Okay, so I'm becoming a bit more useful.  Helping animals.  In my mind, how cool would this be?  To meet all sorts of pets during the course of a given day.  So what if the two pets I had been entrusted to were dead?  The goldfish that jumped out of the bowl and rotted on the baseboard of my room.  The parakeet named Happy who flew away when I inadvertantly left the kitchen screen window open.

I was above that all now.  I wanted to be a pet doctor.

This was the dream until I got my very next pet.  A birthday gift of a beagle which I named Tuffy.  Before you think I'm an animal serial killer, Tuffy lasted eighteen wonderful years.  But, early on, my parents decided that she needed to be spayed.  So there was an overnight surgical visit to the vet and I was so convinced that my beloved friend was going to die during this procedure that I developed sympathetic pains with the school nurse.

Tuffy did survive and my dad brought her home the next day.  She was bandaged, sore, and still groggy.  Sticking out of her abdomen were the metal stitches from her wound.  To me, it looked like she was wearing a wire coat hanger.

The doctor had put that in there?  

I decided right then and there that being a veterinarian was no longer in my future.  If I needed an occupation, I would like to do what one of my father's second cousins did for a living.  He never seemed to go to work.  I can get into that.

It was about at the age of twelve or thirteen that writing started to call to me.  I've already written here about attempting a sitcom script when I was in the eighth grade.  My mother found it and read it.  I doubted she laughed.  The first critic I would ever encounter.

One English class project was to write an original short story.  I did so but used the characters from "Get Smart," which was still in reruns.  The old bag who ran the class probably had not watched them.  She didn't laugh either.  The second critic I would ever encounter.

I began to think that trying to write funny stuff should be left to Rob, Buddy, and Sally on the old "Dick Van Dyke Show."  My focus would shift ever so slightly to a different kind of writing.  And when I began to seriously look for colleges, I sought out those universities that had a specialty in journalism.

This was the longest and most sustained career path to date.

Ideally, I wanted to be a sports reporter.  And it looked like Fordham University would fill that bill admirably.  They had a campus newspaper.  There was a full-blown radio station attached and, for Pete's sake, Vin Scully had worked there.  

I decided to enter this world in both varieties.  Print and broadcast.

Entering the Ram newspaper for the first time, I realized there were lots of others with the same dream.  I was not going to be a one-man-band.  And, while I knew baseball like the back of my hand, there were a multitude of college sports that needed to be reported on.

My first assignment was a tennis match.

Really??  I was even more bored than the people who ultimately read my lackluster account of somebody beating somebody else.

Yawn.

Things weren't much better at the radio station's sports department, which I joined and then concentrated on.  You see, they also covered stuff other than baseball.

I was a spotter for the broadcast play-by-play crew during a football game.  Except I never spotted the right guy making the right tackle.

I did color announcing for a junior varsity basketball game.  The only color I provided was the red on my face from one mistake after another.

When I got the chance to do play-by-play for a Fordham baseball game, the results were so bad that I think WFUV did lose their FCC license for a few years.

A long time dream was over.

I'd have to write other stuff.  Like this Sunday blog piece, for instance.

Now, if you asked me right then and there what my two or three fantasy jobs would be, I would tell you the following.

1.  I'd like to create a television situation comedy.

2.  I'd like to work for a major league baseball team.

3.  I'd like to write or put together some piece of work that told a story about baseball.

Decades later, all three of those dreams are still in active play.

What do I want to be when I grow up?  

I'll let you know when I get there.

Dinner last night:   Mongolian beef from Chin Chin.

Classic TV Commercial of the Month - June 2021

Back in the day, TV sponsors used to have their stars hawk the product in character.  Simpler times.   And here Sheriff Andy talks up Sanka!

  

Dinner last night:  Turkey, cheddar, and tomato on a warm pretzel from Clementine's.

Everybody Loves a June Mug

 

They used the same photo on her Match.com profile.
I guess pie fights are now illegal.

Even Santa!

Sir, this is the county jail, not Mack Sennett's studios.

Also written on his face? The word "guilty."

"Hmmm, let me think. I've been arrested. Should I go to the men's or the women's detention center."

Yeah, that will get you a reduced sentence.

Sneering will get you nowhere.

Please update your wardrobe.
Arrested and on a gurney. It ain't your day, Rufus.

Dinner last night:  Salad.