Steele Smashing

Remington Steele (1982-1987)
Created by Robert Butler and Michael Gleason
Starring Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist
Featuring Doris Roberts

There's not much to recommend the eighties, that decade of rampant greed, big ugly hair, and garish fashion.  But there were a couple of bright spots for me:  my daughter's birth in 1981 and in 1982 the premiere of Remington Steele.  A vehicle for Stephanie Zimbalist, Remington Steele instead made a star of Pierce Brosnan.  Rumor has it there was much jealousy over the "bags and bags" of fan mail that Brosnan received.  How could anyone care about something as trivial as mail when she's lucky enough to work with Remington Steele, er, Pierce Brosnan?  Those piercing blue eyes and black hair.  That tall thin physique that clothes hung so well on.  That English accent with shades of Ireland.  Pierce Brosnan plays a rakish international jewel thief/art thief/pickpocket--just when you thought he couldn't be any hotter--who steps into the shoes of the imaginary Remington Steele and goes straight.

You see Laura Holt (Zimbalist) is a woman detective in a man's world.  Nobody takes her seriously, so she invents a male superior.  Now she's got clients lined out the door.  They all want to meet the mysterious Remington Steele, but, she tells them, "Mr. Steele works best in an advisory capacity."  In Episode One, The Remington Steele Detective Agency is hired to transport some rare gems, and the client insists on meeting Mr. Steele.  Pierce Brosnan's character, a charming career thief whose real name is not revealed, is posing as South African Special Agent Ben Pearson.  Evading some thugs leads to his assuming the Remington Steele identity.

When Laura does some detective work in "Pearson's" hotel room to learn his true identity, she discovers five passports, all with five different aliases, aliases which, she realizes, are all characters from Humphrey Bogart movies. Our charming con man cum Remington Steele is obsessed with classic cinema and turns to old movies repeatedly throughout the series to help solve their cases.  In the second episode he employs The Thin Man dinner scene to expose the killer of his good friend Wallace, a reformed criminal who was running a mission at the time of his death.  Says Remington of Wallace, "He was a nice man--and a hell of a burglar."

Remington Steele was the first detective show to blend romance, comedy, and mystery, often drawing from screwball comedies and film noir of the thirties and forties.  It was the first television program to employ the "will they or won't they" romantic device that has become so common in both television drama and comedy.  Think Niles and Daphne in Frasier.  Maddie and Davis in Moonlighting, the Remington Steele rip off.  In Season Two, Remington Steele acquires Mildred Krebbs (Doris Roberts aka Marie Barone of Everybody Loves Raymond) a middle-aged IRS employee who comes to work as a secretary/junior detective.  Mildred stands in for the every woman in the audience.  She's excited to find herself in the P.I. world.  Although she's over 50 and too old for Remington Steele, she's as captivated by him as anyone and fondly and reverently calls him "Boss."  Laura she treats as a mere coworker.

These days Stephanie Zimbalist works mostly in live theater.  Pierce Brosnan, who for a time was James Bond, still acts in films, though now he usually plays somebody's mean dad.  Still I go to all his movies, and I remember when he was Remington Steele.  For me--and Marge Simpson and probably countless women of a certain age--Brosnan will always be Remington Steele.   I remember how young he once was.  And I am reminded of how young I once was.



Click on links below to buy from Amazon:

Remington Steele: Season One
Remington Steele - Season Two
Remington Steele: Season Three
Remington Steele: Seasons Four & Five
Remington Steele - Seasons 1-5

Survey Says! Goodbye Richard Dawson (1932-2012) and Kathryn Joosten (1939-2012)

The world knows him as the kissing host of Family Feud in the seventies and eighties who coined the phrase "survey says!"  But to me Richard Dawson, who died at the age of 79 of esophageal cancer on Saturday, June 2, will always be Hogan's Heroes' conman/pickpocket Corporal Peter Newkirk, a role Dawson played from 1965 to 1971.  With Dawson's passing there are only two surviving Hogan's Heroes cast members:  Cynthia Lynn (Helga) and Robert Clary (LeBeau).

Character actress Kathryn Joosten, best known for her roles in Desperate Housewives and The West Wing, died Friday, June 1 of lung cancer.  She was 72.  I remember her as the heavy-smoking cafeteria lady on 3rd Rock from the Sun.  The recent series finale of Desperate Housewives centers around Joosten's character dying of lung cancer to the tune of Johnny Mathis's "Wonderful, Wonderful."  An inspiration to everyone of a certain age, Joosten took up acting at the advanced age of 42 when she began acting classes at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago.  She was 56 when she made the leap to Hollywood and went on to win two Emmys.  She proved you're never too old to do what you love.

