Sharon and I took a break ...

Sharon and I took a break: me from Miami and the beaches, Sharon from early Season Four work on Burn Notice. We flew to Washington DC to check out Tyne Daly in Terrance McNally’s Master Class and then trained on to New York to catch up on some theatre in The Big Apple.

Master Class is arguably McNally’s best and there is little that can be said about Tyne’s performance beyond the straightforward truth that she was fabulous. You can look elsewhere (check out the Washington Post review on the Internet) for corroboration and plot synopsis but Sharon, our mutual friend Rosie O’Donnell and I were quite simply blown away. The five of us (the aforementioned foursome along with Rosie’s friend, Tracy) all went out for drinks and dinner after the performance to Ris… a very good, and new-to-me, DC eatery. We laughed with and cheered for Ms Daly while also taking a moment or two to toast Tyne’s double loss of the past few months of her Mother, Hope Newell Daly, and of her Mother-in-Law, Josephine Brown. This was then followed by a raised glass to Tyne’s about- to-be-born newest grandchild by way of the circle of life and her middle daughter, the very beautiful Kathryne Brown. 

Life and death has been on my mind this season. There was the Motion Picture Academy’s slight to the lovely and talented Farrah Fawcett with whom I worked on Charlie’s Angels and for whom I had great respect and an almost school boy crush. Her far-too-soon demise was made even sadder by the fact of it being eclipsed by the sensation of the same day passing of rock icon Michael Jackson. That the Academy’s annual memorial tribute to those in the industry that had died during the year failed to mention her was a gross omission. 

Two television stars I worked with and with whom I had a nice relationship even more recently passed away and I mourn the loss of two of the nicer people I have ever known in a business not particularly celebrated for nice people. I here refer to Fess Parker, who besides bringing the character of Davy Crockett to the known world, starred for six years in Daniel Boone, a series for NBC and 20^th Century Fox that I had the privilege of producing for three of those years. Perhaps in some future blog I will reminisce a bit about that time of my life and that working relationship. “Perhaps,” hell; you can pretty much count on it. 

John Forsythe was the other gentle man referred to. He and I worked together for one season of Charlie’s Angels where, as almost everyone now knows, he played the voice of the unseen on camera title role of Charlie. For a lot longer than that year we shared a terrific friend in Award Winning director Martin Ritt with whom John and I spent many a Saturday at Marty’s Race Track Box trying to keep up with our friend, the best handicapper of horse flesh either of us had ever met.

Fess rode horses and John bet on them. They were a great parlay.  

Barney