"Mare of Easttown" Concludes (Post Contains No Spoilers)

Over the last several years, and this has certainly been exacerbated in the last year due to the pandemic, television has changed, as has the entire delivery system of how we receive our video entertainment.  Video Streaming services are now what one needs to fully enjoy all of the content that is being delivered to the public.  So much so that it is almost impossible to see everything that is available to us.  My friend Dan characterizes this era as the new Golden Age of Television, and who can argue?  Shows like The Crown, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jack Ryan, Perry Mason, The Undoing....all terrific series that we have enjoyed, and all available only through various video streaming services.  At this point, there is not a single series on regular network television that we are regularly watching.

All this is a prelude to a write-up on what may well be the best of such series that we have watched so far, "Mare of Easttown."

In this gritty seven part series, Kate Winslet player Mare Sheehan, a divorced police detective in the small eastern Pennsylvania town of Easttown.  An Academy Award winner, and the beautiful Rose from 1997's "Titanic", Winslet is anything but glamorous in this one.  The outfits she wears always appear thrown together, her hair is always a mess, and she also appears to be a bit overweight (she has to be hip-padded under those jeans and sweatpants), she lives with her widowed mother (wonderfully played by Jean Smart), her high school senior daughter, and a four year old grandson, the son of Mare's deceased son.  Her ex-husband lives in a house directly behind hers, and he is about to remarry.  In short, Mare's personal life is pretty much a mess.

In the first episode, we learn that twenty-five years before, Mare made a winning shot in a state championship basketball game, an event that may have been the only good thing that ever happened in Easttown.  We also learn that (a) Mare's social circle, such as it is, consists of her high school basketball teammates (no one leaves Easttown, apparently), (b) the town is still roiled up over the disappearance of a teenaged girl a year before - what have Mare and the cops been doing about that? - and, oh yeah, (c) another teenaged girl, Erin McMenamin, has been murdered, her body showing up in a creek in a park, dead from a bullet wound to her head.

It is the unraveling of the mystery of the death of Erin that throws the town into a complete turmoil.  Who did it and why?  There is no shortage of suspects, and everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, in Easttown seems to have secrets to hide, and everyone seems to be connected to each other in some way.  As one critic I read put it, the murder of Erin is a thread that, once pulled upon, causes the entire fabric of the town to unravel (great metaphor, right?).

There are wonderful aspects to this series.  There is the performance of Kate Winslet.  She will undoubtedly be Emmy nominated for this one.  There are the local details that the production gets just right.  People wear Eagles, Flyers, and Phillies gear, they shop at Wawa, eat cheesesteak hoagies, drink Rolling Rocks and Yuenglings, and best of all, they have that Philly, or Delaware County (DelCo) accent, down perfectly.  (Go to YouTube and check out the fabulous send-up that the Saturday Night Live people did a few weeks back.) 

Like most people in the Philly area, the Sheehans 

apparently spend summers at the Jersey Shore 

Best of all, though, is the writing.  Each week delivered a twist and a cliffhanger ending that made you completely PO'd that you had to wait a week to see how THAT was going to play out.  Interestingly, HBO chose to release this one episode at a time over seven weeks, so you were unable to binge it all at once, which only heightened the anticipation to see the next episode.  Even in the final episode, just when you thought....oops, forget it; I promised no spoilers.  If you haven't watched, you can start now and will be able to see all seven episodes one right after another. And if you don't have HBO MAX, sign up for one month, watch this series, and then cancel after a month.  It is one way that you can game the Video Streaming System and keep you costs down.

Both Marilyn and I are now just really bummed out that this show is over.  I don't believe that there is any talk of bringing it back for a second season.  Probably best to just leave it on the high note of television entertainment that it was.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Oh, I mentioned that Mare's mother, Helen, was played by Jean Smart.

Winslet and Smart

Daughter and Mom

Smart was fabulous in the part, and her role here drew us to another  HBO series in which she is currently starring called "Hacks."  She plays an older Las Vegas diva comedienne, whose star is waning and her agent teams her up with a young female comedy writer to help her out with her act, help which she doesn't feel she needs.  Six of the ten episodes have already aired, two new episodes drop every Thursday, and it, too, is a terrific show.   I'll be writing about that one at some point in the future as well.

Phil Wins at Kiawah!!

