As I say every year, this song isn't officially about Thanksgiving, but given that its title is "Thank You Very Much," we always go with it here. This is the Oscar-nominated Best Song from the movie Scrooge, the musical adaption of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with a score by Leslie Bricusse. The number features Albert Finney and, in the lead, the wonderful Anton Rodgers. (He first came to my attention when my folks came back from a trip to London and had seen the musical, Pickwick, based on Dickens' novel, with Harry Secombe, and raved about the show, about Secombe, and in a supporting role as Alfred Jingle, about Anton Rodgers. I think you can tell by his performance here in Scrooge what so impressed them. By the way, Pickwick had music by Cyril Ornadel and lyrics by...Leslie Bricusse! So, we're just piling on all the various connections we can. By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if the Pickwick and Bricusse connection, which came six years before the movie, had something to do with Leslie Bricusse -- who also wrote the screenplay and was the executive producer of the film -- wanting Rodgers for the role.) Note: if you haven't seen the movie, this comes from The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come sequence. The people can't see Scrooge, though he thinks they're cheering him -- when what they're overjoyed about is that he has died and all their debts to him are wiped out.
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We'll start off the holiday with something from The West Wing. The series would periodically do a a Thanksgiving-themed episode, and this is one of the memorable sequences from one of those, an episode entitled "Indian in the Lobby." (If it seems to jump in time a bit, that's because it's not a single scene per se, since this is a collection of snippets that the YouTube poster edited together.) Happy Thanksgiving from Joe Bethersenton to you and yours... This is a thorougly enjoyable video of Stephen Sondheim's Kennedy Center Honors 25 years ago, back in 1993. You'll note Jason Alexander below -- as a young actor starting out, he had been in the original cast of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along and joins Bernadette Peters and Scott Bakula to sing "Old Friends" from the show. Also noteworthy is Angela Lansbury here singing Sondheim's classic song for Desiree, "Send in the Clowns," from A Little Night Music. Though she has appeared in several Sondheim musicals -- Sweeney Todd and Anyone Can Whistle, as well as Gypsy, from which Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Jule Styne's music -- 14 years after this performance, she played Desiree's mother, Madame Armfeldt at the age of 85 in the 2009 Broadway revival. This was the year that Johnny Carson and Sir Georg Solti received Kennedy Center Honors, and you'll see glimpses of them. But what leaps out from the entire 20-minute tribute is how intensely-attentive and joyfully appreciative Sondheim is, perhaps more than any other recipient I've seen. So, okay, on Sunday, we had Trump trashing retired Admiral William McRaven for not catching Osama bin Laden fast enough. Monday, was the story about Ivanka Trump using her personal email to send official White House communication. Yesterday, the New York Times had a story about Trump wanting to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. And then there is Trump ignoring the CIA and backing Saudi Arabia in the murder and dismembering of U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
That's three days work. Three days. And it's not abnormal. And it doesn't even include such mere pittances as Trump talking over the weekend about preventing wildfires by taking care of for forests' "floors" -- and lying about a conversation he had about it with the president of Finland who has publicly denied what was said when they talked. Nor does it include that just this morning comes the Washington Post story that Trump's temporary Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, already part of an FBI investigation over a scam company he was part of that was shut down, was paid $1.2 million from an undisclosed source for his one-person "charity." In Trump Land, those almost don't even register on the Richter Scale. Meanwhile, after ginning up his base before the midterm elections about the grave danger to the country from a caravan of 3,500 immigrants 1,000 miles away from the border trying to get legal asylum in the United States, so dangerous to national security that he sent around 8,000 troops and railed about it repeated times a day for weeks leading up to the midterms, Trump has been near-silent after the election about this supposedly monumental danger to the country. Some things are so blatant that comment isn't even necessary. Where comment would not only be redundant but it would almost obscure the true nature of events. That's part of the reason I'm keeping this short and not even adding comment. The other reason is that I prefer for my head not to explode… And the elected officials of the Republican Party just enable it all. That's why this is all about the Republican Party. What kind of a week was it? A week like any other, except...You Are There. I posted a few of these in the past, but it's been much too long, so let's jump in again. This is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as their characters 'Pete and Dud,' a couple of lower-class Cockneys who ruminate on all manner of issues in the world. (Much like Peter Cook's character 'E.L. Wisty' who expounded on life from a park bench. These come from their British TV series in the 1960s, Not only...But Also... I wish there were more of these videos, but many of the tapes (as is the case with such things back them) were destroyed. Happily though there are still a bunch of them around. And quite a few others exist on audio -- including on several albums with the best sketches from the show, one of which, to give full credit, is where I got the title of today's piece. In this one, the two fellows discuss a top they know very little about -- women. Yesterday, the Trump administration put out a list of new guidelines for the press to follow in order to have some grace and decorum at the White House. I believe that the only thing missing was the requirement that gentlemen wear top hats and that ladies always have an escort.
