• Newsday called Carrie “stupendously, fabulously terrible. Ineptly conceived, sleazy, irrational from moment to moment, it stretches way beyond bad to mythic lousiness.”
• The Washington Post likened it to “a reproduction of ‘The Last Supper’ made entirely out of broken bottles. You can’t help marveling at the lengths to which someone went to make it.”
Notable Songs: Carrie’s mother sings about being sexually molested in “I Remember How Those Boys Could Dance,” and Carrie serenades a hairbrush in “I’m Not Alone.”
MUSICAL: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1966)
TOTAL PERFORMANCES: 0 (Closed in previews)
STORY: It had the highest advance sales of any show in 1966, primarily because of its cast—TV stars Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain—but also because audiences expected a light, bouncy stage version of the popular movie. Unfortunately, they got a musical more like Truman Capote’s original novella: dark and tragic. After a disastrous trial run, playwright Edward Albee was hired to rewrite the script. He did little to improve it, removing nearly all the jokes and making Moore’s character a figment of Chamberlain’s imagination. Audiences were so confused that they openly talked to and questioned the actors on stage. The show ran for four preview performances before producer David Merrick announced he was closing it immediately to save theatergoers from “an excruciatingly boring evening.”
Is it a red state? Tomato juice is the state beverage of Ohio.
STRANGE LAWSUITS
It seems people will sue each other over practically anything. We can’t always find the verdicts for these real-life lawsuits, but they’re so funny, we knew they’d make great bathroom reading, anyway.
PLAINTIFF: Norreasha Gill of Lexington, Kentucky
DEFENDANT: Kentucky radio station WLTO-FM
LAWSUIT: In June 2005, Gill was listening to the station when she heard the host offer to give “one hundred grand” to the tenth caller at a specified time. Gill listened for several hours, called at the right time…and won! The next morning she went down to the station to pick up her $100,000, but was told by the station manager that she hadn’t won $100,000—she’d won one Nestle’s 100 Grand candy bar. Obviously, Gill was upset. After numerous complaints, the station offered to give her $5,000, but Gill refused and filed suit, demanding the $100,000 (she’d already promised her kids a minivan). “What really hurts me,” Gill said, “is they were going to get me in front of my children, all dressed up, and hand me a candy bar.”
PLAINTIFF: Luiz Fernandes Peres
DEFENDANT: The Taverna Pub Medieval Bar in Natal, Brazil
LAWSUIT: When Peres got sick and threw up in the bar’s rest-room, the bartender added a “puke tax” to his bill. So Peres sued the bar for charging him the extra fee. “I consider this extortion,” he told the local newspaper. The bar’s owner defended the fee, saying they’ve been charging it to people who vomit on the premises for years.
PLAINTIFF: Marina Bai, a Russian astrologist
DEFENDANT: NASA
LAWSUIT: In July 2005, NASA sent a car-sized probe, dubbed “Deep Impact,” on a successful collision course with Tempel 1, a comet that passes Earth every 5½ years. Scientists were hoping to determine the makeup of the ancient comet, and possibly learn the makeup of the solar system billions of years ago. Bai sued the American space agency for $300 million, claiming that the collision had changed her horoscope. “It is obvious,” Bai told Russia’s Izvestia newspaper, “that elements of the comet’s orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope.”
Smart move: In 1977 Ben and Jerry took a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making.
PLAINTIFF: Patricia Frankhouser of Jeannette, Pennsylvania
DEFENDANT: The Norfolk Southern Railway
LAWSUIT: Frankhouser sued the railroad in 2004 after she was hit by a train…while walking on the tracks. Frankhouser’s suit blamed the railroad company for her injuries, claiming it should have posted warning signs, notifying people that the train tracks were being used by trains. (She wasn’t badly hurt.)
