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I don’t know about you guys, but I have a serious girl-crush on Tina Fey. It’s hard not to when the woman in question is unbelievably talented, smart, funny and beautiful. That’s why I’m so happy to get to write this Neatorama article about one of my biggest idols, who will be celebrating her forty-first birthday today. So for all you other SNL and 30 Rock fans, please join me in wishing Tina Fey a very happy birthday by enjoying these fascinating facts about one of the world’s most influential women (and that’s not just me speaking, see fact #7 for more details).
Image via David Shankbone [Flickr]
Liz Lemon’s first name is actually Ms. Fey’s real first name. “Tina” was actually born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey. To be fair, at least Tina isn’t a complete stage name, it’s just not her real first name. In case you’ve ever wondered, she was born to a brokerage employee of Greek descent and a university grant proposal writer of German and Scottish descent.
If you’ve ever looked closely enough at one of her movies or shows, you may have noticed that Tina has a fairly large scar on the left side of her cheek. While she refuses to talk about it, her husband finally revealed the story during a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair –and the story is a little terrifying.
According to Tina’s husband, she was playing in the front yard of her house when she was five years old and someone randomly came by and slashed her face with a razor. It happened so fast that when it happened, she thought someone marked her with a pen.
Tina says she doesn’t like to talk about the incident because she doesn’t want to seem like she is exploiting the trauma for attention. She’s also said that talking about it upsets her parents.
If you watch 30 Rock (or pretty much any of her work), you’ll notice the show overwhelmingly features her standing with her right side to the camera –that’s why.
Image via Vivanista1 [Flickr]
I always loved Steve Martin, but doing this article about him gave me even more respect for him as I learned just how broad his talents really are. If you thought he was just a funny guy, think again, he’s also a playwright, novelist, musician and more. Let’s celebrate his birthday with a look back at his massive resume.
Born in Waco, Texas, on August 14, 1945, Steve Glenn Martin was the son of a homemaker and a Realtor with aspirations to become an actor. Steve’s father had temper and was not emotionally supportive, although he was proud of his son, Glenn Martin was also very critical. The two had a strained relationship almost until the end of Glenn’s life. It was likely this cold relationship that drove Steve into his later career, as he sought approval from others where he could not get it at home.
When he was five years old, Steve’s family moved to Inglewood, California and at ten years old, the family moved to Garden Grove, the same year Disneyland opened. Steve ended up getting his first job at the park selling guidebooks, but his fascination with magic tricks eventually earned him a place in the Main Street Magic Shop where he was able to perfect his tricks, which would later come in handy in his routine. Years later, he paired with Donald Duck to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Disneyland for a video played inside the park called Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years.
Around this same time, he heard an Earl Scruggs record and fell in love with the banjo. He started playing the record at half speed and taught himself to play along with the music. Again, this would come in handy in his later career.
By the time Steve graduated high school, he was already honing his act by performing magic tricks, jokes and playing banjo music at Knott’s Berry Farm and a few small local venues.
It wasn’t long before he put his performance career on hold for a while and enrolled in CSU Long Beach, where he studied philosophy. As he studied philosophy and logic, he came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as logic, which led to the non-sequitur comedy routine he became known for later on.
He later explained in a magazine article he wrote for Smithsonian Magazine:
“In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song. These notions formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if I created tension and never released it? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. The audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.”
Image via Jim Summaria [Wikipedia]
In 1967, Steve transferred to UCLA and switched his major to theater, but this didn’t last long and he dropped out of school at the age of 21 after he appeared in an episode of The Dating Game and started performing at local clubs regularly.
That same year, an ex-girlfriend of his helped him land a writing job on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Although the show only lasted one season, it did rather well and he and the other writers won an Emmy Award for their work in 1969. He also appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, while he got off on a good start, he didn’t have much material and eventually was demoted to only appearing on the show when there was a guest host.
Rather than stick around Hollywood, Steve decided he would be better off touring around this time, which allowed him to hone his craft without fear of destroying his non-existent reputation. “In this netherworld,” he explained, “I was free to experiment. Everything was learned in practice, and the lonely road, with no critical eyes watching, was the place to dig up my boldest, or dumbest, ideas and put them onstage.”
