Archive for the ‘Actors’ Category

Peter Paige

September 30, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tigers seeing off the month of September; meanwhile, the October Oz-rabbits are massing behind the great fence that separates the two months, and will soon burst through, to blanket the calendrical landscape

Today I will step way from the events of the day and of my life to pick up a recurring theme on this blog, that of the cultural type the queen, moved by catching an admirable exponent of the type, the actor Peter Paige, in an episode of the tv drama Bones (S6 E14, “The Bikini in the Soup”, from 2011):


(#1) Emily Deschanel (as Temperance “Bones” Brennan), Peter Paige (as Darren Hargrove), David Boreanaz (as Seely Booth); Paige plays Hargrove with plenty of queeny mannerisms, but also a certain degree of slyness (he looks serious here because he’s being arrested) (screen shot from IMDb)

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Tomlin and Fonda

September 4, 2025

A very brief appreciation I posted on Facebook on 9/2, which seems to have caught the attention of a number of my readers, corrected and edited a bit here:

It’s that time of the year when I’m pleased to hear that Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda (both a bit older than I am) are still flourishing.

The immediate trigger was LT’s birthday — 9/1/39 (so she’s a year older than me) — with JF’s birthday — 12/21/37 (so she’s three years older than me, as Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, born 5/9/37, was) coming soon. So they’re roughly my age, and their acting, their activisms, and their passionate public commentary have brightened my life and moved me since the 1960s. Despite the considerable differences in their class backgrounds, their personalities, and their sexuality, they have been good friends for many years and have frequently acted together, to my mind most satisfyingly in the comedy tv series Grace and Frankie (aired on Netflix from 2015 through 2022):


(#1) Fonda (as Frankie) and Tomlin (as Grace) in Grace and Frankie; their house in the story is set on the beach down (by San Diego) in La Jolla; the filming happened up (by Los Angeles) on Malibu’s Broad Beach (photo: Melissa Moseley / AP)

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Zimbalistics

May 12, 2025

Zimbalistics, the study of the artistic Zimbalist family, in the three generations from Efrem through Stephanie, following up on my report yesterday, in “Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie”, of this morning name. I wrote:

I understood the [morning] name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.

… [plus a promise of] more on three generations of talented Zimbalists, on their religious affiliations, and on Zimbalistic tv shows.

No doubt Stephanie would not have been your first association to the surname, but she was mine yesterday morning; that’s just an observation about how my mind was working in the fog of coming out of sleep. Sometimes I have no idea where a name in my head comes from. Sometimes it’s associated with a specific referent that I realize was in my mind from something that happened recently. Sometimes, as here, I’m baffled as to where an association comes from; it just is. (I once got Goethe as my morning name, except that — surprise! — it referred to the street in Chicago, locally pronounced /góθi/. I have no idea why I slighted the great German writer, but there it was.)

On to the Zimbalist family — a brisk and abbreviated tour, since I’m overwhelmed with things today. (There are decent Wikipedia entries for Efrem, Efrem Jr., Stephanie, and Alma Gluck.)

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Zimbalist, accompanied by Satie

May 11, 2025

Today’s morning name was Zimbalist, which came to me at 4:10 am to the accompaniment of the delicious, very French, piano music of Erik Satie (to which it has no associations I can think of). I understood the name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.

Zimbalist looks like zimbal + ist, an association surname, possibly an association to an occupation, and so it is: it’s a Slavic Jewish surname meaning ‘cimbalom / cimbal player’ (so it’s parallel to the common nouns pianist, violinist, accordionist, trombonist, clarinetist, etc.).

(The initial letter c of cimbalom represents a voiceless dental affricate [ts], spelled with a c in Russian, a z in German; because of the spelling with c, the name cimbalom is pronounced in English with an [s], and because of the spelling with Z, the name Zimbalist is pronounced in English with a [z] — yes, this is a multilingual, multiorthographic mess, but don’t blame me, I’m just the reporter.)

Now, briefly, to the instrument.

