Carol Channing-this is not a corn thread

She was a talented and very intelligent eccentric. I saw her in Lorelei when I was in high school, her night club act when I was in grad school, and her final tour of Dolly in Chicago. Not a one-trick pony and I doubt she was a smoker—she was very careful about her diet, lots of food allergies, and maintained stamina until near the end. Loved her.

And if you don’t do Broadway or theater, why SHOULD you get her? It’s not like she was doing sports or opera or whatever your interest are?

Hey R2, look sweetie, I'll talk about anything right now because these fucking royal threads are out of control. Why not rename DL to Fat, White, British, Royal obsessed Granny Lounge. They are pushing us out and trying to take over. FF them.

For every one I try to block five more pop up.

Channing lived in Modesto California for 8 years in when she married her high school sweetheart. (She left her former manager-husband when he was paralyzed by a stroke claiming he abused her and they had sex 3 times in 4 decades.) I had an old Hyacinth Bucket landlady once who would corner me whenever she could to gush about Carol and how she met her several times.

The link has Carol singing "Modesto, You're My Hometown" which is adorably awful, her dentures clacking away.

[quote]For every one I try to block five more pop up.

You cannot block threads.

You can temporarily R5 but I was talking about the crazed posters more than the threads.

The point is these cunts have somehow decided to take up residence on a gay message board while being rightwing homophobes.

My folks had never seen her in anything then saw her in Jerry's Girls (who were the other two? Leslie Uggams and Andrea McArdle?). They basically gave her a rave, they thought she was great. They weren't pushovers so I'll take their word for it.

R5 Why did you think OP was talking about blocking threads?

[quote] these fucking royal threads are out of control. Why not rename DL to Fat, White, British, Royal obsessed Granny Lounge.? They are pushing us out and trying to take over. FF them. For every one I try to block five more pop up.

How can threads push us out? Obviously he meant the "Fat, White, British, Royal obsessed" grannies.

I have to admit, I never saw the thrill either. I wrote her off my list when she did a magazine interview and was asked to talk about how her gay fans had built her career. Her reply was "well you know what the bible says about those people". Cunt.

The pic @R4 is the only one I have seen in which she actually looks black.

Her idiosyncrasies are what made her so special on stage

R11 and made her a one trick old bitch

She was an oversized presence built for the Broadway stage. I personally don’t really get the charm of her or Merman or even Mary Martin… but I never saw them live and that’s what they were all about.

So we just have to trust their audiences, who loved them.

Her chef d'oeuvre.

My partner was in the original cast of Jesus Christ Superstar. One night someone said "Carol Channing's in the audience!"

He didn't believe it, so he looked out through a gap in the curtain. He couldn't see anyone in the audience, but he could see this enormous coral pink smile and even more enormous halo of platinum blonde hair.

People like Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, and Tallulah Bankhead were larger than life presences whose personalities and voices could be felt and heard by people sitting in the balconies and the back of the theater. On camera, however, they had trouble reining it in and either came across overwrought, overbearing, or in the case of Miss Bankhead in her earlier films at Paramount, utterly bored. Some people were just meant for live audiences, and Carol Channing excelled at it.

R9 Same. I met her once in Palm Springs and she was sweet as pie but all I could think of was that interview.

She might not have been ideal for the camera, but she was excellent on stage. Very unique and memorable which is more than can be said for most Broadway performers these days. You forget about their performance 5 minutes after seeing it.

R16. I agree. While I don’t think Streisand was the right choice for the film of Dolly, I’m not sure Channing would have succeeded—certainly not with Gene Kelly as director. Channing played a repressed lesbian in a WWII play on Broadway and was apparently quite touching. With the right director, she might have been able to tamp down the theatricality for the screen. She replaced Rosalind Russell in Wonderful Town as the wry, smart Ruth and received excellent notices.

Bankhead was capable of complex acting on film—she won the NY Film Critics Award for Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. It’s a fine performer—the glamor of the journalist who gradually becomes a real woman as everything is stripped away.

She was a comedian who projected to the back row of the theater. Never missed a show while being treated for ovarian cancer in the '60s.

She's the original Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent queen.

I watched this Alice in Wonderland as a child and the only thing I loved about it was this peculiar white queen creature. I could not make sense of Carol Channing because she was utterly unique, from her face and how she danced to her voice and the odd way she spoke. I was probably eight when I first saw this, I am 44 now, and it's etched in my memory. I have always thought of her kind of as a human muppet.

Ha! R21 A Human Muppet! The perfect descriptor. Now, I wish there'd been a version of Hello, Dolly with her as the only human performer and Muppets playing all the other roles.

She also did Shaw—The Millionairess

I recently read her “memoir of sorts,” titled “Just Lucky I Guess.” She explains that’s the punchline to the joke about a prostitute in a brothel who’s asked by a john, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” and she answers, “Just lucky I guess.”

I could hear Carol’s voice saying what she had written. I found her life history interesting, because I knew almost nothing about it before reading her book.

[quote]She was an oversized presence built for the Broadway stage. I personally don’t really get the charm of her or Merman or even Mary Martin… but I never saw them live and that’s what they were all about. So we just have to trust their audiences, who loved them.

Well, some of us did see them, do you think we're all dead? (I never saw Channing but did see the other two. Though I saw Mary in a straight play.)

When I brought Carol to New Hampshire in April of 2008 to do a benefit for the ASO (AIDS Service Organization) I worked for, she was tireless in raising awareness of the work we were doing.

The day before her benefit performance, she asked me if our clients would be attending. I told her we'd provided two tickets for each client but that some were unable to attend. More than a dozen had serious health issues, and several felt that the Kaposi's made them not want to be seen.

Carol insisted on going to each of their homes to say hello and sing a song or two to them.

When she'd arrive, she would say, "I'm carol and I'm bringing a little of my show to you..." She would then sit with them, hold their hand and sing one of her songs. Before departing, she'd give each a kiss on their lips and make them promise to fight.

At 87, she brought a vitality and sense of hope to the entire community and provided, for some of the clients, one last happy memory as they approached their fin al days or weeks.

She said that doing these benefits was so important to her because, "...so many of those beautiful chorus boys who worked with me are gone..."

🎶A kiss on the ass may be quite continental, but corn will let a girl make wind

R26 Now that is a nice story. Great memory - thanks.

Can someone just explain what the reference to corn is everytime Channing's name is mentioned here? Its apparently some great inside joke...

R29 I don't remember...

R29,

R31 Wonder why the thread was closed after 27 replies?

r32 Threads are closed after a period of inactivity. I think a year, maybe?

R33 Oh. Okay, didn't know that, thanks!

I think they implemented that policy to thwart the idiot(s) who keep bumping threads from 2015.

Thanks, R31