Hippie Time Traveler

Schooled
by Gordon Korman
Hyperion Book CH; Reprint edition (August 26, 2008)
224 pages
ISBN:   1423105168
Grades 5-9

Capricorn "Cap" Anderson has spent his whole life--all thirteen years of it--on Garland Farm, a communal farm started by his grandmother Rain in the sixties.  Once home to 14 families, its only remaining residents are Cap and Rain.  When Rain falls out of a plum tree and breaks her hip, Cap must move in with Mrs. Donnelly, a guidance counselor and former resident of Garland Farm, and her crabby teenage daughter.  Says Mrs. Donnelly on meeting Cap, "I looked at Capricorn Anderson and...I saw--not a case, but a time traveler, about to step into a world that had forgotten the sixties except for J.F.K. and the Beatles."

Having been home schooled and knowing nothing of the outside world--he's never watched t.v., never eaten pizza, never played a video game--Cap is totally unprepared for Claverage Middle School, or C Average as the students call it, which he must attend while Rain is recovering from her broken hip.  Cap is an obvious target for the school bullies.  He has never cut his hair, wears hemp clothes and tie-dyed shirts, plays Beatles music on his guitar, is a vegetarian, and practices T'ai chi on the lawn.  No wonder the popular kids decide to elect Cap president of the student body, a dubious honor, as tradition dictates that the biggest nerd in school is always nominated--and always wins.

Cap doesn't see how he can be president, since he doesn't know any one's name.  As he astutely points out, "Life certainly gets complicated when you know more than one person."  Schooled is a thought-provoking read.  Rigid conformity is certainly not a good idea, but is it wise to live completely off the grid with no contact with the modern consumerist society?  Is it fair to raise a child to completely reject society in favor of a more isolated self-reliant lifestyle?  But are there not many useful lessons to be learned in that self-reliant way of living that our modern world has forgotten?  Is there a way to blend the ideals of the sixties with the realities of the new millennium?  Though I found the ending rather pat and could envision a more satisfying one, the book is pure fun and laugh-out loud funny.  Everyone will fall for Capricorn Anderson, one of the most charming hippies the 21st century has ever known.



To buy from Amazon, click Schooled.

John Grisham's Calico Joe

Calico Joe
by John Grisham
Doubleday (April 10, 2012)
208 pages
ISBN:   0385536070
For teens and adults

I hear people say that baseball is so boring, but they are so wrong.  Granted, baseball, played in a park, is a laid-back summer sport.  You hang out, drinking beer and eating dogs and Cracker Jack, just watching the game progress at its own pace.  (Baseball, unlike other major sports, is not played by the clock.)  All of a sudden something exciting will happen.  A home run.  Three strikeouts.  A double play.  An impossible catch in the outfield.  There's real drama in this sport.

I can't get enough of good baseball stories either.  Like Calico Joe.  Calico Joe, Grisham's first baseball novel, is my first Grisham novel ever--yes I'm coming late to the table--but it won't be my last.  Calico Joe is the story of one pitch that ends three baseball careers.  Paul Tracy, only twelve in 1973 when the story begins chronologically, is rooting for two players:  Warren Tracy, his dad cum Mets pitcher, and the Cub's wunderkind rookie, Calico Joe.  Thirty years later, Paul is on a healing mission to bring these two men together again to bring closure to their story.

Calico Joe is a novel of what could have been and takes its place beside W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe and Bernard Malamud's The Natural.  The best baseball stories involve the loss of baseball and an attempt at finding the way back to the most romantic of American sports.  Baseball's not just about today; unlike any other sport, baseball is about history and who we were.  In all of these novels of baseball the past and the present intersect to redeem the sport for the main characters.  Think Shoeless Joe's Ray Kinsella, The Natural's Roy Hobbs, and now Calico Joe's Paul Tracy.

Just as Shoeless Joe (you may know it by its movie name Field of Dreams) is populated with Black-Sox-era players like Shoeless Joe Jackson, Joe's cast includes baseball greats from the seventies.  In one scene Willie Mays, now in his last baseball season, converses memorably with Paul in the Mets' dugout.



Click here to buy Calico Joe from Amazon.

