It’s hard to believe that YouTube is barely 5 years old.
It should be obvious to anyone with access to electricity that since the debut of YouTube, popular culture has changed dramatically. Whether it’s a dancing cat, a woman getting hit in the face with a watermelon, an Indy band with a homemade music video, or a too-comfortable politician saying something off-color at a fundraising barbecue – YouTube can make the trivial, the talented, and the downright terrible alike nationally known within hours and days.
This revolutionary online video portal was the founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – but it was Hurley who studied design at my mother’s alma mater, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim were computer science geeks at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, or as we use to call it in Chicago, Champaign-Urbana.
YouTube’s early headquarters was housed above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California and the first YouTube video was was uploaded on April 23, 2005. That first video, Me at the zoo, features founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. You can still find it on YouTube.
Me at the zoo has scored 3,597,873 views.
Now, even a dinosaur like me is aware of YouTube. In fact, as you’ve seen if you’ve been following this blog since “The Vic & Paul Show” ran in June, I’m gradually getting the hang of how to use YouTube to post video clips and embed video on this blog.
And now I’ve figured out how to create my own YouTube channel. It wasn’t hard. The technology was right at my fingertips. But since nobody uses technical manuals anymore, you’ve just got to stumble around until you figure this stuff out.
My YouTube channel is currently a place where “The Vic & Paul Show” clips live, plus other video treats that will accumulate over time.
Those of us who are of a certain age remember the days when there were only three TV networks (and those two weird UHF channels) – and network news was the Big Deal every night. In those years, back when the network evening news was an important daily event, Walter Cronkite was the Big Man Behind the Anchor Desk.
Walter Cronkite, the anchorman of CBS Evening News, was the most trusted man in America. Seriously. He really was. And he deserved our trust. After all, it was Walter Cronkite who went to Vietnam and said, essentially, game over: we’re losing and we should get out. (Can you imagine Wolf Blitzer going out on that limb?)
So, what’s happened to TV news since the days of the legendary Walter Cronkite?
Here’s a musical reflection on the gradual ruin of television news from “The Vic & Paul Show”, written and performed by Paul Barrosse and Victoria Zielinski — with musical director Steve Rashid.
The show was directed by Shelly Goldstein and performed in June 2010 at Push Lounge in Woodland Hills, CA.
This is the final installment of clips from “The Vic & Paul Show” available for free on this blog and on YouTube. The entire show will be available very soon on DVD. If you’re interested in getting a copy of the DVD, let me know by e-mail or via comment to this blog entry.
I’ll send you a copy of the whole show for $5.00 – which should just about cover the cost. (It’s the cheapest, coolest, and funniest Christmas gift ever!) You can send me a check when you get the DVD.
My wife is a huge Bette Davis fan and years ago she introduced me to one of Bette’s best films: Now, Voyager.
Based on the popular romantic novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, Now, Voyager was released in 1942. Mega-star Bette Davis was Oscar-nominated for her performance in the film, which was selected in 2007 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry. Like all the great movies accorded that honor, Now, Voyager was deemed to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Now Voyager may be a timeless classic – but there’s one central aspect of the film that has not aged very well: all that smoking.
Of course, until the last 20 years or so, everybody smoked in the movies – and in the 40’s and 50’s, cigarette smoke filled nearly every romantic drama, gangster movie, western and film noir frame. But Now, Voyager made smoking a central character.
In the film’s signature moment, Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes in his mouth at the same time and hands one to Bette. Henreid’s ultra-romantic two-cigarette move was first used ten years earlier in the film, The Rich Are Always With Us – but when Paul Henreid did it in Now, Voyager — it caused a sensation. For years afterward, Henreid couldn’t go anywhere without women begging him to pop two cigarettes in his mouth and fire them up.
Back then — unlike Bette and Paul’s relatively chaste and unrequited lovers — Hollywood and the cigarette companies were in bed together. Check out this fine article for some eye-opening details on this unhealthy alliance, including Bette’s contract with Lucky Strikes – and Paul Henreid’s own radio promotion, using his role in Now, Voyager to flog cigarettes.