Although he had a hard time at first, all of this intense practicing and experimenting eventually allowed him to perfect his career. He started off with audiences that didn’t get it and eventually got to the point where they would follow him out the theater. At one point, a college audience continued following him until he arrived at an empty swimming pool. He instructed them to get inside so he could “swim” across them all. He started bringing an increasing level of physicality to his act, which gave it exactly the right amount of humor that the non-sequitur jokes needed to resonate. “My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh,” he said.
During this time, he went from being a hippy-looking kid with a weird act to being a straight-laced freak. With strange gags such as sing-a-longs that the audience couldn’t actually sing along to and his “happy feet” routine, which resulted in his dancing uncontrollably around the stage without being able to stop himself, he developed a unique style that his friend Rick Moranis aptly characterized as “anti-comedy.”
Image via Towpilot [Wikipedia]
Eventually he got to a level where Carson was proud to have him back on the regular show and he started regularly appearing on Saturday Night Live. His regular tv appearances led to him being able to release a comedy album that was a smash hit and led to the popularity of the expression “well excuse me.” His appearances on SNL also led to the trend of people using finger movements to indicate quotation marks.
Contrary to popular belief though, he was never actually a cast member on SNL, he has guest-hosted 15 times though. His Festrunk Brothers character with Dan Aykroyd led to a popular catch phrase and recurring sketch though, “Two Wild and Crazy Guys.” This phrase was also used on his second hit comedy album, titled “Wild and Crazy Guy.” The album also resulted in a disco single that reached #17 on the US charts called “King Tut.”
These albums won him Grammys for Best Comedy Recording two years in a row. His popularity became similar to that of a rockstar and he was soon filling up whole rock arenas.
As his TV performances and positive reviews started allowing him to perform to much bigger audiences, he simultaneously stopped wanting to tour. These huge audiences prevented him from being able to walk out of the theater with the crowd and he loathed it when audience members started showing up with balloon animals and rabbit ears. He also started to suffer from physical exhaustion, collapsing onstage on multiple occasions.
So Steve retired…from stage that is. And he started acting in movies. His first role was in a short film called the Absent-Minded Waiter. Next he played small roles in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Ban , The Muppet Movie, and The Who documentary, The Kids Are Alright. That’s when he stepped up as the lead in a movie he co-wrote, The Jerk. The piece included a number of bits from his stand up act including my favorite part where he leaves his mansion saying “I don’t need anything at all, well, except for this ashtray.” Steve got $500,000 as star of the movie, $100,000 as writer and he made 50% of the profits, which was well over $100 million. Needless to say, it made him a movie star in no time flat.
He soon tried his hand at his first serious film, Pennies From Heaven, but the movie bombed, mostly because people didn’t want to see Steve in a serious role. After that, Steve went ahead and acted in a few more movies with the director from the Jerk, including Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man With Two Brains and All of Me.
Because he’s been in so many successful films, I’m just going to add a few interesting tidbits about some of his more famous performances:
Image via David Shankbone [Wikipedia]
Throughout the 1990’s Steve started writing various pieces for the New Yorker. He also wrote an autobiography called Born Standing Up, the aforementioned novella, Shopgirl, and another novella called The Pleasure of My Company. In 1993, he wrote a play called Picasso at the Lapin Agile, and when a school board refused to let their students perform the piece in 2009, he offered to pay out of his own pocket to allow them to do the performance off site.
While the banjo has played a minor role in Steve’s comedy routines, he is very good at playing the instrument and actually a well-respected musician. In fact, in 2001, he won a Grammy award for Best Country Instrumental Performance for his remake of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and this year, he won the Grammy award for Best Blue Grass Album for his work on The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo.
These days, Steve is largely focused on playing with his band, the Steep Canyon Rangers. Even so, he has still found time to keep his comedy relevant in our digital world by releasing some of the funniest blog posts on the net, the best of which involve mocking himself. While many comedians fade out of the limelight, it seems likely that we will be laughing with Steve all the way to the end.
Image via Kata Rokkar [Flickr]
Sources: Wikipedia, Smithsonian Magazine, NY Mag and Talk Talk.
March 20th is Big Bird’s sixth birthday. You may be wondering how he could be only six years old when he was the first Muppet on a show that has been on for over forty years, but the thing is that Big Bird (or just “Bird” as his friends like to call him) is always six years old. So although the Sesame Street favorite has been around for a whopping 41 years (meaning most of our readers had the chance to grow up watching him and that he got to meet Patricia Nixon while she was still the first lady), we at Neatorama are proud to say happy birthday to one of our favorite perpetual children.
