Don Rickles and the Comedians

The recent passing of the great Don Rickles got me reminiscing about Rickles and the comedians I've enjoyed over the years.

My earliest memory of  Mr. Rickles dates to the summer of 1969.  I got a summer job through a buddy of mine whose father and grandfather worked for a carpet outlet store. We were the company's carpet-hauling muscle for the summer.

My friend's father was kind enough to pick me up every day at the street-corner and we'd drive in together. One day he put a tape into the car's cassette player (very high-tech for the time) and said, "you boys will like this." We did. It was Rickles and he roasted everyone: Jews, Blacks, Catholics, Italians, Irish. My employers were Jewish and they laughed hardest at the Jewish jokes. I was hooked.

My earliest memory of comedians, in general, was watching the Ed Sullivan Show with my father who loved laughter and a good joke. His favorite comic was Alan King. I liked him too, even at that young age, but the first comedian who appealed to me as a boy was Allan Sherman and his album, My Son the Nut, and its chart-topping hit, Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh. That was 1963. My parents owned the album. I would lay on the floor, face up, with my head to the "stereo" and play it over and over again, and even today can follow along with most of the songs.

Jonathan Winters was another old favorite of mine. Winters is rightly called a comic genius and the inspiration to the more widely-known genius, Robin Williams, who could make me laugh as well. In the 60s, I loved Steve Allen and his talk show skits, and Dick Cavett, although the latter wasn't a comedian, per se, but his quick wit as an interviewer appealed to me as did the king of late night interviews, Johnny Carson.

In the early 70s, Steve Martin turned the comic world upside down for the baby-boomers with his satirical skits, Wild and Crazy Guys, and King Tut. Martin and the talented group of Saturday Night Live satirists brought something new to TV comedy. They walk in the footsteps of  Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, and Woody Allen. Billy Crystal combines qualities of both Mel Brooks' satire and the storytelling of Alan King (see the movie Mr. Saturday Night).

I'm not old enough to have seen Charlie Chaplin in silent-theater although I did watch re-runs on television, but never quite got him. I did get his comedic descendants, The Three Stooges. I'm old enough to have seen comedy change from slapstick to joke-telling to satire. And like all art forms, it has its highs and lows.

I was never a big fan of Lucille Ball or Jerry Lewis even though I recognize the talent, it just doesn't make me laugh. The old Dave Letterman shows I thought were funny. I did like some of Carole Burnett's work. I generally don't care for female stand-ups. My favorite female comic is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, although in the TV sitcom Veep, funny she is, but listening to a female use the F word a half dozen times an episode puts me off. Language, humor and everything else that is a part of daily life say something about who we are and what we value, and Veep descends into the banality of street jargon. That being said, her work in Seinfeld is as good as it gets. Hilariously funny.

I probably should add my favorite, more recent sitcoms, Office and Parks and Recreation, which I think are very funny, and cleverly written and performed, and which added another comic element to the sitcom, the acknowledgment of the third-party observer by the actors.

We find something funny for various reasons but it's almost always a "fracture" in reality as in an understated or exaggerated word, expression, or action, or a common frustration, or the accidental minor misfortunes of others. Humor like romance can't be analyzed and enjoyed simultaneously, it can't be commanded, and it's another one of those hard to define qualities that separate the homo-sapien from the lower animals. Cows don't stand around and tell jokes.

Or do they?

THE FAR SIDE, GARY LARSON

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Postlogue

I like the self-deprecating humor of the Jewish comedians: Rickles, Sherman, King, Brooks, Allen, and Crystal, which has its origin, I think, in the Jewish pathos (see the movie Fiddler on the Roof).

The one Catholic boy that fits perfectly into the tradition mentioned above and who I have overlooked is the great Jackie Gleason.

One last song from Sherman which shows his cleverness with words, and which, I think, still stands today as a pretty funny tune (of course, the video's images were added later).

One Hippopotomi


 

The Best Cup of Coffee in Texas.

I've been known to use a little hyperbole from time to time. This is not one of those times.

Fort Worth has a new coffee shop and it's in the Meadowbrook area. I mention the location because we Eastsiders have grown accustomed to driving miles to get a decent cup of fresh coffee. No mas.

Not hyperbole: This is the best cappuccino I've had this side of the Mississippi.

Coffee Folk opened last weekend serving coffee from a beautifully renovated trailer just outside the Firehouse Pottery. Coffee Folk's roaster is Spella Cafe from Portland, Oregon. Of Spella the New York Times wrote, "the best espresso in Portland." I mention that because the Coffee Folk folk are serious about procuring good coffee.

My first visit was today, Saturday, their second weekend open. My wife and daughter had been and reported to me that the coffee was very good, my expectations were high.

I liked it so much I returned an hour later for a second cup.

I'm not a coffee snob but I do appreciate when coffee's done right. For me, the high watermark is a cappuccino from La Colombe in Philadelphia. Every time I order a macchiato, espresso, or cappuccino, it's compared to La Colombe's. If La Colombe is a 10 on a good day everything else in these United States has been less, until today. The Coffee Folk cappuccino was as good and maybe a little bit better than La Colombe's. I'll admit the tipping point in that opinion may be that Coffee Folk is a bicycle ride from my house. And that there is a secondary enjoyment to this coffee bar for those of us in Meadowbrook who have endured less than stellar food and restaurant availability, and that is seeing and conversing with dozens of neighbors who are enjoying good coffee as well.

