Look at all the people! “I Hope I Get It”/A CHORUS LINE
At all the people.
How many people does he need?
How many boys, how many girls?
How many people does he...?
Something is truly amiss when thousands of recent college graduates are unable to get jobs. They have played by the rules. They studied. They burned the midnight oil. They made the grades. But upon receiving their diplomas, they enter a job market that is slamming door after door in their faces.
Just this week, I watched a new documentary, EVERY LITTLE STEP, a multi-camera production that captured virtually every little step of the arduous audition process for the 2006 (and first ever) Broadway revival of the landmark 1975 musical A CHORUS LINE.
It took me back to 1976 when my future wife and I saw it in New York in the first year of what would become its then-record-setting 15-year run. I was in the first two years of my television news career, still taking baby steps to learn, to grow, to get better if only by a miniscule amount day by day. But I had a job—not just any job, but a job doing precisely what I wanted to do with my professional life. I was very fortunate. I knew so then. But looking back from the vantage point of today’s job market, I realize just how fortunate. 
There was something about A CHORUS LINE. On its face, of course, it was about young kids trying to make it as Broadway show dancers. But—and this was part of its art—it was—and is—also about, as the original production’s Playbill stated, “anyone who has ever marched in step…anywhere.” And that is all of us.
One of the producers of EVERY LITTLE STEP has pointed out a crucial difference between his movie - and for that matter the original musical -- and all those TV reality shows that promise stardom: "It's not about being a star," he said. "It's about getting a job."
That underlying sense of sweaty desperation beneath the leotards and behind the pirouettes has always been one of the deeply appealing elements of A CHORUS LINE, linking its not-so-young "gypsy" dancers struggling to stay in the game to anyone who has ever fought to get and keep a fulfilling job.
When we saw A CHORUS LINE in 1976—one of the most affecting nights I have ever spent in a theater--watching sweat sling off the bodies of those healthy, young dancers was somehow life-affirming and life-informing. It told my generation if you really wanted to make it, you had to be willing to sweat, to jump, to leap—to go through whatever hoops of sacrifice necessary to get where you wanted to go. And that’s as it should be. I mean, if it’s really worth having, it shouldn’t be easy, right?
But in late-2009’s shaky job market, when it's even more difficult to get one's toe in the door, let alone a foot, I wonder what’s out there for young college graduates to aspire to?
In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Bob Herbert writes, “These recent graduates have done everything society told them to do. They’ve worked hard, kept their noses clean and gotten a good education (in many cases from the nation’s best schools). They are ready and anxious to work. If we’re having trouble finding employment for even these kids, then we’re doing something profoundly wrong.”
What is it saying to educated and eager young people that even with a degree, the work place has nothing, or very little, to offer them? More and more college graduates are working for free, at internships, which is great for employers. And, of course, gaining experience is great for the young worker. But at some point, one has to ask, “Without paid employment, how will they ever be able to leave home and support themselves?”
Today’s economic climate gives an even tougher meaning to A CHORUS LINE’s lyrics:
I really need this job.
Please God, I need this job.
I've got to get this job.
There comes a moment in life when you are supposed to step onto “the line" or you are not going to make it onto the line, or achieve exactly what your goal is. Up until now at least, that was supposed to be Life.
You can’t help but feel for today’s young people. Like the brutal audition process of A CHORUS LINE, today’s ever-tighter job picture means that only the very strongest, those who persevere in the face of ever-growing odds, will “make it.” Some will falter, some will be cut, and others will simply give up.

What will it mean to society, what will we all lose, when America’s young talent, brains and muscle are not allowed to work at what they love, are not given the opportunity to strive, to soar...to dance?
--Hoyt Harris
Florence, Italy
Many famous Italians are buried in the church: e.g., Leon Battista Alberti, Michelangelo, Vittorio Alfieri, Leonardo Bruni, Gioacchino Rossini, and Galileo. The church is one of the finest examples of early Renaissance architecture.
Fireworks over Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore
Rack focus on man in Palazzo Vecchio ("Old Palace")
Sandra Sebring was feeling a bit upset. But with several things on her mind, she was trying to sort out which one was bothering her most.
As the daughter of First National Bank’s longtime president R. J. McBride, Sandra Sebring had believed most of her life that she had a family reputation to uphold. She felt the same way about her brother James, his wife Mary and their kids.
But her sister-in-law, Mary McBride, who lived four houses down from Sandra and her husband Jack on Beechcrest Drive, was embarrassing the entire family with her nutty behavior--—among other things, Mary’s proclivity for watering her lawn---in her negligee, no less---in the rain. On her way home from the grocery store, Sandra had just driven by Mary’s house during the worst of the afternoon’s downpour. Sure enough, there was Mary standing in her front yard, in a powder-blue, practically see-through nightgown, hand-watering her flower beds while it rained buckets. Sandra knew people in the neighborhood talked about her sister-in-law.
