April Fools’ Day is one of my favorite holidays! It provided musical inspiration too. Last year I whipped together some pretty bitchin’ Halloween and Xmas mixes which I hadn’t done in years. Now I pieced together my inaugural April Fools’ Day celebration. It’s a bit different. The previous two had a related audio clip followed by three songs, repeat. This one is a funny original song, a comedian doing a bit and then a song correlating to the joke, repeat. I’m amazed I already have material to make one for 2022.
Now to my point about how I miss Paul Lynde and why he’s this month’s header.
There’s this one Twitter feed I enjoy called Vintage LA. A really cool lady who is around my age posts old photos of Hollywood landmarks from their pinnacles. Sometimes there’s a person or group of old celebrities. Recently she reposted something from Peter Marshall, the host of Hollywood Squares from the show’s golden age (the Seventies). The dude is still alive and well at 95! How awesome. He and Paul were fixtures of the show and my Grandma, who passed away 20 years ago, was glued to the TV for this gameshow, amongst other things. I remember how much Paul Lynde made us all laugh but somehow the reasons were probably on different levels. My brother and me? We knew Paul as the whacky Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. Grandma? Her sense of humor was narrower and tied to “the gold old days” when swearing wasn’t needed. I bet Grandma probably enjoyed a good dirty joke in her youth, she just would never fess up to me regardless of my age. I think she was also willfully ignorant of Paul being gay, I know she argued to the end about it with Liberace.
So I decided to dedicate the month of April to a great smartass who I wish lived long enough to see America lighten up about who he really was.