Big Bird’s character was originally supposed to be more of a village idiot than a neighborhood friend, but within the first season, the writers and performers quickly started seeing a lot more potential in the innocent and sweet bird. They started envisioning him more as a curious child than a yokel and quickly morphed him more into a role model for the youngsters at home.
Big Bird’s young mind is always inquisitive and he always asks questions as a result. This not only gives kids a chance to learn the answers to questions he asks, but also teaches them that it’s good to ask about things they don’t understand. Big Bird helps children understand that it’s OK to not understand everything because even someone who’s eight feet and two inches tall still doesn’t know everything.
This also helps the character share morality lessons with kids without preaching to them because he is only reflecting on something he just learned.
Big Bird continues to be one of the most prominent characters on Sesame Street. As such, he is often given the opportunity to teach some of the hardest life lessons to the home viewers.
Big Bird’s star role in the early 80’s episode about the death of Mr. Hooper was considered to be a milestone in children’s programming and may have been part of the reason he was selected to play such a key role in Jim Henson’s funeral, where he sang “It’s Not Easy (Being Green)” in memory of Jim, who created the Muppet family and played Kermit. At the end of the song, during which he almost broke into tears, he looked up at the ceiling and quietly said, “thank you Kermit.”
One of the other important lessons Bird taught kids was that just because adults don’t immediately believe you about something doesn’t mean you should stop trying to tell them about it. This came about when the producers of the show decided that the long running gag about Mr. Snuffleupagus never appearing when the show’s adults were around. When a string of sexual abuse cases hit the public eye in the early 80’s the staff worried that the gag might encourage kids to think that adults won’t believe them if they talk about something out of the ordinary, so finally Snuffy actually made himself known to the show’s adult characters. Perhaps Big Bird sums up the message best:
“Snuffy’s my best friend, he was never imaginary! It was just a matter of poor timing. Sometimes I would ask Snuffy to wait for me in one spot, then while I was away he would leave to go put on a tie or brush his teeth. And then when I came back he would be gone! But then one day he finally stuck around, and everyone could see that my friend Snuffy was real after all. I was so glad that day, because then I knew that my grown-up friends on Sesame Street would always believe me when I told them something that unusual but still true.”
Just because he’s only six and a giant bird doesn’t mean Big Bird doesn’t have an array of skills and abilities. He can sing, dance, roller skate, ice skate, ride a unicycle, draw and write poetry. He also lives on his own in the nest on 123 Sesame Street. Well, actually, he does live with one friend, his teddy bear Radar, named for Walter “Radar” O’Reilly from M*A*S*H who was also naive and kept a teddy bear friend. Although Gary Burghoff gave Big Bird Radar during a guest appearance, later episodes claim that he was actually a gift from Mr. Hooper.
Big Bird’s species will likely remain a mystery through the ages, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been hinted at. He most commonly seems to say he is a lark, which started during a 1976 appearance on Hollywood Squares. He even reiterated this fact just last year in an interview with TV Guide. In the same interview though, he also calls himself a golden condor, an origin that started back in a 1981 episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
While many people assume he is supposed to be a canary because of his yellow coloring, it was only said by Ma Bear during the 1987 filming of A Muppet Family Christmas. The Swedish Chef responds to this one by looking at the bird and calling him “gobbla gobbla humungo.”
Oscar the Grouch seems to have his own theories about Big Bird. While he often calls him a giant turkey, he also called him “part homing pigeon” in the 1978 Christmas Eve on Sesame Street special. While his calling Bird a turkey is supposed to be an insult, it actually helped him hitch a ride on a turkey truck in the 1985 movie Follow That Bird because Big Bird was able to explain that “my friend Oscar always says that I’m a big turkey!” In fact, this is actually true to some extent, since only turkey feathers are used for the character’s costume.
Perhaps the best answer for Big Bird’s species though is that he’s a bit of a mixed bag bird. After all, he does have his own scientific name, “Bigus canaries,” according to the book Sesame Street Unpaved. And, in the 2004 special A Celebration of Me, Gover, Big Bird says, “I wish I could fly like Super Grover. But my Grandpa was an emu bird. They can’t fly. But they can run! Every fall, Grandpa ran south for the winter.”
