Vivaldi's Birthday

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Today is the 340th birthday of one of my favorite composers, Antonio Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is best known for his composition "The Four Seasons," which paid homage to the seasons of the year and inspired one of my favorite movies from the '80s.

My very favorite composer is Mozart. I also like Beethoven, Grieg and Bach.

But Vivaldi is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers. Of those others I mentioned, I suppose Bach is the only one from the Baroque period, and while he is also regarded by many as the greatest composer of all time, much of his work was for keyboards. Vivaldi's primary emphasis was on strings.

Both were great, of course. This isn't a competition, and both gave us soothing music that has survived for centuries.

In fact, Vivaldi's compositions have fared better than he did. Vivaldi died in poverty.

What Would Marilyn Be Like at 90?

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The question that is posed in my headline is purely hypothetical, of course.

Marilyn Monroe has been dead for more than 50 years. Trying to picture her at the age of 90, which is what she would be today, is just about impossible to do since we have no idea what she would have been like at half that. She died almost nine years before her 45th birthday. We need those images of an aging Marilyn to put things in perspective, but we have been deprived of that. You can't jump from 36 to 90, even in your imagination.

And yet we can't help speculating, can we? Would she be sharp in old age like George Burns and Doris Day? Or would she clearly have one foot in the grave, the way Bob Hope did?

She was truly remarkable in many ways. There were the obvious ones, of course — Marilyn's face and figure, her breathless voice, a way of walking that Jack Lemmon once described on camera as "Jell–o on springs."

That, of course, was in "Some Like It Hot," one of a couple of movies she made for Billy Wilder.

I always felt she was underestimated by many observers — seen only as a dumb blonde bombshell by many but recognized by some as the talented actress that she was. She still has the ability to persuade people. I have seen it happen. Someone who saw Marilyn as only a sex symbol sits down to watch "Bus Stop" or "The Misfits" and is converted.

Few human beings are recognized the world over by a single name — but Marilyn was one of them.

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Her continuing popularity, more than half a century after her death, is testimony to her staying power.

She was a trailblazer in many ways.

She was Playboy's first pinup — Miss December of 1953 — although I do not believe the centerfolds were known as Miss Anything at that time. Marilyn's appearance was in the magazine's first issue. I don't know how many people thought there would be a second issue.

There was, of course, and it continues to be published today — and, until recently, with photos that were much more explicit than any of Marilyn's. But there can be little doubt that it survived and thrived due in no small part to Marilyn's contribution.

She had her share of problems when it was revealed that she had posed nude for photos before she became a star.

Such a scandal probably would have ruined many, but Marilyn was kind of like the Donald Trump of her day. She didn't run for president — although rumors persist that she slept with one — but it didn't really seem to matter what was said about her. Her popularity just grew.

It was part of what made her one of Hollywood's most bankable stars.

Unless they are unusually dedicated to staying in shape, sex symbols usually lose their looks, and Marilyn may well have met that fate, too. She died at 36, which is probably near the end of the line for most sex symbols. To make most, if not all, of the next 40 years as successful as her first decade or so, she would have had to evolve. She would have had to take roles that relied less and less upon how she looked and more and more on the way she acted.

Could she have done it? I think she could have. I think she was already doing it.

But we'll never know. All we can do is speculate.

A Century of Gregory Peck

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"You have to dream, you have to have a vision, and you have to set a goal for yourself that might even scare you a little because sometimes that seems far beyond your reach. Then I think you have to develop a kind of resistance to rejection and to the disappointments that are sure to come your way."

Gregory Peck (1916–2003)

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I've heard it said that, when Gregory Peck won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in "To Kill a Mockingbird," he was rewarded for playing himself. If that is true, it certainly was appropriate. After all, who better to play Gregory Peck ... than Gregory Peck?

Of course, he wasn't playing himself. He was playing a part that had been created in Harper Lee's masterpiece.

I don't know if Lee had Gregory Peck in mind for Atticus Finch when she wrote the book, but I don't think she did. I have always heard that she patterned the character of Atticus after her father — and I have also heard that her first choice for the part had been Rock Hudson.

Nothing against Rock Hudson, but I simply can't imagine him or anyone else improving on Peck's performance.

And it was a role that was perfect for him, one of those rare times when a great character is portrayed by the perfect actor or actress. Peck himself described the experience of portraying Atticus as "like putting on an old suit of clothes — just comfortable."

Today would have been Gregory Peck's 100th birthday. Turner Classic Movies is marking the occasion with a primetime salute, in which some of his greatest performances can be seen. Oh, who am I kidding? Gregory Peck was great in everything he did. Sometimes his performances were better than the material. No such problem in "To Kill a Mockingbird," though.

And you can see for yourself tonight at 9 p.m. (Central) when TCM airs "To Kill a Mockingbird."

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"I put everything I had into it — all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity."

Gregory Peck on his role as Atticus Finch

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Brush Up Your Shakespeare

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"Brush up your Shakespeare
Start quoting him now
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow."

Cole Porter

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Most of the people I know will tell you they only glanced at a Shakespeare play when they were assigned to read one in school — and some of them didn't even do that. Shakespeare was widely seen as having no real relevance to modern readers.

Those folks probably would be shocked at how often they actually quote Shakespeare, some on a daily basis. He had a far greater influence on our modern English than you probably think.

For instance ...

A few months ago, when the nation marked the 50th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy, the word assassination was used a lot, right? It is the word that has always been used when a prominent person is killed by someone else.

Or is it?

A person who murders a prominent person has been called an assassin for a long time. That word has Arabic roots that go back more than a thousand years. But the act of killing a prominent person was not called an assassination ... until Shakespeare came along and used that word in "Macbeth."

When Shakespeare was writing in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, there was more freedom for writers to do what he did practically routinely — which was to take an existing word and sort of play with it, like a sculptor plays with clay, until a functional shape emerged. Thus, a noun like assassin became a verb (assassinate) — and yielded another noun to describe the action (assassination).

(Of course, we do quote Shakespeare in whole sentences or phrases, too, such as "all's well that ends well" or "foregone conclusion.")

When I was in school, I knew a lot of people who complained when they were assigned to read something Shakespeare had written. His language wasn't modern enough, they complained.

I'm not much of a linguist, but I am something of an historian, and I know that, if the idea was that Shakespeare wrote in Old English, that was plain wrong. Old English began to fall from favor several hundred years before Shakespeare was born.

