Burlesque

What do Ann B Davis, Huntz Hall, Dick Cheney and OJ Simpson have in common? This, believe it or not, had been my quandary until I forged a connection.

Most people know Dick Cheney as the scary former vice president of the United States and OJ Simpson as a first-rate football player, turned second-rate actor, turned victor of a third-rate trial prosecuted by the biggest gang of idiots not proudly billed as such on the masthead of Mad magazine.

Fewer people might know that Ann B. Davis played Alice the housekeeper on TV’s The Brady Bunch four-plus decades ago, although her recent death highlighted that fact.

For every 10 people who recognize Ann B. Davis’s name, however, there may be one or two who remember—or who knew in the first place, particularly if they’re younger than me —that Huntz Hall played a buffoonish street not-so-tough named Horace Debussy “Satch” Jones in the  “Bowery Boys” film series in the 1950s, serving as comic foil to tough-guy Slip Mahoney (portrayed by Leo Gorcey). When I was a kid in New Jersey in the 1960s, Bowery Boys films seemingly were as omnipresent on weekend daytime TV as Law and Order reruns now are on cable TV at every hour. The comic patter went like this: Satch would ask, “Should we sympatize [sic] our watches, Slip?” and his hotheaded mentor would respond, “Ah, you’ll need sympaty when I get through witcha!" This was when Slip wasn’t grabbing Satch’s hat off his head and slapping him across the face with it. Satch nevertheless remained intensely loyal to his abusive buddy, and somehow by the end of the films’ hour-long running time the duo and their pals would solve some crime that had stymied the coppers and help put the bad guys in the slammer.

Anyway, when Ann B Davis died a few weeks ago, the Washington Post ran a nostalgic tribute—partially to the actress and partially to the hokey wholesomeness of her TV character and the show on which she’d appeared. Predictably, the piece elicited a letter to the editor from a reader lamenting the ceding of precious up-front space to an actress whose main claim to fame had been a supporting role in a cheesy old sitcom. I write “predictably” because, for every letter/e-mail writer advocating that this or that hard-news topic receive more/better/at least some space on the front page, there’s always another writer decrying all the doom and gloom on 1A and asking why the deathly seriousness of it all can’t sometimes be leavened by good news and happy stories—such as fond salutes to dearly departed actresses and the campily endearing characters they once played on TV.

“Wait, where’s he going with all this?” you're asking. Hold on a minute while I connect the first two dots, then the third and fourth.

The letter writer who had dissed Ann B Davis’s front-page treatment had sarcastically asked, “Can we now expect a retrospective of Huntz Hall (‘The Enfant Terrible of the Bowery Boys’)?” The comparison seems obscure here in 2014 until you factor in the fact that, at age almost-56, I'm probably on the young side for newspaper readers in the digital age. To my utter delight, one of those aging readers proved to be Huntz Hall’s son. Who, in what's perhaps a cosmic nod to a young Huntz Hall's appearance in 1938's Angels With Dirty Faces, is the dean of the Washington National Cathedral.

“As an Episcopal priest and the son of actor Huntz Hall,” Gary Hall’s letter began, “I am perfectly positioned to respond to a churlish letter [‘Too Much for a Second Banana,’ Free for All, June 7] objecting to the front-page obituary of Ann B Davis.” Hall the Younger went on to decry the writer’s denigration of his dad, proudly noting that “No less an authority than Groucho Marx called my father 'the American Chaplin.’” Gary Hall praised Davis, who had led a religious later life, as a “faithful and selfless church person,” and concluded that “My father would have been proud to have been mentioned in her company, even if ironically.”

It was an awesome letter for many reasons, although it did make me wonder what Groucho Marx had been smoking, or if Gary Hall doesn’t always recognize sarcasm, or what. (For all of Huntz Hall’s comedic talent, I wouldn’t quite equate the Little Tramp with the B-Movie Lummox.) Why was the son's letter awesome? Huntz Hall, a significant TV presence of my youth, now had been mentioned not once, but twice, in the year 2014 in a major American newspaper. A crabby Ann B Davis detractor had been devastatingly slammed by no less authoritative a figure than the closest living relative of the actor to whom said detractor had disparagingly compared her. And, of particular importance to me, Hall’s letter gave me a way to bring Dick Cheney and OJ Simpson into today’s post.

