“I know I’m not a kitten, I know I’m sorta fat, but if you will adopt me, I’ll be your lovin’ cat” – you can’t ask for more than that.

This goes along with my theme of the week ‘singular moments‘. ’69 Mets, ’69 Jets, ’85 Celtics, Trump coming down the escalator in ’15, Armstrong moonwalking in ’69, Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Reagan saying “tear down this wall”, Bo Derek running down the beach in ’10’, 911, the opening credits of the original Star Wars, the Wizard of Oz going to color, John Travolta walking down the sidewalk in Saturday Night Fever, Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’ onstage for the first time, Farrah Fawcett in a red one-piece.

I saw a post on Twitter about something and it reminded me of this Melissa Etheridge song. I thought it was “lonely one” or “lonely boy” but as we see it was “only one“. I hadn’t heard the song in awhile so I couldn’t remember the particulars, all that stuck in my mind was “power”. Lots and lots of power. And this song has it in spades. Its one of those songs you’d sing along with in the car (being ever thankful no one could hear you). Raw naked merciless power!

“Melissa Etheridge, in full Melissa Lou Etheridge, (born May 29, 1961, Leavenworth, Kansas, U.S.), American musician known for her raspy-voiced rock-and-roll singing. She also was noted for her early openness about her sexual orientation. Etheridge began playing the guitar at age 8 and writing songs by age 11. She honed her skills playing in local bands throughout her teens (emulating influences such as Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townshend of the Who) and briefly attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston before returning to Kansas.” – Britannica

“I’m the Only One” will be 30 years old next month. 30 years. Kind of like Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever. I’m eternally curious why it so rarely “all comes together”? Marie Osmond and Paper Roses. Donny Osmond and Go Away Little Girl. They say authors and movie directors have one story in them and they just spend a career retelling it in different ways.

Course with Farrah Fawcett lighting struck repeatedly.

Men of a certain age will remember this scene from the movie Flashdance (1983) with Jennifer Beals. It was one of the most erotic scenes ever filmed, and there was no nudity. The boss of the plant (Nick) where Alex was a welder was finally able to snag a date with her and take her to this exquisitely fancy restaurant (with cloth tablecloths no less). She’d been sitting there in a Tux, getting odd stares from those snooty people! When she whips off the faux jacket (she’s also an exotic dancer so she has a bunch of quick removing costumes) for a ‘3 old lady’ feint! And we are privy to a very attractive Jennifer Beals. Sitting there all demure like.

Which is what I’m getting at. This idea has been with me awhile. I believe in the movie industry that there are actresses (not all of them) that sometimes have one movie that catches them at their absolute peak. Not that there was anything ‘bad’ with them before or after that, but strange as it may seem, I think a lot of times there is a ‘peak‘ moment. Maybe for a second it might seem sad, but the good news is it was captured for eternity on film. I’m also not saying its strictly age related. There are types of lighting (purposeful or not) that are more enhancing of the female appearance. In the scene above you can see its candlelight.

Maybe its the lighting technician. The cameraman. A particular filter the director wanted used. Maybe a lens. The makeup person. Even the film used could make a difference. Jennifer was 20 when this was released, and due to the film being about a dancer, had obviously been working out. So she was probably 19 when filming took place, and was in the best shape of her life. Coming out of the 70’s “big hair” was still a thing, that probably helped too. That big curly fro was wow. Chemistry and attitude probably had a big input. She probably had a sense this movie was going to put her on the map. She probably found it easy to find chemistry with Michael Nouri. The director Adrian Lyne, while maybe not being the biggest name among moviegoers, is I would imagine a huge name within the industry (Fatal Attraction, 9 1/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal). I imagine he had the talent to make Jennifer look her absolute best.

And no of course I don’t base my theory on an example of one. Here are the actresses along with the movie that was arguably her most stunning appearance: Jennifer Love Hewitt – The Tuxedo (2002) age 22. Cybill Shepherd – The Last Picture Show (1971) age 20. Jennifer O’Neill – Summer of ’42 (1971) age 22. Grace Kelly – Rear Window (1954) age 24. Those are 4 good examples of this “phenomenom”. Jennifer O’Neill is a prime example. I’ve seen her in movies immediately before and after Summer of ’42 and she just wasn’t the same. Jennifer Love Hewitt probably weakens the theory the most as her amount of “stunning” appearances stretches over the greatest number of years.