(Old English really has a lot more in common with the Germanic mother tongue of the Anglo Saxons than modern English does.)

Shakespeare didn't write in Middle English, either. There were a lot of changes in the English language after the French–speaking Normans invaded in 1066, and Middle English came to prominence about 200 years before the Bard was born.

If my friends had to read the same text in both Middle English and Old English, they would find Middle English easier to comprehend — but not by much.

(If you don't believe me, try reading Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," which was written in Middle English. Here's an excerpt from the prologue: "To telle yow al the condicioun, Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, And whiche they weren, and of what degree, And eek in what array that they were inne, And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.")

In fact, Shakespeare wrote in what is known as Early Modern English. It came into use about a century before he was born and is nearly indistinguishable from the English that is written and spoken today.

Now, as you may have noticed, I have mentioned Shakespeare's birth a couple of times. That was intentional — or premeditated, to use another Shakespearean creation (from "King Henry VI, Part I") — because, in about six weeks, we will observe what is probably the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.

I say "probably" not because it was a Shakespeare word — it might have been, I just don't know — but because it isn't known exactly when Shakespeare was born. It is known that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, and his date of birth, while not known for certain, has been traditionally observed on April 23.

If that is when he was born, then Shakespeare died on his 52nd birthday because we know that he died on April 23, 1616.

The "Oxford English Dictionary" estimated that Shakespeare created some 3,000 words that one can find in the dictionary today — words like countless, for example (from "Titus Andronicus").

That is an astonishing influence on the language, especially when you consider there was no dictionary in Shakespeare's day. The dictionary came into existence about a decade before he died. Shakespeare was sparsely educated, but he would have had no more resource for studying the language he spoke and wrote than anyone else of his time. Grammar texts didn't come along until a century — or more — after his death.

I'm inclined to think that it isn't so much the words that Shakespeare used that tend to confound people — it's the way they're arranged.

Of course, one cannot disregard the fact that words do change meaning — and some fall from use entirely — over time, which can affect the reader's comprehension.

But I still think a lot of the negative reaction to Shakespeare stems from his habit of organizing words in sentences in ways that sound strange to modern ears — even if the meaning isn't altered.

Need an example? Take this five–word sentence: "The governor made a speech."

You could arrange those words in six unique sentences that essentially say the same thing but in different word orders. (Warning: Sometimes it reads like something Yoda might write.)

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The governor made a speech.
The governor a speech made.
Made a speech the governor.
Made the governor a speech.
A speech the governor made.
A speech made the governor.

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The key to reading and enjoying Shakespeare's work is not learning another language. It is using the language you already know, sometimes rearranging the words in an order that makes sense to you. It really isn't that arduous.

In the meantime ...

The next time you hear the word addiction ("Henry V") or elbow ("King Lear") or rant ("Hamlet"), you can thank Shakespeare.

Of course, someone might have come up with those words someday, anyway. But who knows?

Can You Imagine Pearl at 71?

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Seventy–one years ago today, Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas.

When I was in college, a female acquaintance and I used to listen to Janis Joplin on my friend's stereo while we drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Joplin had been dead for quite awhile at that time, but my friend and I were throwbacks to the '60s. Janis was one of our favorites, even though she wasn't one of our contemporaries.

If it is hard to picture Janis Joplin at 71, you have to remember that she has been dead for more than 40 years, forever a member of the 27 Club. Maybe she just burned out, a victim of all the booze and hard drugs she inflicted on herself. Perhaps it was inevitable that she would flame out the way she did.

(I always think of Joplin when I hear Neil Young sing "Hey Hey, My My." Of course, that could be because my friend was a Neil Young fan, and there's mental association involved for me there.)

"It's hard to imagine what Janis would be like in the 21st century," writes USA Today, "but it's safe to say no one has come close to matching her voice since."

Joplin was, as USA Today observes, "one of the first major female forces in rock 'n' roll." She was a pioneer, and pioneers have to be tough. You have to work hard, and you have to party hard if you're going to be taken seriously.

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Her only #1 hit was "Me and Bobby McGee," which was released the same month that the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon and only rose to #1 after Joplin's death the following year.

On Rolling Stone's list of the Top 100 artists, Joplin ranks #46. Among female artists, only Aretha Franklin and Madonna rank higher.

"She loved her whiskey and made no bones about it," wrote Rosanne Cash for Rolling Stone. "This was a full–blown one–of–a–kind woman — no stylist, no publicist, no image–maker. It was just Janis."

Rolling Stone's list was tough for solo female artists to make. The only other women on it after Joplin were Patti Smyth, Joni Mitchell and Tina Turner.

"She wasn't just a great woman in rock — at the time she was the woman in rock," gushed Cash. "Janis really created this whole world of possibility for women in music: Without Janis Joplin, there would be no Melissa Etheridge. Without Janis, there would be no Chrissie Hynde, no Gwen Stefani. There would be no one."

That may be a bit extreme. Women's voices in rock could not be kept muzzled, but the truth is that Joplin accelerated their influence on modern music.

She was a true pioneer.

John Denver's 70th Birthday

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"Heck, I'm no Henry Mancini or Michel Legrand. I just play the guitar and write songs."

John Denver (1943–1997)

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If I had to name one popular recording artist who embodied the '70s, I would have to pick John Denver.

I'm sure there are '70s musical artists who were more commercially successful than Denver — Elton John, perhaps, or the Bee Gees or the Eagles — and any would probably be better representatives of the decade.

But Denver has always been the '70s to me. It's not so much his music — although that is part of it. It is more his fresh–faced, innocent (almost naive) look, I suppose.

That may be at odds with your mental image of the '70s, but that's the thing that people, especially those who weren't around then, need to understand. The '70s were contradictory years.

They were full of vulgar musical acts, the spiritual fathers of heavy metal, grunge and other extremist variations. They also had more innocent–appearing, wholesome performers than any decade other than the '50s.

John Denver was part of the latter. He wore his hair long, yes, but it was always combed and fashionable. He wore blue jeans like many of his contemporaries, but they were clean and fashionable. He wore colorful shirts, but they, too, were stylish. My grandmother couldn't tolerate most of the musicians I liked — she thought they were "scraggly" — but she had no objection to John Denver. As far as she was concerned, he was a good–looking young guy with a nice voice who needed a haircut.

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And, unlike most of the groups I liked, my grandmother could understand what Denver was singing.

