"Because I was living at home, I was able to see more of Susie. There had been some faint indications of trouble in the relationship, though I was still convinced that we were going to keep going steady until we could get married. In an effort to romance her a bit, I decided to use some of my Tribune earnings for a night on the town. The two of us got dressed up and went along to the Blue Angel, a small night club in Manhattan. There was a twenty-five dollar minimum, but since Susie and I did not drink, we used it up having dinner. The floor show that evening consisted of an opening act by a new young comedian, Orson Bean, and two featured singers, Josh White and Eartha Kitt. I still remember Bean's opening line. He came out, looking rather nervous, and said, "Good evening. I am Orson Bean, Harvard '48. Yale nothing." Josh White sang songs I knew from Shaker Village and even Taconic. It was, as it turned out, the only time I have ever been to a night club. I guess if you get something right the first time, there is no point in doing it again."
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
SAD NEWS
Several days ago I read a brief news item about the comic actor Orson Bean, who died at 91 when he was struck by a car. For 68 years, I have felt a small personal tie to Orson Bean, because of this experience, set forth in my Autobiography. The time was the summer of '52:
"Because I was living at home, I was able to see more of Susie. There had been some faint indications of trouble in the relationship, though I was still convinced that we were going to keep going steady until we could get married. In an effort to romance her a bit, I decided to use some of my Tribune earnings for a night on the town. The two of us got dressed up and went along to the Blue Angel, a small night club in Manhattan. There was a twenty-five dollar minimum, but since Susie and I did not drink, we used it up having dinner. The floor show that evening consisted of an opening act by a new young comedian, Orson Bean, and two featured singers, Josh White and Eartha Kitt. I still remember Bean's opening line. He came out, looking rather nervous, and said, "Good evening. I am Orson Bean, Harvard '48. Yale nothing." Josh White sang songs I knew from Shaker Village and even Taconic. It was, as it turned out, the only time I have ever been to a night club. I guess if you get something right the first time, there is no point in doing it again."
"Because I was living at home, I was able to see more of Susie. There had been some faint indications of trouble in the relationship, though I was still convinced that we were going to keep going steady until we could get married. In an effort to romance her a bit, I decided to use some of my Tribune earnings for a night on the town. The two of us got dressed up and went along to the Blue Angel, a small night club in Manhattan. There was a twenty-five dollar minimum, but since Susie and I did not drink, we used it up having dinner. The floor show that evening consisted of an opening act by a new young comedian, Orson Bean, and two featured singers, Josh White and Eartha Kitt. I still remember Bean's opening line. He came out, looking rather nervous, and said, "Good evening. I am Orson Bean, Harvard '48. Yale nothing." Josh White sang songs I knew from Shaker Village and even Taconic. It was, as it turned out, the only time I have ever been to a night club. I guess if you get something right the first time, there is no point in doing it again."
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7 comments:
If the inflation calculator I used is accurate, that 1952 $25 is now worth nearly ten times as much! Quite a night on the town.
It appears the former Blue Angel space, closed in 1964, is now the Carvi Hotel.
Orson Bean was omnipresent on TV in the years I watched, fifties and early sixties, game shows, drama series, you name it. But the routine I remember most was his creating a fir tree from a rolled-up newspaper, which was probably on the Ed Sullivan show. Having just looked up his Wikipedia article, I was surprised to see that his father, George Frederick Burrows, was one of the founders of the ACLU.
I remember Bean well both from TV and his later incarnations. He was a natural surrealist even in his mundane outings.
I remember Orson Bean mainly from his role in the movie Anatomy of a Murder starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and others. Bean played a psychiatrist whose testimony lent credence to the accused killer's defense of insanity by the fact of irresistible impulse. Great movie. The judge in the movie was played by Joseph Welsh, the lawyer who is rightly famous for asking the Senator from Wisconsin during the Army-McCarthy hearings "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" McCarthy's counsel during these hearing was the odious Roy Cohn, later consigliere to the current occupant of the White House.
I haven't commented on the blog for a while, but I am an avid reader of it. I would like to add that some of the most trenchant and morally incisive commentary on US politico-legal matters is published on the Facebook site of Tobias Barrington Wolff. I I am proud to be a part of the UPenn intellectual community with such as him.
I inherited my abilities from my sons. An odd quirk of evolutionary genetics.
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