{"id":25310,"date":"2012-01-09T08:00:15","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=25310"},"modified":"2012-01-09T10:56:54","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T15:56:54","slug":"lamb-chop-in-search-of-martinis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/09\/lamb-chop-in-search-of-martinis\/","title":{"rendered":"Lamb Chop in Search of a Martini"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/sharilewis.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-25317\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/sharilewis.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"574\" height=\"581\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/sharilewis.jpg 574w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/sharilewis-296x300.jpg 296w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When recently asked his opinion of monogamy, John Waters said, \u201cI don\u2019t need another person to make me feel whole. I feel <em>crowded<\/em>.\u201d The line immediately reminded me of ventriloquist Shari Lewis. Lewis wasn\u2019t crowded, exactly, with only three enduring creations\u2014Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, and Hush Puppy\u2014but to me her career is emblematic of the simultaneously crowded and lonely nature of puppeteering. By Lewis\u2019s own admission, <em>Lamb Chop\u2019s Play-Along<\/em>, which I grew up watching during its run on PBS from 1992 to 1997,<em> <\/em>had no educational content. (\u201cMy show is not organized to educate,\u201d she said. \u201c<em>Sesame Street<\/em> does that brilliantly.\u201d) Instead, <em>Play-Along<\/em> was a serialized sock-puppet soap opera (\u201cAt Home with Lamb Chop\u201d) which kept being interrupted by knock-knock jokes, songs, and gags (including an ingenious method of preslicing a banana so that it would tumble to pieces, Jenga-style, when unpeeled). The show was like Borscht Belt boot camp: a toolbox for kids who desperately wanted to be liked, full of little tricks to spruce up their personalities. Even Lamb Chop\u2019s laugh\u2014a hesitant, schmoozy laugh that usually comes in response to jokes she doesn\u2019t quite understand\u2014hints at her desire to fit in.<\/p>\n<p>The show\u2019s emphasis on showmanship stressed me out as a kid, and I preferred the \u201cAt Home with Lamb Chop\u201d sequences. They were absorbingly plotted but also had none of the perils of interaction, of trying to woo friends, of trying to follow along at home with your own banana. \u201cAt Home with Lamb Chop\u201d offered the comforting suggestion that friends weren\u2019t necessary, that one could simply chop one\u2019s own personality to bits, and, earthworm-style, the pieces would all sprout heads and start bickering.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"574\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/N445qz-Uepo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe> <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Shari Lewis\u2014n\u00e9e Sonia Hurwitz\u2014was raised in the Depression-era Bronx and learned ventriloquism at the knee of an ancient black vaudevillian named John W. Cooper. Her first dummy dated from the turn of the century. Her breed of shtick, in other words, was ancient even when she started out\u2014but it was shtick that continued to delight mainstream audiences. In the forties and fifties, ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy had stars like Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart on his radio show; when McCarthy costarred in a movie with W. C. Fields, the posters crowed, \u201cAt last!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lewis\u2019s first national television series, <em>The Shari Lewis Show<\/em>, ran on NBC from 1960 to 1963, and while the show was broadcast on Saturday mornings, surviving episodes have a sophisticated bite. Lewis had studied with Method-acting legend Sanford Meisner (she may have brought puppets to their sessions\u2014it\u2019s unclear), and her naturalistic, seemingly impromptu conversations with Lamb Chop entranced adult fans ranging from Errol Flynn to Sammy Davis Jr. Lewis was young and beautiful, too, and the music was arranged for a piano and a xylophone, supplying the show with a boozy lounge-lizard feel. In fact, after her NBC show ended (due, Lewis claimed, to the rise of cheap animated series), Lewis performed a Vegas nightclub act that featured a soused Lamb Chop groping around the stage in search of a martini. In one bit, Lamb Chop hoped to become a Playboy bunny; in another she cracked Nixon jokes. PBS didn\u2019t pick Lewis up for almost thirty years, and this was a scrappy, frustrating period for her, during which she conducted symphony orchestras, starred in stock productions of <em>Funny Girl<\/em>, <em>Bye Bye Birdie<\/em>, and <em>Damn Yankees<\/em>, and opened for Jack Benny at casinos.