Of course, everyone’s just going to see what they want to see. The Egyptian god Osiris called Big Bird an ibis during the movie Don’t Eat the Pictures. Personally, I like to think that he’s a canary emu mix.
Just because Big Bird is only six doesn’t mean he hasn’t aged quite a bit throughout the years. Of course, his species must age rather well because he seems to be looking better than ever. The original Big Bird was designed to be clumsy and goofy to go along with his yokel behavior. He had googly pupils on occasion and rather raggedy feathers. His puppeteer, Caroll Spinney remarked on this original incarnation by saying, “He didn’t look too keen. I thought he was one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen!”
Of course, this goofy design didn’t quite work out for the eternal child character they decided he should take on, so near the end of the first season, he was given a makeover. He received more feathers on his head and his eyelids were made to raise and lower. The puppeteers figured out a great way to enable him to move his right arm, which was originally pinned to his side (Caroll Spinney has to use one arm to move his mouth and the other for his left arm, which left his right arm useless). By the second season, his feathers were better groomed and they were a more constant shade of his trademark golden yellow hue.
In season eight, Big Bird was given three bright yellow highlights around his head (like those seen in the image above by Flickr user Anthony Grimley), which he maintains to this day, although the color and size shift through the years. In season ten, Big Bird received a more rounded head and a more shapely neck that largely resembles the current inceptions of the puppet since.
The costume itself is partially assembled by American & Fancy Feather. Because 90% of the feathers selected for the costume are rejected, the company’s owner, Anthony Trento, says Big Bird is his toughest customer.
Big Bird is obviously one mammoth of a Muppet, so controlling him is quite a big job. Fortunately, the team has worked out some ingenious innovations to make Big Bird as lifelike as possible. For the most part, Big Bird is controlled by Caroll Spinney who uses his right arm to control big bird’s head, eyes and mouth movements and his left arm to control Bird’s left wing.
As I said earlier, the first version of the puppet was forced to have his hand tied down because it couldn’t be controlled. They fixed this first issue by tying fishing line to the puppeteer’s arm so the right arm would do the opposite of the left arm. When the arms need to be moved independently in movies, a green screen tool is used so a second puppeteer can stand behind the character and move his arm and then later be edited out of the shot. This cannot be done on the Sesame Street set because it is too vivid of a background.
That’s not the only major change the puppeteer has seen in his costume. While the early incarnations of Big Bird had a small mesh screen in the front of the neck for Caroll to see from, this was latter sealed off to make things look even more accurate. Instead, Mr. Spinney uses a video monitor in the front of the suit to navigate his way around. He says he also includes the scripts in his costume to make it easier to remember his marks.
When Big Bird performs on-location, he cannot use the monitor suit though, so the team uses a neck tie or tuxedo shirt to hide the screen on the front of the costume.
Image by Luis Rubio [Flickr]
Jim Henson was originally slated to play Big Bird and the first costume was actually built for him, but the man who built the costume told Henson that he wasn’t walking the way a bird should stroll, so Jim decided not to play the part. He then offered the role to Frank Oz, who is known for playing Bert, Grover and Cookie Monster, as Big Bird, but Oz refused largely due to claustrophobia related to being in the giant suit. Fortunately, Caroll Spinney took on the character and helped shape the creature into the endearing bird we know and love today.
Spinney has played Big Bird almost consistently since the show’s inception in 1969. Daniel Seagren performed in his place a few times when he was sick and also on a few appearances on other shows and in recent years, Rick Lyon and Matt Vogel (the main understudy) have taken on apprentice roles in anticipation of 76 year-old Caroll’s eventual retirement.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved Big Bird, and so do millions of other Americans. After all, you have to be pretty popular to have your own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (pictured above thanks to Flickr user GrahamKing) and to be featured on a postage stamp. I hope you all enjoyed learning about the character that helped so many of us learn!
Sources: SesameStreet.org, New Yorker, Muppet Wikia, New York Times, Wikipedia, Jim Henson: The Works
Legendary author Ray Bradbury is turning 89 this year on August 22nd. He will be celebrating the event at a bookstore in Glendale, California. For the those of you into Bradbury, but can’t make it to the party, just send him a card. The store has assured they will pass on any cards sent to:
Ray Bradbury C/O
Mystery and Imagination
237 North Brand Blvd.
Glendale, CA 91203
Link Via BoingBoing