Two words here: second banana.

Bear with me, because I really want to say a few words about Cheney’s idiotic recent pronouncements about Iraq, and also to reflect briefly on the 20th anniversary of the OJ Simpson trial. And Ann B Davis and Huntz Hall have provided my thread.

It wasn’t until I read Gary Hall’s letter that I was reminded of the earlier letter’s headline. That got me to thinking about how the term “second banana”—much like the names “Ann B. Davis” and “Huntz Hall,” as a matter of fact—aren’t often seen in the pages of modern publications. Given that I, too, am a product of an earlier era, I recognized “second banana” as meaning “sidekick” or “number two” or “also-ran.” When I looked up its origins on the Internet, I discovered that the term dates back to burlesque acts in the vaudeville era. During a show’s finale, showgirls would bunch together in a banana-shaped formation, making the center showgirl the “top banana.” In comedy acts, then, the straight man to the headlining comedian became known as the second banana.

This got me to thinking about how Cheney, as vice president, had been grim straight man to George W Bush’s comedy act of stumblebum policymaking and mush-mouthed malapropisms. And how OJ Simpson had been a lightweight second-tier actor before starring in a farcical trial that ended in his literally getting away with murder.

Next, I took the dictionary one step further, looking up the word “burlesque.” This really was where everything came together for me.

Here’s Google’s definition of burlesque: “An absurd or comically exaggerated imitation of something; a parody.”

Why, I thought, Google might just as well have been defining “Recent Dick Cheney editorial in the Wall Street Journal” or “OJ Simpson trial from start to finish”!

In that recent editorial, the oft-heart-attacked Man Who Will Not Die and his daughter Liz added new dimensions to gall by essentially opining that Iraq’s current chaos is all President Obama’s fault, and that the current commander in chief is, in fact, “on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.” This from the man who, as vice president, was integral to all the bad decisions that have brought Iraq to where it is today. As even Megyn Kelly of typically Cheney-friendly Fox News was compelled to remind him this week, “You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said that with our intervention, extremists would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.”

My point here is not to point out the myriad ways in which Cheney was wrong. That’s being done very effectively across the news media this week, by seemingly every outlet and commentator except maybe Aryan News Today. Which, if it exists, displays as its logo a lynched black man who looks suspiciously like Barack Obama.

No, my point is return to that definition of burlesque and note the parodic absurdity of Cheney’s claims. While I’m at it, I also would like to say, in my own defense, that there are good reasons I didn’t alert the world to the satanic horns atop Cheney’s head when I interviewed him in his House office as a Capitol Hill intern back in 1979. I was young and nervous, and he had hair then to cover his demonic protrusions. Also, his tail was out of view, because he was sitting behind a desk.

Which brings me to OJ Simpson. People who are old enough to have followed that trial live vividly remember the array of comically exaggerated absurdities—ranging from but not limited to the endemic racism within the LAPD, the inept prosecutors, egocentric and grandstanding Judge Lance Ito, the low-speed chase by the allegedly suicidal defendant, the high theater and low comedy of a pair of moisture-shrunken gloves somehow failing to fit OJ’s hands, and finally, of course, the all-counts acquittal in the face of overwhelming DNA and circumstantial evidence, thanks both to those prosecutorial blunders and the long legacy of institutional racism in the United States.                

While we’re on the subject of burlesque, the trial anniversary also has brought up the dark comedies of the two decades since. Such as the fact that Simpson ended up in prison anyway, for his role in a bungled burglary of stuff he used to own. And the fact that surely he’s still telling anyone who’ll listen that while he is languishing in a jail cell, the “real killers” of his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman remain at liberty and unpunished. And the fact that, before Simpson was jailed, his search for those killers seemed to be conducted strictly on golf courses. And the fact that, even now, race relations in this country are such that the prevailing postmortem on the trial among black Americans seems to be, “OK, OJ probably was guilty, but hey, how many black men continue to be racially profiled and unjustly railroaded in America? Score one for our side.”