I realize that we are now three days after the fact, but The Grandstander cannot let any further time pass without acknowledging the phenomenal performance by Phil Mickelson in winning the 2021 PGA Championship at the Ocean Course in Kiawah Island, SC this past weekend.  As everyone knows by now, at the age of 50 years, 11 months, Phil became the oldest golfer to ever win a Major Championship.  It was remarkable accomplishment by a popular player and was great fun to watch as Phil battled Brooks Koepka in that final pairing on Sunday.

(Little Known Facts:  The Grandstander is very much like Phil Mickelson.  I am a natural right-hander, I play golf left-handed, and I, too, am - ahem - over fifty years of age.  No wonder people are always getting us mixed up.)

This victory by Mickelson, a 3000-1 long shot who was ranked 176th in the world coming into the event, sparked comparisons to Tiger Woods' equally remarkable win at the Masters in 2019, and it reminded us all that both Woods and Mickelson will forever be linked as the greatest golfers of their generation.  One must wonder how truly staggering the wins and wins-in-majors totals for Phil would have been had he not been a playing contemporary of Woods over the last twenty-five years or so.

It is interesting that the two of them, who were never particularly close, and, in fact, may not have even liked each other all that much, have seemed to draw closer as they have aged, in  much the same way that Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus did when their glory years were behind them and they got older.  Think of Phil dressing in red and black on the Champions Tour the weekend after Woods' auto accident earlier this year, and think of Woods tweet saluting Mickelson  (and Phil's response) after the big win on Sunday.  It's kind of cool, really.

And as this Barry Svrluga column in today's Washington Post indicates, the injured and inactive Woods and the fifty year old Philly Mick are still the only gofers that really move the needle among the sporting public.

Two more comments on the PGA Championship. 

The Ocean Course is a gorgeous piece of golf property in a spectacular setting.  Wonderful to look at.  That said, I would have no desire to ever play on it.  I mean, it looks like just about the hardest golf course that I've ever seen.  I can't imagine having a bit of fun slogging through it.

The surging of the crowd onto the fairways after Mickelson and Koepka teed off on 18 can only be classified as an absolute disgrace.

"But that happens all the time at the British Open" I can hear you say, and that's true, but the Brits do it in a much more civilized manner.  What we saw on Sunday was the equivalent of drunken mobs storming a football field.  It's lucky no one was hurt (that we know of) or worse in that melee.  Say what you will about Brooks Koepka, he had every right to be thoroughly pissed off to be swallowed up in that mass while he - in theory - still could have hit shots that would have won the tournament for him.

Let's hope that the stuffed-shirts of the USGA learn from this and does NOT allow this scene to be repeated at the US Open next month.

Book Review: "Find You First" by Linwood Barclay (No Spoilers)

Twenty years ago, software engineer Miles Cookson was a bright guy with big ideas - and no money.  Strapped for cash, Miles went to a fertility clinic in New York and made a "donation" in exchange for some ready cash.  With the money, he upgraded his computer, started inventing apps right and left, and now, twenty years later, he's a high tech gazillionaire.  He has also been diagnosed with Huntington's, a genetic debilitating and deadly disease.

Miles never married and has no children in the conventional sense, but his diagnosis has started him thinking about that "donation" of his two decades ago.   Surely there are biological children of Miles' out there.  Miles feels the need to find them and let them know that they, too, might be subject one day to the same inherited illness that is now killing him, and he can will to them a part of his large fortune to help them.  But how to find them?  Well, with large amounts of money, you can pretty much get whatever you want, regardless of the wisdom or morality of the matter, and this is just one of the themes of this terrific thriller.  

Miles soon learns that there are nine such children who have resulted from his donation, and it is only when he meets up with the first of them, a spunky young woman named Chloe (I want Saoirse Ronan to play her in the movie version of this book), that he comes to question whether he has made the right choice in seeking out these children.  Oh, and yes, some of the other of Miles' biological offspring are disappearing and leaving behind absolutely no trace of themselves.  They have vanished as if they never existed at all.  The reader, of course, knows that these young adults are being killed.  What you don't know is who is behind these killings and why are they taking place?

Along the way, we meet conniving in-laws, underworld hitmen, business people with questionable ethics, and a New York City mover and shaker who isn't named "Jeffrey Epstein" in the novel, but who clearly is, well, Jeffrey Epstein.