68 years later, Now, Voyager’s smoky and sensual signature bit of dramatic business just wouldn’t fly in today’s more health conscious, socially and politically correct Hollywood.
So, while we were working on “The Vic & Paul Show” early this year, we asked ourselves, “What would happen if Now Voyager was re-made in 2010?”
Here’s our answer to that question, performed puff by puff at the Push Lounge in Woodland Hills in June 2010.
It was not all that long ago that men and women in the throes of romance took pen in hand to write long, expressive letters to each other.
Your parents probably wrote love letters to each other. And if you’re anywhere over the age of 35, you and your loved one probably did a lot of letter writing, too.
That’s not necessarily the case today. I imagine that stationery sales are not what they once were. Modern lovers now proclaim their undying devotion via e-mail and text messaging.
Instead of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s immortal prose…
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach…
…today’s lovers are more likely to text:
do I luv u?
OMG!
xoxox
ILY, 6Y
Ur BF
The great romantic novelist Jane Austen, who was born on December 16th, 1775, lived and wrote in a world of quills and ink and letter writing. Her novels celebrate a time when people in love put their thoughts and emotions into words. Lots of words. Pages and pages of words. Relationships in the Age of Austen developed more slowly than today. There was time for reflection and expression. Lots of time. That was then…
And now?
The first iPhone was introduced on January 9, 2007 – 190 years after Jane Austen’s death. An amazing technological marvel, the iPhone might also be the final death knell for romantic letter writing.
From what I’ve witnessed, texting is now the universally preferred method of communication between young people with a romantic interest in one another. In fact, they’d rather text than talk on the phone. I have two teenage daughters. Trust me. I’m not making this up.
So, when my wife Victoria and I were writing “The Vic & Paul Show” this year, we thought it would be fun to look back at the slower, more deliberate, literate and reflective expression of passion back in Jane Austen’s day – as opposed to today’s rapid-fire boy-girl TTYL texting.
“The Vic & Paul Show” was performed in June 2010 at Push Lounge in Woodland Hills with musical director Steve Rashid at the piano and directed by Shelly Goldstein.
What would happen if Medea was making the media rounds to promote her sensational new book?
No, not Tyler Perry’s “Madea”…
I’m talking about the infamous ancient Medea: the barbarian demigoddess of Greek mythology.
Medea’s lurid autobiography – a story of adventure, romance, scandal, revenge and murder — would be as big a bestseller today as it was back when the Oracle at Delphi drew bigger ratings than Fox News.
The same book publishers, news media and television networks that shamelessly flog the latest tell-all tomes by the famous and fallen would love to put Medea on the talk show circuit.
In recent years, the American public has shown either an increasing appetite for scandal or a short memory or both.
It’s one thing for author Andrew Morton to cash in by writing Monica’s Story, the authorized biography of Monica Lewinsky – but quite another for Monica herself to parade in front of the media like she’d actually accomplished something other than being a Friend of Bill with Benefits.
And while it took lots of chutzpah for a philandering, ethically disgraced politician like New Gingrich to write a book called Rediscovering God in America – the media hacks who interviewed Newt on his book tour (like Fox’s Sean Hannity) rarely, if ever, bothered to mention Newt’s serial adultery or the fact that he was the first Speaker of the House in history to be disciplined for ethical misconduct.
It’s even more ironic when you realize that Newt’s co-author, his third wife Callista Gingrich, was the woman he was having an affair with during the Congressional investigation of Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal. And, how’s this for scandalous symmetry? Callista is 23 years younger than Newt: Monica is 27 years younger than Bill. Betcha Sean Hannity didn’t point that out.
And, like rubber-neckers at the scene of a traffic accident, there’s a segment of the public that just can’t ignore a book like Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour, in which conservative former mega-church pastor Ted Haggard’s wife, Gayle Haggard, explained why she stayed with the holy rolling hypocrite after a 2006 scandal revealed his drug use and “massages” by a male prostitute.
Still, compared to Medea, these scandals are tame and not likely to stay anywhere near as long on the bestseller list. After all, Medea’s story has been a classic in print for more than 2,400 years.
