The untimely death of child actress Erin Moran over the weekend — at age 56, her body was discovered in an Indiana trailer park — leaves an abyss in each of us even though we may not recognize the depth, and the severity, of the hole. For those of us of a certain age, Erin Moran, will always be Joanie — the spunky, spicy, daughter on the first season of Happy Days.
I wasn’t planning on writing about Carrie Underwood’s painfully wooden live performance last night in NBC’s misbegotten, and ill-fated, “dead” re-enactment of the fabulous Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, “The Sound of Music.”
All the promotional wind leading up to the live event immediately prickled senses in the wrong direction. The show was being sold as some sort of feel-good, happy children, sparkling story full of singing and wonder and dancing when, in reality, the musical is actually extremely dark and threatening and dreary.
The musical moments in “The Sound of Music” drive the frightening plot forward into a total, creeping, Nazi occupation — and it is in the artful context of that delicate balancing between whistling in the graveyard while staring death straight in the face — that made Rodgers & Hammerstein musical geniuses.
Continue reading → Carrie Underwood’s Wooden Live Performance in the Sound of Music
It has been nearly five years since the world exploded with the news that there was a sex tape that starred then mostly unknown Kim Kardashian, daughter of the late high profile attorney Robert Kardashian (read — someone who worked hard to get to be as successful as he was) and musician Ray J. This sex tape was of course filmed in complete discretion and was never meant to be seen by anyone but a private small group of people — perhaps only the two people that were in the tape.
Continue reading → Is a Kardashian-Free Year Too Much To Ask?
When concert promoters are unable to persuade people to buy tickets to see the concerts they are promoting and shows go on with many empty seats, it is a huge problem for them on multiple levels. For one, they will have trouble convincing any future venues to take on the artist — how can they know if they will lose money on the artist or not when their past experience tells them the artist is a bad investment? It also reflects badly on them as a promoter — they couldn’t generate interest? Other artists will shy away from them.
We are well aware of the excellent help that celebrities provide when the need is there — whether the help is for PR purposes or not, or whether other celebrities actively try to discourage you from helping, the help is there and can make the difference between a charity receiving hundreds of dollars versus hundreds of thousands of dollars — even if most of the money ends up coming directly from the celebrities themselves!
Continue reading → Do Celebrity Endorsements Sell More Product?
This was going to be a standard, run-of-the-mill, pontification about the seeming void of value in making Celebrity Best Dressed lists. Then on Wednesday, December 14th, something amazing happened. My wife, Elizabeth Davidescu, was rushed to the hospital because she wasn’t feeling well and she had thrown up a few times. She was 35 weeks pregnant. It was soon evident that it would be in the best interest of the baby and the mother to deliver the baby via c-section. As a result, I became a first-time father at 10:08 PM on Wednesday, December 14th. Having the baby the way we did made me really think about the best dressed lists and how incredibly absurd they are.
Continue reading → Baby Davidescu and the Pointlessness of Celebrity Best Dressed Lists
Yesterday, a bunch of B-List celebrities decided “to die” to save the world: It was “Celebrity Opt Out Day” if you will. These faux-celebs wouldn’t really be dead, though. They’d only be pretending to be gone — by not posting anything to their social networks like Twitter and Facebook — but we were supposed to be upset that they were dead so we’d donate our money to their cause of healing lives from HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. Great notion. Terrible execution.
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