The Greatest Television Performer of All Time

Theater is often thought of as a writer's medium,
but from the standpoint of the director and the actor,
the weight definitely falls with the actor who can
do whatever he wants while up on the stage.

Even the incomparable William Shakespeare can
do nothing if some actor decides to add his own
lines to Hamlet's soliloquy.

Film belongs to the director.  The actor can do what
he or she likes, but the editing can change everything.
The look of sorrow can be cut after his friend dies
and cut in when she realizes that despite her husband's
death, his money is still out of reach.  The director
controls the performance.

Today television is thought of as a producer's medium.
It is the producer who sets an esthetic for the show
which both the actors and the director must follow.
A director does not come in and change the producer's
way of covering a scene.  A new director lets the DP
show him how scenes are covered on the show and
works with the guest actors a little.

But in the early days of television - when it was
usually broadcast live - it was the performer's medium
par excellence.  Not only were you as live as in theater
but you had an audience in the millions - larger in one
night than a hit film would have in its whole run.

And in those exciting, heady days of television, the
show belonged to the performer who could take
control of the moment and make it his or her own.
And no one grabbed the attention of the camera
and those both in the studio audience and on
the other side of the lens and then held it like
Dean Martin.

Don't get me wrong:  Martin was a very good film
actor too.  The Matt Helm films and his films with
Lewis at their best often have the feel of the actors
writing the movie as it unfolds; but it's in his live
television performances, where his own good humor
overcomes any need for taking the proceedings too
seriously and in which his charm seems equal to any
darkness - and just imagine the shadow of fear hanging
over duck and cover America - that his full genius really
comes into his own.

No performer since the days of live television has really
had a chance to develop as Martin did, therefore his status as
the greatest television performer of all time is probably
as safe as Joe Dimaggio's 56 game hitting streak. 

This clip is a perfectly ordinary one, nothing special
by the standards of his show, yet Dean puts his guest
completely at ease, because he's in complete control
and uses that to his guests advantage; and the comraderie
that flows between him and the other performer is irresistible:


Dean Martin Show Clip

Born Too Early, In Memory of Kit Carsson

There are about forty minutes left on the first anniversary of
Kit Carsson's death.  Last February 4th she died from what
were probably complications of cancer, but since she refused
to be treated when she felt herself declining again, we'll not
know for sure.

Kit was not only a dear friend of mine.  She was the collaborator
who except for Michael Maggio had the largest influence in
pushing me into trying theater.  She directed my second produced
play, Sleepwalker, in a basement.    It became my most produced
play, and she even led one in Berkeley.

For a while we had a theater company called Marlowe's Swan,
maybe the most obscure company of what was the Golden
Age of Chicago Store Front Theater before Curious Theater
Branch moved to the Lunar Cabaret, back when Paula Killen
seemed to have a new one woman show every week and
Theater Oobleck was mounting the impossibly inventive and
moving plays of Mickle Maher such as The Hunchback Variations.

Kit never directed another play of mine.  She did a wonderful
Hapgood, which I consider the ideal Stoppard production.  She
explained to me that a double agent works for both sides - cold
war still barely on, you know - and who prospers from her
information has to do with which side uses her more deftly, not
with where her deepest loyalty supposedly lies.

Everything she directed now is lost in the tangles of a very
few people's memory and in several capsule reviews in weekly
papers she had long since given up sending out.

All that's left is a blog she wrote for a single person - and
for me too I suppose, since she did show it to me - but which
she never showed to that person.   Kit died of a broken heart.
I really believe that.  Not long before she died she told me
that she had a dream in which her face was buried in a
snowbank.  She remembers a voice, probably her own, saying,
"If you don't lift your head, you're going to die."

I think she made the decision to NOT lift her head.
Kit felt she was born 15 or so years too early, and that when
she got sick enough to need home nursing, she met
her soulmate, only to find the difference between them
was a little too much to be overcome.  As long as Rachel
was there, Kit was happy:  she didn't really need romance;
she just needed Rachel around.  But when Kit got well
enough to not need a nurse anymore, Rachel left.  Kit
did fine for a few years, and she started a blog - to Rachel.

She did not publicize it, and she never showed it to Rachel.
She showed it only to me for my feedback on how to improve
her poems.  With Rachel gradually  passing out of her life all
together.  Kit used to say to me, she always hoped as long as
she lived that Rachel would think of her at least one more time.

At her death she left it up to me whether to leave her
blog up.  I took over the administration of it and left
it up, posting one more of her poems she wrote near
her death.  I do not have the heart to take it down.
I feel it is less a collection of love poems, than a novel,
mainly in verse, charting one sensitive woman's unbearably
painful love for another.   I wish there were a button for
blogspot which you could push and reverse the order of
 the posts.  I would read them from her first to her last,
but if you choose to read them, read them in whatever order
you desire.

One final note:

As far as I know, Rachel, Kit's beloved has never
read these posts or even knows about them. I don't
know if she ever guessed Kit's feelings for her.  She
called me one afternoon to tell me she felt perhaps
she had said too much to Rachel, and Rachel wouldn't
be back.  From what Kit told me, it wasn't clear that
she had.  If she had ever showed Rachel this blog,
it would have all been clear, but she never did.
Here it is:

Rachel is Gone