look out for that ottoman

[from Dictionary.com]:

borscht circuit
noun
the hotels of the predominantly Jewish resort area in the Catskill Mountains, many of them offering nightclub or cabaret entertainment.

Also called borscht belt.

Origin:
1935-40; so called, facetiously, from the quantities of borscht consumed there

borscht belt

noun
(informal)  a resort area in the Catskill Mountains of New York that was patronized primarily by Jewish guests; "many comedians learned their trade playing the borscht circuit"
[end Dictionary.com excerpt]

(That's like "chitlin circuit" -- someone interviewed about the Ike and Tina Turner Revue said when the group traveled in the South, they played the "chitlin circuit"...)

-------------------------- [excerpt, The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book]  "I was what we called a 'three sewer hitter,'" Reiner told his publicist in 1959.  "I could belt that ball three sewer covers away -- which is quite an accomplishment when you're playing ball on a Bronx street."

It wasn't until he was sixteen, and his parents began urging him to find a trade, that Carl Reiner finally glimpsed his horizons in show business.  He had already landed a job as an assistant machinist in a shop that repaired sewing machines for New York's then-thriving millinery trade when his older brother Charlie urged him to look into a drama course....

The younger Reiner found himself bitten by the theatrical bug, and it wasn't long before he found himself abandoning his plan to enter the machinist's trade to embark on a career in the theater.

Once he'd committed to the actor's life, Carl Reiner trod a well-worn path...that began with bit parts and summer stock.  An extended apprenticeship at New York's Gilmore Theatre led to a few seasons of summer stock in Rochester, New York, where the young actor landed roles in dozens of venerable melodramas and light comedies of the era, including a lead role in a stock production of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. 

Not long after that, Reiner embarked on a memorable ten-week tour with a traveling Shakespeare troupe, where the fledgling thespian got his first -- and last -- taste of the classics.  "I was never comfortable as a serious actor," Reiner recalled some years later.  "I felt silly cavorting about in pink tights, masquerading as a Danish King."  And so, in the early 1940s, Reiner made his way to the Catskills, where he found more suitable employment as a sketch comedian in a Borscht Belt resort. 

"I fell right into the work," he recalled.  "Although I hadn't been able to accept myself -- a watchmaker's son from the Bronx -- as a King of Denmark, I was perfectly at ease kidding kings and generals."  It was a quality that producer Max Liebman would admire when he later cast the young comic to play Sid Caesar's foil on Your Show of Shows.  Notes Reiner, "He used to call that sort of performance 'stinky acting.'  It's good bad acting.  You make fun of the character and yourself at the same time."

...Drafted into the armed services shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Reiner found himself stationed at Camp Crowder, near Joplin, Missouri, the real-life military installation that would also serve as the setting for some of Rob Petrie's more memorable exploits some twenty years later.

After Reiner was eventually assigned to a base in Hawaii, he continued to hone his comic skills in a series of army revues that were designed to boost morale of GIs stationed in the South Pacific.  It was there, Reiner would later recall, that he first discovered his uncanny knack for comic improvisation.  "I created my own theater by standing in front of a microphone in rec halls, telling stories and doing Hitler routines"....
[end excerpt]

I don't know why I like to know this stuff, but I really, really do.  At various different points in my life, I've viewed every episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, at least once, and this "history" of the series shows the reader where it all came from.  Where the people came from -- both the characters and the real actors -- Carl Reiner was the source, and the Rob Petrie character was sort of him, but Dick Van Dyke played the part instead, & Carl Reiner would appear occasionally as the mercurial and volcanic star of the show Rob wrote for, "The Alan Brady Show." 

(In the episode where Laura accidentally reveals, on television, that Alan Brady wears a toupee, Reiner, as Alan Brady, hollers at her, with his toupees all lined up in front of him on his desk, "What am I supposed to do with these, now?!"
Laura (in shaky, teary desperation):  "Well -- there must be -- some needy bald people....")

After World War II, Carl Reiner came back to NYC, and was in shows called
The Fifty-Fourth Street Revue
Alive and Kicking
Call Me Mister

These titles fascinate and mystify me, and I try to imagine, What kind of show was that?  Who was in it, what did they do, who wrote it ? ? ? ( ! )

[excerpt]---------------- ...Alive and Kicking.  It was in that show that Reiner first caught the eye of Max Liebman, the impresario who would revolutionalize television comedy in 1950 when he married Broadway revue and Borscht Belt musical comedy styles in a prime-time variety series called...Your Show of Shows.-------------------[end excerpt]

==================
{excerpts from The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, by Vince Waldron.  Copyright 1994, Hyperion, NY, NY.}

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