The basics of Medea’s tale are headline-making stuff indeed. The daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, Medea was the granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later married the celebrated hero Jason (the guy with Argonauts). After helping Jason win immortal fame by bringing back the Golden Fleece, she settled down with him and they had two kids. Then, things broke bad for Medea.
According to Euripides in his play Medea, Jason dumped Medea for a younger woman, (Just like Newt Gingrich did.) It was William Congreve who wrote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” That would make a good title for Medea’s tell-all book: an account of how she got her revenge on Creon, Glauce and Jason.
How did Medea get her revenge? If you don’t already know, hold on. I’m coming to that…
In recent decades, the character of Medea has been portayed by a trio of the greatest Greek actresses: Maria Callas, Melina Mercouri — and Victoria Zielinski.
In 1970, the opera singer Maria Callas starred in Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film adaptation of Medea. And in the 1978 film A Dream of Passion – the great Melina Mercouri (who was such a Greek national treasure they put her on a postage stamp) played as an actress portraying Medea who seeks out a mother who, like Medea, recently killed her children.
As for Victoria Zielinski, she was one of two exceptional women to address the Medea role in notable Los Angeles area productions in the past year. The three-time Oscar-nominated actress Annette Bening played Medea in UCLA Live’s staging of the classic at the Freud Playhouse last fall. Bening got great reviews. But Victoria got a lot more laughs.
Here’s Victoria playing Medea in “The Vic & Paul Show” this past June at the Push Lounge in Woodland Hills.
The video clip doesn’t quite capture Drew McCoy’s great lighting plot, Emilia Barrosse’s timing on the light cues, or Shelly Goldstein’s dramatic direction — which made the live experience very special. But Victoria’s bravura performance blends Callas, Mercouri and Arianna Huffiington into a Medea to remember…
Which brings us back to the opening question: What would happen if Medea was making the media rounds to promote her sensational new book?
Jesse James’ tattoo-laden mistress is actually scarier than Medea.
When I was a kid — before it became politically and socially incorrect — it was still okay to get laughs by playing a drunk.
Dick Van Dyke did it. Dean Martin did it. Jackie Gleason did it. Foster Brooks did it. Boy, did Foster Brooks do it.
Red Skelton did it, too. And he may have done it best.
Red was 73-years old in 1986 when I first saw him perform his classic “Guzzler’s Gin” sketch on the stage of The Chicago Theatre. That year, my wife Victoria was a member of the team led by Ray Shepardson (and our pal Drew McCoy) that rehabbed the venerable Chicago Theatre and reopened it on September 10, 1986 with a gala performance by Frank Sinatra. (Frank knew how to play a drunk, too.)
Soon after Sinatra opened the venue, Red Skelton was booked to perform. So, one day that memorable year, Shepardson called Victoria to say he needed someone to pick Red up at the airport and keep him company until his show that night. Are you kidding? Spend a day with a vaudeville, radio, film and TV legend: one of my comedy heroes? We jumped at the chance. (Someday I’ll tell you the whole story of that day — including what Red told me that George M. Cohan told him. Talk about oral history!)
Born to a former circus clown, Red was traveling with a medicine show by the age of 10, and he was in vaudeville at 15. Over the next quarter of a century, he rose to fame on stage, on radio, in film – and in the early days of television. A great slapstick clown, Red perfected his popular progressive drinking sketch “Guzzler’s Gin” over the years in vaudeville and in nightclubs. He performed “Guzzler’s Gin” at his 1940 screen test for MGM — and it was featured in the 1945 film The Ziegfeld Follies.
And here’s another bit of wonderful comedy lore…
Did you know that Red’s “Guzzler’s Gin” bit was the basis for Lucille Ball’s classic “Vitameatavegamin” routine? It’s true. Lucy and Red were both in The Ziegfeld Follies. They became friends — and Red let Lucy rework his sketch and make it her own.
By the time I saw Red do “Guzzler’s Gin” at The Chicago Theatre he’d been doing it for half a century. And it was still funny. Fall down funny.
Red Skelton and “Guzzler’s Gin” were still on my mind in January 2010 when Victoria and I began work on a sketch about the early Old West days in California’s Santa Ynez Valley, north of Santa Barbara – before it became genteel wine country.
