One CC of Cordrazine

Until recently, when I would click on the “Publish” button that commits my words “permanently” to this space, the screen was filled with ideas for another great blog article topic. The fine folks at WordPress were basically offering up writing prompts, not unlike the kind of essay-question starter kits one might find in the midst of a standardized Language Arts test. So this is my response to one of their more interesting prompts, namely:

What historical event would you attend if you were able to time-travel?

With the understanding that time travel could possibly lead to strange realities like meeting your own grandfather and accidentally killing him…

“If we could travel into the past, it’s mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn’t today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it’s possible, but it’s certainly worth exploring.” –Carl Sagan, 1999 interview

Or at the very least, with the understanding that time travel might make life grammatically difficult…

“…I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations – conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.” –Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

…I decided to think about this question.  It only asks which historical event I would attend, not which one I would change. If the goal were change for the better (setting aside from the fact that I might return to a present that was (is?) (see?!!) at least somewhat different, and possibly completely different, since it makes my head hurt), I might choose moments like the birth of Adolf Hitler, or the moment when TV writers dreamed up the concept of “My Mother the Car”.

Perhaps I might reflexively have chosen to show up at Mission Control during the first mission to the Moon – cool! Or … the day when Edith Keeler crossed the street in front of that truck…

(Nerd.)

But, considering the relatively throwaway remark that I made, in the midst of a recent interesting conversation with a friend … here are some ideas. Interesting if I showed up at …

 

[] The first rehearsal of “West Side Story”. When the cast first got the music and lyrics, or perhaps when they first started work on the choreography. “Lenny… we trust you, and we loved ‘On The Town’, but… explain this to us again?…”

[] The WLW radio station studio in Cincinnati during the late 1920s, as Henry Fillmore‘s Syrian Temple Shrine Band performed one of its weekly broadcasts. A concert band with a weekly radio show. Now there’s an idea.

[] The writing meetings for “The Muppet Show”. Any season, any episode. Or possibly the writing meetings for “This Is Spinal Tap”.

[] The first time Groucho Marx ever performed the song “Go West, Young Man”.

[] The first time Charlie Parker ever played in public.

[] The band rehearsal where John Philip Sousa first brought out the sousaphone.

[] Any performance of the Brat Pack. (The first, last and only time I’ve been in Las Vegas, I got to go to a show called “The Brat Pack Is Back”, featuring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joel Grey impersonators. The actors were so good, the snappy patter (early-1960s politically-incorrect though it was) was so funny, and the band was so on, I can only wonder what the original genuine articles were like.)

[] DCI finals in 1987, as the Garfield Cadets addressed Aaron Copland. Thom Hannum, for the win.

[] The Harry Connick Jr. concert at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts in late 1991 – because I was there, and I’d like to see it all again. I would risk meeting myself (although I would be forced to ask myself what I was thinking when considering wardrobe choices).

[] John Williams’ first rehearsal with the Boston Pops. “Hi everyone. Pleased to be here. We’re going to do hard music now.”

[] Any live performance by Louis Armstrong. (Speaking of Pops.) It just seemed like it was probably a pack of fun to watch and listen, and/or to be onstage.

[] I know it’s got nothing to do with music, but … just one taping of the Laugh-In Joke Wall.

 

“If you could time travel through a trumpet, would you find today and tomorrow too loud?”  –Jarod Kintz, A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dipped Carrot

A Slightly-Less-Snarky Year-End Review Than Last Year’s

So, how to characterize the year 2011? Tempting to try to boil it down into a phrase or even a word. Oversimplification can be fun!

 

TIME Magazine recently declared “The Protestor” as its Person of the Year. Seems logical: all year long, whether in the Middle East or the Midwest, whether peaceful or violent, whether full of human microphones or thrown rocks, whether self-named (Occupy) or not (help me out here: was the “Arab Spring” so named by the media covering it?) … protests have been the order of the day. The Year of the Protest!

Early this year, the Arab Spring uprisings made the job of “Middle Eastern affairs analyst” a special brand of tightrope: first Tunisia, then Egypt, then Libya, then Syria. Governments and leaders were toppled, regimes were ended, celebrations were launched, and (predictably) complete uncertainty about the future was felt. (And the passive voice was overused, seemingly.)

Here in the US, it began with residents of Ohio and most notably Wisconsin protesting their governors’ and state legislatures’ raids on union collective bargaining rights (not to mention did you spot Michigan governor Rick Snyder’s remarkable assault on democracy itself? Go here for that harrowing story) … and the year has ended with the spread and evolution of the Occupy movement.