<\/p>\n<p>Lewis\u2019s work, however, rarely tipped into seediness, in part because Lamb Chop\u2019s voice\u2014her singing voice in particular\u2014is shot through with purity. In <em>Blue Valentine<\/em> Ryan Gosling\u2019s character says, \u201cI can\u2019t really sing. I have to sing goofy, in order to sing. Like, I have to sing stupid.\u201d That\u2019s true for Lewis. While her own singing voice has a metallic, tremulous Judy Holliday quality to it, when singing as Lamb Chop she is <em>singular<\/em>\u2014producing an adorable little caterwaul with phrasing as crisp as Sinatra\u2019s. If that comparison seems presumptuous, it should be explained that on <em>The Shari Lewis Show<\/em> Lewis\u2019s puppets regularly dug into the American songbook, with an emphasis on flippantly woeful ballads: within a single episode, Hush Puppy sang \u201cThey Can\u2019t Take That Away from Me,\u201d and Lamb Chop delivered \u201cI\u2019ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/shariandlamb.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-25320\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/shariandlamb-287x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"287\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/shariandlamb-287x300.jpg 287w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/shariandlamb.jpg 751w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a>They were beautiful, those songs, though perhaps I have a perverted sense of what\u2019s beautiful. Of all the aspects of puppetry that simultaneously muss the illusion and sustain it, there are few I love as much as puppet vibrato. Muppets like Miss Piggy are made of sculpted foam latex, and can only simulate vibrato by rather mechanically clapping their mouths open and shut\u2014but as a nearly unadorned sock, Lamb Chop\u2019s face is extraordinarily expressive. Her vibrato shows up as a ripple, a series of split-second fabric bunchings, an Adam\u2019s apple that ricochets around her head like a pinball. And yet it\u2019s <em>less<\/em> realistic than a Muppet trill, because in scrutinizing Lamb Chop\u2019s face you can pick out a thumb here, a pinkie there. Realism\u2019s no priority in ventriloquism, of course\u2014the Man Behind the Curtain is <em>there<\/em>, and Lewis designed her routines knowing that children were drawn to staring at her clenched teeth, trying to catch her on the plosives. I used to relish this little game, especially in a world of kiddie entertainment where \u201cmagic\u201d was laboriously, and often tiresomely, sustained.<\/p>\n<p>And yet the emotions of Lewis\u2019s high-strung little socks remained poignant. Film critic David Thomson has written that \u201cthe most special effect in movies is always the human face when its mind is being changed.\u201d He didn\u2019t mention what Shari Lewis gives us: the effect of the human <em>hand<\/em> changing its mind.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"574\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iW0tr-ZPUsU#t=433\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Like Grover and Cookie Monster, Lamb Chop sings <em>willfully<\/em>, with an insistence on hitting notes she doesn\u2019t quite have. So she hits them. Note, also, the subversive guttural <em>ch<\/em>s that Lewis has Lamb Chop use when she\u2019s singing \u201cThe First Noel,\u201d at 7:13 in the video above. It\u2019s the giddy usage of a little Jew who\u2019s just been taught how to pronounce <em>challah<\/em> and is overdoing it. (Lamb Chop, with her Yiddishy line inflections, often seems Jewish\u2014and Charlie Horse definitely is, having once referred to himself as \u201cone of the few Palomino Jews.\u201d) Although Lewis\u2019s family was not observant, she considered herself culturally Jewish, telling a member of the American Jewish Committee, \u201cI certainly am alienated from society. Jews are alienated from society.\u201d While conceding that she grew up in a Jewish community, Lewis added, \u201cOnce you look out at the outer world you see the rest of them. You become aware of the fact that it\u2019s us and them, and that \u2018us and them\u2019 never leaves you, I think.