So, there it is: Second bananas. They’re sometimes benign, like Ann B Davis and Huntz Hall. They’re sometimes pure evil, like Dick Cheney. They can be deadly, like OJ Simpson. And yeah, they may even provide a pretty weak unifying theme for a guy who wants to cover the waterfront in a single blog post.

Road Trip

The road trip is this near-mythical American concept, born of equal parts Manifest Destiny, Henry Ford and evocations in popular culture. To me, those two words conjure Kerouac’s On the Road, which I haven’t read. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which I have, and Paul Simon’s song America—the latter having been revitalized in my memory by the recent discovery of an improbable version by the British prog-rock band Yes that I found on an added-tracks CD of 1971’s Fragile.

In Simon’s bittersweet Vietnam-era travelogue there’s the line “Michigan seems like a dream to me now.” Well, so, too, does my own April 13-19 journey through the American South. While it was happening I took daily notes, with the intention of ending my self-imposed blog hiatus with an amazing, revelatory addition to the Great American Road Trip canon. In my mind, this idiosyncratic yet deeply insightful piece not only would elicit gasps of admiration from my tiny but loyal readership, but somehow would find its way to a wider audience, leading to a book deal or at least to an invitation to blog for pay on some hotshot website.

But when I came off the road, it seemed as if there were many demands on my time more compelling than sitting down at the PC in a protracted struggle to shape my experiences into something literarily memorable. There not only was that pesky paying job that again was taking up so much of my time, but there were newspapers and magazines to read, e-mails to write, texts to send and TV shows to watch. Indeed, even though the editing project that had been the putative cause of the hiatus was done, not even an automotive odyssey trip through seven states and across 2,400 miles in six days had changed the fact that blogging is work, and that my work ethic isn’t the best. Would I like to be known far and wide as a brilliant writer? You bet! Am I—have I ever been—willing to put in the time and effort to hone those skills and truly develop whatever talent I might have? Not so much.

Still, there are certain things I want to relate to you about what truly was a memorable trip—one that came about because Lynn’s and my friend Julie Smith wanted to show her English second cousin Danny Pickwell a bit of America on his first journey stateside.

Now, if I were to have written the rich and multifaceted travel opus I’d originally conceived, there’d have been a lot in there—in a much longer post than this one—about the many charms of the tireless Julie, who got stuck with the vast majority of the driving because I can’t (physically or legally) drive a stick shift, and because Danny didn’t feel entirely comfortable driving on the “wrong” side of the road. I would have tried to convey, too, why and how much I enjoyed the company of the affable Englishman, who runs a bed and breakfast back home and surely is the perfect host.

But, for the purposes of this lazy-assed abbreviation of my road trip story, suffice it to say that I can scarcely imagine two people with whom I’d rather have shared close quarters for multiple days while constantly snacking, singing badly to various musical genres, and popping in and out of truck stop megastores so jam-packed with junk foods, automotive supplies and electronic gadget as to make one simultaneously awed and appalled to live in a nation whose carbon footprint is so grievously outsized.

So, let me first related the itinerary, then bullet-point the highlights.

We set off from Julie’s house in Sterling, Virginia, and reached Nashville, Tennessee, that first day. We subsequently traveled through Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, the Mississippi city of Hattiesburg (where Julie’s English mum incongruously lives), and New Orleans, then headed back via the Gulf Coast all the way to Pensacola, Florida, through Alabama to Athens, Georgia (home of Julie’s adult son Tanner), and back to Sterling.

Highlights:

Graceland. In the 19th century, cotton was king in the South, but by the latter half of the 20th century the King was Elvis Presley. So, we hardly could take an English tourist through the region without paying tribute to the King at his home in Memphis.

I’d never been to Graceland, but I thought I knew what to expect: Kitsch overload. Ostentation, tacky furnishings, an onslaught of gift shops bursting with tacky souvenirs. An ambiance that was in keeping with the man himself: a huge talent who wasted and prematurely lost his life in an excess of food, booze and pills.

What I saw and discovered, much to my surprise, delight and sorrow, was a moving memorial to a devoted family man and generous philanthropist whose descent into dissolution was tragic, but which didn’t negate all that was admirable in his musical and personal legacy.