 

Maybe it was the Year of the Crisis. In January, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, and the resultant conversation in the media rightly suggested a crisis in public discourse (unfortunately, the moratorium on gun- and violence-related metaphors in public speech lasted only about as long as this sentence). In March, Japan experienced a massive earthquake and tsunami, leading to the meltdown of a nuclear reactor in the north of Japan. In April, Prince William and Kate Middleton were royally wed (–sorry. I apologize to my UK relatives: not a crisis after all; just a frenzy).

All year, the European debt crisis expanded, beginning with Portugal, Ireland and Greece, and spreading to Belgium, Italy and France. And other crises arose!! involving debt ceilings … payroll tax cuts … and NBA players and owners nearly cancelling their own season thanks to a disagreement about how to distribute their absurd amount of revenue. Well, some crises were man-made and perhaps not that necessary. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard quite as much about the War on Christmas as I usually do. (And oh yes! How about… blog posts that yield Defcon-One-grade comments from the Mightily Offended? Okay, speaking of unnecessary crises…)

 

Perhaps it was the Year of the Scandal. (To be fair, what year isn’t?) Arnold Schwarzenegger had an affair…? Anthony Weiner had, well, had a cellphone that took pictures…? Amateurs. The Ohio State football team had the kind of problems that would cause the resignation of its head coach, and would attract NCAA sanctions…? Sad, but not super-unusual.

A former Citigroup treasury finance VP was arrested on bank fraud charges stemming from his embezzlement of more than $19 million…? Bank of America used $355 million in settlement money to resolve Justice Department allegations that Countrywide Financial Corporation (purchased by BofA in 2008), “engaged in a widespread pattern or practice of discrimination against qualified African-American and Hispanic borrowers in their mortgage lending from 2004 through 2008”…? Now we’re getting into scandal-of-worthy-scope territory.

Charlie Sheen, and tiger blood, and winning!!…? A celebrity-fluff scandal, but a loud one, and one which should have been more of a cautionary tale than it turned out to be.

In fact, up until the last month or so, I thought that the News Corp. cellphone hacking scandal, which is still a big news story in the UK and needs to not be forgotten in this part of the world, would be the Scandal of the Year. Anything that remotely threatens Rupert Murdoch’s global media (and by extension, political) empire is something that deserves all the attention we can give it, I think.

Until Penn State. If the Penn State / Jerry Sandusky mess is Scandal #1, then Scandal #2 actually ranks about #14. The Penn State child sex-abuse scandal is horrifying, beyond its basic content, because it’s important from so many different perspectives.

 

Maybe it was the Year of the Rather Momentous Death of Momentous Public Figures who have spent at least ten years being infamous, about which it may or may not be polite or politically wise or humane to celebrate: in May, Osama bin Laden. In October, Moammar Gaddafi (or however the frak he spelled his name).

 

The Year of Endings? In July, it was the final Space Shuttle mission. In September, it was a treaty, signed by India and Bangladesh, which ended their 40-year border demarcation dispute (hey! This sort of thing CAN be done!). This fall, it was the end of the era in which the global population could be described as “six billion” (the United Nations selected October 31 as the symbolic date on which the population hit seven billion). Ah yes! And Regis Philbin retired from television after fourteen decades of exemplary work.

 

More endings: at the end of a year, the mass media hurriedly generates lists of celebrities who have gone to the Great Celebrity Beyond, usually with titles like “Those We Have Lost” – as if we knew them personally, which is a topic for another time. This year, some of the names that struck me particularly, as I perused other people’s lists, included …

Golfer Seve Ballesteros. Boxer Joe Frazier (and it wasn’t long, sadly, before a wiseacre sportscaster made a “down goes Frazier” joke).

Electronic music composer Milton Babbitt. Film composer John Barry, whose passing made me think of the film composers that have made the biggest impression on me, here.

Pianist George Shearing, a 33 rpm record of whose music I ground down to nothing as a kid. My favorite growlin’ saxophonist, Clarence Clemons. Singer Amy Winehouse, who probably died of complications from stardom. Singer Gerry Rafferty, who is probably justly famous for other things than this, but this is my association.

Author Anne McCaffrey, none of whose books I have read but ALL of whose books’ covers I have marveled at; one day I’ll rectify that.

Actors Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Cooper, Peter Falk, Cliff Robertson, and Charles Napier, who for me will forever be driving an RV in “The Blues Brothers”. And actor Harry Morgan, paid more complete and proper tribute here.

Euthanasia advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian – there are probably ironic punchlines to be generated, but I shall resist. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, easily one of the most important figures in the history of innovation in America, but also probably a large beneficiary of the standard mass-media post-celebrity-death worship mode.