My mother really liked Denver's music, and I acquired my fondness for his recordings from her. I guess you could describe much of his music as "folk music" — he started his professional career playing with folk groups in the 1960s — but that wasn't his only genre. He also wrote and played pop songs. He did perform mostly acoustic guitar — power guitar wasn't his style.

It didn't surprise me that Mom gravitated to Denver's music. Mom liked folk music. I think of Simon and Garfunkel most when I think of her — they were her favorites — but I also think of John Denver and Don McLean. In fact, I often listen to Simon and Garfunkel when I go to the cemetery to visit Mom's grave, but I listened to John Denver the last time I went there. It seemed appropriate, given that his 70th birthday was coming up.

And now it is here.

Born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in Roswell, N.M., his first hit composition, "Leaving on a Jet Plane," actually was a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, who made it the #1 hit on Billboard's Hot 100.

Most of his solo career was in the 1970s. That's when he released his biggest hits — "Take Me Home, Country Roads," "Rocky Mountain High," "Sunshine on My Shoulders."

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In fact, John Denver was one of the first recording artists I ever saw perform in concert.

I've seen many concerts since. I wish could say that it was the greatest thing I ever saw, but, really, the only thing that was memorable about that concert for me was that it was one of my first.

My memory is that it was a low–key concert. No fireworks or explosions or anything like that. Modern concertgoers probably would be disappointed. I don't think there was even a big screen behind him showing images that were relevant to the songs he sang.

Just Denver playing the guitar and singing with the background musicians and singers making their contributions but never taking the spotlight unless invited to do so by Denver. It was Denver's show.

That makes it sound like he might have been some kind of micro manager or an obsessive type, doesn't it? I don't mean to imply that. I don't know what kind of personality he had. I never got the sense that Denver was a control freak or anything like that.

(At one time in my life, my favorite album was Denver's two–record concert album, "An Evening With John Denver." I have it now on CD — thanks to CD technology, it is even better with the addition of half a dozen tracks. It's a pretty good example of what Denver's concerts were like around the time I saw him.

(Speaking to the audience in that album, he encouraged them to "go wherever the music takes you — any time you feel like singing along, as always you're welcome to do that — please limit yourselves to the choruses of the songs and let me do the verses!")

It was well known that he was committed to humanitarian causes, which suggests a generous spirit. It was also known, although perhaps not as widely, that he had had problems with alcohol, which led to other problems in his life.

For some reason — and I don't know why this is so — I got the impression that the dovetailing of his career in the 1980s was connected to his alcohol abuse. Perhaps I read an article that said that.

But that may not have been the case. Perhaps, for whatever reason, people stopped paying attention to him. I know I did, but I don't think it had anything to do with his drinking. My interests changed.

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It is true that Denver's best–known songs were recorded and released in the 1970s, but I thought that many of his most thoughtful, most insightful, most meaningful songs were products of the 1980s, when the spotlight seemed to have passed him by — songs like "Perhaps Love," which he recorded with Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, and "Love Again," which he recorded with French singer Sylvie Vartan.

In those later years, after both of his marriages had ended in divorce, including the one that had inspired the phenomenally popular ballad "Annie's Song" at the height of his popularity, his music seemed to speak of his yearning for love and his desire to understand it.

That's a pretty tall order for most of us.

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On a Sunday in October in 1997, Denver perished when the private airplane he was piloting crashed in the Pacific Ocean.

(There is, in hindsight, a poignant moment early in that concert album in which Denver speaks of arriving in Los Angeles prior to the concert and going to the beach. "I felt very good," he says, "about being with the ocean again." Since his death, I have often wondered if he felt that same sense of exhilaration in the moments before he died.)

What would he have done in these last 16 years? I don't know. I imagine he would have continued to compose and record. Perhaps he would have found the love of his life and retreated into a comfortable retirement.

Just speculation, of course. Today is merely the 70th anniversary of Denver's birth. He isn't celebrating his birthday. He is no longer living.

But it is beyond dispute that his influence continues to be felt. A few years ago, the Colorado legislature made "Rocky Mountain High" one of two state songs.

And I still hear his music on the radio. Not as often as I once did but more often than you might think.

Perhaps, in a way, he does still live.

Harpo's 125th Birthday

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In the realm of wordless comedy, no one may have been better at it than Harpo Marx, a clown/mime.

When I was a teenager, a group of young people from the Methodist church in my hometown went to Little Rock one night to see Marcel Marceau in a one–man show. My memory is that it was a bitterly cold night, and Marceau was good.

But Harpo was the best. Marceau was Harpo's spiritual descendant.

Harpo was so good that people actually believed he couldn't speak, which wasn't true, of course. In some Marx Brothers movies, Harpo's brothers mentioned the fact that he didn't speak — but not that he couldn't. They were careful to imply that it was a choice, not a condition.

On the other hand, there were times in some of those movies when Harpo tried to communicate something urgent to someone else, but he could only do so in his silent charades–like way. It isn't hard to see how that would convince people that he was mute.

Harpo's silent shtick was inspired early in his career when a reviewer of the brothers' stage performance wrote glowingly of his "beautiful pantomime" — "which was ruined whenever he spoke." So he almost never spoke.

His nickname was simply a reference to the fact that he played the harp.

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That was something he did in just about every Marx Brothers movie.

Harpo was a self–taught harp player, and the fact was that he tuned and played his harp incorrectly. Nevertheless, he played beautifully. I have heard that he spent a small fortune hiring music teachers to show him how to do it correctly, but they were more interested in watching him play his way than teaching him how to play correctly.

If he wasn't recognizable enough in his frilly wig that looked blond in black–and–white film (turned out it was really red), he was always dressed the same — in a trench coat with oversized pockets and a top hat.

I have often wondered if Harpo's usual dress inspired Blake Edwards or Peter Sellers to use it for Inspector Clouseau. Perhaps it was Harpo who was inspired — by the inspectors of his day.

Doesn't really matter, I guess. As a young journalist — and before, for that matter — I always regarded anything that wasn't original to be plagiarism. As I have gotten older, though, I have learned that isn't a hard and fast rule. It is plagiarism if one lifts, word for word, what someone else has written and claims it as his/her own.

But being inspired to use part of what someone else has utilized, like clothing, and adapting it to a new creation is another matter.

Besides, no one could duplicate Harpo.

Natalie Wood's 75th Birthday

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Hollywood has boasted many beautiful actresses over the years, but only a handful have made my personal list of truly great beauties.

That list doesn't actually exist, of course — well, outside my mind, I suppose. But my mental list includes the likes of Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood. I'm sure there are others that you readers will think of, but those are the top five on my list.

