7/31/22
Newsletter58
The Crack of Dawn
It’s night.
When I was about eight years old I understood that “anti” meant against. So I asked my dad, “What’s a Semite?” Dad replied, “A wandering Jew.” I thought, “Well, we live in a house, so that doesn’t apply to us.” Then I asked him, “Why don’t people like Jews?” And my dad replied, “They smell. Orthodox Jews don’t bathe.” My father’s wisdom.
A priest, a minister and a rabbi are asked, “When does life begin?” The priest says, “When the sperm touches the egg.” The minister says, “When the baby is born.” The rabbi says, “When the kids move out.”
In my kitchen is a framed poster for the film, The Killers (1964). This film is a remake of the 1946 version of The Killers, which was Burt Lancaster’s debut. The remake was directed by Don Siegel, who I mentioned in an earlier newsletter. The screenplay was written (based on an Ernest Hemingway short story) by Gene L. Coon, who would soon become the head producer of the TV show, Star Trek, of which he wrote several episodes, wherein he invented Klingons and StarFleet Command. The Killers stars: John Cassavetes, Angie Dickenson, Lee Marvin, and Ronald Reagan as the violent mob boss. In one scene Reagan smacks the crap out of Angie Dickenson with a magazine. Reagan had already made his move into politics, becoming president of the Screen Actors Guild, and was about to run for governor of California. He decided that he couldn’t play parts like the one in The Killers and still be electable, so he quit the movies.
When the internet first appeared in the mid-1990s, Francis Coppola started his website, American Zoetrope. He had an “open chat” and there certainly couldn’t have been many people online attending. In any case, after a few stupid questions by other people, I wrote, “I’m from Detroit. Aren’t you, too?” He explained that he was born in Detroit, and the Ford in his name was after Henry Ford Hospital where he was born. I then asked, “How much of George Patton’s real dialogue did you use in your script for Patton?” This set off an enormous answer, as he explained how he used as much of Patton’s real dialogue as he could get into the script, including the entire opening. I asked, “Patton really said, ‘We are going to rip out their living guts and grease the treads of our tanks?’” Coppola replied, “You can’t make that up.”
The longest-running model of an automobile is the Fiat 500, first introduced in 1936, and still sold today. It was immediately nicknamed, “Topolino,” meaning Mickey Mouse. With many changes to the engine, but almost none to the body, that car has sold well for 86 years.
Returning to the WWII adventures of the shortest, and the only Jewish American paratrooper, Rod Serling, he spent most of the war in the Philippines. He and his squad were dropped way behind enemy lines and were to be resupplied by parachute drops. The little planes that would resupply them were immediately destroyed by the Japanese. Rod Serling and his squad, with no food or extra ammunition, spent ten days fighting their way out of the jungle. They resorted to eating insects, and Serling remembered eating a foot-long caterpillar. When a plane was finally sent with supplies, it dropped a big wooden box attached to a parachute. One of the American soldiers was so hungry he ran out to catch the box and was crushed and killed.
Two old Jewish men are talking. One asks the other, “How’s your sex life?” The other old man says, “Sex life? I have no sex life.” The first man says, “Then you don’t know the secret of a long sex life. The secret is rye bread.” The other man goes directly to a bakery and says to the girl behind the counter, “Give me ten loaves of rye bread.” The girl replies, “Ten loaves. It’ll get hard.” He says, “Give me twenty!”
It's day.