Plays The Boy Scouts and more

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I posted a picture today about a peacock, and somebody
just suggested it become the new state bird. Well, because
we were talking during the Blazer Show about that this effort,
this bypart, is an effort in the legislature to have
an official state fish. So I guess the state bird
the only thing I can see because I've had several
messages today about peacocks and people having them as pets,

(00:21):
and they are becoming invasive in some areas in the
state of Ohio. How do they get along with the
Canadian geese?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Those Canadian geese are pretty mean.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
That's what I'm saying now. If the peacock and the
Canadian geese are not friends, and they could perhaps get
the Canadian geese to sell their nest and move to
another neighborhood, I don't think they be that bad.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
No, I don't think they'll do that though.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Why geese don't move? Let's Canadian geese go wherever they want.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
They might if the peacocks make them.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
I don't know. The look at them.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
They're from Canada. They're already invading. They invaded the United States.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
But they're not They're not welcome here, you know, you
tell them that. I just I don't like those things.
They're so mean. They are they are so mean, they
will chase you at the park, in a parking lot.
They just I don't know what makes them so aggressive.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
They're colonizers, they're birds, for goodness sake.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
What makes them so blasted aggressive that they think they
can get away with that?

Speaker 2 (01:21):
No, Canadians do have that reputation.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
No they don't, No, they don't. Oh, Canadians are very mellow.
What a speaking of? I was googling here trying to
find Oh, hang on a second, your mom just posted
a picture on Facebook. Oh you look so cute. My
mom did. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Oh is it in Florida?

Speaker 1 (01:47):
I don't know. It says you were maybe eight or seven,
eight or nine years old. Moms are wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That was down in Cape Canaveral
in Florida. Dad had to go down there for training
of some sort.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
I thought maybe you went down there see if you
could hit your ride home. No, no, back to the
Mothership at least.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
No they did.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
The NASA didn't have the technology then to send us
all the way back.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
But let me see here. I got a couple of
messages I wanted to go over Sheila, saying that didn't
know you were a theater guy. You should get back
into it. I wish I could, but I don't have
the time. I just I seriously do not. There's no
possible way that I could accommodate it. You've got to

(02:35):
be able to rehearse, and then, you know, if you
do the shows for three weeks or so, that's weekends
that you've got to There's just too many other things
going on in life for me to do it. It
was fun. I enjoyed it a great deal, and uh,
you know that was then. This is now. Now is busy.
I miss it. I do that. That's standing on stage

(02:57):
and creating a person, taking written words off of a
page and actually making them a person. That was awesome.
But that was then. Do you ever been a theater guy?
You ever do what he plays? No?

Speaker 2 (03:10):
But I like going to him, But no, I could
never do that. I can never do that.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
You could.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
I can't talk in front of five people in a room,
let alone like act or whatever memorized lines that.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
There's no way the stuff that we did, we did
one that nobody had ever heard. It was an original.
I cannot remember the playwrights named David something or other. Now,
there was an old old film Drums Drums. Was it
Drums along the Mohawks? I think it was sure something
along those lines of Western and Uh. This guy wrote

(03:46):
one called Bums Below the Mohawk, which was it was
a took place in the Houston Street subway station in
New York and h that was a fun show even
though nobody had ever heard of it because it was
an original piece. I love that I played a bomb

(04:07):
and he was kind of a drinka his p hogy
and hogy was uh, you know, just uh. He was
very casual about living in a subway station. And there
was a line the guy who was playing the uh,
the Louis Depama of the subway station, his name's Jack Baby.
He's passed away, now, Jack was. He loved to tell

(04:29):
you he was an equity actor. He held a Union card.
He was an equity actor. He had a nice little
bit part in the Jesse Owen story. And he was
the the voice for many years for a Harding hospital.
If you're old enough to remember those old commercials that

(04:49):
ran on the radio where the guy did a monolig
say hey, look, Jeane, you know sometimes people have problems
real raspy type voice. Well, Jack and as part of
his props in his cage, had some Playboy magazines and
I am asked if I had seen somebody. I said,

(05:11):
I saw him down the street watching TV through the
store window. I think it was Leave It to Beaver.
Jack is supposed to throw a line at that point,
and he missed the queue. He wasn't on stage, so
I walked into his little, uh, his little cage there.
I'm going, yeah, that beaver, that beaver, I love that beaver.
And then I picked up the Playboy, dropped the centerfold

(05:33):
with and hello missus, cleaver Hey. And when the audience
laughed at that, Jack heard laughter where it should not
have been and realized he was supposed to be on stage. Yeah,
it came out and we got back in. But that
was it was just a fun show. It was. It
was loose, but it was it was a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
I've always respected the people who do the the plays.
I'm sure acting on a set is just as diff
but man, the people and plays who you're out there
in front of people and they go back and do
costume changes and then like it's a two or three
hour show depending on what they're doing and all the
dialogue that the main characters have to remember.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
We did one called The Robert Bridegroom where Joy Schmidt,
who was one of my favorite ladies ever. She has
also passed away now, but she played Salome, this this vixen,
and there's a saw Salome and there's a song in
the show where she's she's grabbed by the townspeople, put

