RIP to my dad, who passed away this morning at age 79. Ironically, he and my mom had just moved to assisted living on Friday (for those of you not in the US, it's kind of an intermediate step between living at home and living in a nursing home -- you have your own apartment, but there's extra care available if you need it and your meals are included). He wasn't a film or TV star, though we all appeared on the morning news way back in 1982 as part of a feature on this newfangled thing called "personal computing." He was a doctor, and he treated and/or knew a number of famous people: Cab Calloway and Benoit Mandelbrot (father of the fractal) were both patients, and Anna Adams, another patient, used to perform live accompaniment to silent films and was the best friend of Liliian (or was it Dorothy?) Gish. He also knew Dr. Oz as a colleague years before Oz became a TV star, and Warren Zevon's cousin Sandy was another doctor at the hospital.
My dad had a head for trivia, particularly for old ads and "that guy" actors, which is one of the traits he passed on to me. One of his favorites was Eugene Pallette, who played Friar Tuck in The Adventures of Robin Hood and Fray Felipe in The Mark of Zorro, both of which he watched with us many times as my brother and I were growing up. He could do a perfect impression of Pallette saying "Forgive me, Lord!" after knocking out a guard, which Pallette did in Robin Hood and (IIRC) recreated in MOZ a few years later. He also did a great impression of Feodor Chaliapin, Jr., saying, "I'm so confused!" in Moonstruck. And he was a huge fan of Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows, so that when I saw My Favorite Year (one of Peter O'Toole's best films and one of my favorites), I knew who Joe Bologna as King Kaiser was supposed to be.
He also used to quote the tag line from a fake ad, I think from the Ernie Kovacs Show, for Old Frothingslosh, "the pale, stale ale with the foam on the bottom."
He was the kindest, sweetest man I ever knew, and while I didn't exactly follow in his footsteps, I try to bring the same warmth and empathy to my interactions with students that he did in his visits with patients. I hope I bring some of that here too. At the very least, I'm quite sure that my love of acting, movies, and the whole craft of entertaining comes in large measure from him. I miss you, Dad, and thank you.
ETA: Olde Frothingslosh was
not from the Ernie Kovacs Show after all! As it happens, it was part of a radio show by Rege Cordic on KDKA, a Pittsburgh radio station my dad must have listened to when he was at the University of Pittsburgh for medical school. While there, he used to watch TV with a mouse that lived in his apartment wall and would come out whenever the TV was on, and he also told a story about how he slipped on a very steep, very icy hill in the winter and would have gone straight into oncoming traffic if his slide hadn't been stopped by a convenient mailbox. Anyway, after all these years, I now know the true source of the fake ad, and I can add it to my (and your) collection of useless trivia. He'd be proud of that, I think.