“Whenever I watch Fanny’s videos, (which is an activity I by no means confine to the holiday season), I find myself thinking a great deal about her beleaguered assistant Sarah, who in addition to being made to wear a Branch Davidian-chic caftan had to endure the brunt of Fanny’s intemperateness; for when it came to cooking, Fanny would not settle for anything less than perfection.”
Victoria Principal (actress), 17 years old: “It was a month before my eighteeenth birthday that I finally lost my virginity….We were in the front seat. To have gotten in the back would have seemed to premeditated and I was still holding on to some vestige of propriety. It was very short and there was no particular pain or pleasure, no particular physical sensation. In fact, afterward I thought, ‘Jesus, there’s got to be more than this. If not, I’m going back to the other stuff because petting was a lot of fun.'”
Which leads me back to the great Totie Fields. Perhaps her greatest moment was the time she made mincemeat of Kiss’ Gene Simmons on the Mike Douglas show in 1974. Only during that era could you even have two disparate entities like Totie Fields and Gene Simmons inhabiting the same stage; they were simply from two totally different planets, she from the Catskills and he from Mars. Or were they?
In 1978, Ethel’s voice was still as efficient a killing machine as it was in the 1930s. Taking aim on the lovely set decorated for Christmas, Merm launches into the Strouse/Charnin standard with the intensity of a category five hurricane and proceeds to do to Sesame Street in 1978 what Godzilla did to Tokyo in 1956.
Here we have a clip of show business legend Leslie Uggams struggling through Rogers & Hammerstein’s “June is Bustin’ Out All Over,” a video that was being traded by gay collectors and folks in the Broadway community (redundant?) years before anyone thought up YouTube.