If she had not died in 1981 under circumstances that are still labeled, at best, mysterious — and if we further presume that nothing else would have killed her in the last 32 years — today would have been Natalie Wood's 75th birthday. If she was alive, she'd be a grandmother. Hard to imagine, isn't it?

It's always hard for me to picture people who died young as they might have been at advanced ages, whether they were famous or not. Whenever the subject of prominent people who died young comes up, it never fails to include the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, John Belushi, Elvis, Princess Diana, and it is always difficult for me to picture them being 30 or 40 or even 50 years older than they were when last we saw them.

I had a friend who died of cancer before his 30th birthday. If he was still living, he would be in his 50s today. I find that very hard to picture. I remember him as he was, and it is hard for me to imagine what he would be like if he had not been dead for nearly 22 years — primarily, I suppose, because I can't really imagine what might have happened in his life in the last couple of decades and how those events might have shaped him.

In a way, I guess, it is the same with Natalie Wood, whether you think of her as a young girl in the original "Miracle on 34th Street" or as a young adult in "West Side Story" or as a more mature woman in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." She was 43 when she died. How can we know what might have happened in her life that would have shaped her into the 75–year–old we will never know?

I guess the hardest part of imagining Natalie Wood at 75 is remembering her when she was 8 in "Miracle on 34th Street."

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I don't remember how old I was when I saw that movie for the first time. I may have been no older than Wood had been when she made it, and I remember having a huge crush on her. I guess she was my first.

Anyway, that is the image of Natalie Wood that always comes to my mind first when her name is mentioned — and, I suppose, always will, no matter how many times I see "Splendor in the Grass" or "Rebel Without a Cause" — or the movie she was making when she died, "Brainstorm."

When Wood drowned while on a yachting trip with her husband Robert Wagner and her "Brainstorm" co–star Christopher Walken, her death was ruled an accident, but many of the details surrounding her death were unknown then and are mostly unknown today.

I remember that rumors were rampant at the time. I always dismissed most of it as idle gossip. Nevertheless, there were parts of the story, however incomplete it may have been, that were disturbing.

It was known that Wood had been drinking that evening and that she and Wagner had argued. But no one could be found who could say definitively how Wood — who was known to have a fear of the water and drowning — wound up in the waters of Santa Catalina Island.

But the case was reopened last year when the captain of the yacht reportedly told authorities that an argument between Wood and Wagner had caused her death. To date, no one has been charged in connection with Wood's death.

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After all these years, I'm not really sure if I want to know the truth about what happened to Natalie Wood.

At the time, it was enough for me simply to know that she was dead. I suppose there was a time when I wanted to know if someone had caused her death, but after 32 years, I really don't know what useful purpose could be served. If Wagner really was the cause of her death, would there be anything to gain by putting him on trial now and perhaps imprisoning him? The man is 83 years old.

Wood's family may be seeking some kind of closure. If they are still seeking it after 32 years, I hope they find it — even if it doesn't come in the form they may be hoping for. Thirty–two years is a long time to wait for anything.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Everyday People

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In recent years, I've observed the 70th birthdays of all sorts of people who were young, rising stars when I was a child, and that truly is an eerie feeling.

Talk about feeling old!

Most of the time, I don't feel particularly old when I hear of such things — but I really did feel old when I heard that Sly Stone was turning 70 today.

The Newport News, Va., Daily Press wryly observes that Stone's milestone is "a concept that seems so improbable because (a.) he will always be locked in our minds at a much younger age, and (b.) nobody ever thought he would live that long."

Rather like Keith Richard, I suspect. About a year ago, I saw a meme on Facebook that observed that Keith Richard had outlived Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Elvis. "Betcha didn't see that coming" was the punchline.

A talented and creative song writer, Stone penned and recorded songs in the late '60s and early '70s that combined a genuine social consciousness with the fun of popular music. He formed a band that was a celebration of diversity long before diversity was a popular buzzword.

But abuse of and addiction to particularly potent drugs like PCP and cocaine hastened the decline of the Family Stone.

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And with the roster of deceased performers from that era, it was hard for even the most optimistic of observers to visualize a scenario in which he would live to the age of 70.

But he has. Happy birthday.

Woody Guthrie's Centennial

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It seems like I've always known the words to Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land."

But I have concluded that I must have learned them in school, in music class, which sounds like much more than it really was. It was nothing more than the occasional visit from a woman who played the piano and led the pupils in songs, one of which was "This Land Is Your Land."

I presume the woman was an employee of the school district who went around to the various schools. She wasn't a constant member of any school's faculty. She was never at our school long enough to learn any of our names.

In fact, I don't remember her name now.

But I still remember some of the verses of "This Land Is Your Land." And, for that, I will always be thankful to that music teacher, whoever she was.

Patriotic songs were staples of that music class, as I recall. We sang songs like "God Bless America" in that class — never once thinking about anyone who might be in our midst who had religious issues with the song and whose rights we might be trampling.

I guess it was taken for granted that we were all God–fearing Americans, even at tender ages like 6 or 7 or 8. That was sort of the way the adults in my hometown looked at things.

Funny thing was, Guthrie was a communist. Well, not exactly. Guthrie claimed that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party," but he wasn't actually a member of the party.

He did sympathize with its platform, though, and he wrote a column for the communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. I guess he would more correctly be called a fellow traveler — he had kind of a parallel relationship with the communists without actually being one.

Well, I suppose that is another subject for another time.

Today marks a century since Woody Guthrie was born, and, no matter what one might think of his politics, it's as impossible not to think of him when you hear "This Land Is Your Land" as it is not to think of his son when you hear "Alice's Restaurant."

He was a troubadour of the American experience in the first half of the 20th century. He's been gone nearly 50 years ... and he is still missed.

Remembering the Captain on His Birthday

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Today would have been the 85th birthday of Bob Keeshan, the man who was TV's Captain Kangaroo for decades.

The Captain Kangaroo show was on the air before I was born — in fact, my family didn't get a TV until several years after I was born — but that is the earliest memory I have of TV. Well, that and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

At first, that was all that Mom would allow my brother and me to watch. She gradually relented on some things — like letting us watch Bozo the Clown and his cartoons in the afternoons.

I guess she knew she couldn't keep us from watching that one. We could see it at any of our friends' homes after school, and there was a TV in the school cafeteria which usually had Bozo on in the afternoons so if we were detained at school for any reason, the chances were pretty good we could see Bozo there, too.