(06:34):
in a burlap sack and thrown down a well. There's
a trap door in the stage for the well well.
There was an obviously we prop change. Joy went behind
the assembled group went down into the trap door. We
then took the burlap bag that looked like Joy was
in it and tossed it around on stage and then

(06:57):
threw it over and down the well. And little Seth
and Sarah, who were in the audience, their parents were
in the show. They thought anti Joy really got thrown
down that hole and they threw a fit man and
they you know, it was a little theater off Broadway.
They were maybe twenty feet from the stage, but they

(07:18):
thought Joy went down that well, and they that's the beauty.
That is the beauty of being on stage. You can
you can literally get into you're you're they're in you
and you're in them. It's a very interactive thing, and
it's it's if you if you're young, especially and you've

(07:40):
got plenty of time, and you've never considered getting up
on stage, I would look go look up some auditions,
even a chorus part, just for the experience, because it is, Uh,
it's pretty awesome stuff. Nothing like live live performance. Uh.
Your your girl Ella still does a lot of stuff
on stage. Yeah, and I have yet to make it

(08:01):
out to see I want to see her work.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
I mean, she's pretty funny just talking her, so I'm
sure she does great.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
I would imagine.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yeah, Well, she's got a very good sense of humor,
a good personality. Johnny Hill performs. He's a musician, Yes, yes,
and that's you know. I Mark hasn't in a while,
but you know, Mark's a drummer. He doesn't talk about
it very much.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
I do know that.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
I don't think Elliott does anything except sleep and come
to work.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
I mean that's a he has to get out pretty early. Yeah,
there's a lot to.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Do, but there's you know, everybody's got their little side
interest and and that was that was one of mine.
And now I'm sitting here thinking about all those wonderful
moments and times and laughter. And I got in trouble
once for hanging a cabbage patch kid backstage because we
had this one little girl in the cast that was
just so obnoxious and nobody liked her.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
How old was she, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Eight maybe, and I hung her cabbage patch doll? I couldn't.
I was mean. I was no.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
Kids that they know that they're what they're doing by
that age.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Yeah, but she was a little diva already. That's the problem.
You're a little child in a community theater production. Stop
being like that. But she just she was. She was
a pain in everybody's doll.

Speaker 2 (09:26):
I walked through the hall.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah, yeah, she really, she was a pain in everybody's
And so yeah, I got in a little hot water
for doing that, but it was fun anyway. So anyway
we're talking about chocolate chip cookies. I got some some
grief from a couple of people in my chocolate chip
cookie stands. I do like the chips, ahoy. I do
like the crunchy ones. I do not like the soft ones.

(09:48):
I do not like the really sweet stuff that people
consider to be kind of a higher end cookie. I
think they are perfect. But it is National Chocolate Chip
Cookie Day, and I'm sorry that I did not know that,
because honestly, I would have made chocolate chip cookies for
today and brought them in and you and I could
have sit here and crunched on the air for three

(10:10):
or four hours and enjoy. And I dropped the ball
on that, and I apologize.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
Well, I don't think that that's something you should apologize for.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
Do you like Girl Scout cookie?

Speaker 1 (10:20):
Here's the deal. Everything with me is a deal. I
like Girl Scout cookies, but I don't like the price
of Girl Scouts.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
They're pretty expensive.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
And I'm gonna be honest with you. I found store
cookies that look and taste just like them. I wouldn't
be surprised if they don't come out of the same
factory for a lot less.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, but they're going to a good cause.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
I yeah, Well, I've got my experiences with that too.
The Scouting thing, I've had a couple of things over
the years that I've not been pleased about, and so
that's not a selling point for me. I would love
to see a return of the Boy Scouts, and we've

(11:15):
been talking about that at home quite a bit. I'm like, Okay,
I don't have time for anything else, but if I
can find an eagle Scout out there that wants to
be a Scout master or whatever, maybe I can spearhead
the pr into this thing and get a couple of
the schools around here on my beloved west Side to
reinstitute a Scouting program, because honestly, I think it's missing.

(11:39):
I think it's When I was a youngster, we had
the Boy Scouts. There were before the Boy Scouts. You
had cub Scouts for the younger kids. There were girl Scouts.
There were also Brownies for if you were younger. There
were also the campfire Girls. My older sisters were all
camp fire girls. We had all of these organizations that
were teaching and fraternal and and it taught those socialization skills.

(12:04):
It taught natural stuff and camping in the woods and
how to fend for yourself and care for yourself and
all this kind of stuff. We don't have any of that.
And then we wonder, why, you know, we got a
bunch of idiots walking around at twenty five years old. Well,
they're not being taught anything anymore. The schools don't teach them,
the organizations don't exist anymore. The boy Scouts become the

(12:26):
everybody's Scouts. The girl Scouts are only there basically when
it comes to selling cookies. I don't know if they
still have brownies anymore, or Cub Scouts anymore, or campfire
Girls anymore. I don't even know if those things exist anymore.
But our kids grew into better adults when we had
those things. So yeah, that's been on my mind a

(12:47):
lot lately the last couple of months. I guess, with
the approach of the new school year and everything, and
you know, having the grandsons, I'm like, I wonder if
there's any possible way I could I could spearhead putting
Scouts through respeck in some of these schools. Then don't
let me say that too loud, because somebody will say, oh, yes,
all you need is another ten hours a week to
dedicate to it. That's yeah, I got that.