PLAINTIFF: Bernd Naveke of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
DEFENDANT: The Brahma Brewery
LAWSUIT: Naveke, 40, worked as a brewer and beer taster for 20 years until being forced to leave his job because he had become an alcoholic. In 2000 he sued the company, saying that for the 20 years in their employ he had to drink eight liters (about two gallons) of beer daily and even more during holiday seasons. “I left work drunk every day,” Naveke said. Was it the brewery’s fault that he was an alcoholic? The court thought so: Naveke was awarded $30,000 and a monthly pension of $2,600 for the rest of his life. But he thought it wasn’t enough. In 2004 the appeals court agreed…and awarded him a lump sum of $2 million.
PLAINTIFF: Jesus Christ
DEFENDANT: West Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles LAWSUIT: A man who changed his name to Jesus Christ sued the West Virginia DMV in 2005 because they wouldn’t issue him a driver’s license with the name on it. Officials said they couldn’t issue the license because his birth certificate shows his birth name, Peter Robert Phillips Jr., and he never obtained a legal name change. He did, however, have a passport, a Social Security card, and a Washington D.C. driver’s license, all of which showed the name “Jesus Christ.” His attorney said he had changed his name 15 years earlier and had never had a problem. When asked if his client would comment on the case, his lawyer said, “Christ is not speaking to the press at this time.”
Cold cash: McMurdo Station in Antarctica (winter population: 200) has its own ATM.
WACKY TV
Every year TV executives hear hundreds of ideas for new shows. We all know the great ones; here are a few of the clunkers. Believe it or not, these actually made it to the tube.
SIT OR MISS (1950)
A fast-paced daytime game show in which five contestants competed for cash and prizes by playing musical chairs.
TONI TWIN TIME (1950)
Basically a 15-minute commercial trying to pass itself off as a talent show. Hosted by a young Jack Lemmon, it featured pairs of teenage twin girls. First came the talent portion: girls would sing a song, perform a dramatic recital, or play an instrument. Next, though completely unrelated to the talent portion, the audience would guess which girl had had her hair done professionally and which had used a Toni Home Permanent kit. The program aired in prime time.
THE UGLIEST GIRL IN TOWN (1968)
In order to stay in London with his British girlfriend, an American man dresses in drag and lands work as a fashion model. Despite looking nothing like a woman (his face wasn’t even shaved), he becomes the toast of the swinging ’60s fashion world because of his “unique” appearance. It ran for 20 episodes.
LANCELOT LINK / SECRET CHIMP (1970)
A parody of secret-agent shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. but with an all-chimpanzee cast. The plot: the members of a chimpanzee rock band, the Evolution Revolution, have a sideline—they’re spies! So, cut between footage of chimps “playing” guitars and drums are scenes of chimp gun battles, chimps jumping out of airplanes, and chimps crashing cars. Special effects weren’t used to make the chimps “talk”; producers gave them gum to chew to mimic talking and voices were dubbed by humans. A goofy show like this would have worked fine on Saturday mornings as a kids’ show, but Lancelot Link was broadcast in prime time. And it bombed. So it was moved to Saturday mornings, where it thrived. (It was also successful on Nick at Nite as a rerun in 1988.)
Most school buses in America are painted “National School Bus Chrome Yellow.”
THE BRADY BUNCH VARIETY HOUR (1977)
Three years after their sitcom went off the air, the cast of The Brady Bunch returned in this weekly hour of songs, skits, and water stunts (yes, water stunts), performing in character as the Brady family. The original Jan (Eve Plumb) didn’t want to do the show and was replaced with actress Geri Reischl, who didn’t loo
k like her. It lasted nine episodes.
GREAT DAY (1977)
Al Molinaro (“Al” in Happy Days) and Billy Barty play two homeless alcoholics trying to survive on the streets of New York City. A compelling tragic drama? No—Great Day was a comedy. It aired only once.