Most mothers have to face that moment when they realize they cannot monitor their children's activities 24 hours a day. I suppose Mom knew we would be making more decisions as we got older, and she would just have to trust that she had given us the basic knowledge we would need to make the right ones.

But TV really was an emerging technology when my brother and I were little, and Mom didn't feel bound to rules on which she had been raised because there were none. She made the rules about TV viewing, and she absolutely put her foot down when it came to the Twilight Zone reruns that followed Bozo. Twilight Zone was well beyond our years, as far as she was concerned. And, with the benefit of age, I must say she was right about that.

(I do love Twilight Zone, though. A week from today, I will be doing what I have done for years — I'll be watching the Fourth of July Twilight Zone marathon on the Syfy channel.)

But Bozo was just the next step. After that, Mom gave in on The Flintstones (which was being shown in primetime in those days) and Saturday morning cartoons. It wasn't long before my brother and I had gone beyond animation, and Mom started letting us watch programs with actual humans.

Of course, that really wasn't new for my brother and me. Captain Kangaroo had humans ... and some puppets, too. It also showed some cartoons.

Well, anyway ...

As I say, Captain Kangaroo is the first TV personality of whom I have any real memory. In hindsight, the show must have been patterned after a children's radio program. The acting was really nonexistent, and most of the humor consisted of sight gags accompanied by raucous sound effects.

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Mr. Moose was a good example of that.

Mr. Moose was a puppet of a — you guessed it — moose. When Mr. Moose was on the screen, I suppose it prompted the same Pavlovian effect that was achieved in the old Fibber McGee and Molly radio show. Fibber McGee and Molly wasn't a children's show, but I'm sure it inspired things on Captain Kangaroo — such as when Fibber McGee announced he was going to look for something in his hall closet.

If my parents told me about it once, they must have told me hundreds of times. When Fibber McGee opened the door to the hall closet, everything in it came crashing down around him — everyone knew that was coming — and that, essentially, was what happened with Mr. Moose.

Mr. Moose had no closet at the aptly named Captain's Place. His shtick was conniving the captain into standing where he would be in the line of fire — of a deluge of ping pong balls.

All these years later, that is what I remember best from Captain Kangaroo.

Well, that and Mr. Green Jeans.

Mr. Green Jeans was a human who wore a pair of overalls that, supposedly, were green, but you couldn't prove it by me. We had a black–and–white TV when I was a child — didn't move up to color until I was about 11 or 12, which was too old to be watching Captain Kangaroo anymore so I never did confirm whether Mr. Green Jeans really did wear green jeans.

I assumed he did, though. I mean, Captain Kangaroo wouldn't lie about a thing like that, would he?

Sir Paul Turns 70

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Paul McCartney is 70 years old today, which seems incredible to me.

I don't remember much about the early days of global Beatlemania, but I do recall that McCartney was generally regarded as the attractive Beatle.

The other Beatles had their devotees, of course, but the impression I got was that most of the young women of that time had serious crushes on Paul.

I never really understood that. Paul wasn't the youngest of the Beatles (that was George Harrison) or the wittiest of the Beatles (as far as I was concerned, that was John Lennon). Maybe there was a perception that he looked more boyish than the others — but, as far as I was concerned, they all looked boyish when they burst onto the scene.

There was a good reason for that, too. They were all in their 20s.

McCartney always had a knack for writing catchy tunes — just count all the hit tunes he wrote — and there is something to be said for longevity. Lennon died at the age of 40 (he was murdered), and Harrison died of cancer when he was 58. McCartney has avoided either fate — thus far — but I'll be darned if he doesn't still look a bit boyish.

He doesn't look as boyish as he did when, in his early 50s, he appeared on Saturday Night Live and was interviewed by Chris Farley.

That's been nearly 20 years ago, and it is the first thing that comes to my mind now when I think of McCartney.

In the skit, Farley played a rather clumsy TV host who was interviewing McCartney and asking him questions like "Remember when you were with the Beatles? That was awesome!"

Farley kept chastising himself after every question, and McCartney constantly reassured him that "You're doing great."

(Perhaps my favorite part of that interview was when Farley asked McCartney about the rumor that the phrase "Paul is dead" could be heard if a Beatles record was played backward. "That was a hoax, right?" Farley asked.

(And McCartney replied, "Yeah, I wasn't really dead.")

But what started out as a lame interview (for comic purposes, of course) gained some redemption at the end when Farley asked McCartney, "Remember when you were in the Beatles? And you did that album Abbey Road, and at the very end of the song, it goes, 'And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make?' Is that true?"

McCartney replied, "In my experience, it is. I find, the more you give, the more you get."

Farley turned to the camera and mouthed the word, "AWESOME!"

And I would agree with that.

The Class Clown's 75th Birthday

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I first became aware of George Carlin when I was about 12 years old, and I heard the "Class Clown" album for the first time.

Most people will probably tell you that the thing they remember most from that album is Carlin's brilliant routine on language, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television."

There was great humor to be found in that routine — on many levels. I have often mused about how Carlin would respond if he could come back sometime in the (near?) future and discover that the seven words he was prohibited from saying on television were so commonplace that they evoked no response at all.

He might find that the brilliance of his routine had no relevance, anymore. If that routine, which evoked such outrage in some corners and such amusement in others during Carlin's life, had been reduced to quaint, I think Carlin would be pleased.

And make no mistake. It was brilliant — and timeless, even if, at some point in the future, it is regarded as quaint.

But so was the stuff he said about children and the class show–offs they encounter in school. Sometimes, I was the class clown in my small–town Southern school. Other times, it was someone else. We must have had some sort of unspoken agreement. We each had our special talents, and we each shared them with our classmates at different times.

Most of the time, I guess it really was as simple as Carlin said it was: "You'd be bored and, you'd figure, well, why not deprive someone else of their education? And you would set about disrupting the class by ATTRACTING ATTENTION TO YOURSELF! That is the name of this job, you know? It's called, DIG ME!"

So I could relate to the things he said about classmates who could "belch at will" or turn their upper eyelids inside out. (Frankly, I didn't really get most of the rest of the humor on the album until I was older.)

George Carlin provided me with lots of laughs over the years. It's hard to believe, but, if he was still with us, the Class Clown would be 75 years old today. I've missed him since he died nearly four years ago. I had grown accustomed to a new album every other year or so and fresh, new nuggets of Carlin's humor to enjoy.

