Greetings over your interweb devices
“Ed Mos-ko-witz
Ed Mos-ko-witz please
I want you to
Do the show for me
Ed Mos-ko-witz
Ed Mos-ko-witz please
Do my show for me.
Eddie says he’ll never
Never ever ever
Screw the audio
Eddie says he’ll never
Never ever ever
He’ll never mess up your show.”
While prevailing thought has it that Showbiz is nonstop excitement and glamour — there can be great amounts of stress –– and long stretches of ennui, too. Crew members come up with some unique “tension breakers.” For instance, when a crew discovers there is a jail set onstage — the urge to be immortalized harming it up behind the bars is almost inescapable. Case in point: the Anger Management sound department. L to R – Anthony “Butch” Inglese, Lenny Moskowitz, Steve “Rabbit” Schuneman, Eli Moskowitz — and the ring-leader, Ed “Captain Purple” Moskowitz (who has been my go-to audio guru since the beginning of “The Golden Girls”).
In those early days of “Miami Nice,” when we sought to battle the doldrums, our secret weapon was a succession of song parodies to rival the brilliance, wit, and elegant meter of an Allan Sherman or “Weird Al” Yankovich. Some of these ditties were dedicated to various members of the crew (such as the Ode to Ed Moskowitz above set to “Come Go With Me” or yesterday’s Tribute to Bill Conroy based on “Mr. Sandman”). Previously, we have credited the creation of these melodious masterpieces to the “partnership” of Spina and Omero.
Now the Spina half of the team, was our ace script supervisor (and occasional script writer of “The Golden Girls”), Robert Spina — for whom we created the title, “Vice-President of PL Comedy Development” (it was a year in which the owners of our company gave out fancy titles and “promotions” in lieu of pay raises — we figured what was good in the tower . . .)
The PL, aka Private Line, was a closed-circuit communication system through which all technical departments spoke – including the director and his or her team, and all tech departments like lighting, cameras, audio, and the tape operator. To perform their appointed functions, those on this circuit had to be listening more than they would have liked. Any opportunity to mute that “infernal noise” (even for a few minutes during a break) was seized upon with all dispatch. Except on our show — where the chance for our essentially captive audience to hear the newest of Robert’s songs and discover to whom (or to which department) it was dedicated — to participate in a rousing round of “Super-PL Bingo” (bingo cards were distributed to any interested parties in the loop, the column and numbers were called out over the PL, and prizes awarded with silly props left over from previous weeks) — or even to hear a jazzified/spoken word reading of the evening menu set to a hummed version of Neil Hefti’s “Cute” — people actually started to like listening to our own pirate radio. Had Nielsen kept ratings for closed-circuit communications, we would have been at the top of the charts.
Oh, and the Omero half of the duo is who Robert has become now, Ms. Isabel Omero — we did say it was a partnership. The logo on the soda can may have transformed, but the contents are still as entertainingly effervescent!
To one and all, Be Safe-Stay Healthy