“...about what a nut she is,” Sandra thought.
But Sandra also knew that while Mary was a little “off,” there were plenty of people in this city who made Mary look normal. So, in order to save family face, when playing bridge on Monday nights, she tended to casually defend Mary by dropping lines like, “Oh, Mary’s a little eccentric, I guess”; or “That Mary is so colorful.”
“And besides,” Sandra mused, as she unpacked her groceries, “so what if Mary watered in the rain? The only harm is flooded flower beds at the least, and, at worst, root rot.”
Having mentally reduced Mary’s behavior to nothing to be much concerned about, Sandra moved on to something else that had been on her mind this last week: her golf game. It was off. And not because she was doing anything wrong. Her stance on the green was better than ever. She was addressing the ball better than ever---in fact, addressing it as if it could talk back.
Problem was, lately it had talked back. But because she always played alone, there had been no one else to hear it. Therefore, she wasn’t sure if the bumpy, white Titleist ball had actually said what she thought she had heard.
“Don’t hit me. Please, p-l-e-a-s-e, don’t hit me!”
She’d frozen in mid-swing, the driver poised in mid-air. Dr. Armstrong and the doctors at the state hospital had told her to ignore these voices. They had said that when things like pictures on the wall, people in photographs, her dog Pixie, or things like bananas started talking to her, to just ignore the voices.
“They’re just in your head, Sandra.”
Hearing the doctors’ voices in her head, she took comfort in their words. Relieved, she had addressed the ball again --—“Alright, buddy, no sand trap this time!”--- and had followed through on the swing, slightly squinting her eyes and wincing, just in case the ball screamed .
It hadn’t. Or if it had, the sound was lost as the Titleist soared through the air, straight down the fairway.
“Per-fect!” Sandra said out loud.
Shoot, for a drive that good, she thought, I could take a chorus of screams from all the balls in my bag. 
No, it wasn’t Mary’s watering in the rain that had bothered Sandra in recent days.
It wasn’t even the talking Titleist that gave her pause. (Shoot, just last month, she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that the little man on a can of Chef Boy-R-Dee ravioli had given her tips on how to improve the sauce.)
No, what really had been on her mind was that someone ---some thing--- had been... watching her. She could feel it. It was like that feeling of someone looking at you, that feeling of eyes on the back of the neck. No, it wasn’t quite that feeling. It was more like eyes on the top of her head.
That’s right. Something was above her, looking down.
Looking down...at her. And it seemed to be just above her head, straight up.
Last week, last Wednesday to be exact, just as she’d been on the verge of making a putt on the fourth green, on a perfectly calm day, not a breeze in the air, she had felt herself suddenly wrapped in a swirl of air, like a swirling cloak of air, a cocoon of air spiraling from the top of her head down to her exposed ankles.
She had quickly looked up, expecting for the briefest moment to see a room fan hovering above her head, whirring on “high”, plugged into nothing at all, but going full tilt.
But when she’d looked up, there was nothing, except the ever so slight rustling sound of...of...silk skirts?
Is that what she heard as she stared into a cloudless sky?
With her arms dropped to her sides, her putter lax in her hand, all she saw was a tiny white feather, no more than a fluff of a feather, floating down, then hanging for the briefest moment right in front of her eyes, giving her a good look, before coming to rest on the very tip of her upturned nose.
She felt it.
It tickled.
But, stifling a sneeze, when she tried to brush it away, it was so lightweight that it swirled away on the air current stirred by her hand.
What she couldn’t get out of her mind, though, was that she had seen the color of the feather---not exactly white but more like a white background overlaid by a pearlescent sheen, like the colors inside an oyster shell.
“What bird has feathers like that?” she wondered.
And Sandra Sebring knew from birds.
There were mockingbirds and grackles. There were jays and chickadees.
There were cuckoos.
And there were loons....
Blues legend Henry Gray (center)
with Hoyt Harris and Herman Fuselier
Downtown Alive! Lafayette 2 October 2009
DTA! is a free event. The Fall 2009 Series features Grammy nominated artists and performances by renown and up and coming musicians from a variety of genres ranging from Cajun, Swamp Pop, Blues, Southern Rock and more.

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) is the most acid look Hollywood has ever taken at itself. It is the one movie--if I had to pick just one--that I would take to the proverbial deserted island. Gloria Swanson's aging silent star "Norma Desmond" is theatrical and grotesque, yes, but we have compassion for her as she skates along the rim of insanity for most of the movie before finally slipping totally into madness.

Norma's Descent into Madness
SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
When, in that closing sequence, she descends the staircase of her crumbling Hollywood mansion she is also descending into madness: she thinks she's back in the studio when, in fact, those cameras belong to tabloid news photographers capturing her insanity for the world to see. The sequence is mesmerizing and, as a "mad scene," ranks right up there with Lady Macbeth's.