The old stuff is still good, but, regrettably, it is all we have now.

A Dickens of a Birthday

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"It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,

"we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Charles Dickens
"A Tale of Two Cities"

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As one who has always aspired to be a writer, I am left breathless by the greatest of the writers, so many of whom came along in the 19th century — Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Brownings, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, many others.

And Charles Dickens.

Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth, an event that is being marked the world over, and I feel safe in stating that few, if any, writers of Dickens' time — or of any other — possessed his flair for realism, comedy and characters.

Especially the characters.

I've always held that a good story has good characters, and there have been few characters who were more enduring than Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Wilkins Micawber, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. Others, too.

Every Dickens novel has memorable characters who, as none other than Virginia Woolf said, "exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

But even that doesn't capture the full range of Dickens' character development.

Take, for instance, Madame Defarge in "A Tale of Two Cities."

In the reader's first encounter with her, she is silent. But the reader is acutely aware of her knitting. It makes her seem harmless, in a way — submissive, devotedly domestic — but the reader comes to see how she is driven by bloodlust during the French Revolution and the role her knitting plays in her life as a tricoteuse at the public executions.

As I say, she is silent at first, communicating with her husband through darting glances and subtle nods. The reader comes to understand these things better, but, to the naked eye, it is tragically deceptive.

Often, those characters were modeled after people in Dickens' life. That's a common strategy for writers — I have frequently been advised, whether by teachers, professional colleagues or friends, to write about what I know — as is the time–honored method of writing (in as disguised a way as possible) about one's life experiences.

There wasn't anything new about those literary devices in Dickens' day. He just used them more effectively than his contemporaries. Maybe it was more personal for him than anyone ever realized.

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"[L]ike many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield."

Charles Dickens
"David Copperfield"

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Well, "David Copperfield" had several autobiographical elements to it. There was never really any secret about that, even in Dickens' time.

But there was certainly more to Dickens.

He was a passionate advocate of social reform and took the occasion of his first visit to America in 1842 to write of his objection to slavery.

I am certain he would, at the very least, empathize with the modern–day Occupy movement. Financial disparity is a kind of slavery; the issues aren't the same, of course, although that may depend upon one's interpretation.

Anyway, following Dickens' death in June 1870, Queen Victoria wrote of him in her diary: "He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes. He felt sure a better feeling, and much greater union of classes, would take place in time. And I pray earnestly it may."

Still waiting on that one. But it may yet come to pass.

In the last six or seven decades, though, it hasn't been necessary to wait long for a movie or TV adaptation of Dickens' works. When I was a child, a movie based on "Oliver Twist" was a big winner at the Oscars and a top money earner, and its success apparently inspired another Dickens adaptation (this one based on "A Christmas Carol") a couple of years later.

There have been others since. The stories have a timeless appeal.

As Annie Fischer observes, in the Kansas City Star, Dickens' "cultural relevance lives on."

Indeed it does.

Betty White Turns 90

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Perhaps one of the most amazing phenomena of recent years has been the surge in popularity of actress Betty White, who is 90 years old today.

I would be tempted to compare her to Grandma Moses — except that she didn't begin this career in her golden years.

Most people probably know she's no newbie — but still, I think, a lot of people probably don't realize just how long she has been around. Her career spans seven decades. She started out singing on an experimental TV station in Los Angeles right out of high school, but her early career was spent mostly on radio.

By the early 1950s, she was on TV, by that time an established entertainment medium, and, by and large, that is where she has remained. And she made it her own in a career that has had its share of ups and down.

She really appeared to make the medium her own as Sue Ann Nivens, the Happy Homemaker, on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and the bubble–headed Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls, but she had some flops, too, like her short–lived sitcom, The Betty White Show, that followed the wrapup of the former and served as something of a bridge to the latter (although people often forget that she had recurring roles on The Love Boat and Mama's Family between the two).

She is still influencing entertainment as an immensely popular and award–nominated star of the hit cable sitcom Hot in Cleveland. Not bad for a gal who just hit 90, huh?

Frankly, I've never really been able to comprehend what it was that people liked about her. Even in the '70s, when she starred in her own series, I felt she was capitalizing on the success — and longing for — the Mary Tyler Moore Show and tried to ride piggyback on that series's success.

If that was her intention, it failed. I think the series was canceled after just a few months. And I remember hearing a lot of jokes from the late–night crowd of the day (mostly Johnny Carson) about it.

But, I suppose, neither White nor those affiliated with the show could be blamed for trying to strike while the iron was hot. After all, isn't that a guiding principal behind just about every endeavor?

Sometimes, such gambles pay off. Other times they don't.

I suppose enough have paid off for White over the years — or else we probably wouldn't be observing her 90th birthday today.

Love Is All Around ...

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They just don't make 'em like Mary Tyler Moore anymore.

And, yes, I actually do mean that in two ways.

In no particular order:

• They certainly don't make sitcoms like the ones that featured Mary Tyler Moore in the 1960s and 1970s.
  
  She first came to people's attention as Laura Petrie, the wife of Dick Van Dyke in the show that bore his name. Only 23 when she was cast in the role, she won two Emmys for her work and confided that she was convinced "this will never happen again."

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  But it did — three more times as the star of her own series, the iconic Mary Tyler Moore Show in which she played a single career girl, the associate producer of a Minneapolis TV station's evening news.


• And they don't make people like Mary Tyler Moore anymore. Anyone who remembers watching her in the 1970s will tell you that.
  
  The Mary Tyler Moore Show was really an ensemble production with some truly talented people in the original cast — Ed Asner, Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Gavin MacLeod, Ted Knight. Others were added to it later on — Betty White and Georgia Engel.
  
  But it seemed to reflect Moore's personality. She never produced a local news show, but the series really seemed to be her story. Some series are like that. The actor or actress is so perfect for the role that the audience can't tell where reality and fantasy part ways.
  
  Maybe it was different for people who were old enough to remember when Laura Petrie was on primetime, but I never felt that her story was Moore's. I had no trouble at all with Mary Richards, though.

Moore, who celebrated her 75th birthday today, was nominated for an Academy Award after she and the cast of her TV series voluntarily ended it while it was still riding high in the ratings in 1977. She has appeared in numerous movies since the show went off the air, and she has even made some appearances on TV.

But nothing she has done since — and nothing she is likely to do in the future — really compares to her work on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. She really made it seem effortless, as if the series really did tell her story. As if Mary Richards' strengths and weaknesses were Moore's as well.