I approached my drunken cowboy role with all the subtlety I’d learned from Red and Jackie and Foster and Dick and Dean. But mostly Red. Red played it so “smooooottthhhh!”
We performed “Whiskey Tasting” as part of “The Vic & Paul Show”, which we performed in June 2010 at Push Lounge in Woodland Hills, California.
Now, as it turns out, some people really do whisky tasting. (Evidently, there’s no guzzling involved. And no gin chasers!) You can read about how whisky tasting should be done here and here and here.
Bottom’s up!
And finally, enjoy this classic Red Skelton moment, captured by the brilliant Ron Crawford.
“Here is a drawing I did at the Chicago Theater at the Red Skelton news conference (thanks to you guys). He looked at it and grabbed it away and signed it. I still can remember the feel of the warmth in that room radiating off that wonderful man.”
In May of 2009, President Obama nominated an unheralded federal appeals court judge named Sonia Sotomayor for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing retired Justice David Souter.
Soon, there was the now-obligatory pre-Senate-confirmation-hearing political dustup. The right wing questioned Sotomayor’s objectivity – pointing to the following statement…
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Before long, Sonia Sotomayor was a household name – and despite the “wise Latina” controversy, her nomination was confirmed by the Senate that August by a vote of 68–31.
But how would Sotomayor’s presence on the Supreme Court affect the court’s political balance?
And how would the court’s conservative “white males” deal with this “wise Latina woman” and “the richness of her experiences”?
Most interestingly, how would Justice Antonin Scalia react to the new woman on the bench? Pundits noted that Scalia and Sotomayor are both New Yorkers and lifelong Yankees fans. But would that common ground be all that united them?
Would Sonia help counter Scalia’s ultra-conservative power in the Supreme Court chambers? Or would Scalia draw Sotomayor to the dark side? As my wife Victoria and I began writing “The Vic & Paul” show in January 2010, we knew we had to address this supreme relationship question.
Here, then, is another musical sketch from “The Vic & Paul Show”, performed in June 2010 at Push Lounge in Woodland Hills, California.
Can love bridge the ideological gap between the Left and the Right? We take you now to the dark and shadowy chambers of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia…
Saturday night, June 26th is sold out. Tickets are still available for Friday and Sunday. For reservations:http://vicandpaulshow.doattend.com/. Tickets for tonight (Friday night’s show) are not available online — but you can get them at the door. (We’ll get you in somehow!)
“And that’s the way it is.”
Those of us who are of a certain age remember the days when there were only three TV networks (and those two weird UHF channels) – and network news was the Big Deal every night. In those years, back when the network evening news was an important daily event, Walter Cronkite was the Big Man Behind the Anchor Desk.
So, what’s happened to TV news since the days of the legendary Walter Cronkite?
This is the final installment of clips from “The Vic & Paul Show” available for free on this blog and on YouTube. The entire show will be available very soon on DVD. If you’re interested in getting a copy of the DVD, let me know by e-mail or via comment to this blog entry.
Paul's Voyage of Discovery & Etc. 
My YouTube Channel
It’s hard to believe that YouTube is barely 5 years old.
This revolutionary online video portal was the founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – but it was Hurley who studied design at my mother’s alma mater, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim were computer science geeks at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, or as we use to call it in Chicago, Champaign-Urbana.
Me at the zoo has scored 3,597,873 views.
Now, even a dinosaur like me is aware of YouTube. In fact, as you’ve seen if you’ve been following this blog since “The Vic & Paul Show” ran in June, I’m gradually getting the hang of how to use YouTube to post video clips and embed video on this blog.
My YouTube channel is currently a place where “The Vic & Paul Show” clips live, plus other video treats that will accumulate over time.
You can access Paul’s Channel at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/58pab
But if you’re looking for videos of dancing cats, don’t look here. Our noble beast Caliban just isn’t the dancing type.
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Tagged as cabaret, improvisational comedy, music, Paul Barrosse, Paul's Channel, The Vic & Paul Show, upload, Victoria Zielinski, videos, YouTube