But the coffee is the centerpiece of this table and the coffee is good.

Thank you Coffee Folk.

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Coffee Folk is just outside at the Fireside Pottery at the corner of Meadowbrook and Oakland Boulevards, Fort Worth, Texas. For now they're open Friday and Saturday only. Coffee Folk also serves a small selection of fresh pastries from Rooster Bakery in Fort Worth and a selection of teas.

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Photo credits
Top: Rebecca Smith
Bottom: Jaime Brabander / The Plumbing Place

Rambling about the Beatles & When I'm 64 . . .

Paul McCartney composed this whimsical love song when he was sixteen years old. Eight years later "64" would become an unexpected hit and take its place in the most significant album in the history of 60's rock and roll.

I refer, of course, to the song, "When I'm 64," and the album, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. "When I'm 64" was released in 1966 as the B-side of the juke-box single, featuring "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."  In 1967 it was placed on the Sergeant Peppers album.

Everyone back then loved the Beatles. They were a sensation that even they couldn't explain. At first it was all fun, a fusion of Buddy Holly, Elvis, Carl Perkins, The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry and Little Richard by a British guitar-playing quartet and hits like "Twist and Shout."

Then something happened and art imitated and abetted the changing world.*

In 1965, the Beatles produced the transitional album Rubber Soul, the first album where John, Paul, George and Ringo had complete control of the music, and, where the Beatles produced songs like "Norwegian Wood." "Twist and Shout" it wasn't. A year or so later, the Beatles went "all in" with Sergeant Peppers. Everything about it was different from the iconic album cover, to the full orchestra, to songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and with it rock and roll had the permanent imprint of the psychedelic age. Fifteen million albums were sold worldwide. It was a tidal wave.

The White Album followed in 1968, a double album set, and so also the beginning of the end of that short-lived musical era. The despair of John Lennon, and to a lesser degree the other members, permeates the album in songs like "I'm So Tired," "Revolution 1," and "Revolution 9." Notwithstanding, some of their best music is found in the White Album: Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and McCartney's "Blackbird."  (Sidebar: Now,  fifty years later,  the Musak version of "You Say You Want a Revolution" plays in continuous loop on elevators across America, leading me to think that Lennon's despair was not so misguided.)

Abbey Road and Let it Be, released in 1969 and my favorite albums, were the final albums for the Beatles and with few exceptions for 60's music in general. By the time you get to Led Zeppelin and "Stairway to Heaven" in 1971 it's over. Indeed, many of its luminaries were gone: Hendrix, Morrison, and Joplin come to mind, and the Beatles as a band were no more.

Many of us who came of age in 60's were formed in some way by the music of the Beatles. I was 15 when the song "When I'm 64" was released on Sergeant Peppers.

I'm 64 today.

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*Sorry for the gross simplification but you try to explain the 60's in a sentence or two.

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Rest in Peace, Merle Haggard

More Summer Talk: 50 years of the Cape May - Lewes Ferry

Yesterday (1964)

Today

The Cape May-Lewes Ferry celebrates 50 years of service this year. That's fifty years moving passengers and vehicles across the Delaware Bay from Cape May, New Jersey  to Lewes, Delaware and back. By my calculation that puts the start date at 1964. I started riding the ferry in 1965. I was thirteen.

The 1964 ferry was a bulky boat made of thick sheet metal, half-dollar sized rivets, layers of paint, chipped off paint and rust and driven by a diesel engine that you felt and heard and that shot a plume of black smoke into the summer sky (top picture). What kid could resist it?

The highlight of a ferry ride for me in 1964, besides the joy of being at almost-open sea, was watching that big old thing dock. It was there that the ship's size and weight was appreciated. Under the captains guidance, the ship slowly drifted sideways until its metal bumper guard met the dozens of telephone-pole pilings driven into the sea bottom. The pilings bent under the mass of ship as it creaked along the wood towards the landing.

Today, ferry-goers ride in tonier ships (color photo) and docking is as smooth as silk. The old telephone poles have been replaced with neatly grouped pilings with smooth plasticized cushions. Hardly as much fun but I still watch it dock when I ride the ferry.

My most vivid memory of Cape May-Lewes ferry travel was one summer day in 1965 when my buddy Billy Velvel and I hitchhiked the five or so miles from our home in Rehoboth Beach to Lewes, purchased round trip tickets for a quarter, and then hitchhiked from Cape May up the Jersey coast to Wildwood. It's very likely that neither of us had any more money than the cost of the ferry ride and that both of us were shoeless.

I mention that because on this particular trip the hitchhiking failed us on our return to Cape May and that last ferry ride home to Lewes.  We ran, hitchhiked, and ran some more hoping and praying that we we didn't miss the boat. There would be hell to pay with my parents if we did because a) they didn't know we were across the bay in New Jersey, and b) mom or dad would have to make the four hour drive around the bay to pick us up.  And then there was the problem of knowing how we could even call them. Failure to make the return trip was certain death for me. (See image below)

Thankfully, we made it with just a couple minutes to spare.

I get to the beach these days once or twice a year to visit family and to enjoy all that is enjoyable about the eastern shore. And more often than not, I stop by and visit the ferry and every couple of years I take the trip from Lewes to Cape May and back. I'm never, ever disappointed.

Except at the end because the trip is over, and because I still want to see the old, fat ferry crunch the old, creaky telephone poles.
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