(By the way, I have a side bet going with myself about that last paragraph.)

Former First Lady Betty Ford. Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Former VP candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Statesman, activist and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver. Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel, whose life was devoted to freedom from oppression, and whose death was completely overshadowed by the passing of the North Korean dictator, the oppressive “Dear Leader” his own self, Kim Jong-Il.

 

For me, the last year(-plus) has featured all of those things: change, upheaval, the expressing of opinion (constructive or not). In particular, it’s been a year full of passing-away – an unusually protracted run of deaths, of people directly or indirectly connected to the circles in which I travel (both professional and personal). I wrote about one of those, a member of the church choir that I direct, here.

As I’ve gone back over my notes and eMails from 2011 and taken note of the unusually great number of people who have passed away, I’ve been tempted to wallow, bemoan their passing, and think about how much they’ll be missed, either by me or by the friends and colleagues to whom they were more directly connected. These are not by themselves bad things to do. But it seems appropriate, concurrently, to follow one of my favorite “Starred Thoughts®”, which suggests: “Tell people what you think of them, before it’s too late.” Or, less morbidly, …when you have the opportunity.

So I won’t sit it out; I’ll dance. I have a pack of remarkable friends and colleagues, and however it may be that our Venn-diagram circles intersected, the important thing is to recognize that I ought not take them for granted. So I won’t.

(Neither can I take for granted the people who have decided to read all the way to the end of any of these windy blog items, this year. Holy cats! –I’d stink at Twitter.)

 

Finally, the best thought of all, from Harry Morgan’s Col. Potter, of M*A*S*H: “Here’s to the New Year. May she be a damned sight better than the old one and may we all be home before she’s over.”

The Command of Col. Sherman Potter

Some time during my career as a junior high school student, I discovered “M*A*S*H”.

My parents tuned in to CBS just about every Tuesday night at 9 o’clock to watch this half-hour situation comedy, which featured the doctors, nurses and other attendant personnel of a Mobile Army Surgical Unit located in Korea during the Korean War of the late 1950s. I don’t recall the exact way they got me to join them, but once I was in, I was in for good. The first thing that struck me was how funny the program was, and the next thing that struck me was how serious the message of each episode could be. And somewhere behind my conscious brain, I wondered how that balancing act could be accomplished.

Didn’t take long to figure out that one major factor was the design of each character and their interactions, and the individual and joint performances of the actors who portrayed them. Oh, and the writing, I suppose.

Hawkeye Pierce, as portrayed by Alan Alda, could veer wildly back and forth between between channeling the anarchy of Groucho Marx, and unleashing genuinely passionate rants about at the fact that nations fought stupid wars and forced him to patch up damaged soldiers so that they could return to that fighting – or at any large or small examples of unfairness in the world. (Something of a capsule summary of the whole show.)

Mike Farrell’s B.J. Hunnicutt character was a devoted family man who was also capable of gleefully participating in elaborate practical jokes. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, as deftly performed by Loretta Swit, was a taskmaster of a head nurse who was not above various forms of tomfoolery – and could be equally demanding and defensive of the nurses she supervised. Jamie Farr’s performance as Corporal Maxwell Klinger took a character whose one-joke existence was his desperate (and cross-dressing) bids to be dismissed from the Army, and turned him into a man who was devoted and fiercely loyal to the Army personnel with whom he served. And as Father Mulcahy, the 4077th’s chaplain, once said (through the marvelous execution of William Christopher), “I believe people are essentially good, but sometimes you have to put them in a half-nelson before they cough up.”

 

I arrived at “M*A*S*H” at about the moment in the series when the pompous Brahmin-born Major Charles Emerson Winchester III did. (And eventually, through the wonderful work of the completely not-blue-blooded David Ogden Stiers, Maj. Winchester was revealed to be hardly as one-dimensional as Major Frank Burns, the cartoonish character he supplanted!)

According to the timeline of the series, this was not that long after the 4077th M*A*S*H unit had undergone a change of commanding officer. McLean Stevenson had departed from the series. His Col. Henry Blake character had received an honorable discharge from the Army, but never made it home, as his plane was shot down not long after departing Korea (off-screen, as heartbreakingly reported to the operating room cast by Gary Burghoff’s company clerk character, Radar O’Reilly). The series had set the stage for challenging tasks for both its new commanding officer and the man who would portray him.

It didn’t take long for Col. Sherman T. Potter to be established as a very different commander than Blake. Where Blake was eccentric, scattered and not at all convinced that he wanted to be in command of anything connected to the Korean War, Potter was a career Army officer, described as “tough, yet good-humored and caring — a father figure to the people under his command.”

