the music was lovely, the man was a mensch

One day in the late 90s I entered a music store and got into a conversation with a teen-aged girl who was working there.  I mentioned a name and she replied, "Oh, I know her.  She's a lovely person."

I thought it was cute, and cool, that this high schooler was referring to a woman who was in the age group of her parents -- and me -- as "a lovely person."

It made her seem mature, grown-up, and sophisticated -- it was like, by using the term "lovely" which isn't so common, or current, she stood apart from the every-day things and took a position of dignity and benevolent authority.  She took power unto herself by speaking in such an atypical manner:  "She's a lovely person."

(I can say who is a lovely person -- and -- mmh...I just did!)

Then I said I wanted to buy a CD of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album:  I told her that when the album had come out 20 years before, I never had it, only because it was so popular that the songs were being played everywhere around you, & you didn't really need to have the record yourself.  Now, I told her, I need to have it so I can play it!

Looking like she totally understood where I was coming from, she said with a smile, "It's a lovely album."

OK -- realizing this is a trend, or a kick, or a groove -- everything on our "good" list is -- lovely.  What a nice experiment for a teenager to conduct:  trying out using the word "lovely"...I thought it was pretty great.

This girl was Asian -- her parents, I think, were Vietnamese "boat people" who came over in the '80s. ...

"She's a lovely person."
"It's a lovely album"...

-------------------------------- The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, by Vince Waldron {Copyright, 1994, Hyperion, New York, New York} also is "lovely."  So full of fun and information!  One interviewee is quoted, describing Dick Van Dyke's unique brand of physical comedy and expressionism:  "I remember the bit where Dick flows down off that chair....I'd never seen anyone do anything like that; he was like a human waterfall."

Carl Reiner, well-known veteran of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, had written a whole first season of a situation comedy about his own life -- he starred in the pilot, and while the network liked it, the feeling was, that it was lacking some type of "punch" -- they felt like they needed a different person to star in it: 

-------------------[excerpt]  As an actor himself, Sheldon Leoanrd recognized that breaking this news to Carl Reiner would almost certainly require a considerable amount of delicacy.  "How do you tell an actor he's just not the type to play himself?" ...

When Carl Reiner wrote the episode, "It May Look Like A Walnut," as a parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Sheldon Leonard at first didn't like it.

---------------- [excerpt]  "Sheldon and I had a big argument about that show being no good," concurs Reiner, who recalls that his executive producer pronounced the script unsalvageable after a single table reading....But Carl Reiner held firm, and finally -- after the requisite amount of around the table haggling -- the executive producer gracefully bowed to his producer's instincts.

  And when Leonard finally saw how well the episode played before the audience at the show's Tuesday night filming, he was the first to admit he'd obviously misjudged the effort.  "I was 100 percent wrong," the executive producer would later observe, "and Carl was 100 percent right on that one." 

"Sheldon was terrific," recalls Reiner, "a mensch.  He just said, "You were absolutely right!"

According to Van Dyke show writer Sam Denoff, Leonard's handling of the debate that surrounded the walnut show provides a revealing glimpse of the executive producer's evenhanded managerial style in action.  "Sheldon was really the boss," says Denoff.  "But he never, ever said, 'You do it my way.'  All of his producers would fight with him, and he'd always say, 'Okay, if that's the way you wanna do it.  But I'm telling you it's gonna stink.'  And when it didn't stink, he'd admit it didn't stink.  He was that kind of gracious man."------------------ [end excerpt]

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