MANIMAL (1983)
An animal behavior studies professor can turn himself into any animal he wishes, whenever he wishes, and uses his power to fight crime. What was an intriguing premise didn’t work. Why? Because the special effects needed to turn man into animal turned out to be very expensive. So producers cut corners, using poorly trained animal actors. Result: the show’s handful of episodes featured birds, tigers, dogs, snakes, and cougars moving the wrong way, attacking the camera, looking directly into the camera, or sitting completely still when they should have been running. NBC’s most-hyped show of 1983 was gone after eight episodes.
THE CHARMINGS (1987)
Premise: Snow White, Prince Charming, a magic mirror, and some dwarves are accidentally transported through time to 1980s Burbank, California. The show featured live actors, not animation, and the comedy arises mostly from Snow White’s difficulty in dealing with the 20th century—especially modern appliances. It ran for 20 episodes.
It takes about 0.004 gallons of gas to start your car in the morning.
WOOPS! (1992)
Back in Fox’s early days it liked to experiment with edgy concepts. Here’s one they came up with: A nuclear holocaust instantly kills everyone on Earth except for six Americans: a teacher, a feminist, a yuppie stockbroker, a homeless man, a doctor, and a ditzy blonde. They manage to find each other and try to come up with ways to rebuild civilization. Sound familiar? Basically, they just took the premise for Gilligan’s Island and changed the island to a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland after billions of people died. Funny, huh? Viewers didn’t think so. Woops! lasted only 10 episodes.
FATHER OF THE PRIDE (2004)
Produced by animation studio Dreamworks (they made the Shrek movies) this prime-time cartoon was for kids, right? Wrong. It was about the private lives of the jungle animals in Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas show and was strictly adults only, with lots of frank sexual dialogue and depiction of drugs. The fact that prior to the show’s debut Roy Horn was critically mauled by one of his tigers couldn’t have been a good omen. But since each episode took nine months and $1.6 million to produce, NBC went ahead and aired the show anyway, despite the tragedy. They should have heeded the omen—Father of the Pride lasted only seven episodes.
* * *
JEWEL THIEF
“Two thieves who tried to rob two elderly women in the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda, thinking they were easy prey, got more than they bargained for. The two would-be thieves rang the doorbell and attacked the women as soon as they opened the door. But Zoja Popova, 93, brought one of the robbers to his knees—she grabbed the thief by the family jewels and squeezed. ‘I pressed as hard as I could and he squealed like an animal,’ said Popova. Neighbors came running to find out what all the shouting was about. The robbers tried to escape through a window, but were caught by private security guards and handed over to the police.”
—Mail & Guardian UK)
It may not look like it, but a violin contains about 70 separate pieces of wood.
WRONG WAY CORRIGAN
While rummaging through our “Dustbin of History” file recently, we discovered the story of this colorful character. He snookered his way into the hearts of people on both sides of the Atlantic by heading in the wrong direction and ending up in the right place.
THAT’S MY STORY…
On the foggy morning of July 17, 1938, a 31-year-old pilot named Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field on a solo, nonstop trip to California. Twenty-eight hours later, he landed in Ireland…with a lot of explaining to do. He had no passport or papers of any kind, nor had he received permission from U.S. officials to make the transatlantic flight.
Safely on the ground, Corrigan offered this explanation to Irish customs: Heavy fog in New York had forced him to navigate using only his compass. The fog continued all that day and into the night; there was never good visibility. When the sun rose the next morning—26 hours into his flight—he was surprised to find himself over an ocean. Taking a closer look at his compass, Corrigan realized he’d been following the wrong end of the needle—heading due east instead of west! But by now he was almost out of fuel; he couldn’t turn around. His only hope was to continue east and hope to reach land before he ran out of gas. Two hours later he saw fishing boats off a rocky coast and knew he was safe. From there, he made his way to Baldonnel Airport in Dublin. His first words upon exiting the plane were “Just got in from New York. Where am I?”
…AND I’M STICKING TO IT!
He repeated the story to the American ambassador and then to Ireland’s prime minister. By this third telling—to the Irish cabinet—the European and American press had got wind of the story and ran with it. When he got to the part about misreading his compass, the cabinet ministers all laughed and Corrigan knew that things would work out. Ireland graciously sent him home without penalty.