Goodbye Harry's Law

First season I cheered.  Second season I jeered.  But now that NBC has decided to pull the plug on Harry's Law, despite it's being the second most watched drama on NBC, I have to admit I'm going to miss it.  Two episodes ago, Harry and company revisited the locals with Harry defending a gang member accused of killing a cop, and she remarked that she wished they would get more clients from off the street like they did last year.  (Had she only read my blog, she would have come to that conclusion much sooner!)  Last episode Harry lamented not being between 18 and 49--that golden demographic the sponsors so desperately want to attract.  This is what killed David Kelly's last drama, Boston Legal.  Too bad.  Sponsors and networks, listen up:  Viewers over 50 spend money, too, so stop taking our television programs ("our stories," as we call them) off the air.

Keeping It Real at The Jot 'Em Down Store with Lum and Abner

Which comes first:  plot or character?  I say most good stories are character driven and that plot comes from character.  If you're a writer struggling with character development, one of the best examples of character-driven drama that I can point to is the old radio program, Lum and Abner, which aired from 1931 to 1954.  If you've never listened to radio drama/comedy, you've missed out on one of the most entertaining of all art forms.  Created by Chet Lauck (Lum) and Norris Goff (Abner), Lum and Abner centers on two old backwoodsy men who own and operate The Jot 'Em Down General Store in the fictional town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas.  The real town of Waters, Arkansas, which served as inspiration for Pine Ridge, actually had its name legally changed to Pine Ridge in 1936.

Lum and Abner's fictional exploits stem from the unusual characters that they are.  Lum, pretentious with dreams of being a big man, considers himself president of the Jot 'Em Down Store and serves as the town's justice of the peace.  Lum often ventures into new enterprises with the hopes of making a big splash on the world.  Often his schemes are attempts to make a lot of money, attempts which are usually foiled by Squire Skimp, local flim flam man.  Other schemes are attempts by the old bachelor to woo the newest in a long line of school marms with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love.  In one series of episodes within the span of a couple of months Lum falls in love with Miss Fredericks, opens a library, becomes a lion tamer and a fight manager, and starts a bakery.  His side kick Abner is a simpler sort with a literal turn of mind and a much more practical nature than Lum.  It is Abner's misunderstanding of most of what Lum says that drives much of the humor, humor that is more innocent than that of contemporary drama, but is actually quite hilarious and surprisingly stands up to the passage of three-quarters of a century.

In addition to doing the voices of Lum and Abner, Lauck and Goff voiced all of the other characters.  Lauck was Cedric the village idiot and Grandpappy Spears, the feisty old cuss who hangs out in the store to play checkers and gossip with Abner.  Goff was most of the other characters including Squire Skimp and Dick Huddleston, the voice of reason amidst all of the eccentric characters in town--think Andy Griffith in Mayberry.  Lauck and Goff went on to act in several Lum and Abner movies and even filmed a t.v. pilot though the television program never came to fruition.  The Andy Griffith Show, which employed several  Lum and Abner writers, is an homage to the old radio program.  Howard McNear (Floyd the barber) was a regular guest star on Lum and Abner, and Opie and Gomer were named after Opie Cates and Gomer Bates of Lum and Abner fame.  Norris Goff even appeared as a shop keep in the sixth season of The Andy Griffith Show.

Lum and Abner originally aired before I was even born, but the old radio program began playing in syndication on radio stations around the country back in the early seventies when we were living in Pennsylvania.  My father, who had listened to radio shows in his boyhood, introduced me to Lum and Abner.  When we moved to Illinois a few years later, we found several southern Illinois stations that aired the syndicated Lum and Abner, and we followed the show as faithfully as any television sitcom.  Years later, in 1989, I moved to Ohio and found a station in Portsmouth that was still running Lum and Abner.

In the nineties I became a card-carrying member of The National Lum and Abner Society and bought up all of the extent Lum and Abner episodes on audio cassettes.  The episodes run for about 15 minutes a piece, and I like listening to one or two of them while cooking or driving.  Today anyone can listen to the program online:  For some good old-timey fun, click here.  To get the flavor of Lum and Abner, I recommend starting with episode #261 (10/9/41) "Lum's Infatuated with Miss Fredericks" and listening through at least episode #290 (11/27/41) "The Petition of the Lion."  By the way, grade-school children (being less jaded than their older siblings) will probably love Lum and Abner.  My own daughter used to listen to the program at bedtime.

This you tube link is the traditional Lum and Abner Christmas story that aired every Christmas of the show's run beginning in 1933.  The story takes place in Pine Ridge, but reflects Bethlehem's nativity story.

Remembering the Kent State Shootings