Okay, so what are all the cliches about books like this..."a real page turner"...."couldn't put it down"...."has you guessing to the end"...."a non-stop thrill ride"...well, that's what this book is.  I loved it and read it in two days, and I hope that they do make a movie of it.  With Saoirse Ronan.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

By the way, this is the second novel of Linwood Barclay's that I have read in the last year or so, the other one called "A Noise Downstairs."  Both  are terrific, and the guy has a whole shelf full of books in the library and in bookstores.  If these two are any indication, I'll be seeking out the others in the future.

To Absent Friends - Rennie Stennett, Charles Grodin

Two notable persons left us yesterday, and deserve recognition from The Grandstander.

Rennie Stennett

1949-2021

Renaldo "Rennie" Stennett died yesterday at the age of 72, a cancer victim.  Stennett was a valuable member of the Pirates 1971 and 1979 World Series Champion teams.  Being a key member of those teams is reason alone to include Stennett as an Absent Friend.  He was a mid-season call-up in 1971 and in only fifty games, he hit .353 for the Bucs during that season's stretch run.  His career with the Pirates ran from 1971 through 1979, during which Stennett hit .278 over that time.  He then spent two seasons with Giants and retired with a .274 career batting average.

In 1977, Stennett was hitting .334 and battling teammate Dave Parker for the batting title when in August of that season, he suffered a broken leg and dislocated ankle while sliding into second base.  He was never the same ball player after that.

He will also be forever remembered for going 7-for-7 in a game against the Cubs in 1975, a feat never accomplished in MLB before or since.  I was was working in Cleveland, Ohio at the time, and I remember getting a call at my desk from my Dad to tell me that Rennie Stennett had just gone 7-for-7 in an afternoon game against the Cubs at Wrigley Field.  Funny, the things that you remember.  Coincidentally, just this past weekend, I saw a feature about that 7-for-7 performance on the Inside Pirates Baseball show prior to one of the Pirates games.

Mr. Seven-for-Seven

Stennett remained a lifelong Pirate, was active in the Pirates Alumni group and would usually show up a couple of times a year for events at PNC Park.

Charles Grodin

1935-2021

Comic Actor and Pittsburgh native Charles Grodin (Peabody High School grad) died yesterday at the age of 86.

As often happens when someone likes this leaves us, you remember what you remember ("Midnight Run", "The Lonely Guy", "The Heartbreak Kid"), and then you read the obits and realize what you have forgotten.  For instance, he played the Robert Armstrong role in the awful 1976 remake of "King Kong", and he co-starred on Broadway with Ellen Burstyn in the play "Same Time, Next Year."  The movie version of that play is one of Mr. and Mrs. Grandstander's favorites.  It starred Burstyn and Alan Alda, but in watching the movie, you can just see how Grodin would have been perfect in the part.  He also auditioned for Mike Nichols for the role of Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate", a part that eventually went to Dustin Hoffman.

Grodin also has become a part of our regular vernacular as a result of a scene in the 1988 comedy-action movie "Midnight Run."  Grodin plays a white collar criminal who is being escorted back to justice by a bounty hunter plated by Robert De Niro.  It is a road trip wherein Grodin completely exasperates De Niro which leads to a classic line that De Niro delivers, as only De Niro can, to Grodin:  

"I got two words for you: SHUT THE F--- UP!"

RIP Rennie Stennett and Charles Grodin.

To Absent Friends - Michael Collins

Michael Collins

1930 - 2021 

A belated and melancholy Happy Trails to astronaut Michael Collins who died last month at the age of 90.  As a member of the historic Apollo 11 crew, Collins flew the command module Columbia solo around the moon while crew mates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the lunar module Eagle  to the lunar surface and became the first humans to walk on the moon.  When Collins flew Columbia around the back side of the moon, he lost all contact with both Armstrong and Aldrin and with Mission Control on Earth.  The official mission log of Apollo 11 noted that "Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins."

Collins was a graduate of West Point, and like most of the early generations of American astronauts, he served as a test pilot in the US Air Force.  He was chosen to be a Project Gemini astronaut, and made his first trip into space aboard Gemini 10 along with John Young.  His mission aboard Apollo 11 was his second and last flight into outer space.