Joe Gillis narrates: "So they were turning after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merficul, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her."
Chilling.
--Hoyt Harris
Forty years after turning Bert Lahr into the Cowardly Lion in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), Charlie Schram was Peter Sellers' personal make-up artist on BEING THERE (1979).
Cast by director Hal Ashby as "Agent Riff", I was the only TV reporter on the set which was otherwise closed to the media. This gave me incredible access to do reports on location.
I did a feature story on Schram. We decided I would interview him while, for the sake of the story, he turned a 29-year-old me into a 75-year-old. As I sat in his make-up chair, my photographer clipped mics onto Schram and me and filmed my transformation in the huge mirror.
As Schram began putting subtle smudges of dark make-up below my cheekbones, I asked what he was doing.
"I'm aging you," he said.
"How did you learn how to do this?" I asked.
"In the Thirties, I studied art and sculpture in Paris," he said.
During its glory years, Schram had headed MGM's make-up department for 20 years, transforming the young faces of Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner into icons of the screen.
After 30 minutes of sinking in my cheeks, adding lines to my face and putting streaks of gray in my hair, Schram spun my chair around. Staring back at me from the mirror was...an old...me! He had made me so believably old that I FELT old.
At that moment, I realized make-up was half the battle of getting into character.
The highest I have ever been was the day Hunter was born---and I was stone-cold sober. It doesn't seem fair: Bette did all the work (I WAS in delivery as her Lamaze coach) but while she is laid up in the hospital after labor and delivery, I'm on Cloud Nine.
Although Hunter was born at 1:30 in the afternoon, twelve hours later I'm still zooming on the natural high that we now have this beautiful, healthy son to raise and love.
Unable to sleep at home, at roughly midnight I drive back to the hospital, parking in the back. Because the hospital is closed to visitors at this hour, I know it's pointless to try entering through the front. In the back, I spy a light underneath a door. I try the door. It's unlocked. I quietly let myself in and find myself practically in the dark.
But as my eyes adjust as I'm walking through this large dark room, I realize I'm in the hospital morgue. Row after row, there are corpses on tables to my left and to my right.
But I want to see Hunter. I keep walking until I come to a door, exit into a hallway and take an elevator to the maternity floor. As I exit the elevator, I see a light way down the hall. I walk toward it, finding a lone nurse doing paperwork in the nurse's station.
I politely say, "I know it's after hours. But could I get my son from the nursery and take him to my wife's room?"
For the first time, she looks up from her task, recognizes me from the news and says, "He's yours, isn't he?"
With that, I go to the darkened nursery, collect Hunter from his bassinet and take him to Bette's room. As she continues sleeping, I hold him for an hour in the dark, thanking God over and over for the gift with which he has blessed Bette and me.
21 March 2009
From left: Evan Anderson, Megan Schiering, Marcelle Fontenot, Hoyt Harris, Tracy Wirtz, Jim Hummel, Rob Kirkpatrick
In the summer of 1974, I spent three weeks on Maui. Everyone, it seemed, had read "Jaws" that summer. But not I. I'd been too busy finishing my master's degree back in suburban Chicago. On July 4, I was bobbing along with our hostess off the coast of Lahaina in what had been a rectangular raft. But, while awaiting our turns to use one of the surfboards, we had used the raft so much for body-surfing, riding waves up onto the beach, that the sand had finally torn the bottom out, leaving a rectangular "inner tube."
Nancy and I were sitting in it, at opposite ends, facing each other, our legs dangling down into the water. We were about 200 yards from shore. All of a sudden, she clamped her finely manicured fingernails into my forearm and gave me a quiet but intense "SSShhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I thought, "What's wrong with this woman?" Following her gaze, I turned my head to see one of the most spectacular sights I have ever seen. There, not three feet from the raft and less than two feet below the surface was an 8'-10' shark. It was just hovering there--suspended in the water--as if it wanted us to climb aboard for a ride or something. Stunned but fascinated (and you're not going to believe this), I started to reach down to TOUCH the creature. At this point, blinding pain shot through my forearm. Nancy had dug her nails deeper into the skin, drawing blood.
At this point, people on the shore are running around, screaming, "SHARK!! SHARK!!" A young man is running toward the water with a rifle held in one hand above his head.
The shark begins to ever-so-slowly swish his tail back and forth, angling slightly away from us. Having bobbed back into water only chest-deep, Nancy and I slowly walked--within the rectangular "tube"--toward shore. Rifle shots rang out. The shark got the hell out of Dodge. Then everyone regaled me with the book "Jaws."
The next summer--1975--as I was ending my first year in TV news--I took the woman I would eventually marry to see Spielberg's movie version at a Nashville theater, which was packed with screaming movie-goers. Then and only then was I scared witless at what could have happened the previous summer when I --very, VERY stupidly--had even CONSIDERED touching the damn thing.
