Lookee you, Lori! You dredged up a post so old, we've never heard these voices before! What a treat. I can relate so much to some of this, especially doing the polka! We had a t.v. in the basement and there was lots of room around there so we would go for broke, sisters and brothers, cousins, aunts, and my dad & mom dancing cheek to cheek. And a one and a two (or as Robin Williams said, "Ever hear Lawrence Welk being a d.j. at a club? He's like, 'And a one and a two, get a down, get a funky...'")
My dad had a beautiful Irish tenor voice, though he was a Dutch immigrant, and Mom taught herself to play the piano, and took turns doing so in Church every Sunday (later, she picked up organ as well). Two of my sisters got singing lessons (have no idea how they could afford them) and two others took piano lessons. This was an investment for the day we'd take the stage as the new, improved version of the Lennon Sisters! We sang for every public event, sacred or secular. The surviving sisters still do, as far as I know, but they could never match what we did in the Fifties and Sixties.
And Redd Fox? For us it was Red Skelton, but he was forbidden. Mom hated him because, as she said, "I hate people who laugh at their own jokes." Redd Fox didn't show up on tv until Sanford and Son, in the 1970s.
I had a big BW tv with tubes that I watched well into the 1990s. It was so cool, it actually picked up HBO on Channel 2! Take THAT, Comcast!
And on that subject, did anyone here see "My Favorite Year?" It was Mark Linn Baker's first film role as Benjy Stone, producing a late 1950s "variety show." My god, that movie is brilliant. And Peter O'Toole? Who knew Lawrence of Arabia could do comedy? Dinner in Brooklyn at Benjy's mom's place, with her Filipino bantam-weight husband who served a meatloaf made of parrot... "They're not easy to work with! They put up quite a squawk!" and Lainie Kazan, who never used her gorgeous singing voice (one of the only 33 1/3 records my parents had was by her), married in real life to Joe Bologna, who played the star of the show, spluttering as her sister-in-law arrives for dinner wearing her 50yo wedding dress because it was the fanciest thing she had to greet the movie star guest: "Sadie! You look beautiful! What a lovely dress!" (gritting teeth)!" and Sadie says, "You like it? I only wore it once!"
Les Paul and Mary Ford singing "How High the Moon..." as intro music...
Belle passing hors d'oeuevres, "A little liver?"
Joe Bologna, "What a stinkburger!"
Alan Swann's secret daughter, Tess, played by Cady Maclain, who, 20 years later, did soaps for 11 years and is now A WOMAN DIRECTOR!
And the great Alan Swann's epiphany, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
I wonder if this is on DVD. I was just thinking about it the other day, almost posted to this Movies forum to ask our local cineophiles if they'd seen it... It's star-studded, masterfully scripted, and unlike Sy's monologue, FUNNY!
Watching that movie from a design and music standpoint, on a farm outside Seattle instead of Rockefeller Center, 30 Rock, in NYC, was a whole lot like taking a tour around my family manor! Only a few movies bother to get every period detail correct. Even within the movie, if I recall, King couldn't wear his watch during the swashbuckling scene with Alan Swann because watches like that didn't exist in the 1700s.
Highly recommended
View attachment 2324View attachment 2325View attachment 2326View attachment 2327View attachment 2328
and all the Clint Eastwood movies and of course John Wayne's Rooster Cogbern movies and my favorite comedies are everything Mel Brookes ever wrote 
