I've posted a couple of impressive videos of Judi Dench, of all people, in stage musicals. There was her surprising appearance 45 years ago as the original Sally Bowles in the London production of Cabaret. And then, we had the video of her Olivier Award-winning performance as Desiree in the London revival of A Little Night Music. But this may top them all. But for very different reasons. It's not from any stage musical she was appearing in on the West End, but rather a London concert that got aired here on PBS in 2002. The show was One Enchanted Evening, a tribute to Rodgers & Hammerstein. I saw this when it was first broadcast, and the show was fine, but it was this number in particular that blew the usually-solemn British audience out of the water, and almost had me on the floor in hysterics. The performance is a...well, no, I'm not going to say a further word about that, and give anything away. You can enjoy it just like the theater audience did. I'll just say two things -- 1) Listen carefully for a very funny twist on the lyrics at the 1:00 mark. It's very subtle, and the audience misses it, but you can tell by Dame Judi's reaction that the one-word change is there. And 2) it's hard to imagine many highly-respectable actors having even half as much ludicrous fun at their own expense as she is. The actor opposite her is Brendan O'Hea, who had earlier appeared with her in that aforementioned revival of A Little Night Music as the ever-moody, young Henrik. And with all that out of the way, here from The Sound of Music is "16 Going on 17." The video quality isn't great. And you won't care.
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Okay, so you remember how a couple months ago Rutgers University had a sports scandal when their basketball coach Mike Rice was extensively caught on tape physically and verbally abusing players. (I wrote about the story here.) Rice lost his job, as did the man who hired him, athletic director Tim Pernetti. To clean up the program, Rutgers hire Julie Hermann as the new A.D. She previously had been the assistant athletic director at the University of Louisville. She's scheduled to start on June 17.
There's a problem, though, you see. It's hard to know whether the problem is more "big" or "bizarre." The Star-Ledger in New Jersey reports that 16 years ago Hermann quit as coach of the Tennessee women's volleyball team coach after the entire team wrote a letter claiming that she used -- are you ready? -- "humiliation, fear and emotional abuse." Seriously. As I like to say, and alas, much too often, no, this isn't The Onion. In their letter, the players wrote, "The mental cruelty that we as a team have suffered is unbearable," noting that among other things Ms. Hermann called them "whores, alcoholics and learning disabled." They added that "It has been unanimously decided that this is an irreconcilable issue." The players tell the Star-Ledger that when the team held its final meeting with the coach, her response was, "I choose not to coach you guys." The Star-Ledger writes: "Their accounts depict a coach who thought nothing of demeaning them, who would ridicule and laugh at them over their weight and their performances, sometimes forcing players to do 100 sideline push-ups during games, who punished them after losses by making them wear their workout clothes inside out in public or not allowing them to shower or eat, and who pitted them against one another, cutting down particular players with the whole team watching, and through gossip. "Several women said playing for Hermann had driven them into depression and counseling, and that her conduct had sullied the experience of playing Division I volleyball." One of those players, Allison Stricklin Harvey told the paper that she'd quit the volleyball team, but returned after Coach Hermann left. When it was announced that she had been named the athletic director at Rutgers, the former player's initial reaction was "I like to think she has evolved." But when she saw pictures of her former coach, her attitude reversed. "It just put a pit in my stomach." How much of the charges are true is one matter, though the letter and unanimity do add substance. But two issues stand out. One is Julie Hermann's response when the Star-Ledger contacted her. "I never heard any of this, never name-calling them or anything like that whatsoever." The word "whore," she said, is "not part of my vernacular. Not then, not now, not ever. None of this is familiar to me," That is just too unbelievable to me. I would understand someone explaining the issues away as overblown or taken out of context or such. But to say you've never heard of it and it's all completely unfamiliar when an entire team makes the charge and sent a letter belies any credibility. (And "None of this is familiar to me" is such a strange phrasing and defense, not that that's proof of anything. But it certainly goes out of its way to leave the door open for questions.) The second issue, though, is the most notable one for me in all this. It's that for a school like Rutgers that specifically is trying to clean up a scandal of physical and verbal abuse by a coach -- what on earth kind of due diligence are they doing?? Is anyone in charge there?! Even if the story turns out to be, bending far over backwards to be fair, overblown and taken out of context, it would seem that when you're trying to clean up a scandal-ridden program, you don't even want overblown and context -- you want pristine. You want someone who has a career known as impeccable, not one that at best dances awkwardly around the edges. And how thrilled the Big Ten must be for bringing Rutgers into the conference next year. As I also wrote in another post that an old musical, High Button Shoes had a song called, "Nobody Ever Died for Dear Old Rutgers" (sung by Phil Silvers, which I embedded here). It seems that not only is that song wrong, but the bodies keep piling up. On Thursday, a bridge collapsed over Skagit River in the state of Washington. As it happens, the American Society of Civil Engineers