You know how many of us, when dripping wet, look like drowned rats? I know I do. Well, on June 6, 1967, the day before I embarked on a summer in Europe, I spent the entire day with Cybill Shepherd. (Yes, THAT Cybill Shepherd.) Cybill is from Memphis but was visiting mutual friends of our families in my hometown, Lewisburg. We spent part of the afternoon swimming. A member of the swim team at East High School in Memphis, Cybill would do these absolutely perfect dives, swim the length of the pool underwater, coming up at pool's edge, long blonde hair gleamingly wet, looking for all the world like some sea goddess. We were 16 then. And while "youth itself is beauty", Cybill was perfect.
At this point in her life, her only claim to national fame was that she had won Miss Congeniality in the Miss Teenage America pageant. Had this turned her head? Not in the least. She was as down to earth a girl as you'd ever want to meet. The next year--1968--her entrance onto the national stage got a major boost: she won Model of the Year in New York City and appeared on the cover of Glamour magazine, the first of what would become a record number of covers on Glamour. 
But that first cover was all it took. Her picture was spotted by film-critic-turned-Hollywood-director Peter Bogdanovich who cast her as "Jacy Farrow" in his THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, what Newsweek's Jack Kroll would call in the opening line of his review "a masterpiece." In it, Cybill had a quick nude scene: while standing on the diving board in a bathing suit, she quickly takes it off and dives in. (A perfect dive, of course.) She comes up out of the water--again a sea goddess. This time for the whole world to see. For me, of course, it was a case of art imitating life....
In his Oscar-winning screenplay for 1950's ALL ABOUT EVE, in the movie's opening sequence writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz has the narrator say of Eve in voice-over:
"Eve. Eve, the Golden Girl. The cover girl, the girl next door, the girl on the moon...Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes--she's been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and when and where, what she wears and when and where, whom she knows and where she was and when and where she's going...."
At the ripe age of 18, this was the world Cybill stepped into. You couldn't walk through a grocery or drug store without seeing her face staring back at you from a magazine cover. You couldn't turn on "The Tonight Show" without seeing Johnny Carson dazzled by her blonde good looks. Cybill was the healthy, athletic beauty who replaced the likes of reed-thin model Twiggy and preceeded the anorexic, coked-up-looking models like Kate Moss and the clones that followed. The powers that be in the fashion industry and on Madison Avenue should be crucified for glorifying models who look like concentration camp survivors. Had they continued to "glamour"-ize the likes of Cybill our young women today would be a lot healthier.
In the early 70s, Cybill went on to do several films for Bogdanovich, with whom she was now living in Hollywood, but none as successful as PICTURE SHOW. Despite critics scathingly panning her work in Bogdanovich's period-piece, DAISY MILLER, and his musical, AT LONG LAST LOVE, she remained a fashion icon. And in 1976, she got good notices for her performance in Martin Scorcese's TAXI DRIVER.
But in 1978--at the ripe, old age of 28--unhappy with where her career was "not" going, she went home to Memphis, became pregnant and had her first child, daughter Clementine. Her marriage ended in divorce several years later. A second marriage produced twins and ended in divorce after three years.
But Cybill bounced back with the TV sitcom "Moonlighting," a huge hit for Cybill and the up-and-coming Bruce Willis. In the mid-90s Cybill showed her business chops when she executive-produced the TV sitcom, "Cybill", based loosely on her two marriages. It was a huge hit for Cybill and for CBS. 

Fast-forward from when we swam in 1967 to 1991. I was in Memphis, having been invited by my alma mater to participate in the annual Rhodes Forum. My college put me up at the Peabody Hotel for the long weekend. Cybill was living in a Peabody penthouse while her Japanese-style home was under construction in Memphis on property that borders the Mississippi River.
On side-by-side treadmills, we exercised---and we talked: Cybill has remained a fighter; with such an up-and-down career, she's had to. In hearing her story, it was fairly heart-breaking to see what Hollywood fame, the bust-up of her eight-year, on again-off again relationship with Bogdanovich, the failure of two marriages, life in the goldfish bowl of media coverage, and being a target of fevered entertainment reporters working overtime can do to the human spirit.
She is a survivor. Over the years, she evolved into an out-spoken voice for civil rights. At 58, ingenue movie roles haven't come her way in decades. She now does television, having starred in two television movies portraying Martha Stewart. Personally, I think her life itself has the makings of a movie. She survived the beauty pageant circuit of the Sixties; she rose and fell and rose again in Hollywood; her personal life hasn't been "happily ever after."
In many ways, she is Everywoman.
But I will always remember Cybill as "the golden girl" of my generation, the dazzling-even-when-drenched sea goddess, the once-upon-a-time, quintessential, All-American girl-next-door.
---Hoyt Harris