Well, dear readers, lovely comments and e-mails and texts are still coming in about the show and that made yesterday, which had a fairly intolerable half-hour, tolerable. Everyone is loving Sami, which is what I wanted most of all, and I think they like the throwback nature of it. So, we’ll keep pushing it and trying to get more viewers – please let your friends know if you’d think they’d enjoy it and the more Facebook postings, the better, especially if you’re on any of the musical theater groups. ChasSmith started threads on two of them – Cast Recordings and Forgotten Musicals – so if you’re in those groups, add a response in those threads, it helps keep them at the top o’ the page. And now, I am sitting here like so much fish, in a romantic mood listening to The Romantic Moods of Jackie Gleason, one of his popular easy listening albums, which I loved as a young boy. I remember as a young teen only wanting to have a romance if this were the background music. Bobby Hackett’s hyper beautiful trumpet permeates these albums, and I always loved the way there’d be a barely heard tinkling piano, single notes, under the lush strings. These Capitol recordings were beautifully done. Just finished a beautiful Days of Wine and Roses and now I’m misty listening to Misty. I used to describe the sound of these to my engineer Vini – how they sounded like we were on a high hill at night, and I’d always ask for that in our mixes where it was appropriate. Anyway, it’s the perfect accompaniment to writing these here notes during a week where I will not allow anyone to negate the joy this week is bringing, hard as they may try and try they do. In fact, today’s contretemps almost took me to a bad place – seconds away from sending a really nasty response but changed it at the last minute because nope not doing that. I did manage to watch a motion picture entitled The Trials of Oscar Wilde, starring Peter Finch and James Mason from 1960, the better of the two competing Oscar Wilde films – yes, as soon as this one was announced, Fox decided to make a black-and-white cheapie with Robert Morley, which I haven’t seen it. That one beat this one out by a week and both suffered. Anyway, I know very little about Mr. Wilde so I found it very interesting and it sure was a frank movie for 1960 Britain, where homosexuality was still a crime – shameful – and that wasn’t made right until 2013. Everyone thinks that the updated 1967 law righted all the wrongs, but many people were imprisoned in the ensuing years. Not exactly something the UK should be proud of. Peter Finch was excellent, Mason was his always fine self and all the other actors were good. Not a happy story, but a strong one and one worth seeing. I found it on HBO-Max, I think. It was directed by Ken Hughes and produced by the folks who’d go on to do the Bond movies shortly thereafter. In the irony department, one of the actors in the film is named Ian Fleming, not THE Ian Fleming, but an Australian actor.
Yesterday was mostly okay save for the brief irritating interlude, which was brief and irritating. I was up at eleven after eight hours of sleep. Once up, I had a lot of e-mails to answer, checked out all the Sami activity, was dismayed that the galley didn’t arrive and wrote to my guy again, who told me the design department hadn’t gotten back to him and that he’d get hold of them this morning. There’s no excuse for a week to go by with the materials they were given. They could have finished in a few hours. I also copied my gal there so she’d know what’s going on. For food, I had a bacon cheeseburger and onion rings for food and that was fine. Then I had to get some stuff organized for our Emmy Awards submissions, which I did. Then I watched the movie.
Then the Firestick spazzed out and wasn’t showing me any of my apps. Nothing would fix it and I couldn’t remember how I did the restart thing, which helped the previous issue, so I had them call me. I got a guy with the personality of a stick and he had me do the usual stuff that never works – unplugging and plugging back in. Eventually, he took me to My Firestick TV in the help section, which is what I couldn’t remember, but instead of having me try the restart, which I’m pretty sure would have worked, he had me click on revert to the factory settings. I thought that would be a simple thing, but nooooo – it turned into a thirty-minute ordeal because when you click that it takes you back to the beginning, as if you’d never set it up. We had to go through all the steps and of course I couldn’t remember what the wi-fi password was so he had to wait while I called Spectrum and got it (I wrote it down this time), then I had to go through a bunch of other steps and finally all was back to normal. The first thing I did was try to play episode three of Sami, the one that wouldn’t play – and voila, it played fine, so this all is on Amazon, as they make the Firestick. Nothing to do with Spectrum or Internet speed.
Today, I’ll be up by eleven, I’ll do whatever needs doing, hopefully I’ll have an ETA on the galley, then at three I’m doing the Donald Feltham radio show with some of my personal favorite Sondheim things I’ve recorded, talking about Sami, and whatever else comes up. After that, I’ll get something to bring back home and eat, then I can watch, listen, and relax.
The rest of the week is more of Sami and book, Thursday we have a casting session, and then we’re shockingly heading towards a new month.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by eleven, do whatever needs doing, hopefully have an ETA, do the radio show, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: If we do a Zoom Q&A for Sami, please post what times and days through next Sunday that might work for you and we’ll see if we can pull it together. Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, not letting anything get in the way of joy this week, simply not having it.