has reported that that bridge isn’t even close to the worse shape of bridges in Washington State alone – it’s only rated “functionally obsolete.” But there are 750 others bridges in Washington that are “structurally deficient,” a lower category. That’s just one state. Last year, the ASCE put out a report that said 150,000 bridges were either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In 2007, 13 people were killed when the I-35 bridge collapsed in Minnesota. Since then, there have been seven major bridge collapses. It’s only luck that no one has been killed in any of them. Grover Norquist, Republican head of Americans for Tax Reform, "My goal is to cut government in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Grover Norquist, conservative head of Americans for Tax Reform, once famously said, "My goal is to cut government in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." When there is a refusal to raise taxes for needed repairs, when government and oversight disappear, then bridges crumble and collapse and disaster follows. And Grover Norquist gets his bathtub and his wish. This shouldn’t come as a shock. In fact, in September, 2011, I wrote the following article for the Huffington Post. The High Cost of Low Cost A successful freelancer once explained to me that he regularly tells companies who balk at paying his price, "If you think I'm expensive, wait until you work with amateurs." Lower-quality work will invariably cause big problems and much more money spent correcting them. But this isn't just a reality for all business. It's the way of all life. This is far more basic than Economics 101. It's nothing more than a wise saying everyone learned in grade school. You Get What You Pay For. Usually, that's said with a shrug and a wistful smile. But then, we generally don't expect the payment to be made with people's lives. Save money by not doing required repairs on a bridge. It collapses, causing devastation and death. The original price to fix the bridge was $3 million. The financial cost only of replacement and economic upheaval is an estimated $500 million. Save money by cutting $65 million from required maintenance on levees. They're breached, wiping out a major American city and killing 1,577 people.. The cost of rebuilding the levees is $10 billion. Rebuilding the city is an additional $53 billion. Save money by having your toys made cheaply overseas. Toxic paint is found in 21 million products for children, in three separate recalls. Save money by importing on pet food more cheaply from overseas. Contaminated food kills over 17,000 pets. Save money on toothpaste by importing it more cheaply from overseas. Products with a poisonous chemical is distributed to hotels. Save money on automobile tires by importing them more cheaply from overseas. Over 450,000 faulty tires that can fall apart were recalled. These aren't isolated incidents. This is a pattern. You do get what you pay for. Wal-Mart might love to advertise with that little smiley-face knocking the prices down, but when they had to remove those toys with toxic paint from their shelves, remember: a frown is just a smile upside-down. The manufacturing problem for all those recalls was caused elsewhere, in China. But someone had to hire them. And someone had to cut government costs for inspecting them. There are many dirty fingers. When Wal-Mart strong-arms its suppliers to under-price everyone else, those suppliers are forced or choose to go overseas where there is cheap labor and cheaper consumer protection. And other retailers are pressured to follow, or do so happily. Companies can insist they're just giving the public what it wants, low prices. And that's a wonderful argument until reality kicks in and you stock your stores with toxic toys, toxic pet food, toxic toothpaste and exploding tires. Surveys show that customers tend to not want those things. Everyone likes low prices. Spending less. Saving money. But you get what you pay for. It's not Economics 101. It's Life 101. Here's another basic, wise saying: pennywise and pound foolish. But this is pennywise and pound insane. And it holds true in everything. Including the crass political tactic that anyone who wants to raise taxes is just a "Tax and Spend Liberal" and irresponsible and evil and smells bad. Well, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) played that card and vetoed a transportation bill because it would have raised taxes. His way collapsed a bridge. There are apparently 79,427 bridges considered inadequate in the U.S., and the cost to repair them all is estimated at $9.4 billion every year, for 20 years. That's $188 billion. Think that's a lot? Nah, it's peanuts. Chump change. If the cost to the economy of this one Minnesota bridge is $500 million, then the potential damages for all those inadequate bridges is $40,000,000,000,000,000. (That's "$40 quadrillion" but it's a word so large to be meaningless. It's so large it sounds like you're an eight-year-old making up words.) Fun with Math: to pay that scary $188 billion national bridge repair, you'd only have to shut down the Iraq War 2-1/2 years early. Or just have taken 2-1/2 years looking carefully for those pesky WMDs before shock-and-awing. The bridges would be paid for by now. Not suggesting a plan, of course, but merely putting things in perspective. If something is important to you, you find the money. That is, unless you're too cheap and don't mind the risk of flooding a city, killing pets or poisoning the nation's children. Is that a cheap shot to take? Perhaps. But it's less cheap than not minding the risk of flooding a city, killing pets or poisoning the nation's children. But then, you get what you pay for. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday announced that they were expecting more than the average number of hurricanes this year, up to 11. And three to six of those could be "major." The reason is higher than usual ocean water temperatures and favorable atmospheric conditions. (Not so much "favorable" to those on land, mind you.)