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Well, nobody’s perfect

May 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of May, and hordes of aroused bunnies are streaming in the streets, aggressively singing “L’Internationale”

Meanwhile, I had a wonderful dream last night, starring — a dream first — my grand-child Opal Armstrong Zwicky, who in real life is just about to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. In the dream,  Opal and another young woman wrote a zany hit musical show in both English and Spanish. During the flurry of production, I met the grandfather of Opal’s collaborator, a charming man with whom I developed a friendship. My clothing, in the dream as in real life, clearly conveys that I’m gay, so this man, not wanting to be leading me on, admitted, gently, “You know, I’m straight” — to which I replied, quoting one of the great films of all time, “Well, nobody’s perfect” — a line I use frequently in my postings, after I celebrate some good friend, woman or man, whose nature runs contrary to tight gender norms, explaining that they’re straight, but, well, nobody’s perfect.

The movie is Some Like It Hot, and it’s a French farce given a distinctly American twist, with mobsters and eccentric millionaires. I am astonished to see that I haven’t ever written it up on this blog. But now its day has come. It seems to afford no place for the Industrial Workers of the World, but, well, you can’t have everything.

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Mollified about Monaghan

April 5, 2025

Sweet Gee (an alter ego of Gadi Niram’s) wrote on Facebook yesterday about a character in the delightful Hetty Wainthropp Investigates tv show, who I took to be the character played by the adorable Dominic Monaghan, but turned out to be Joe Peluso’s. I wrote:

Ah, I am mollified. I’d completely forgotten JP. Meanwhile, I know that mollify has to do, etymologically, with softening, but I couldn’t help thinking of it as Molly-fy ‘make into a Molly’, presumably by getting into drag.

Two clusters of things here: the Wainthropp show and DM; and the verb mollify and the noun molly / Molly.

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Tommy and the Doctor

December 20, 2024

Briefly noted.

Previously on this blog. In my 12/18 posting “Doctor The Who”,

a portmanteau title — Doctor Who + The Who = Doctor The Who  — for a hybrid cartoon character, who is simultaneously Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor Who and also the leaping, jumping Pete Townshend of the rock band The Who:


I referred to this Bizarro cartoon on Facebook as Tommy and the Doctor, referring to the Who’s rock opera Tommy, with Pete Townshend in the title role, and to Doctor Who, and making a sly filmic allusion, which Dennis Lewis caught on Facebook

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SoCal lads with spread-lip smiles

November 12, 2024

…  and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.

(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)

Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.

Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)

And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).

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Video therapy takes a new turn

November 5, 2024

It starts at 4:30 am with today’s morning names: George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. Gershwin was in my head because when I woke my Apple Music had just finished playing an album of Gershwin songs. Gershwin immediately triggered Berlin, that’s an obvious leap — and also led to Porgy and Bess and the complexity of the relationships between American Jews and Blacks. And Berlin’s name triggered his “God Bless America” (from World War I), an uncomfortably sentimental patriotic anthem that I’ve always disliked, but on the other hand it’s a displaced person’s outpouring of love for the country that found a place for him, and then I was filled with dread, and the fear that my country had no place for me, that the troopers would come and drag me away to a concentration camp.

This is by no means an irrational fear, especially today.

But I pulled myself together and started the day, almost immediately returning to my regimen of video therapy (even before breakfast, and then during breakfast).

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Death comes to Shangri-La

November 4, 2024

I’ve been using my writing on this blog to dodge oppressive current events and my bodily miseries. I’m also undergoing intensive video therapy, using re-runs (on dvd) of all six years of the tv series Major Crimes (details of the show in my 10/29 posting with that title). Today I report on one of my favorite episodes (S2 E9 “There’s No Place Like Home”, 1st aired 8/5/13), whose main story-line — every episode interleaves several story-lines, including at least one about the lives of the LAPD officers and their associates — has the squad investigating the death of a landlord despised by all his tenants, the residents of Shangri-La (a ramshackle apartment complex), all of them former performers on a ’70s tv medical examiner show. Further notes from the Wikipedia summary:

As in their show, Deputy Medical Examiner Morales comes up with the extra (beyond autopsy) evidence that solves the crime. [AZ: and then some side-story events, irrelevant here:] Provenza faces desk duty if he can’t improve his target practice results; Rusty tries to tell Kris he can’t date her.

Note: the retired television co-workers were played by a quintet of predominantly octogenarian actors from various popular television shows from the 1970s and 80s onward – Tim Conway, Paul Dooley, Ron Glass, Doris Roberts, and Marion Ross.

These five, in character, in a shot from the wonderfully comic episode:


Left to right: Glass, Dooley, Ross, Conway, Roberts; spoiler: they all did it (details to follow)

Now some details about the actors playing the Shangri-La Five.

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