Doris Day Day

I’m making today Doris Day Day here on the blog.

This is Doris Day.

She’s a cool singer. A cool actress. She’s one of those rare show business people that I’ve never heard anybody say anything bad about.

I’m feeling awful about Doris Day because she got edited out of yesterday’s cartoon.

Pete Townshend also got edited out of yesterday’s cartoon, but I don’t feel too bad about that because I featured Pete back in a story I told during Marianne Faithfull week. I spelled his name wrong, but he nonetheless had a featured cameo.

Yeah, so, anyway, last weekend, Sunday afternoon, I fired Doris Day and replaced her with Lindsay Lohan.

I’m guessing I incurred a heck of a lot of bad Karma over that so I’m trying to make things right by giving Doris Day a whole post to herself.

When I did the pencil layout for yesterday’s cartoon, in fact even when I started to ink the lettering, I had been planning on using a different caption. The caption in the original rough was: “An Al-Qaida spokesman shocked the world by announcing they would end all global fighting if the West would create a YouTube video of Pete Townshend kissing Doris Day.”

I really liked that caption.

It’s absurd. It’s bizarre. And it’s a very obscure reference to a real bit of pop culture trivia. On Pete Townshend’s 2006 album (well, Who album) “Endless Wire” he includes a song where he dies and goes to heaven and meets various dead celebrities. He included Doris Day among the dead celebrities. He wasn’t being cruel, he’s just a British guy who isn’t completely up on American life and he didn’t know Doris Day was still alive.

So, I liked the original caption because it combines absurdity with obscurity and achieves, I think, a cool kind of truly pointless silliness. However, after giving it a lot of thought I decided it was simply too absurd, too obscure, too pointless.

I once made a reference to Townshend when I was talking to someone who is now in her early twenties and she had no idea who I was talking about. Poor Pete.

I don’t mind being obscure, but I generally prefer people at least to have an idea of what I’m talking about.

So I fired Doris Day and Pete Townshend and replaced them with two people who seem to be in the papers every day, Al Gore and Lindsay Lohan. I think the new caption is still absurd. It’s not really obscure but I think it’s still silly. And silly is always enough for me.

*

So today is Doris Day Day.

Doris Day is an interesting person.

She became famous as a singer during the big band era. That was a very interesting time. A person could make the case—I won’t try to make it here—that the rise of radio as a mass-medium combined with big band music marked the very start of celebrity driven pop culture in the particular form that we know it today. Vaudeville of course had been around for generations. But as popular as Vaudeville entertainers may have been, they were regarded by the general populace as fringe people, low-lifes. On the other hand, the front men of the big bands, the band leaders, were regarded generally as more-or-less respectable and became very influential. Someday I will have a lot more to say about the big band era and band leaders (if nothing...discontinuous... happens to me, like getting taken away by aliens or some such thing).

Doris Day is also the only person I know who is tangentially connected to both the Kennedy Assassination and the Manson helter skelter killings. It is a weird, acausal connection, but that is perfect Goblin Universe stuff.

The very first network broadcast of news from that day in Dallas occurred over the ABC radio network. At the time the news broke, the network had been playing Doris Day’s cover of “Hooray for Hollywood.” Doris Day singing about Hollywood got interrupted so the ABC newsmen could tell the world about Kennedy getting shot.

The house where the Manson helter-skelter murders took place was actually owned by Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son. Manson—so the accepted story goes—was furious with Melcher because Melcher, a music business executive, had declined to record Manson’s music. Manson sent his followers to Melcher’s house to to kill Doris Day’s son but apparently didn’t know that Melcher had rented the house to Roman Polanski. And that’s how Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and her friends came to be murdered. They were home in the house belonging to Doris Day’s son.

That’s almost certainly not the truth, the whole truth and nothing-but-the-truth about the helter skelter murders. However, like the Kennedy Assassination, I strongly suspect we will never know what really happened. Unless somehow people learn to tap into the Akashic records. And I haven’t completely given up on that.

*

So Doris Day is an interesting person who’s had an interesting life.

But when I think of Doris Day I think mainly of her 1966 comedy film, “The Glass Bottom Boat.”

The movie, made by former cartoonist [!] Frank Tashlin, is one of my favorite films of all times. It is exactly the kind of thing that I love. It brings up serious issues—the space program, national security, cold war spying, love & romance—but all the serious elements are reduced to farce and silliness and absurdity. (Dom DeLuise as a would-be vicious spy who is hopelessly hapless and nice attempting to torture Doris Day?!)

Beyond just being kind of silly, the film features Doris Day being kind of sexy. She has scenes in a mermaid outfit [!] and although she never appears in a bikini, Rod Taylor sends her a bikini after he accidently strips off her mermaid outfit [!] while fishing. Doris Day holds up the bikini and for that second, at least, viewers get to picture Doris Day in a bikini.

Those were the days. Can anybody in today’s world even imagine that a woman could strike a sexy pose just by holding a bikini?

Those were the days. And Doris Day was pretty damn cool.

So, I’m making today Doris Day Day here on the blog. And I’ll end this post with Doris Day singing the theme from “The Glass Bottom Boat:”

All aboard, all aboard
On the glass bottom boat
It's the greatest show that was ever afloat
Take a ride on the tide with the guide and see
The way out wonders of the deep blue sea

The deep blue sea, the deep blue sea
There's a lot to see, in the deep blue sea
The sailfish sail and the blowfish blow
Cockles & mussels, alive-alive-o

The hermit crab, he lives alone
You can't even get him on the telephone
The halibut's eyes turn up and in
He don't know where he's going,
But he knows where he's been

The deep blue sea, the deep blue sea
There's a lot to see in the deep blue sea
The glass bottom boat, you will agree
Can show you the magic of the deep blue sea

Spiney crabs and white fish too
Will all be there, what a hullabaloo
With so many fish upon the sea
There's hardly room for a fat sardine

The deep blue sea, the deap blue sea
There's a lot goin' on in the deep blue sea
Oh life on the glass bottom boat is great
(I'm the captain) You could be a mate

Now the turtle is slow, but not so dumb
He has his own condominium
A bluebird oyster was caught with "foyle"
He "swoyre" he didn't even know the "goyle"

The deep blue sea, the deep blue sea
There's a lot to see in the deep blue sea
The glass bottom boat, you will agree
Can show you the magic of the deep blue sea

All aboard, all aboard
On the glass bottom boat
It's the greatest show that was ever afloat
Take a ride on the tide with the guide and see
The way out wonders of the deep blue sea