Elvis Above the Waist

I didn't watch a lot of TV as a kid, or listen to a lot of radio either. I don't remember why, I must have had other interests. I do remember the Ed Sullivan Show, and another one, the Steve Allen Show. As I remember it, Allen had more personality than Sullivan, but Sullivan had more celebrities on his show. I had heard Tiny Tim do "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" on the radio once or twice, but I had never seen him perform until that time on Sullivan, and I neither heard nor saw him after that, until now.

It was the same thing with Elvis Presley. The kids at school talked about him frequently, but I never paid much attention because I was no fan of that modern rock and roll music. I had seen several comedians do parodies of Elvis, but I never saw Elvis himself until he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show one evening. I remember thinking that he was okay, for a rock and roll singer, but I couldn't understand why people made such a big fuss over him. I don't know how many years later it was that I read or heard something about that performance. It seems that they had the camera aimed so that we only saw Elvis above the waist because the stuff he used to do below the waist was deemed unsuitable for prime time TV when children might be watching. Ah, those were the days!

I saw Steve Allen again shortly after we got our first TV around 1975. It wasn't his original show, it was a miniseries kind of thing on the PBS channel called "Meeting of Minds". Allen was the moderator for a panel of four or five actors who played various famous people from history. They never had met each other in real life, but now they had been resurrected and briefed on current events before debating each other on the show. The same actors appeared in each episode, but they were made up to look like their characters had looked and I watched several episodes before I realized that it was the same people each time. I remember one time they had Emily Dickinson interacting with Attila the Hun, which was cool. Another one I remember was when Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Thomas Paine were discussing religion. That was the first time I had ever heard of Deism, and I was so impressed by it that I subsequently read Paine's book on the subject, and I have considered myself to be a Deist ever since. Too bad we don't have people like that with us at the Institute.