Of course, it's less the number, but more the intensity of the hurricanes, and as Gerry Bell, a forecaster for NOAA said, "It only takes one hitting you to make it a really bad year." Last year, for instance, only two hurricanes formed in the Atlantic. One, though, was Hurricane Sandy. Over 650,000 homes were damaged, and 8 million people lost power. Coming on the heels of the giant tornado in Oklahoma, one sits waiting for three things: 1) those Climate Change deniers to keep ignoring science to the detriment of society, 2) conservatives in Congress refusing to aid those in desperate need, and 3) Pat Robertson blaming it on sinners, unless they're predominately white and conservative. We haven't had any Bob & Ray for a while, so this seemed as good a time as any. And a video, no less -- and in color. I've always loved Bob & Ray, but they endeared themselves to me even more when I wrote them a letter of appreciation 10-15 years ago or so. Their letterhead was wonderful, with (among other things) lists of their worldwide offices. Almost all the cities were international glamor spots -- London, Paris, Rome, Zurich and such. And in the middle of all these was -- Glencoe! (Where I grew up.) If I needed one more reason to love them, there it was. Yesterday, the Huffington Post homepage had an article about the "best surprise ever." Now, forgetting for the moment that the Huffington Post headline writers use the word "ever" more often than a teenage girl says "rilly," and forgetting that the homepage that day also had big news stories about candid photos of strippers, Mariah Carey falling out of her dress, and Michael Bolton losing his virginity (and again, these were all on the homepage), I'm a sucker for "big surprise" videos. Furthermore, reading the accompanying story beforehand, it says to have the hankies ready when you see the son of a soldier in Iraq discover that his mom got leave from the Army to be at his pre-graduation party.
How big was what may be the "best surprise ever"? Again...The Best Surprise -- Ever. Afterwards, on camera in the video, the kid says that he sort of thought his mom might do something like this, since she's been saying for four years that she'd be at his graduation. I mean, he says that. On camera. You can't miss it. And his weep-inducing reaction? He's sitting, turns in his chair, and gets a nice grin on his face. Just last week, there was a video of an Army dad in catcher gear who's flown back from Iraq as his 10-year-old daughter threw out the first pitch to him, not knowing it was him, before a baseball game -- and when he takes off the gear and she recognizes who it is, he goes racing across the field and leaps into his arms. That video runs circles around this one. And it was only a week earlier. Such are the problems of short term memory loss. This graduation moment is a nice little video, and I'm sure it was a deeply moving wonderful moment for the kid and his mother. But it was so woefully far from the best surprise ever that I'm not even embedding the video. Best surprise ever? It wasn't even the best surprise of the week. It wasn't even the best "soldier parent returning from Iraq for their child" surprise of the week. Methinks the word "ever" is getting a tad overused. And for us lovers of "best evers," it's becoming a problematic epidemic akin to the Boy Who Cried Wolf, where you get sensory overload from all the "evers" and start to ignore them. It's like the worst linguistic abuse -- ever. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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