Who knows what it is? Maybe sometimes its just intangibles and dumb luck. I just know that I’ve seen pictures of Beals through the decades after this and while perfectly fine, were just not ‘Queen of the Ball’ stunning that these are.

Jennifer Beals‘ trend-setting collarless sweatshirt came about by accident. The sweatshirt, which Beals brought from home, had shrunk in the wash and she had to cut the collar off in order to get it over her head. When director Adrian Lyne and costume designer Michael Kaplan saw it at the wardrobe fitting, they both loved it and Kaplan improved the overall look of the sweatshirt for the actual shoot. – IMDB

Another one was Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny! She was probably 27 during filming. Anyone who has seen it would say it was her “I don’t give a damn” attitude that was so attractive. And that hair. She seems like a nice woman but let’s face it, she was off the charts for that movie.

1971. The Waltons. “On Christmas Eve 1933, the Waltons prepare for the holiday. However, John Walton, who was forced to take work in another part of the state, has not returned home yet, and his family are becoming increasingly worried.” – IMDB

What a time to be alive. This TV movie was the pilot for the show that would begin the next year and run until 1981. Along the way in those 10 years we got to see the children grow up, the parents age, and the grandparents pass away.

I was paying attention to the opening footage and storyline, and was blown away by the production value. Once again with my tired refrain that Hollywood couldn’t do this now 50 years later on their best day!

They could put the story on film, but not the warmth and emotion. We the audience also were not so cynical and hardened that we couldn’t accept such a simple story. The human values, the Jesus story and his birth. Christmas as it was meant to be.

It was exactly the time of this movie I was castigated for not having nostalgia for The Lawrence Welk Show, and not having appreciation for its style of music. I do now, but I certainly didn’t when I was 12!

I don’t know. I don’t think I’m crazy. In fact I know I’m not. I do know that this generation’s intelligentsia is. They can’t tell a boy from a girl and think the world will be destroyed from cow farts.

They would have been looked at as aliens from another planet to be spouting that nonsense in the year this movie was set, 1933. As they would have the year this movie was made, 1971. But not today. Today they are taken seriously and we have the child mutilations to prove it. And their ‘green’ energy policies being forced on the rest.

Nope, the only thing that separated the people of 1971 from the people of 1871 was the technology, not the values. They would have recognized each other. Not so today. One of the biggest of those areas was the work ethic of 1933, to a large segment of the current generation who isn’t going to work at all.

“Earl Hamner’s two children, Scott and Carrie, are in the film as two of the children listening to the missionary lady. She is the short-dark-haired girl in a homemade hat and he is the boy with paler hair.”

The closing narration: “Christmas is the season where he give tokens of love. In that house we received not tokens but love itself. I became the writer I promised my father I would be and my destiny led me far from Walton’s Mountain. My mother lives there still. Alone now for we lost my father in 1969. My brothers and sisters, grown with children of their own, live not far away. We are still a close family and see each other when we can. And like Miss Mamie Baldwin’s fourth cousins, we’re apt to sample the recipe and then gather around the piano and hug each other while we sing the old songs. For no matter the time or distance, we are united in the memory of that Christmas Eve. More than 30 years and 3,000 miles away, I can still hear those sweet voices.”

I regret to report that the kids I knew back then through peer pressure were taught to think of The Waltons (and 3 years later Little House on the Prairie) as something incredibly “uncool” and something not to be liked (in case you were forced to watch it). Both are shows that now in my senior years I cherish. But back then something like that was unbelievably nerdy, similar to a wholesome singing group the Osmonds. I apologize for going into the culture war issues in the post, but as the point of the post was about the values then, it was the only way I could see to compare and contrast the values now.

The ‘baton’ from that era would be passed in a few years to the ‘new’ generation. The inevitable process of aging. The Homecoming was the generation that grew up in the Great Depression, and came of age during WW II. They were to a large degree “one people” in a sense. Not all of course, but the majority were white, anglo-saxon protestants. They voluntarily for example went through hardships to a degree to save sugar, or oil, or rubber, or whatever for “the war effort “. The idea that people would voluntarily suffer and do without for a larger national effort is unfathomable. Or that men would volunteer to go die for some stupid reason.