I was surprised by the modesty and lack of grandiosity of everything from the house and grounds to the portrait of the man painted by the audio tour and the photo-rich memorabilia. Yes, I know that Graceland, as a money-making enterprise, is dedicated to burnishing Elvis’s image, but I learned a lot that added dimension to the flat and rather clownish image I’d had of a sultry superstar gone fat and stoned. Particularly moving were the joyful reminiscences of her dad by Lisa Marie, who’s always come off in public as a rather cold and unsympathetic figure.

There is what only can be described as a riot of gift shops, however. And my Graceland umbrella, purchased in response to that day’s downpour, lasted fully one day before it fell apart. And no, Elvis’s decorating style wasn’t the classiest, as evinced by the carpeted walls of the stairwell leading to the King’s faux-safari room.

Clarksburg, Mississippi. You know that Cream song “Crossroads”? It’s not a Cream song. It was written by Delta bluesman Robert Johnson in 1936. The crossroads to which he was referring are in Clarksburg. We stayed there overnight, at a great ramshackle cluster of lodgings called the Shack Up Inn. Julie found it for us on the Internet. The owners have moved and refurbished a collection of old sharecropper shacks. Mine was named Pinetop in honor of bluesman Pinetop Perkins.

While in Clarksburg, we heard live Delta blues at Red’s, a bona fide juke joint that is dumpy, tiny, smoky and wonderful. There, I happily burst my eardrums and washed down my two coleslaw sandwiches (there was nothing else vegetarian on the menu) with an 18-ounce Budweiser.

Clarksburg also is the home of the Delta Blues Museum, which we toured, and the Ground Zero blues bar, which is partly owned by Mississippi native son Morgan Freeman. We lunched at Ground Zero, where I feasted on a soul food vegetable plate that included one of the best pieces of cornbread I’ve ever eaten.

Also in Clarksburg, I added Mississippi to the list of states in which I’ve run for one uninterrupted hour. It was chilly and windy that particular morning, and I got no sense that passing motorists had any inkling of the history being made on their roadside. But I was psyched, and afterward I allowed myself a few mini-doughnuts from the Shack Up’s version of a continental breakfast spread, which was limited to a few pastries and coffee.

New Orleans. This wasn’t the stuff of Mardi Gras. It was a cold day; the parade of naked women Julie had assured us we’d see failed to materialize, to Danny’s and my bitter disappointment; and our streetcar ride was intermittent and confusing due to construction on the trolley line. But we got a great walking tour of the French Quarter that included a raised cemetery and the House of the Rising Sun, I snapped pictures of Danny stuffing his face with crawfish, and at Julie’s urging we went that night to a dueling-piano bar that was so cheesy that, with the aid of a few ridiculously alcoholic hurricanes, it was fantastic. Four female pianists alternated taking pop-song requests from the audience and reducing each to its two-minute essence. A sloppy cross-section of America enthusiastically if not tunefully harmonized.

Photographs. This was my first road big road trip with an iPhone, so I took a lot of pictures. This was a highlight for me because of the ability my phone afforded me to indiscriminately shoot, and the gratification of being able to instantly view every single poorly composed, badly lit and blurry image.

Actually, some shots turned out pretty well. Among my favorites were interior shots at Graceland and exterior shots of the rustic and rusty Shack Up Inn grounds; a fish skeleton on the beach in Long Beach, Mississippi; a line of urinals in rainbow colors behind  a casino in Biloxi where construction was being conducted; the juxtaposition within a Gulf Coast strip mall of The Wireless Center and End Time Ministries (enjoy broadband access while awaiting Armageddon!); close-ups of a pelican and a heron at a downtown Tallahassee park; and shots of Danny modeling cowboy hats at a huge discount store in North Carolina on our journey’s final day.

So, that was my road trip. It wasn’t bawdy like Kerouac’s, or topical like Steinbeck’s, or lyrical like Simon’s. It was personally memorable, though. And Danny has promised us Road Trip II: The English Leg when we can get over there. Maybe that will be the road trip that I’ll immortalize in brilliant prose. A Maryland Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or some such.

But I dunno. Sounds like a lot of work. Probably not.