\u201d Being a woman isolated Lewis further. \u201cThe real difference between Jim [Henson] and me was his power as a team player,\u201d she said. \u201cGirls are not brought up that way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This alienation comes across in her work: the profession of ventriloquism was assurance that Lewis would never have to interact onscreen with anyone other than herself. I recently watched her <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sesamestreet.org\/video_player\/-\/pgpv\/videoplayer\/0\/f36575d8-fd37-45be-b8d4-91b78141fd03\">1996 guest appearance<\/a> on <em>Sesame Street<\/em>; the episode is ostensibly about a kittenish Lamb Chop learning how to meet new people, but what struck me was how furiously Lamb Chop and Lewis kept their eyes on each other throughout. Big Bird, Lamb Chop\u2019s \u201cnew friend,\u201d just stood there like a lug while the two of them sang. A new friend, of course, would throw their rhythm off. Their shtick is self-sufficient.<\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong>For a while my friend Sara and I had a running parlor game in which we tried to determine who in our lives qualified as a \u201ctragic figure\u201d\u2014who, that is, had been battered by misfortune and failure to the point that they transcended reality and seemed to exist in enormous, Jocasta-ish proportions. The game faded from our lives, partly because of the gradual realization that <em>we<\/em> might be tragic figures ourselves, but it all came flooding back when I watched a recording of Shari Lewis\u2019s 1993 appearance at the Museum of Television &amp; Radio. It was a blip in Lewis\u2019s fifty-year showbiz career, but a revealing blip all the same.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/thesharishow1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-25322\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/thesharishow1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"408\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/thesharishow1.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/thesharishow1-220x300.jpg 220w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a>The turnout was mostly children, and Lewis hastily abandoned the planned interview and began prancing about and singing to hold their attention. Less than five feet tall, she seemed to be all pantsuit lapels. There was no sweetened laugh track to leaven her jokes, either, and as gag after gag flopped, Lewis took to doing little burlesque bumps and saying things like, \u201cI need a rimshot!\u201d Her fear of being washed up was obvious. When asked if her show had been renewed, Lewis tentatively replied, \u201cWe\u2019re going to find out Tuesday at twelve o\u2019clock.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Later in the Museum of TV &amp; Radio appearance, she invited a small child onto the stage. The skittish child tried to retreat, but Lewis coaxed her back, manhandled her onto her lap, and ordered her to tell a knock-knock joke. When the joke turned out to be incomprehensible, Lewis froze for a second, then laughed mechanically to get the audience going\u2014but you could see her nostrils flaring with disgust at the kid\u2019s unprofessionalism. That same year, Lewis told the <em>Baltimore Jewish Times<\/em>, \u201cI am a performer who loves performing.\u201d When the reporter prompted her, \u201cAnd loves children?\u201d Lewis hastily added, \u201cYeah, oh yeah, I love children.\u201d She\u2019s not too convincing\u2014and watching the Museum of Television &amp; Radio appearance made her plight obvious: Lewis performed for children because they were the only people still showing up.<\/p>\n<p>She was never particularly into kids as an audience. While touring in a production of <em>Funny Girl<\/em> in 1967, she told newspapers, \u201cI don\u2019t want to be known as a children\u2019s performer. I\u2019m an entertainer.\u201d She spent decades yenning for a prime-time sitcom. A month before her sixtieth birthday, she boasted to the <em>New York Times<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s something I\u2019ve always wanted, and the offers are finally coming my way.\u201d No such offer materialized, of course\u2014but Lewis never incorporated her resentment of Lamb Chop (if she had any) into her act.