Jerry Lewis has written a book. I’ve heard the interviews with Lewis on NPR. Those of you who visit here who are younger may not know much about Lewis and Martin. Their partnership as a comedy team was in the fifties and sixties. I was just a kid when they were first on TV. It was BIG news when they broke up. It was an estrangement that no one in the public anyway understood.
Martin died a few years ago. Jerry Lewis is alive, has had health
problems, has had many telethons to raise money for Muscular Dystrophy,
and has written a book in which he tells about the estrangement with
Martin. In the radio interviews I heard, he says that they always loved
each other even though they weren’t on speaking terms. I don’t know if
he is right about that or in denial. But the book should be
interesting. The following link takes you to the Amazon listing for the
book.
This estrangement seemed about as weird to a lot of people as the one between the advice columnists, Dear Abby and Ann Landers.
Who expects a bitter estrangement to happen between two people whose
mission in life was to make people laugh for so many years? Two people
who seemed as tight as the dovetails on a well crafted drawer.
Estrangement is about as unfunny as you can get. Death is unfunnier but
estrangement is a form of death, the end of a relationship. We might as
well expect that the Smothers Brothers would stop speaking to each
other. Or the Farrelly brothers. Or Cheech and Chong? Uh oh! Bad
example! Cheech and Chong were said to be estranged for 20 years till
recently when they made a new film together.
DEA’s Raid Helps Fire Up Chong’s Act, March 16, 2003
But then Chong doesn’t call it an estrangement: He says that they
kept in touch and remained friends. Cheech agrees that they both always
cared about each other.
Associated Press article on Cheech and Chong on the Arizona Daily Star at:
Chong Goes Legit, After going to pot, comedian surfaces in off-Broadway role. Dec. 10, 2004
Maybe caring is dangerous and leads to estrangements? No wonder
some of us are so careful about who we care about! Lewis and Martin
loved each other. They just didn’t speak. Cheech and Chong cared about
each other. We just thought they were estranged.
Who’s next in line for an unexpected estrangement? For those of you
who think YOU are immune to this condition, remember my website.
Estrangements.com.
Some day you might want to come back and read it again. Estrangement is
a club that you don’t want to join but one day you wake up and you find
yourself to be signed up and you never paid a fee or filled out a form
and you can’t get out.
Snicks