Forget for a moment if a government organization put out a list of guidelines for the proper behavior of gun owners while on government property or else they would be banned from doing their jobs there. I would imagine that you'd be able to hear from outer space the screams and mangled howls of agony from the gun manufacturer corporate-own NRA and other gun-rights advocate about protecting their Second Amendment rights. But it seems the First Amendment isn't so lucky to have "patriotic" Americans on the far-right willing to march and make America grand once more on its behalf, so it will have to make do without their jingoistic support. So, we'll put that aside for the moment, even with it taking an awful lot of heavy lifting to put aside. No, instead we'll just focus on the simple and basic, which is much easier to deal with. And that's wondering if Trump himself will be allowed in the press room now. Given that these news Guidelines of Grace and Decorum came only the day after Trump sent out a tweet (always a cringe-worthy place to start any sentence) where he referred to Congressman Adam Schiff -- soon to be chair of the House Intelligence Committee -- as Adam "Schitt," it is not being even remotely facetious to suggest that irony has been bludgeoned to death by the Trump White House. Even forgetting two years of Trump name-calling, and bullying, and calls of "enemy of the people" -- let alone the year leading up to it with his demeaning war heroes, Gold Star families, women's looks, sexual abuse and the physical actions of the disabled, or a lifetime of such conduct dating back to taking out full-page ads in the New York Times calling for the death of five innocent young black men -- that one "Schitty" tweet alone about the man who will soon chair the investigation of whether the Trump administration conspired with Russia to manipulate the U.S. elections -- would get him banned from the White House press room. Actually, it would probably get him banned from the third grade. And sent home from school with a note. Seriously. "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Trump, Donny used that offending word again while making fun of one of his classmates. As you know, this is against our school policy, wanting to make Barack Obama Elementary a nurturing place of learning for all. And it's something we have discussed and warned about in his actions previously. We like to give our young students chances to learn and grow from their mistakes, but after 1,026 warnings (we were going to send this note when it reached a thousand, but even there we bent over backwards in hopes that a child couldn't be that mindless to keep insulting others, grabbing the girls in unwanted places, and trying to keep our minority children from participating with the others at recess) we feel that the message has not gotten through, and have finally decided that this last straw was so utterly infantile and inexplicable that it suggested a character flaw so deep that it would be best for him to do some reflecting at home about the way he treats others. The school board called an emergency session and voted by 12-0 to institute this action. To show how seriously we take this, please be aware that we only have 10 members on the school board." The White House issuing a Debutante's Guide to Grace and Decorum is like the Unabomber putting out a handbook on "Ted Kaczynski's Rules for Good Grooming and Interpersonal Relationships." There might be some reasonable nuggets buried in there if they were allowed to exist free on their own in the cleansing light of sunshine, but when surrounded by an army of alien insanity it's all just a cry for mad help that brings the authorities rushing with a SWAT team, arrest warrant and a straight-jacket. And yes, all of this still puts aside for a moment the concept of the administration putting First Amendment restrictions on how the press does its job. And also, as always -- even with the mid-term election over -- this isn't about Trump, since we know who he is, but is about the elected officials of the Republican Party who enable him. |
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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