<\/p>\n<p>A small mountain of lore has accumulated on the subject of Lewis\u2019s connection with Lamb Chop\u2014it\u2019s been suggested that she smuggled the puppet along on her honeymoon and that she insisted producers flying her places purchase a seat on the plane for Lamb Chop\u2014but it\u2019s hard to tell how much of it\u2019s apocryphal. Lewis herself confessed that after <em>The Shari Lewis Show<\/em> was cancelled in 1963, she \u201cwent to Lamb Chop and cried with her. But it hasn\u2019t happened since.\u201d Even once seems like a lot, though, and <em>Lamb Chop\u2019s Play-Along<\/em> often seems to be referring to that moment of demented codependency, presenting situation after situation in which Lamb Chop is jonesing to get away from Lewis. Here\u2019s a typical exchange:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><strong>Lamb Chop: <\/strong>She treats me like such a child. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, Shari is always <em>lurching<\/em> in the background. <em>It\u2019s not healthy<\/em>.<br \/><strong>Shari<\/strong>: Well, what do you want?<br \/><strong>Lamb Chop: <\/strong> I think it\u2019s time you tried to find some friends your own age. <em>(pause)<\/em> No matter how long that takes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It\u2019s a winningly abrasive routine, but I think I prefer the yearning, Ramona Quimby-esque Lamb Chop of <em>The Shari Lewis Show<\/em>. She was still fantasizing about solitude in 1961, but the sentiments were abstract and dreamy: \u201cSometimes I wish I could go away to a little town where nobody knows me \u2026 and tell them about me,\u201d she said once.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, Lamb Chop <em>did<\/em> get her solitude: Shari Lewis died on August 2, 1998, of complications from uterine cancer. Lewis died when I was on the cusp of outgrowing Lamb Chop. If she\u2019d stuck it out for a couple of months, I wouldn\u2019t have needed closure, wouldn\u2019t have had to dig my cleats into her life as I\u2019m doing now. As it is, even Lewis\u2019s televised sign-off fascinates me. It was a little jingle called \u201cHello, Goodbye,\u201d and in its very chintziness it seems to be encoded with the tragic disappointments of Lewis\u2019s career. The song was edited to a montage of Lewis\u2019s greatest screen triumphs (none of which seem very great, and none of which are as moving as the simple arrival of Lamb Chop\u2019s runny-nosed falsetto two minutes in). \u201cHello, Goodbye\u201d was the last time Lewis appeared on camera. Huddled with the rest of the crew of <em>The Charlie Horse Music Pizza<\/em> to watch the playback, Lewis fixated on Lamb Chop\u2019s televised form, saying, \u201cIsn\u2019t she beautiful, isn\u2019t she funny, isn\u2019t she hysterical?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, yes, she is. But then, I have a perverted sense of what\u2019s beautiful.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"574\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/rY8Rl3RnRH4\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Matt Weinstock lives in Manhattan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When recently asked his opinion of monogamy, John Waters said, \u201cI don\u2019t need another person to make me feel whole. I feel crowded.\u201d The line immediately reminded me of ventriloquist Shari Lewis. Lewis wasn\u2019t crowded, exactly, with only three enduring creations\u2014Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, and Hush Puppy\u2014but to me her career is emblematic of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1160],"tags":[5618,5610,2926,5620,5617,3308,5611,5619,428,5608,5609,5158,5163,5621,5037,5615,2922,5463,5622,5616,3688,5607,5614,2918],"class_list":["post-25310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-television","tag-blue-valentine","tag-charlie-horse","tag-charlie-mccarthy","tag-david-thomson","tag-errol-flynn","tag-frank-sinatra","tag-hush-puppy","tag-jim-henson","tag-john-waters","tag-lamb-chop","tag-lamb-chops-play-along","tag-miss-piggy","tag-muppets","tag-museum-of-tv-radio","tag-nbc","tag-pbs","tag-puppet","tag-ryan-gosling","tag-sammy-davis-jr","tag-sanford-meisner","tag-sesame-street","tag-shari-lewis","tag-the-shari-lewis-show","tag-ventriloquism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Lamb Chop in Search of a Martini by Matt Weinstock<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 9, 2012 \u2013 When recently asked his opinion of monogamy, John Waters said, \u201cI don\u2019t need another person to make me feel whole. 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