David Shanske

• The Jarmels
• Kid Kyle
• Barbara Harris and The Toys
• Vito Picone and The Elegants
• Jay Siegel’s Tokens
• Cancelled: Lenny Dell and The Demensions

I’ve been a fan of 50s music since I became fond of the classic movie, Back to the Future, as a child, and came to listen to a lot of music from that era.

The audience was also from that era. The majority of people there were of an older bent. The Jarmels were only 33% original, and 66% replacement. But I am always struck by the performances by doo wop groups, and what they do with their hands and feet while performing…something you can’t hear in the recording. The Jarmels only had one hit, A Little Bit of Soap.

Kid Kyle was one of the youngest people there, except me. Of course, he got paid. He’s just under 22 and has been singing doo-wop since he was 8. It is nice to see that these songs will not die with their originators and original fans.

The Toys were formed in 1961 in Jamaica, Queens. Barbara Harris, the lead singer of the Toys, is still actively touring with two younger musicians. While it was my least favorite act, mostly because I found the pitch painful because I was too close to the right speaker( 5 rows from the front), Harris was impressive in the energy she is still able to convey. She had several Senior Citizens dancing in the aisles.

The Elegants also only had a single hit…Little Star, which Vito Picone recorded when he was 17. Now 75, he and the remaining Elegants performed not only that song, but a doo-wop cover of Ray Charles’ Georgia(Picone oddly put on dark sunglasses for that), as well as several other songs.

Finally, the Tokens appeared. Out of these groups, I had seen the Tokens perform before. Their version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, with Jay Siegel still able to hit the high notes he hit in 1961 is still impressive, and despite other recordings predating it, is generally the best known version of the song.

The group started in Brooklyn, and Neil Sedaka was one of its early members. The Tokens also produced other musical acts, such as the Chiffons, Randy and the Rainbows, the Happenings, etc.

For anyone interested in their next concert, the same production group is bringing Vito Picone back, along with the Happenings, the Marcels, The Tymes, and The Excellents on Saturday, March 25th, 2017 at 7:30PM, also at the Colden Auditorium at Queens College. Call 718-423-8394 for more information.

The event was also the first I brought my new 360 degree camera to. It is interesting to take a video where you can see not only the audience, the performers…but me reacting to them. That’s a bit too much me in the shot. I like a bit more subtlety.

But there is some part of me that wishes random people still formed doo-wop groups. Part of me would enjoy the experience of singing with one at least once.

The episode that aired last night, entitled, How the Sausage is Made…has Sherlock Holmes coming up with a conspiracy where there is a enough profit in the FDA classifying artificially grown meat as a ‘meat substitute’ instead of as meat to allow Jews to eat cheeseburgers and Muslims to eat pork that someone would kill to ensure it.

During the course of the episode, Holmes tries to explain kosher law, among other things….that food is broken out into meat and dairy, and a third category that is neither…one he calls Parevah. I usually say Pareve, but even par-veh is correct. I’ve never heard anyone call it pareva, to be honest and I asked around this evening. There isn’t one person who could look up the common pronunciation. One would assume the character might be wrong, but in the scene he had just met with some rabbis discussing the issue, so he should have just heard it. On the other hand, if you google pareve, and click the pronounciation, it pronounces it paravah also, I embedded Google’s pronunciation below. Either someone tell me they’ve heard it pronounced as three syllables or someone at Google please correct it.

Perhaps in a universe where the Convocation of Orthodox Rabbis(I’m assuming as a stand-in for the OU, the Orthodox Union) exists, the issues are different. I confess to not be as familiar with the Halal certification bodies in the U.S. but I am fairly familiar with the kosher ones.

So in the end, Holmes and Watson lead the murderers to believe that the bodies that certify kosher and halal food will, because of the suspicious murder, never certify the artificial meat as ‘pareva'(sorry, it just annoys me) and that the whole murder would therefore be pointless as the product would be relegated to the vegan aisle. And if someone confeeses to the murder, the rabbis and the imams will change their mind because ‘murder is not kosher.’ I would hope that the two characters are lying through their teeth, but I would hope that two individuals who are counting on a big payday from kosher and halal sales would know better the issue if they are going to kill for it.

