The recent TV talent shows featuring elaborate and intricate displays of amazing abilities bring back fond memories of the less sophisticated, yet in many ways more enjoyable, local contests of long ago. Remember, seniors, the hard wooden chairs of the grange hall, lodge or auditorium and our home-grown stars; some appearing yearly and some nervously facing the huge crowd of hundreds for the first time.
Can you relate to my memories? We start with the emcee, the local radio personality/TV weather man, and his jokes and introductions. The first treat is the 10-year-old marimba player; a flailing fiend with those double knockers. Then the yodeling sisters performing country western and alpine styles. Fabulous!
A great favorite was always the animal impersonator. We couldn’t swear to the accuracy of his camel, but his love-hungry moose brought down the house. Thunderous applause came also from the many family members in the audience for the large tap dancing ensemble from Paula’s Academy of the Arts.
Less well-received was the quivering high-school songstress in a taffeta and tulle ball grown who plowed valiantly through “The Last Rose of Summer” with loud piano accompaniment by her sister in some sort of a snit. Good natured chuckling met the Elvis wannabe working hard to be sexy at 14. The retired fireman ventriloquist appeared for the 10th time with his self-stuffed raccoon doll, Ronda, and received for the 10th time polite applause.
The winner was (again) 82-year-old Mavis Waterman, the champion whistler. Her “Danny Boy” brought all but the deaf to tears and when she melded that into a take-no-prisoners “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” the prize was hers: $100, dinner for two at Dot’s Diner and two cartons of Camel cigarettes (unfiltered).
Yodelers, whistlers, 10-year-old magicians, baton twirlers . . . you millennials don’t know what you missed.
Scandals past and present
Our former civic leader’s peccadillos and the big Wiener story are currently manna to many a grateful comedian. Let me review some earth-shakers of the past.
Once upon a time screaming headlines daily recounted the battle to have the forbidden word “damn” allowed at the end of Gone With the Wind. Some years later the decadent idol Elvis Presley’s first TV appearance was finally allowed when the producers promised to shoot him only from the waist up lest the sight of anything lower send the teenagers of America into mad, orgasmic frenzies when anything (too dreadful to detail) might occur.
Movie star Robert Mitchum was caught with mind-blowing, suicide-inducing, madness producing marijuana! His career was seriously damaged and other stars not so famous completely ruined.
An Italian movie showing a married couple in bed together had to be banned. While such things went on “over there,” they certainly were not to be allowed in Portland, Maine.
Gay allegations about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were barely understood by decent people and even then discussed only behind closed doors and never were women’s ears to be soiled. As for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, they were a couple of “dear friends” and, after all, they were living in France so not really our business. Gays and lesbians did not exist in the Father Knows Best world. They succumbed to the pressures, got married and lived in fear of the knowledge of their true selves producing publicity and ruin.
The world keeps turning and people keep doing the same old things. It is the headlines that change. As to what will constitute a scandal in the future, the mind boggles.