Space travel barely makes the television news anymore, but if you were alive in the Summer of 1969, you will never forget the excitement surrounding the truly heroic events that surrounded Apollo 11 and man's first landing upon the surface of the moon.

RIP Mike Collins.

The Crew of Apollo 11

Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin

Aldrin is the only one still with us

Just Shut Up!

Welcome to a new feature of The Grandstander.  I like to call it.....

 Aaron Rodgers.

We're all tired of hearing you moan and groan about how mistreated you feel over how the Green Bay Packers are treating you.  This also goes for the media members (I'm looking at you, Tony Kornheiser) who have been slurping you and promoting the idea of how dissed you have to feel ever since the Packers drafted Jordan Love with there first round pick in 2020. How conveniently everyone forgets the last time the team dissed a Hall of Fame QB in Brett Favre when they had the temerity to use a first round pick to draft, oh who was it?  Oh, right, it was YOU!

So, either have your agent negotiate in a business-like manner to get you traded or released, go to work for State Farm full time, take the Jeopardy gig, or just show up and collect your $25 mil from the Packers, but otherwise, Just Shut Up!

LeBron James and Luka Doncic. 

Both of these very terrific NBA players have been sounding off of late about the new NBA "Play-In" element of the NBA Playoffs.

(In case you are unaware....In an effort to avoid "tanking" and keeping interest up late in the season, instead of the top eight teams in each conference making the Playoffs, the teams that finish 7-8-9-10 will play a play-in format.  Seven will play Eight, Nine will play Ten.  The winner of the 7-8 game gets the seventh seed for the conference.  The loser of the 7-8 game, will play the winner of the 9-10 game; the winner of that game gets the eighth seed.  Sounds like fun!)

Both James and Doncic, whose teams are in danger of finishing in seventh or eighth and facing the play-in-within-the-playoffs are now crying unfair.  First off, these extra games will generate additional monies from television, approximately 51% of this money will go to, by CBA, the PLAYERS.  Two, if it so unfair, then play better during the season and don't finish in seventh or eighth place!!! 

Otherwise, Just Shut Up!  

(Full disclosure.  I happen to like Rodgers, James, and Doncic, but that doesn't make them above criticism when warranted.)

Rudy Giuliani, Just Shut Up! 

Neither explanation nor photo necessary.

Final Note....Just Shut Up! may or may not become a regular feature of The Grandstander.  Depends on how the Loyal Readers receive it.  I will accept nominations from any of you out there who feels that someone needs to be told to Just Shut Up!

Book Review: "Gods At Play" by Tom Callahan

 

Allow me to quote from page 248 of Tom Callahan's terrific book, "Gods At Play":

Red's (Smith) death reminded me that, when the eyewitnesses go, sports are left only with the bare statistics, which aren't nearly as evocative or reliable.  Red rode trains with Babe Ruth. "It wasn't just that Ruth hit more home runs than anybody else," he said.  "He hit them better, higher, farther, with more theatrical timing and more flamboyant flourish.  Nobody could strike out like Babe Ruth. Nobody circled the bases with the same pigeon-toed mincing majesty."

With that overriding thought in mind, Tom Callahan sets out to write everything that he has seen in over fifty years as a sportswriter and columnist in cities such as San Diego, Cincinnati, Washington, and New York. Try to think of a significant sports personage over that period of time, and chances are, Callahan had an encounter with them and tells a great story about them in this book.  In addition to the sporting figures....Paul Brown, Joe Montana, Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, Gale Sayers, Pete Rose (Pittsburghers, wait until you read what Pete had to say about Forbes Field!), Bob Cousy, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammed Ali to name just a few.  Equally compelling are the stories that Callahan tells of other sportswriters like Red Smith, Shirley Povich ("the only man to appear in Who's Who in American Women), Bill Nack and others.

If you are a sports fan, I simply cannot imagine you NOT liking this book. I finished it in three days.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Reading this book also made me think of some of the things that I have seen, both in person and through the magic of television, in my sixty plus year of following, watching, and loving sports.  Such as....