J. Edgar Hoover once gave his mother a canary bred by the “Birdman of Alcatraz.”
When he got back to New York, Corrigan was amazed to find out he’d become a folk hero. In the bleak days of the Great Depression, Corrigan’s achievement and amusing explanation lifted people’s spirits. Over a million well-wishers turned out for a ticker-tape parade in his honor (more than had turned out to honor Charles Lindbergh after his transatlantic flight). The New York Post even ran a backward headline that read “!NAGIRROC YAW GNORW OT LIAH!” (“Hail To Wrong Way Corrigan!”).
THE TRUTH
So what really happened? It’s no secret that Corrigan’s dream was to fly solo across the Atlantic. He got his start in the airplane business in 1927 working for the company that built Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis. Corrigan helped assemble the wing and install the instrument panel on the famous plane. His greatest honor was meeting Lindbergh. (“Even more than if I had met Abraham Lincoln himself!”) After Lindbergh made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, Corrigan vowed to follow in his footsteps.
He spent the early 1930s barnstorming the country, landing near small towns and charging for airplane rides to pay for gas. In 1933 he bought a secondhand Curtiss Robin J-6 monoplane for $310, which he named Sunshine, and began overhauling it for a trip across the ocean. In 1936 and again in 1937, Federal Aviation officials denied Corrigan’s requests to attempt the Atlantic flight.
So it’s unlikely that when Corrigan took off from New York in 1938, he didn’t know where he was going. Not only was he an accomplished pilot and navigator who had a history of flying without the proper paperwork, but he’d been working 10 straight years toward his dream of flying nonstop to Europe. Wrong Way Corrigan knew one end of a compass from the other.
COME ON, JUST ADMIT IT
For the rest of his life (he died in 1995), people tried to get Corrigan to come clean—but he never did, not even in his autobiography. In 1988 Corrigan took Sunshine on a national tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his famous flight. He was continually asked the same question: “Were you really trying to fly to California?” “Sure,” he answered. “Well, at least I’ve told that story so many times that now I believe it myself.”
In the Middle Ages, dead bodies were often used as ammunition in catapults.
UNSUNG HEROES
You may not recognize their names, but you’ve heard their music more times than you know. These teams of studio musicians have played on hundreds of hit records over the last 50 years.
THE WRECKING CREW
That’s the nickname these musicians from the 1960s gave themselves after the old line studio players, who hated rock, complained that they were “wrecking the business.” The band, which included Hal Blaine (drums), Joe Osborne (bass), Larry Knechtel (keyboards), Glen Campbell (guitar), and Leon Russell (piano),
were producer Phil Spector’s “go-to” guys.
♪ The Wrecking Crew played on six consecutive Record of the Year Grammy winners: “A Taste of Honey” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (1966), “Strangers in the Night” by Frank Sinatra (1967), “Up, Up and Away” by the Fifth Dimension (1968), “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel (1969), “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” by the Fifth Dimension (1970), and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel (1971).
Selected Hits: “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes • “Surf City” by Jan and Dean • “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers • “I Got You, Babe” by Sonny and Cher • “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds •“California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas • “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys • “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys • “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees • “River Deep, Mountain High” by Ike and Tina Turner
MUSCLE SHOALS RHYTHM SECTION
Jimmy Johnson (guitar), Roger Hawkins (drums), David Hood (bass), Barry Beckett (keyboards), and Donny Short (lead guitar) are known as the “Swampers” by the music legends who’ve come down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record with them since 1967.
♪ The musicians were given the nickname “Swampers” during a recording session with Mick Jagger because of the swampy land in Muscle Shoals. They were referenced by name in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Dust from the Sahara desert has been carried by the wind as far as Chicago.
♪ The Muscle Shoals Sound Studios were founded in 1969 in an old casket warehouse. Their first client was Cher.
Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader Page 7