Two Absent Friends - George Wendt and Charles Strouse

 

The death of actor George Wendt earlier this week at the age of 77 prompted an outpouring of tributes in both traditional and social media, and that should not have been surprising.  Wendt's portrayal of Boston barfly Norm Peterson on "Cheers" was truly iconic.  You can go on YouTube and find a clip of every entrance that Norm made into the bar and delivered one of his trademark clips.  It runs for nineteen minutes.  Many of them you remember ("How's the world treating you, Norm?"  "Like a baby treats a diaper.") and many of them you don't ("How's a beer sound to you, Norm?" "I don't know. Coach, I usually drink it before it has a chance to say anything."), but all of them funny. and perfectly delivered by George Wendt.

After "Cheers" long run ended, Wendt didn't have much success on TV. By his own words, television didn't;'t have much use for him, but I was surprised to see that he had a long string of successes in the theater, including Broadway.  I loved the fact that one of the many shows that he did was Neil Simon's "The Odd Couple".  If anyone was born to play Oscar Madison, it was George Wendt.

I close with a meme of one of my favorite "Norm" lines and two of the many memes that have appeared in the wake of George Wendt's death.

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Charles Strouse

1928 -2025

Three time Tony Award winning Broadway composer Charles Strouse died earlier this month at the age of 96.

Strouse composed over thirty musicals, fourteen of which went to Broadway.  He won Tony Awards for three of them.....Bye, Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie (which ran for over 2,300 performances).  If that was all he ever did, that's not a bad body of work, but there were other successful shows, and some flops, too, including Dance A Little Closer in 1983 that closed after one performance and Nick & Nora in 1993 that closed after nine performances.  In regard to the flops, I loved this paragraph from one of his obituaries:

“Everybody has flops,” he said. “When I teach, the students say, ‘How can you work three or four years on a show … and it flops? How do you recover from that?’ The only answer is, you’ve done your best, it didn’t work, what’s next?” 

There was more than just musicals for Strouse.  He did numerous film scores, including Bonnie & Clyde in 1967, and he was the composer of the "Those Were The Days" the theme song for the hit TV series All In The Family.

I will leave you with THIS SONG from Strouse first Tony winner, Bye Bye Birdie, wherein the great Paul Lynde wants to know "what's the matter with kids today?"

RIP George Wendt and Charles Strouse.

Irony of ironies, I also include THIS CLIP from a 1995 television production of Bye Bye Birdie where the song "Kids" is performed by..... George Wendt.