With Your Kind Indulgence...

The PenPal and I decided to get each other the ultra-deluxe Barbra Streisand: The Television Specials DVD set for Christmas this year. The set includes 1965's magnificent My Name is Barbra (winner of 5 Emmy Awards and the Peabody Award), 1966's Color Me Barbra (nominated for 5 Emmy's), 1967's rarity The Belle of 14th Street, 1968's A Happening In Central Park and 1973's Barbra Streisand...and Other Musical Instruments.

I was truly excited to own this as I have never seen Belle, and in particular BS&OMI. I owned the soundtrack to the latter, and listened to it quite often trying to envision what the show was like.

Well. Now I can tell you...

It's a good thing I never saw this back in the day...it would have been far too much for my teenage heart to handle.

Piano Practicing, the opener, is still one of my favorite bits, and Barbra looks GORGEOUS. It's one of those"I can sing/talk REALLY fast, with a funny Jewish/New York accent" bits done with just an eight year old pianist show-off sporting a forerunner of Adam Rich's haircut from"Eight Is Enough".

I've Got Rhythm, a 20 minute tribute to world music (she should get a credit in the annals of music history - I mean Barbra did it all from Native American drumming to Scottish bagpipes, in under 20 minutes) opens with Barbra running through the western orchestra as they are setting up. Watch the dude playing the saw. (What, they could find no theremin player?) Everything is all swell, until she makes him use his saw to even out the wobbly chair she is sitting on. This is clearly insulting to him, I mean, it is probably like the Stadivarius of saws, and she wants him to use it AS A SAW, destroying its finally honed and tempered sound. So watch at the end when she passes him by - he is CLEARLY thinking, "I can let the end of this go and it will slap your lilly white behind, lady" - OR -"Have you ever seen a magician saw a woman in half, lady? Let's give it a try."

Later, she descends on an Indian rope trick rope accompanied by some erotic sitar playing, in a gorgeous, form fitting (exposing) gown - her designers have certainly always known how to expose that woman's finest womanly parts - her back, legs and bosom. Wow.

Then she enters this little tunnel that makes you think a hookah smoking caterpillar is going to appear, and here is the part where I triple dog dare you not to COMPLETELY lose it -

She does a belly dance segment. Really. However, the costume is constructed in such a way that no skin shows, but, and here is the incredible part, they have sewn like, a saddle of bells to her posterior, and she flits about the set, shaking her rump at the camera. Really! Barbra Streisand!

So the final part of the rhythmic marathon ends with her virtuoso performance of holding a note for an extraordinarily long time. Like 20 seconds. Listening to this LP (repeatedly) I imagined the scene going down in a very different way. They cut to a montage (for those with a limited attention span who forgot all of the cultures visited in the past twenty minutes) and then right towards the end they cut back to her, and she is obviously reaching in and PULLING out every millisecond of air she possesses in the depths of her lungs...she is in pain. I vaguely recall reading that they attempted to film the scene again, and she passed out. I believe it. In my imagination though she just tossed it out like butter.

She does three numbers with the great Ray Charles, (which are not on the LP), and they are fabulous. And she even gets down with the sistas, the Raylettes (she looks incredibly frightened at one point when they get a teeny bit to close to her and start testifyin') on Sweet Inspiration/Where You Lead, and Ray is shown down center, in the foreground, just laughing away at those wacky chicks...

THEN comes Auf DemWasser Zu Singen, which is "really one of my favorites, and I'm sure it's one of yours. In fact, it is so much fun to sing, why don't you join in with me and y'know, sing along with Schubert?"done in a lovely lace Victorian-esque gown that I swear was her wedding dress in A Star is Born, and sporting Dolly Levi's hair from Hello Dolly.

THEN the moment we've all been waiting for, THE CONCERTO FOR VOICE....and Appliances. A Carol Burnett classic. I am pretty sure that the "musicians" are really the wait staff from the Harmonia Gardens - really. Check 'em out, they look just like they might break into Hello Dolly at any moment, and she is wearing the 'do after all. Either that or they were the orchestra from like, Benny Hill, because they are all weird old balding British looking men with bad teeth. Especially the guys playing the electric toothbrushes.

Now THERE'S a sentence I never thought I'd write....