Showing posts with label teeth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teeth. Show all posts

January 29, 2011

Live From New York... It's a BatR Exclusive!

I don't know why I'm frantically throwing this blog entry together considering it's 32-year old news, but being the consummate broadcast journalist I am, I've got the innate fear that someone else may still beat me to it. I was just watching an old episode of Saturday Night Live on Netflix hosted by Milton Berle--Season Four, Episode 17, April 12, 1979. I'd read that his performance on the episode lead to his subsequent "banning" by Lorne Michaels, so I had to see for myself. 

His opening monologue was very old school--rapid fire self-deprecating one-liners and some jokes about black guys, Arabs, and Puerto Ricans. His set is briefly interrupted by a loud sound from backstage (courtesy Bill Murray). As it turns out, karma might have come back to bite Berle in a moment that I have not found addressed anywhere else on the internet. Yes folks, it's time for a Beauty and the RoBeast exclusive!

The premise for the skit is not especially hilarious--it's The Widettes (the big butt family) with Berle as the visiting uncle. He and Dan Aykroyd are planning an Easter egg hunt for the children (Gilda Radner and John Belushi). Here, they sit on the couch just before Aykroyd announcing to the family that the hunt is on.

Milton drools/smiles.

This may look like Milton Berle getting in on another one of those crazy early-day SNL orgies, but I can assure you it's just the young Widettes scrambling for eggs.

Uncle Miltie plops down on the couch while Dan "Zapruder" Aykroyd stays in the back watching the Widette joke play out. 
See, they're always bumping into things with their big butts, and for the first time all night, Berle is not babbling or mugging for the camera. 

Not only is he uncharacteristically quiet, he also looks like he's been shot from the grassy knoll. Gilda's found an egg, but Berle appears to have lost something important. 

It seems to me that Milton Berle has lost his false teeth, but I can't tell if it's a setup or if it was an unintentional accident. 

At this point, Berle actually slams his hands down on the coffee table and frightens Gilda into a split second of silence. He then desperately retreats back to the couch.  

As he sits back, something rolls into sight on the side of the couch. I know this is a jpg capture of a streaming video originally broadcast on network television in 1979, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's dentures. 

His hand searches the couch a couple times though we never actually see it make contact with the object from the previous shot. Here, he is either jamming the dentures back into his mouth, pretending to jam dentures into his mouth, or just taking stock of what teeth are left.


He hides behind Gilda for a moment than starts saying his lines. I don't really see a mouthful of teeth here, but his dialog doesn't seem horribly affected. Still, the next shot is a very long, awkward, unnecessary solo shot of Aykroyd. It could be an excuse to keep Berle off camera while he gains his composure, or it could just be the lingering 70s camera style. 


After watching the clip about 50 times, I still can't figure if it was

  • the joke
  • an ad-libbed joke
  • actually his teeth falling out

I am reserving my laughter only for option three. Still, I implore you to watch the clip for yourself and tell me what you think happened (if you have Netflix streaming, use this link and skip t\o 14:40). Was it intentional or was it a celebrity tooth-oops? I may have to write a letter to Dan Aykroyd or Jane Curtin.


February 7, 2008

Flawless Failure

My super power has returned. Two light bulbs down. Snap. Crackle. Pop. The hallway in front of the bathroom and one of the lamps in the living room's many tentacles shorted out rather spectacularly when I grabbed its bendy neck to direct the light. My body is filled right now with a potent chemical cocktail of unhappy sauces: prolactin, cortisol, and adrenaline. It is not responding well to this, and I guess my electromagnetic field is shorting out on certain frequencies. All of us here at Princess Central (me and the voices in my mind) have been strung out on love hormones like a fucking junkie. I am jonesin' for the body's natural opiates, the enkephalins; I don't want to kick the endorphins and the dopamines. I want to be high on love all the time, but kids, sadly that high can so rarely stay. It passes, and you feel a little sick, a little shaky, a lot raw. The upside to crying your eyes out? Sssh, it's nature's chemical peel, as well as, a way to purge that overdose of negative hormones out of your body. I am secreting my despair and thus purging myself of it, and once my face has healed from the slight prolactin, sodium chloride, and potassium chloride burn, my skin is going to look be-yoo-ti-ful. This time around, I took note of the emotions coursing through my body when the light bulb sparks and burns out, and it is straight up despair, a river of angst pouring through my chest. I just wanted to turn my brain off yesterday, so I wouldn't feel. Too late. Apparently, I broadcast across a wide spectrum. All artificial lights will feel my wrath and tremble.

Why the long face little bear? Well, I met a man or a robot (it's entirely possible) on the internets. We laughed, we loved, we conducted a relationship entirely made of pixels and electrical bursts. We entered into a year-long family plan cell phone contract. Do you take this 404 area code to have and to hold as your own even though you live in Sayton, Ohio? He did, and there was much chatting and texting and rejoicing on the full keyboard of the Sidekick. We named our future children. In fact, if it was possible to be impregnated via sms protocol, I would be 6 months pregnant right now. Alas, it was not to be, and I come now to you, the blogosphere, to bury this cyber-relationship. For truly, it is over.