Were they a “better” generation? I’d have to say so. Were they naive? I’d have to say so. Did the people have greater character and better values? I’d have to say so. Was there crime back then? Sure. Murders? Yep. Sex crimes? You bet. Like today? No way. Demographics is destiny. And that does not bode well for this country. Since 1965 we have not been taking in people with “the habits of Liberty”. They are cultural strangers. You can’t have cultural continuity with strangers. We also created a welfare state. This movie was set in the first year of FDR’s “New Deal”. But back then they were actually work programs. Yes they got money, but it was pay for a job they performed. In the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration. Not to sit at home watching The Price Is Right and making babies with a woman they aren’t married to.

So I’m sort of “half watching” this really bad movie this morning, Winter Meeting (1948) and I go to IMDB to look up the ages of the two stars Bette Davis (I always thought it was pronounced ‘Bet’ but they tell me its ‘Betty’) and Jim Davis (yes Jock Ewing from Dallas). They were both 40 near enough. Which is funny as Davis always had these horrendous bags under her eyes that added 10 years easy to her appearance. Kind of like Lauren Bacall, even though I like Bacall and despise the queen of melodrama Davis. I just always have resented Hollywood telling me who I have to think is “great“.

So I get to the IMDB page where they have the little picture and the name of the actor playing the role, and I see the name of this gorgeous woman Janis Paige playing ‘Peggy Markham’. Being a sucker for 1940’s era cheesecake I look a little deeper into Miss Paige. Reading through her bio she seems to have done okay, but just never became the celebrity of her archnemesis Doris Day. She got so fed up with the workings of Hollywood she left it for a time to devote her attentions to Broadway. She was quite the singer and quite the looker, but for reasons I don’t fully understand (I think its lack of imagination) Hollywood has a very strict pigeon hole system and it is nealy impossible to break out of. She was never able to get out of the shadow of Day. She recently celebrated her 100th birthday September 16.

“Joyous scene-stealer Janis Paige started out playing rather bland film ingénues, but never seemed to be comfortable in those roles–she had too much snap, crackle and pop to be confined in such a formulaic way. Born Donna Mae Tjaden in 1922 in Tacoma, Washington, she was singing in public from age 5 in local amateur shows. She moved to Los Angeles after graduating from high school and earned a job as a singer at the Hollywood Canteen during the war years. The Canteen, which was a studio-sponsored gathering spot for servicemen, is where she was spotted by a Warner Brothers talent scout, who saw potential in her and signed her up. She began co-starring in secondary musicals that often paired her with either Dennis Morgan or Jack Carson. Later she was relegated to rugged adventures and dramas that just seemed out of her element. Following her role in the forgettable Two Gals and a Guy (1951), she decided to leave the Hollywood scene. She took to the Broadway boards and scored a huge hit with the 1951 comedy-mystery play “Remains to Be Seen”…. – IMDB

Hollywood rejected that? It makes no sense. A triple threat. Asolutely gorgeous. Why?

James Everett Bohannon was an American broadcaster who worked in both television and radio. He is best known for hosting the nationally syndicated late night radio talk show The Jim Bohannon Show on the Westwood One Network. Born: January 7, 1944, Lebanon, MO. Died: November 12, 2022. – Wikipedia.

He died 2 days ago and this morning was the first I heard about it. He hosted an early morning radio show that depending on the market would air sometime between say 11 pm and 5 am in the morning. He would cover a wide range of topics. Wikipedia’s description of him is unusual in that most of the bio’s list him as “conservative talk show host”. Kind of. In a Republican Senator kind of way (Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton). I knew of him because I’m an insomniac and a radio guy. The same way I know Bruce Williams, Larry King (from his radio days) and Art Bell. Listening to the radio, especially back then when you couldn’t just look them up on the computer, your mind involuntarily makes up a picture of what you think they look like. I had Jim pegged as a Gary Owens look alike (the announcer from Laugh-In). Nope, and when you think about it, ‘Bohannon’ makes more sense to be the redheaded Irishman. The time I was probably the furthest off was with radio preacher Dr. J. Vernon McGee.

I knew something was up a few months ago when he returned after a long medical absence (esophageal cancer) and was getting calls wishing him well from old Army buddies and that. Turns out his last broadcast was October 14. I had no idea he went back as far as Vietnam, but since he was 78 that makes sense. His website says it best about what he covered: “a spectrum of topics ranging from current events and politics to entertainment and pop culture“. He often had endless patience with callers. Only 1% – 2% of radio listeners ever call in, so if you do call in you’re not a rookie. So you know damn well radio time is precious (16 minutes on air is a radio half hour). And they will call up and the prelude to their actual question is often no kidding a minute and a half. It’s like how do you not get that listeners want to hear the guest and other callers, not you for 5 minutes? That type of obtuseness drives me up a wall.

