From Playboy to Playbill
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
This first little bit is not really part of this column, just an observation. I turned on the Vision Channel a week or so ago and watched an ad for On-Line Gambling. I thought it odd that a religious channel would promote gambling. It doesn’t seem that many years ago (maybe in the 40s and 50s) that churches thought card-playing was sinful. I’m beginning to wonder if going to heaven or hell is just based on the flip of a coin.
Way back in the 80s and 90s I wrote gag lines for Doug Sneyd for Playboy. Doug, as you must know if you have any literary expertise at all, was a featured cartoonist in Hugh Hefner’s magazine for well over thirty years. Sadly the magazine folded after 806 well-thumbed editions throwing Doug and I out of work, thousands of bunnies looking for something to wear, and millions of teenage boys back to peeking in bedroom windows.
On a rather interesting aside, I read in one edition in 1999 that Kelsey Grammer, TV’s Dr. Frasier Crane, would be playing the title role in Macbeth at a Shakespearean festival in the summer of 2000.
I found it fascinating a TV comedy star would tackle such a demanding role, forgetting that most TV stars started out as actors. The more I thought about it, and perhaps after a single malt or two, it occurred to me that I could rewrite Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a comedy to be published in Playboy and I would make a fortune. It would have to be Playboy since no other publisher would ever attempt such an asinine venture. As you might expect, my version would not be written for children, young teens and possibly even normal people. But who could I cast along with Kelsey Grammer? The first four actors in the opening scene were easy.
MacFrasier: A tragedy
Dramatis Personae (In order of appearance)
THREE WITCHES – Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue MacLanahan
Special guest appearance – Estelle Getty, as Ma
ACT 1. SCENE 1 An open place Thunder and lightning.
Enter three WITCHES and MA
FIRST WITCH – When shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain?
MA – For God’s sake, Dorothy, why do we always have to meet in the bloody rain? We can’t meet when the sun is shining? My rheumatism is driving me crazy. Back in Sicily…
FIRST WITCH – Will you cut the Sicily crap, Ma? I’m trying to set up a meeting. How say we meet on the heath when the hurlyburly’s done?
SECOND WITCH – When the what is done? We didn’t have a hurlyburly back in St. Olaf, Dorothy.
FIRST WITCH – You didn’t have in-door plumbing in St. Olaf, Rose. Now can we set a date?
THIRD WITCH – Will there be any men there?
FIRST WITCH – Will there what?
THIRD WITCH – Will there be any men there? I need a man, Dorothy. I haven’t had any action since that warlock in Aberdeen.
FIRST WITCH – For God’s sake, Blanche. Will you forget about sex for 5 minutes? I’m trying to set up a meeting here.
MA – Throw a pail of cold water on her!
FIRST WITCH – How be we meet when the battles lost and won?
SECOND WITCH – Do we need a mover and seconder for that?
THIRD WITCH – I suppose we really should. It says in the Witch’s Covenant of 1266 that…
FIRST WITCH – Never mind the damned covenant; its final, we meet after the battle upon the heath.
SECOND WITCH – There to meet with MacFrasier.
ALL – Fair is foul and foul is fair; hover through fog and filthy air.
SECOND WITCH – I’ll bring the brownies and Rocky Roads ice cream. (Exeunt – i.e. leave the stage)
As you can see I was well on the road to fame and fortune, but sadly a problem arose:
Did you happen to study Macbeth or any of the other Shakespearean dramas and comedies in high school? Have you ever gone to Stratford and watched the finest actors of today perform his immortal works? If you did any of these things, you might have noticed something about the Bard’s plays, especially if your bum is fairly delicate and you were in the cheap seats, the damned things are hours long. I plodded away with my rewrite for two weeks and didn’t get as far as Act ll and there are five of them. So I quit.
Now this is interesting; I was using a computer; old Will was using a quill he plucked from a goose’s bum. I am not too well-versed on the technology of the writing instruments of the 1500 and 1600s but I seem to remember a sharpened quill and a pot of ink was about it. Will, as you no doubt know, was mouthier than all the begetters of Genesis put together. My Complete Works of William Shakespeare contains 37 plays and a whole whack of sonnets.
Can you imagine what the goose population thought about their particular contribution to the publishing industry of the day? Every time Will sat down at his writing desk, the neighbourhood geese would wrap their feathers over their beleaguered bottoms, waddle hell-bent-for-election across the barnyard and squawk, “Get out the Ozonol, boys! He’s got that look in his eye again.”
(Image Supplied)
