I don't mean to tell too many stories about show business. However, a few columns ago, I mentioned an interesting story from my own abortive career in show business, and didn't want to go a year without telling it. So here goes.
I actually left the "career" part of show business ten years prior to this story. I had been singing with opera and operetta companies in the mid-1970s, and eventually panicked at the thought of having to work with actors for the rest of my professional life. So I switched to the most closely related profession, information technology, and started getting paid enough to eat and stay warm.
But I still enjoyed performing. In 1985, with a professional life sufficiently established to support my family, I joined a group in Virginia called the Alexandria Harmonizers. The Harmonizers were a competitive group of men who sang music in the barbershop style and competed with other such groups across North America.
Think of it (the contests) somewhat like the network TV show "The Sing-Off", at least in the sense that was always "a capella" music, and the visual aspect was critical. Delete the beat-box effects and the hand microphones, and add in a lot of rules about what you can and cannot sing (e.g., no religious or patriotic material) and how the music had to be arranged. That's enough to know for now.
Eight months after I joined the group, and almost certainly with no correlation whatsoever with my presence, the Harmonizers won the world championship in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was July 1986, and probably a bit of an upset, over rival groups from Chicago, Phoenix, Toronto, Raleigh and elsewhere who were also extremely good. But we had the gold medals, and over the next 12 years we would actually win three more times.
Cut to November 1987. The Kennedy Center Honors was to be staged Sunday, December 6. This annual event celebrates the careers of five great stars of the entertainment world, in a gala performance at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, DC. The honorees sit in the center of the first balcony with the president and first lady, and watch 20-minute segments on stage all about each of them. The performers on stage often include true performing greats and major celebrities.
In 1987, the honorees included Bette Davis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Nathan Milstein, Alwin Nikolais ... and the great American popular singer and variety host Perry Como. Typically the segments are put together at the last minute; in the case of the segment for Como, it was about three weeks before the show.
The production of that segment was coordinated by Como's long-time musical director, Ray Charles (of the Ray Charles Singers, also called the "white Ray Charles"), who was living in California. Since Perry Como started out as a barber in Pennsylvania, Ray decided to have a barbershop group as part of the segment, to do a medley of his songs. Not knowing any such groups, he asked around and was immediately told that the world champions were right there, a few miles from Washington. So they contacted us (the Harmonizers) and asked if we would perform.
"Sure", we said.
Of course, we were 100 amateurs with actual jobs. And we didn't have a medley of Perry Como songs, which meant the songs had to be cleared, arranged, and then the arrangement given to us to learn. Oh yeah, plus the staging, we had to learn that, too. The good news is that the guys put in the effort, and the result can be seen here. If you like, you can pause at the 5:16 mark -- the handsome fellow in the front row with the dark hair and mustache is yours truly.
I'll get to Lucy, I promise.
I do, first, have to mention that what you don't see in that clip is that at 3:00 pm on the day of the show, Sunday afternoon, the producer of the overall Honors show decided that our staging and choreography didn't work. So the entire staging was dumped, redone in a back hall, and put on stage five hours later with almost no rehearsal on the Honors stage at all. One hundred amateurs. Ahhhh, show business.
Now ... at the end of the Honors show, there is a finale that brings together all the performers to celebrate the honorees collectively. In this case, it was an Irving Berlin tribute that included performance of "God Bless America" by all those who had been in one of the five segments, and that included 100 Harmonizers.
Due to the short available time, we were told to form a semicircle on stage, left to right, of 50 guys (the shorter ones) with a second semicircle immediately behind (the taller guys). The instructions were simple -- four groups of 25, one coming from the wings offstage left, one from offstage right, and one each coming down the two aisles of the audience, with the guys in ascending order by height. I would lead the right audience-aisle group.
I was told personally to lead my group down the aisle, ascend the stairs to the stage, and walk in an arc to the dead-center stage point to meet the lead of the left audience-aisle group, forming the semicircle. The groups from the wings were to do something similar, to form the semicircle behind us. We were to hit the stage from the stairs and immediately turn our heads to the audience with a smile as we crossed the stage to our positions. We vaguely knew there would also be a straight line of performing celebrities downstage of us, but the stars were never there the time or two we rehearsed this.
The lack of rehearsing with all of the participants meant that we -- meaning I, and the leader of the other aisle group -- didn't know that at the point where we hit the top of the stairs, mounted the stage, turned our smiling faces toward the audience and walked quickly to our assigned positions, the ten stars were also walking from the wings to their positions, downstage (in front) of us in our path! This picture shows the end result.
Kennedy Center Honors Finale, December 1987, "God Bless America". Stars in the front row who had performed earlier (l-to-r): actor Ken Howard, singer Rosemary Clooney, acting couple Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, singing couple Diahann Carroll and Vic Damone (my face is between them), actor Jimmy Stewart, tap dancer Fayard Nicholas, actress and comedienne Lucille Ball, and violinist Pinchas Zuckerman. In the center of the orchestra behind the singers, at the piano is the singer Ray Charles, not to be confused with the "other" Ray Charles, who produced the Perry Como segment. They met for the very first time after the show ("Ray Charles, meet Ray Charles") and I was, very coincidentally, standing right there.
Suffice it to say, as Murphy would have it, the 76-year-old Lucille Ball walked, or was led, to her position in such a way as to walk directly in my path four steps after I got to the stage. Smiling to the audience all the way, I was aware of very little but my instructions, and had to be told afterward that when the great Miss Ball crossed my path I had knocked her over on her backside. Fayard Nicholas, of the famous tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, was fortunately right there to pick her up and get her to her position.
Lucille Ball passed away less than two years after, and 99 Harmonizers immediately and touchingly took pains to blame me for her demise. This December it will be thirty years since that night. Others are able to tell their children and grandchildren interesting and fun stories about things they've done, people they've met. Wonderful, wonderful stories.
I knocked Lucille Ball on her butt. I'm just lucky that didn't make it to the TV version.
Copyright 2017, 2016 by Robert Sutton