Like a lot of radio professionals he could cut through the crap when he wanted to. But from my limited knowledge he never “pulled the trigger”. He never fully got behind “the disruptor”, Trump. He knew the Federal Reserve was wrong, but he thought reform was the answer not completely abolishing it. He knew an open border wasn’t right, but he never would have gone for an ‘Operation Wetback’ (1954). People such as him have always confused me. They get past the run-of-the-mill Republican thing, but they never get to the point where they understand tinkering around the edges isn’t going to do it, the entire system needs to be flushed. I think part of it was his generation. Born in ’44 he is “pre-boomer”. He was becoming a young man in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He knew America when she worked. He I believe always had faith that things could be turned around.

Yep, life is strange. And ironic. I’m 15 years younger and don’t have terminal cancer, but I know life is too short. Which is why I no longer play the piddly ass political game. They’ve never done anything of note and they never will. They’re spinning their wheels in the sand. They’re wasting time. I just don’t understand “half-measure”. I’ve seen it my whole life with co-workers and friends and such. They never get up “Bircher Hill“. They get to the base of it but never see the last climb. They are all generally smarter and better educated than I am but they just never get there.

[10:30 pm update: I heard the first half of tonight’s show with substitute Rich Valdés. It was a nice tribute to Jim. A longtime caller really nailed it. He said Jim was “fair and square” down the line. That he didn’t go into a show with a topic or guest with his mind already made up. He gave everybody a shot. I can’t remember all his words but the gist of it was a humanity Jim had that I wasn’t able to convey earlier. Which is why I did the post because I liked the guy and could tell he was a decent person. Rich has been named the replacement.]

Laugh-In announcer Gary Owens

“Born in New York in 1916, Eyvind Earle began his prolific career at the age of ten when his father, Ferdinand Earle, gave him a challenging choice: read 50 pages of a book or paint a picture every day. Earle choose both. From the time of his first one-man showing in France when he was 14, Earle’s fame had grown steadily. At the age of 21, Earle bicycled across country from Hollywood to New York, paying his way by painting 42 watercolors (that’s interesting). In 1937, he opened at the Charles Morgan Galleries, his first of many one-man shows in New York. Two years later at his third consecutive showing at the gallery, the response to his work was so positive that the exhibition sold out and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of his paintings for their permanent collection. His earliest work was strictly realistic, but after having studied the work of a variety of masters such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rockwell Kent and Georgia O’Keefe, Earle by the age of 21, came into his own unique style. His oeuvre is characterized by a simplicity, directness and surety of handling.

In 1951 Earle joined Walt Disney studios as an assistant background painter. Earle intrigued Disney in 1953 when he created the look of “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” an animated short that won an Academy Award and a Cannes Film Festival Award. Disney kept the artist busy for the rest of decade, painting the settings for such stories as “Peter Pan”, “For Whom the Bulls Toil”, “Working for Peanuts”, “Pigs is Pigs”, “Paul Bunyan” and “Lady and the Tramp”. Earle was responsible for the styling, background and colors for the highly acclaimed movie “Sleeping Beauty” and gave the movie its magical, medieval look. He also painted the dioramas for Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland in Anaheim, California….” – Eyvind Earle bio dot com

To me looking for more of his art after the lead off piece, everything was normal. Art the way God intended with the colors of red, white and blue. Then it quickly turned into ominous purples and sinister blacks! That’s when I could see the similarities to maybe his most famous work: Sleeping Beauty!

Some of the great images on Twitter.

“Marina Marcolin was born in Vicenza in 1975. Painter and illustrator, she collaborates with national and international publishing houses and galleries. Her works have been published in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Greece, Taiwan, Korea, Ireland, United Kingdom, United States and exhibited at the Museum of American Illustration in New York…”

I think I know why I like her stuff, its chock full of whimsy. CHOCK.

[artist statement:] “I’m Natasha, an artist and illustrator originally from Suffolk, UK, but currently working from my studio in the Surrey Hills. My paintings are inspired by nature, home, and the English landscape. I like to work with a variety of materials including watercolour, gouache, acrylics, ink and coloured pencils, to name a few.”

She even sells postcards, wonder if I can get them in ‘Murica?