The truth of the matter is that the issue of whether meat grown in a lab would be considered not to be meat, and thus not subject to the prohibitions of keeping meat and dairy separate is not an issue so clear cut for many reasons, so it would not be something that they would hold over the heads of would-be murderers like a business transaction. If you just search for kosher artificially grown meat, the first few entries lay out how much debate would be necessary to settle the issue. And in my personal opinion, it is much more likely to be classified as meat.

That said, the suggestion that all Jews are sitting around, clamoring for the opportunity to find a loophole to eat cheeseburgers and other food which is not kosher(the same for Muslims) suggests an extreme level of cynicism.

I have to say, while television is often lacking in realism, and often poorly written, this seems to be a case of a writer trying to come up with a clever story, but failing to do five seconds of research to put the issue into a realistic perspective. And, while poor characterizations of Jews on television has always annoyed me, sloppy storytelling annoys me even more.

Finally, it is the character of John Hancock who finally loses his temper and asks him about it. Portrayed by Howard Caine in the movie, Morris admits that the New York Legislature has never given him specific instructions on anything. “Have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature? They speak very fast and very loud and nobody listens to anybody else with the result that nothing ever gets done.”

Nothing much has changed in New York politics since 1776…or at least when Stone wrote the play in the late 60s. Stone also wrote the screenplay for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three(the original, not the horrible John Travolta remake), which also pokes a lot of fun at New York, as well as the 1997 musical(not to be confused with the movie) Titanic.

I actually repurchased 1776 this year on Blu-Ray. The new version includes an all-new commentary, an extended version, and some deleted scenes. I found this lengthy explanation of the various cuts over the years in the Amazon commentary. To summarize:

• The movie premiered in 1972, approximately forty minutes shorter than the director’s original cut.
• “Cool Cool Considerate Men” was cut after a negative reaction from the White House regarding the scene’s anti-conservative tone, studio executives agreed to remove eight solid minutes. So great was the pressure that the original negative and all known parts of the scene were destroyed. A search began for any version of the missing footage.
• The restored film on the laserdisc was presented in the widescreen format and remixed for true stereo sound using the original multi-track units (in some cases as many as twenty-four tracks). It contained a total of 40 minutes of footage not seen since the two premiere screenings in 1972. Other highlights of the Laser Disc version were the full opening credits, newly incorporated character closeups and additional music for several songs. The running time was once again 180 minutes. The 1992 Pioneer Laser Disc Special Edition of 1776 was one of the most ambitious video restorations ever performed.
• For the 2002 DVD release, the replaced footage was been repaired, giving the DVD a much cleaner look visually than the laserdisc, but the film was been shortened to 166 minutes.
• Finally, in 2015, the director’s cut of 1776 has made its way to Blu Ray and it includes a “branching version of the movie” with both an extended and the director’s cut, which incorporate many of these missing moments mentioned from the Laser Disc,scrubbed up and restored to as pristine a quality as possible.
• The Extended cut has everything that was on the Laser Disc except: Overture and Entr’acte created for the LD; Scene of Jefferson (sitting on a window sill in Congress) watching some children playing (rather patriotically) as a young girl looks back up at him and smiles; An extended scene (just after the conclusion of Yours, Yours, Yours): Instead of the blackout (that now occurs between scenes) there was one continuous scene showing the breaking dawn as Franklin arrives, after taking a piece of fruit in the marketplace, and finds Adams asleep on the stairs below Jefferson’s room while a lamplighter blows out a nearby streetlight; The underscoring to John and Abigail’s final scene [leading into “Compliments”] — though the underscoring to Franklin’s entrance has been restored.

On a related note, anyone want the DVD copy? I can give you a good price? And I just noticed the 42nd anniversary edition of Taking of Pelham 123 is out…with interviews with surviving production individuals, and the single surviving lead actor….think I should click? The one saving grace of Blu-Rays lately vs streaming are the extras they bring to the table, especially for classics. They keep rereleasing things with more material and trying to get me to buy it. They may succeed in this case.