Harry Morgan was the actor tasked with bringing Potter to life. He did so in Emmy Award-winning fashion. He and the “M*A*S*H” writers created a commander and administrator that most of us, I suspect, would be only too happy to serve under, or work for.  Potter was willing to deliver a figurative kick in the ass when his men and women needed a reminder of what was expected of them, or when they needed that sort of motivation; but he was also happy to treat his charges kindly, recognizing that they were your standard fragile human beings. Potter was a gruff Army man who was equally able to display his own fragility in front of his comrades.

 

The writers gave Col. Potter some very, very funny things to say; and Morgan delivered them with dead-on, mostly deadpan comic timing:

“It’s 3 in the ‘blessed’ a.m.! Even roosters are comatose!”

“Just once I’d like Supply to get here ahead of Demand.”

“You blow another kiss, Pierce, and those lips will never walk again.”

“Pierce, are you deef? I’m giving your hijinks the heave-ho, post-haste! I’m the boss here! I can do that!”

[about Hawkeye and B.J.] “Please excuse these two, they’re themselves today.”

“You have to give Winchester credit. He is bright, educated, and an A-1 surgeon, and with all that he still found a room to be a total jerk.”

“I’ve got a soft spot for Klinger. He looks a little like my son, and he dresses a lot like my wife.”

“The next person who’s nice to me is going to die with boots on. Mine!”

“Never insult seven men when all you have is a six shooter.”

“Well, official channels could take forever. I remember when I applied for permission to get married. By the time the papers came through, my son was divorced.”

“I’m a little gun shy of any tradition that hasn’t been done before.”

“The General answers his own phone. Must be a Unitarian.”

[singing] “Friendships in the army, they say are mighty rare. So I spend all my free time carousing with my mare.”

And an ever-expanding repertoire of creative cusses.

 

And then the writers would give Harry Morgan lines of dialogue that would help define M*A*S*H as perhaps the best thing television has ever produced:

“You know, sometimes I think there should be a rule of war saying you have to see someone up close and get to know ‘em before it’s ok to shoot ‘em.”

“Listen, when you love somebody, you’re always in trouble. There’s only two things you can do about it: either stop loving ‘em, or love ‘em a whole lot more.”

“Well, boys, it would be hard to call what we’ve been through fun, but I’m sure glad we went through it together. You boys always managed to give me a good laugh right when I needed it most. Never forget the time you dropped Winchester’s drawers in the O.R. ‘Course I had to pretend I was mad at ya, but inside I was laughing to beat all hell.”

And this, which was perhaps the point of the whole project.

Harry Morgan passed away earlier this week, at the age of 96. The articles that were written about him and his career detailed a man who may have been, as they say, the hardest-working man in show business; except that he would never have told you so. He never sat as a guest on a talk show, ever, as he didn’t feel comfortable with the idea that his whole purpose on such a broadcast would have been to talk on and on about himself. The posthumous tributes from his former show-business colleagues were of the number and sincerity that any of us would dearly love to receive when we go.

Mike Farrell’s statement to the press said that Morgan “was a wonderful man, a fabulous actor and a dear and close friend since the first day we worked together. As Alan [Alda] said, ‘He did not have an unadorable bone in his body.’  He was a treasure as a person, an imp at times, and always a true professional. He had worked with the greats and never saw himself as one of them. But he was. He was the rock everyone depended on and yet he could cut up like a kid when the situation warranted it. He was the apotheosis, the finest example of what people call a ‘character actor.’ What he brought to the work made everyone better. He made those who are thought of as ‘stars’ shine even more brightly. The love and admiration we all felt for him were returned tenfold in many, many ways. And the greatest and most selfless tribute to the experience we enjoyed was paid by Harry at the press conference when our show ended. He remarked that someone had asked him if working on “M*A*S*H” had made him a better actor. He responded by saying, ‘I don’t know about that, but it made me a better human being.’”

The genius of “M*A*S*H” was that it took the awfulness of war, and the situation of humans living in desperate conditions, trying to repair the physical and emotional damage inflicted by humans upon other humans, and utilized it as both the setting of and the inspiration for a weekly comedy that then (under the radar, pardon the pun) regularly made serious and establishment-challenging commentary upon it all. And even amidst a cast of stellar on-screen performers playing passionate and outlandish characters, Harry Morgan stood out as a leader – both as the character he played and the professional he reportedly was.

Occasionally TV critics and others have poked fun at the frequency of “M*A*S*H” reruns. But this week, it’s great to think that Harry Morgan’s work still continues to be available for new generations of Americans to discover.