• Clemente fielding, throwing and hitting
• Maz turning a double play
• Bradshaw to Swann and Stallworth
• Ben to Hines and Heath and AB
• Franco and Jerome
• Connie Hawkins grabbing rebounds out of the air with one hand
• Joe Greene changing the fortunes of a franchise by the sheer force of his will
• Mario and Sid

And that's just the local guys.  Fifty years from now, people will still read of these guys and will be able to look at all the numbers, as well as see their busts and plaques in Halls of Fame, but, as Callahan said in the passage quoted above, numbers don't even begin to tell the stories.

Read the book.

Book Review: "Still Fooling' 'Em" by Billy Crystal

"Still Fooling' 'Em" was one of those books that popped up as an Amazon buck ninety-nine special in my email a few weeks back.  I figured, hey, it's Billy Crystal, it's gotta be good.  And it was.  If you like Billy Crystal, and I don't know anyone who doesn't, you should seek out and read this book.

It's not a new book.  It was published in 2013 to coincide with Crystal's 65th birthday.  While it is autobiographical - separate lengthy chapters cover Crystal's career in his 20's, 30's, 40's, and 50's - it is interspersed with some classic Crystal riffs on growing old.  It is also filled with anecdotes about so many people that have played such important roles in his life, from a contemporary New York City high school basketball player named Lew Alcindor to Mickey Mantle to Muhammed Ali and show biz folk like Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Jack Palance, and dozens of others, this book is a real neat ride into the fabulous, or should I say mahvelous, career and life of Billy Crystal.

On more serious notes, Crystal writes of his father's death when Billy was fifteen years old, and the effect that had and continues to have on him to this day.  He also writes that his mother, no matter where Billy was on the given day, would always call him precisely at 7:36 AM, the time that he was born, to wish him Happy Birthday and tell him to be sure and "do something special" on the day.  Years after her death, Crystal still looks at the clock at 7:36 on the morning of his birthday and thinks of his mother's calls.  And on the final two pages of the book, Billy Crystal gives absolutely the best definition of Heaven and the Afterlife that I have ever read, better than anything I ever heard in twelve years of Catholic education, in fact.

And in  perfect note of symmetry, the book also ends with Crystal telling us of the birth of his fourth grandchild, a boy, who was born on March 14, 2013, which was Billy Crystal's 65th birthday!

"Still Fooling' 'Em" gets Four Stars from The Grandstander.

The Steelers and the 2021 Draft

Don't want to disappoint you, but this post will contain no letter grades or opinions as to how the Steelers "did in the draft."  I make no claims to any expertise that would allow me to do so.  No one actually KNOWS how these kids are going to do in the NFL - not Kevin Colbert, Mike Tomlin, nor Bill Belichick, let alone Mel Kiper, Mike Greenburg, Booger McFarland, or the "PM Team" blowhards on 93.7 The Fan - until they get to training camps and begin practicing with and against and playing against actual NFL players, so we won't REALLY know how the Steelers, or any other team, did in the '21 draft until sometime in 2022 or 2023.

Still, on Draft Day(s), you have to be optimistic.  Two days ago in this space I wrote of how pleased I was with the selection Alabama's RB Najee Harris with the Steelers first pick.  In the second round, the Steelers surprised (and enraged!) a lot of people by selecting tight end Pat Freiermuth of Penn State.

Again, I will put my trust in Tomlin, Colbert, & Company with this pick, and will also say that any college TE who carried the nickname "Baby Gronk" should - should - be well worth a second round pick.  Plus, besides Harris, Freiermuth is the team's only selection that I can honestly say I actually saw play and on whom I have a semi-informed opinion, and I remember liking what I saw when I did see him play, so bring him on!

After the second round, the Steelers had seven more selections and used them to select two offensive linemen (a position of need), two linebackers (can one or both of them become an "edge rusher"?), a defensive lineman, a cornerback, and, in a very intriguing selection, a 263 pound punter!

After the draft, the Steelers also signed eight undrafted free agents (UDFA) - two cornerbacks, two linebackers, two safeties, and two wide receivers.  I won't even begin to speculate about them, but I will predict that at least two of them will make the team, and one of them could be a special teams standout.  We can also all remember that Donnie Shell, who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer, was an UDFA, and we can all dream, can't we?

Like I said, we should all be optimistic after a Draft, but, realistically, of the nine dated players, if five of them become solid starters over a period of five seasons or more, and if at least two of them can become Pro Bowl caliber players, I am guessing that Mike Tomlin and the team will be more than happy with "how they did" in this Draft.