There are ways to end a relationship that require tact and delicacy. Some go for more of a burn the bridge and salt the earth approach. I have experienced many finishing moves that were awesome in the scope of their douchebaggery. There was the boyfriend who left me while my mother and BOTH my cats were dying of cancer. There was the boyfriend who went to the beach with his buddies for New Year's Eve rather than spend that magickal moment with me; though, I begged and pleaded with him to go on a trip with me anywhere, my treat. He later met a new horse-faced makeup beast and flew to London the next year to celebrate New Year's Eve with her. Ah yes. Still, it burns. Today. Today, I have experienced a new finishing move, a move worthy of Mortal Kombat: the Douche-ality.

Let me set the stage for you. It was Xmas, and I was working 3 jobs to ensure that when my dearest cyber-love winged his way to me that I would have enough money to be able to not work during his visit thus ensuring that I could stay home all week and have violent monkeysex and bathe in the aura of our love. We could not be together at Xmas, or New Year's Eve for that matter (foiled again), because he has a child and shared custody and needed to save his money to make a little girl's Xmas special. All perfectly understandable, I gave him props for tending to his child and having his priorities in order. Did I expect a present from him at Xmas? No. Would a $2 card and a $.25 plastic ring have sufficed? Yes. Yes, it would have been enough for me as I am a cheap and sentimental date, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I bought him a small gift and waited to give it to him in the flesh. I kept the light of our love alive in my stupid, stupid heart.

Sadly, it truly was the beginning of the end. Things were amiss. He became wishy-washy. I mean we had only kept this thing alive for 6 MONTHS without ever meeting one another for real. Everytime he was supposed to come visit me (and there were 3 separate incidents all to be paid for on my dime), he would get cold feet and come up with outlandish excuses...like teeth. Yes, TEETH. Not mine but his. Apparently, he was afeared to meet me because his teeth weren't perfect, but kids, I had seen pictures of his teeth, and they were fine for my purposes. Plus, I was IN LOVE, and frankly, he could have been purple and had tentacles for all I cared. I just wanted to touch him and love him and perform unspeakable sex acts upon his naked flesh. BUT NO. It was not to be. Teeth. My birthday rolled around Feb. 2nd, Groundhog's Day. We had been squabbling a little and expectations were low. A phone call would have been nice; a 2 word text saying "Happy Birthday" would have even been acceptable. Nothing. Friends I had not spoken with in 2 years took the time out to text me Happy Birthday. People I have never met made an effort to leave me glittery birthday comments on my mspazz page. There were phone calls and life-sized Wonder Woman pinatas --(Dear Spanish language, I apologize, but I cannot find the enyas and tildes on this damn non-standard keyboard)-- and cake and plastic rings and many Lonestars, but there was nada from the cyberboy. Nary a peep nor a pixel was to be found. I got a phone call a few days later. His excuse? I had said my bday was not a "big deal", and he didn't want to be an asshole. Seriously? But, you are being an asshole by not calling so how are you not being an asshole again? Oh that's right, you are being an asshole and you KNOW it; you just don't want to have to deal with why you are being an asshole. You can't hide from the truth because the truth is all there is. Classic move straight out of the Douchnozzle Twatwaffle Handbook. Let me explain the ultimate triple ice burn subtlety of this move. Acting like the ultimate asshole forces me to preemptively break up with him right before Valentine's Day thus pulling the perfect no-gifting trifecta of Xmas, my bday, and Valentine's Day. Your plan sir is fiendishly simple yet cowardly implemented. It would have been easier and more humane to rip the band-aid off this thing months ago pre-holiday season, but, and here is the kicker, he didn't even realize he had pulled the Classic Ultimate Douche-ality until I pointed it out to him, and he had the grace to kind of act SORRY. Listen, DUDE, I GET it. You didn't think about it. You didn't even bother to think about me. In fact, you had already stopped thinking about me altogether. God, at least if he had done it on purpose, I would have known that he had spared at least 2 FUCKING seconds of concern and thought for me. I TOTALLY get the message; we has received it loud and clear. Thus, sir, I crown you the winner in this round of the Mortal Kombat that is love and romance in this digital age.

Ultimate Douche-ality: Flawless Failure.



(I tried to make a snappy Photoshop pic of Sub-Zero ripping the spine out of a bleeding unicorn to go right here. It just wasn't in me today though. I have even lost the will to form Voltron. Tragic. Ask and ye shall receive. This lovely graphic is courtesy of Moo. Much Love.)


I name thee wonderkiller, unicorn maimer, butterfly crumpler, doubt sower.

What's the moral of the story kids? Don't put yourself out there? Don't try? Make better choices with your heart? Expect the best but prepare for the worst? Don't meet people over the internet? All plausible, but I don't think so. I'd still walk this heart over the lava pit, no net, for the right person. What do I know though? I'm just the dumbfuck who fell for it all. To borrow the much finer words of Mr. William Faulkner, "'Tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying...nothing."



(via XKCD click pic to make bigger)