#1
Posted: 7/30/06 at 10:38pm
from Carol Channing's book JUST LUCKY I GUESS
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Now Doug Cramer , the producer of television's HOTEL and THE LOVE BOAT, wanted to win the TV sweeps that year. In case you dont know what the sweeps are, all the television programs put on one special show to raise the average of their ratings. He asked me to go to Hollywood and do a two-hour special with Ann Miller, Merman, and Della Reese. I went. The driver of the limousine picked me up where I lived in Los Angeles and started driving up to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He explained, "We're going to pick up Miss Merman on the way to the studio." Profound silence from me. I decided, There's only one way out of this, I'll be dilligently learning my lines, squeezed into the back corner.
Well, out came Ethel! Into the bright California sunrise. She looked oddly like Harry Langdon, the silent film star. Her famous beaded eyelashes were coagulated after she'd slept on them, so that they made one straight, black, perpendicular spike, like the circus clowns wear from the center of their upper eyelids to the center below the lowers.
She got in the backseat with me and yelled, "Hi, Carol!"
Oh good, she's talking to me.
Ethel: I had the strangest airplane trip out here. A passenger was bleeding from the rectum.
Now that's the first thing she'd said to me since 1964. Why was she so chatty when I was invisible for so long? Later, Mary Martin told me Ethel had that tumor in her brain and nobody knew how long it had been growing. I told Mary I thought it must have been ever since GIRL CRAZY, since Ethel was never any different that I knew of.
Anyway, I repeated, "A passenger was bleeding from the rectum?"
Ethel: Yeah.
Naturally, I said what you would have said, "How did you know?"
"Well," she said, "there was no doctor on the plane, but I'm a nurse. What the hell are yuh laughin' at? I'm a good nurse. I volunteered to serve at Roosevelt Hospital for every Thursday!"
Now I ask you, if you were strung up in Roosevelt Hospital, wouldnt you dread Thursdays? I mean, this woman walks into your room with her little white nurse's band above her forehead and screams, "Ah'm your nurse! Roll over!" Wouldnt you? Dread Thursdays?
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Now Doug Cramer , the producer of television's HOTEL and THE LOVE BOAT, wanted to win the TV sweeps that year. In case you dont know what the sweeps are, all the television programs put on one special show to raise the average of their ratings. He asked me to go to Hollywood and do a two-hour special with Ann Miller, Merman, and Della Reese. I went. The driver of the limousine picked me up where I lived in Los Angeles and started driving up to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He explained, "We're going to pick up Miss Merman on the way to the studio." Profound silence from me. I decided, There's only one way out of this, I'll be dilligently learning my lines, squeezed into the back corner.
Well, out came Ethel! Into the bright California sunrise. She looked oddly like Harry Langdon, the silent film star. Her famous beaded eyelashes were coagulated after she'd slept on them, so that they made one straight, black, perpendicular spike, like the circus clowns wear from the center of their upper eyelids to the center below the lowers.
She got in the backseat with me and yelled, "Hi, Carol!"
Oh good, she's talking to me.
Ethel: I had the strangest airplane trip out here. A passenger was bleeding from the rectum.
Now that's the first thing she'd said to me since 1964. Why was she so chatty when I was invisible for so long? Later, Mary Martin told me Ethel had that tumor in her brain and nobody knew how long it had been growing. I told Mary I thought it must have been ever since GIRL CRAZY, since Ethel was never any different that I knew of.
Anyway, I repeated, "A passenger was bleeding from the rectum?"
Ethel: Yeah.
Naturally, I said what you would have said, "How did you know?"
"Well," she said, "there was no doctor on the plane, but I'm a nurse. What the hell are yuh laughin' at? I'm a good nurse. I volunteered to serve at Roosevelt Hospital for every Thursday!"
Now I ask you, if you were strung up in Roosevelt Hospital, wouldnt you dread Thursdays? I mean, this woman walks into your room with her little white nurse's band above her forehead and screams, "Ah'm your nurse! Roll over!" Wouldnt you? Dread Thursdays?
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