The audience was never certain if that was true, but there was one thing that was undeniable. Mary Richards had spunk.

And television in the 1970s was better because of it.

David Frye's Birthday

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I try, I really do try to keep up. But sometimes things just slip through the cracks. You know?

Last January, I was starting my second semester as an adjunct journalism professor in the local community college. I was busy, but I didn't realize I was that busy — anyway, somehow it completely slipped past me that one of my favorite impressionists died.

It slipped by me so completely that it was only recently that I learned he was dead, nearly 10 months after the fact.

He wasn't exactly young — nor even middle–aged, for that matter — so I guess his death wasn't much of a shock. I don't know if he had been sick or if he had enjoyed generally good health.

No, I'm not speaking of Rich Little — although I did have the opportunity to see Rich Little perform here in Dallas about nine years ago. Little, by the way, is still living.

I'm speaking of David Frye, who was rather popular during the Nixon presidency — although he probably wasn't too popular with Nixon himself. The Nixon years were Frye's best, but it was kind of a meteoric thing. His popularity really took off when Nixon was elected president in 1968, seemed to reach its peak during the Watergate scandal, then began to decline dramatically after Nixon resigned.

Frye continued to do impressions of the major political figures of his time — often as well as or better than Little, at least in my opinion — and, like Little, he did impressions of other celebrities, too — movie stars (like George C. Scott and Henry Fonda), athletes (like Muhammad Ali and O.J. Simpson), etc. — but it was his impression of Nixon that people seemed to remember, even when he died.

I, for one, loved listening to Frye's records when I was a boy. His impression of Nixon was so good Nixon's own mother probably couldn't have told the difference. But, as I say, there was so much more to his comedy.

In one of my favorite Frye albums — "Richard Nixon: A Fantasy" — Nixon was dreaming about the Watergate break–in and the investigation.

One segment had his vice president, Spiro Agnew (who was particularly smarmy, even in comparison to some of the people who have been vice president since his day), being interviewed by Bill Buckley, who asked him if he had prepared himself for the possibility of becoming president. (Frye provided both voices — as well as nearly all the other voices on the album — and was spot on, as always.)

Agnew replied that he believed Nixon was innocent and he believed the rest of the country did, too. Then Frye provided the voice of Agnew thinking something entirely different — "Oh, boy! President Agnew! President Agnew! That'll show all those guys back in high school who used to tease me with 'Spiro, Spiro is a zero, With a name like that he must be a queer–o!' "

His humor went far beyond an uncanny ability to sound like so many people — and an occasional tendency to offend. He often could summarize entire personalities in one or two well–crafted lines.

Anyway, today would have been his 78th birthday. It's the first birthday he's missed.

And, while I wish I could have said this to him while he was living, better late than never, I guess.

Happy birthday.

Chuck Berry Is 85

The fact that Chuck Berry has lived to his 85th birthday is a significant milestone, one that many of us feared he might not reach not too long ago.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Berry had collapsed at a New Year's show in Chicago. Thankfully, he seems to have rebounded.

There doesn't seem to be any real agreement on how rock 'n' roll came to be. About the only thing on which there does seem to be agreement is the idea that it originated in the South in what can only be described as a convergence of several musical styles — blues, country, jazz, gospel, folk, swing — that evolved into rock 'n' roll.

Because it was such an evolutionary kind of thing, it's been tough for music historians to pinpoint when the phrase "rock 'n' roll" was first applied to music. It was apparently used in the early part of the 20th century to describe both the fervor of the religious faithful and the ecstacy of a sexual encounter.

But the phrase caught on — in a musical sense — in the 1950s. Some people credit Bill Haley and the Comets and "Rock Around the Clock." Others say Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard deserve the credit.

They're all rock 'n' roll legends and all equally deserving of recognition, but I say Berry is as worthy as any, and "Johnny B Goode" is as good a demarcation point as you will find. It may be Berry's most recognizable song. It's bound to be the Berry song that has been covered the most, from Elvis, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and the others to Michael J. Fox in "Back to the Future."

If anything is absolutely certain, it is that rock 'n' roll has been around for a long time, so long that dictionaries don't agree on its definition.

Some dictionaries will tell you that "rock 'n' roll" is synonymous with "rock music" while others will say that rock 'n' roll preceded rock music and is a different genre, even though the two have many things in common.

I doubt that such distinctions have ever really mattered to Berry. As Bobby Gillespie wrote in The Guardian last year, "Berry started the global psychic jailbreak that is rock 'n' roll," but I suspect that, if asked, Berry would tell you that what has always mattered to him was whether the music sounded good, whether it made the listeners move their feet — and the rest of their bodies — and sing along (even if, like me, they have no real talent for singing).

And that, I suppose, tells you all you really need to know.

Rock 'n' roll is as much a state of mind as a state of being. It is at the heart of being young and thinking young.

It is why, at the age of 85, Chuck Berry is still singing and playing for audiences.

Happy birthday, Chuck, and many more.

How Terribly Strange; Paul Simon is 70

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"Can you imagine us years from today?
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be 70."

Paul Simon
"Old Friends" (1968)

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I have many memories of my mother, and one of the most lasting, I think, will always be her admiration for Paul Simon's music.

Mom was brought up in the Depression, and it nurtured a frugal side to her nature. When I was a child, she was not inclined to spend money recklessly (for example, when I was little, I remember that, for awhile, she gave me powdered milk because it was cheaper to add water than buy bottled milk at the store). Spending money on records was, for the most part, too reckless for her when she had two growing children to feed and clothe.

But she bought most of Simon and Garfunkel's albums, anyway, and she introduced my brother and me to their enduring harmonies.

When my brother and I were older, Simon and Garfunkel, who had split up several years earlier, reunited and went on tour. On a memorable August night only a few days before Mom's birthday, the whole family went to see them when they played in the Cotton Bowl here in Dallas.

It was Mom's kind of show, and I am glad I could share it with her. It is a memory that shines brightly for me now.

Mom's been gone for more than 15 years so, needless to say, we were all a lot younger in those days. And I know that time waits for no man.

Nevertheless, it's a bit stunning to think that Paul Simon is 70 today. Time, it turns out, doesn't march by. It sprints.

How "terribly strange" it is, as Simon wrote in his song "Old Friends" in 1968.

I observed back in the spring that Bob Dylan turned 70 in May, but somehow that seemed different to me. There was no TV in my home until I was in grade school so I have no memory of public figures who, prior to the time when our family did acquire a TV, were familiar to people who had one — except from the photos and films I have seen.

