Friday, October 10, 2008

Revisiting An Old Friend

Mitchell here.

Last year, in a comment to a post by Ray, I upbraided Karl Keating for being willfully out of touch with popular culture. "Can you understand – even enjoy – aspects of pop culture without being consumed by it?" I asked at the time. My answer: "I think you can." I took particular exception to what I saw as a gratutious shot by Keating at the actor Orson Bean. (" I never could figure out who the guy was," Keating wrote. "So far as I knew, he never had done anything of note. He was on the show because he was a celebrity, and he was a celebrity because he was on the show. . . He was the compleat artificial man.")

Not only was this needlessly cruel, I argued, it was also patently false - Bean had had a long and succesful career on Broadway (including a Tony nomination), movies and television, and had authored several books. Meanwhile, at my main blog Our Word, Drew piled on with his comments in this piece.

Well, over at the inimitable Dirty Harry's Place, Harry links us to this video of Orson Bean appearance this week on Dennis Miller's radio show. In it, Orson talks about iconic things such as the first blacklist, Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar, and discusses his new book M@il For Mikey, in which he writes about finding God and becoming a Christian.


orson bean
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We can only be glad, I guess, that God has a wider range of interests than Karl Keating has. But, more seriously, we can be very happy for Orson Bean, and that the many years of pleasure he has given us has now been matched by the happiness that his his.

Cross-posted to Our Word and Welcome to It

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