Sea Street

A guest in my home for eight years...

Tony Soprano has been a guest in our home for the last eight years.  My son, Daniel, who is going to film school in the fall asks, "Why do you watch that stuff. The storyline is convoluted and confusing and the editing is terrible."

            But of course my answer is, "It's the acting that makes the "Bada Bing" crowd come alive."  These dead-on performances ring especially true to my wife and I.   Karen grew up in a town full of Soprano types and I spent decades playing music in nightclubs, owned by "Tony's crowd".  We can put real names to every character on the show.  "It's like going back to Fairmont," says Karen.

But the only "boss" I knew was not a Soprano type but rather a guy named Mario.  Mario was handsome, as handsome as Marcello Mastroianni.  He was charming and gracious to those he liked, but his conversation dripped with sarcasm toward those he didn't.  This man gave me years of employment and invited me to his home many times.  Still, I knew there was another side to him.  In short, he could be a nasty man just as Tony Soprano was a nasty man.

Henry the Eighth was a nasty bastard too.  This year his story followed the Sopranos on Showtime.  The Tudors is a classier series, the editing is good, the writing good and the acting is superb.  Henry the Eight is Tony Soprano's aristocratic counterpart.  He is handsome in the series although in real life he was a red-haired, round-faced Welshman.  The man was gifted.  He spoke several languages, wrote poetry and was a consummate musician.  He composed Green Sleeves, a piece that is still with us in Christmas madrigals, not to mention a jazz version by Shorty Rogers.

The series has a Masterpiece Theater look, although it is filled with sex and nudity.  It also uses contemporary language including the word "technology" (a word invented in recent times).  This series will be with us as long as the Sopranos were.  Henry hasn't even killed Anne Boleyn yet and when he does he'll still have four wives to go and there's another Tudor waiting in the wings, his bad-tempered daughter, Elizabeth. 

Watch The Dan and Dad Show
July 21 at 9:30 p.m. on Channel 17 for
BLOG BOUDOIR with Peter Kenney, Julia Richard' and Dan RojayThe reason I'm writing about Tony and the Tudor King is that they hold the same kind of fascination for Anglo audiences and American audiences in particular.  Why is this?  Is it because the general population of Americans is from Europe's underclass and has a natural dislike of authority and the rule of law?  Tony Soprano and Henry the Eighth are and were lawless creatures who selfishly demanded immediate gratification no matter the cost.  Sound familiar?  Does all this explain why brutish, evil men have inhabited the American imagination for so long?

My Great Aunt Molly, who was born in 1860, grew up to marry an Inn Keeper in southern Illinois.  One summer night several men rode up on horseback and demanded supper.  My aunt remembered serving them smoked ham and vittles.  After they finished eating, the leader introduced himself as "Jesse".  When Jesse's plate was lifted, she found a hundred dollar gold piece.

Aunt Molly told this story many times through the years.  I remember sitting on the porch swing and listening to the old woman in her nineties sing, "Oh Jessie had a wife to mourn for his life, Three children they were so brave, But that dirty little coward, That shot Mr. Howard, Has laid Jesse James in his grave, Has laid poor Jesse in his grave."  To her, Jesse James had been a hero. 

There were many other denizens of the Old West who were made into legends by the American public.  In my father's day, no story resounded more loudly than that of the lady in red, the woman who pointed out John Dillinger to the Feds. 

My dad, who had been a gambler and bootlegger in his youth, loved the story of John Dillinger's death.  The movie moguls of the day, outsiders themselves, developed a genre of gangster films that featured George Raft, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart among others. 

The film noir period saw more of the same.  Of course there was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and other glorifications of lawlessness almost always brought to a close by a violent showdown.  But the Sopranos and Henry the Eighth avoided this fate.  Henry died in bed of diabetes; as for Tony Soprano and his family, I have it on good authority from friends in New Jersey that they were ... "blacked out" ... by a video editor.

Future Blogs:

• Carmen's Back in Town
• About Obama
• Coulter by the Commode

On July 21 at 9:30 p.m. on Channel 17 for  BLOG BOUDOIR
With Peter Kenney, Julia Richard' and Dan Rojay