I don't recall the young Bob Dylan who burst onto the scene. The Dylan I knew always seemed older to me than Paul Simon — and not just by months, either.

Maybe it was because Paul Simon always came across as more naive — in his songs and his appearance. Dylan was a much more hardened realist, and he always seemed to look the part. Simon was a dreamer and a romantic. Even in middle age, he looked like a young boy.

His hair is gray now, but his face still has that youthful quality to it. In the attached video, Simon sings on last month's 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks — and, if you ignore the color of the hair peeking out beneath his baseball cap, he looks and sounds like he did 40 years ago.

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When I think of Paul Simon after his split with Art Garfunkel, I often think of his performance on the early Saturday Night Live wearing a turkey outfit for Thanksgiving and singing "Still Crazy After All These Years." He was the same old trusting, even gullible, starry–eyed dreamer he'd always been.

But I also think of the music my mother played on the family stereo when my brother and I were little. In hindsight, it is clear to me why the music appealed to Mom the way it did. Simon's songs were optimistic and sentimental, expressing hope, joy, sorrow, uncertainty, regret. Perhaps more than any other singer/songwriter of his generation, he sang of the wide range of human experience.

He spoke to — and for — millions. He continues to inspire today.

Happy birthday, Paul Simon.

The Century of Lucy

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"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age."

Lucille Ball (1911–1989)

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Historians have called the 20th century "the American century" because of all the world–changing developments that took place here.

I think it could easily be called the century of Lucy.

Lucille Ball would have been 100 years old today, and I have to believe she is just about as popular now as she was in her lifetime. Good comedy never goes out of style or becomes obsolete, and Lucy is still making 'em laugh.

You could say that Lucy was an expert on comedy. She led some comedy workshops and worked with some of the most talented performers of her time — and she observed once that comedy was something that could not be taught. You either had it or you didn't.

It goes without saying that she had it.

It also goes without saying, I suppose, that there were many changes during Lucy's lifetime, but here is something that might put it all into some kind of perspective. The world in which Lucy was born had automobiles but no electric traffic lights. The first one was installed the day before her third birthday.

It is tempting to believe that Lucy was always the beloved figure that she is now — but it wasn't always easy. She faced many challenges in her life. She lost her father before her fourth birthday. For a time, she was cared for by her stepfather's parents.

There were several Lucys, actually. There was the Lucy who began acting in movies and radio when she was in her 20s and blossomed into a star in her 30s. There was the Lucy who was probably TV's biggest star when she was in her 40s. Then, in her 50s, 60s and 70s, she divided her time between television and the movies.

Eventually, it added up to one of the longest careers in show business history — not too shabby for a girl who became America's most popular TV star playing a wannabe actress.

She was one of those women who always looked younger than she was — and appeared to do so effortlessly, although it must have been harder for her to achieve as she aged. Few people probably knew that she was in her 40s when I Love Lucy was the top–rated TV show in America.

She was almost 40 when she had her first child, Lucie, in 1951, about three months before the debut of I Love Lucy. Her second child, Desi Arnaz Jr., was born a year and a half later, after the show was a bona fide hit.

In fact, Lucy's pregnancy was written into the script, and the pre–recorded episode in which her character gave birth to a boy aired on the very day she gave birth to her real–life son.

There were many elements of Lucy's life that she worked into her show. Lucy's marriage to her co–star, Desi Arnaz Sr., for example, was a rich source of material for the Lucy–Ricky relationship on I Love Lucy — although, in reality, it was a sensitive subject. Not because of the mixed–race aspect but because Lucy was actually six years older than Desi.

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In those days, marriages between older women and younger men were not socially acceptable.

(There was an age discrepancy in my own family — between my mother's parents — that my parents didn't discover until both of my grandparents were deceased. The difference between them was only a little more than a year, but all their lives they claimed to have been born in the same year, whittling the difference to only a couple of months, which was socially excusable.)

Until they were outed, Lucy and Desi split the difference and told people they were both born in 1914.

Although the age disparity wasn't nearly as significant in the Lucy–Desi relationship as it is in some modern ones, the concept of cougar is far more acceptable now than it was in 1951. And, as I say, they had to be "outed" at the time.

Later in her life, Lucy spoke of how she missed the old studio system and felt that she owed a lot to it — because she didn't think she had much talent. I disagree. Her comedic gifts, as I say, are still making people laugh nearly a quarter of a century after her death. That's staying power.

I'm always interested in which I Love Lucy episodes are fan favorites. I believe you can learn a lot about someone simply by finding out which I Love Lucy he/she thinks was the best. There are so many options.

I've heard folks name the one where Lucy kept trying to tell Ricky she was pregnant. Or the one where Lucy and Ethel got jobs in a candy factory. Of course, there were many episodes that featured cameo appearances by the entertainers of the day when the Ricardos and the Mertzes went to California.

I guess my personal favorite, as I mentioned here a few months ago, was "Vitameatavegamin," but there were so many great episodes in that series that, as soon as I think of one I really like, I'm sure to think of two or three more that I think are equal to the first one.

If you are a Lucy fan, you'll have some opportunities to see her comic brilliance this weekend. In honor of her centennial, a weekend–long marathon of I Love Lucy episodes will be shown on The Hallmark Channel. And there are bound to be more. Check your local listings.

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Lucy is remembered as one of TV's early superstars; her movies are seldom mentioned in conversations about her career. However, if you'd rather see her movies on her birthday, Turner Classic Movies will be showing them as part of its annual "Summer Under the Stars" celebration — with today dedicated to Lucy on the big screen. And TCM has some good ones lined up. This morning, you can see Ball with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in "Without Love." This afternoon, you can see Lucy and Desi in "The Long, Long Trailer." Tonight, you can see Lucy with Hepburn and Ginger Rogers in "Stage Door."

And there are several others on today's schedule as well. You just really can't go wrong with Lucy.

Speaking of Lucy's movie career, I think it would be a mistake to think that all of Lucy's talents were in comedy. A few years after I Love Lucy went off the air, Frank Sinatra wanted her to appear with him in "The Manchurian Candidate," but director John Frankenheimer wanted Angela Lansbury.

The future star of Murder, She Wrote got the part, and she was rewarded for her work with an Oscar nomination. But it is intriguing to speculate what Lucy might have done with the role of the manipulative Mrs. Iselin.

She might have won.