How to Beat the High Cost of Living was a 1980 American crime comedy film starring Jane Curtin, Susan Saint James and Jessica Lange as a trio of desperately strapped for cash housewives who decide to steal the money from a huge glass ball set up at a local mall as a promotional event. While they are trying to do so, a light pole falls on the ball, shattering it and sending the bills flying. The trio grab the cash, nobody gets arrested, and Curtin’s character Elaine finds love and happiness with the town’s top cop.
Jane Curtain and Susan Saint James starred together in the sitcom Kate and Allie about two divorced women who shared an apartment with their kids. The show won two Emmys for Curtain.
While guest-hosting Saturday Night Live in 1981, Susan Saint James met her third husband, then-SNL executive producer Dick Ebersol; they married within the year. The marriage produced three sons, Charles, William, and Edward (Teddy).
On November 28, 2004, a private plane carrying Ebersol and two of their sons crashed during an attempted takeoff from Montrose Regional Airport in Colorado. Ebersol and son Charles survived, but son Teddy, age 14, died, as did the pilot and flight attendant Warren T. Richardson III. Teddy Ebersol’s Red Sox Fields at Lederman Park in Boston, MA is named in memory of Saint James’s son, and an episode of the television series Scrubs was dedicated to him.
In early 1980, as Saturday Night Live wrapped up its fifth season, show creator Lorne Michaels stepped down as executive producer, citing burnout; his departure also lead to the departure of the entire cast, and most of the writing staff.
After the mass exodus, associate producer Jean Doumanian was elevated to the role of executive producer for the 1980-81 season. Doumanian’s tenure at the helm of SNL was tumultuous, and the season was widely panned.
After cast member Charles Rocket uttered the word “fuck” in an episode in late February, the show was put on hiatus. In the weeks that followed, Doumanian was fired, Dick Ebersol (who had worked with Michaels to develop the show) was brought back as executive producer, and several cast members were also fired.
SNL returned from the hiatus for one episode in April, before a writers’ strike scuttled the remainder of the season. Ebersol remained as executive producer for the next (1981-82) season, with only Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo returning from the previous season’s cast.
Besides Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels also created and produced The Tonight Show and Late Night (with Letterman, Conan, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers).
Lorne Greene was born in Ottawa, and read the news for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio long before he became famous on TV’s Bonanza. He was nicknamed “The Voice of Doom” for the combination of his deep voice and the usually gloomy World War II news and the casualty lists that he read.
Bonanza, an American western television series, ran on NBC from 1959 to 1973. At 14 seasons and 431 episodes, it is NBC’s longest-running western, and ranks overall as the second-longest-running western series on U.S. network television, behind Gunsmoke, which aired on CBS.
In 2002, Bonanza was ranked # 43 on TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. *Gunsmoke *was # 40 on that list.
The Big Valley ran as a TV western series for four seasons, from 1965 to 1969. It was set in Stockton CA and loosely based on the Hill Ranch of western Calaveras County which existed from 1855 to 1931 and was about 30 miles NE of Stockton. Today the ranch is covered by the Camanche Reservoir.
The Big Valley ran as a TV western series for four seasons, from 1965 to 1969. It was set in Stockton CA and loosely based on the Hill Ranch of western Calaveras County which existed from 1855 to 1931 and was about 30 miles NE of Stockton. Today the ranch is covered by the Camanche Reservoir.
(Double post – damned 50X errors!)
In the late 1960s, actor Lee Majors was a rising young star, thanks to his role on the TV western The Big Valley. In 1969, Majors was offered the starring role in the film Midnight Cowboy, but was forced to decline, as The Big Valley had been picked up for an additional season, and production of the series conflicted with the film shoot.
Instead, the role in Midnight Cowboy went to Jon Voight, who received an Academy Award nomination for it.
Out of college, Lee Majors was offered an NFL tryout with the Cardinals of (then) St. Louis. He chose acting over football.
“Out of Africa” is both the name of a memoir by Karen Blixen of her life in British East Africa, and the theory that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and then migrated to other parts of the world.
The African Great Lakes are located in the East African Rift Valley of western Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique. They include Lake Victoria, the third-largest fresh water lake in the world by area, Lake Tanganyika, the world’s second-largest freshwater lake by volume and depth, and Lake Malawi, the world’s eighth-largest fresh water lake by area. They contain more water than the Great Lakes of North America and account for 25% of the Earth’s unfrozen fresh water.
CATS the movie, which premiere on December 16, 2019, stars Francesca Hayward as Victoria, Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella, and the legendary Dame Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy.
The Five Books of Moses are the first five books in the Bible, in the Old Testament. They are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These books are also called the Torah, of the Jewish Bible, and they are also called the Pentateuch. For hundreds of years they were not written down. They were passed down from generation to generation orally before Moses, it is attributed, wrote them down.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat contains the lyric:
Potiphar was cool and so fine;
But my wife would never toe the line
It’s all there in chapter thirty-nine
Of Genesis
The aging lawyer and former presidential candidate Matthew Harrison Brady (an expy of William Jennings Bryan) in the play Inherit the Wind, loosely based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, recites the names of the Five Books of Moses, including Genesis, as he insists upon his rock-solid faith in God.
Conservatives and religious folks have long decried the play and movie Inherit the Wind.
Guess they don’t understand the concept of a drama based on true events.
Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame spent his career working as a banker at the Bank of England; he retired from the Bank in 1908, at age 49, due to ill health, having reached the post of Secretary of the bank.
Grahame had been writing since his twenties; after his retirement, he adapted the bedtime stories he had told to his son, Alastair, into the children’s book for which he is best known, The Wind in the Willows, which was first published that same year (1908).
In 1929, A.A. Milne, who was the creator and author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, adapted The Wind in the Willows for the stage, as the play Toad of Toad Hall.