Enotes

This may be shocking to read, but it's not over the top to say that Valerie Harper was supposed to be six feet under now. Instead, she's going to be dancing up a storm. Harper, beloved to this day for having played the sassy, tough Rhoda Morgenstern on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda," was diagnosed with brain cancer earlier this year. Her doctors gave her three months to live. Maybe she couldn't pay her bill, and the docs are giving her six more months. With apologies to Henny Youngman, whose joke I just bastardized, have you noticed what's been going on with Harper? The most recent news is that she's going to be one of the celebrity contestants on "Dancing With the Stars" this fall. Before that, Harper appeared on an "MTM Show" reunion on Nick at Nite, and filmed a movie role. Not bad for someone who was supposed to be gone by now. Cancer is a funny thing, and never before has the word "funny" b...

Just take a pill! Just drink a shot! If you watch TV advertising these days, it seems as if the country needs help going to sleep and waking up, and with plenty of things in between. Like my lovely wife so astutely pointed out, "It's like this country has turned into one big Elvis Presley." Yeah---or Michael Jackson. Meaning, TV advertisers look at us like the late rock-and-roll and pop stars, who infamously would take gobs of pills and other meds to sleep, and gobs more to get themselves back up, and gobs more just to get through the day. I'm uneasy as to where we're headed. Last night it struck me. I've never professed to be a fast learner. It was a commercial for a sleep aid that set me off. I started to think of the fancy-shmancy "sleep number" beds and other sleep aids I see advertised, which led me to think of the 5 Hour Energy spots and others similar. The 5 Hour Energy commercials stick in my craw. They dismiss coffee as eithe...

Lesley Visser, the statuesque, longtime correspondent for CBS Sports, was on my TV screen last weekend. And I barely recognized her. She had that "look" about her. The one that has, more and more, vexed both male and female celebrities---though more female than male. The "look" is what we'll refer to here as "the Joan Rivers Syndrome." You know---plastic surgery gone wild. WHY are so many people in the entertainment industry who appear on stage or in front of the camera allowing butchers to take to their face? The results aren't pretty---literally. Lesley Visser, I thought, was an attractive woman in her 50s who was aging quite well---and naturally. Yes, she had a jogging accident in 2006 which required some surgery to her face, but what I saw last weekend as she did some pre-game NFL playoff work, was above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak. She's hardly alone. Even Marie Osmond---yes, Kewpie doll-cute Marie Osmond---looks to have gone ...

The people who get us talking about things aren't always those who you'd like to actually talk about those things with. Dr. Jack Kevorkian was one of those people. Kevorkian, "Doctor Death," was laid to rest the other day and no matter what you thought about him or his ideas, you're a liar if you say he didn't get you talking and thinking about assisted suicide. But would you have liked to have lunch with Kevorkian and rap about it? Unlikely. Kevorkian had to be an assisted suicide physician. He just looked the part: a long, drawn face, boney body---he looked like a gothic character from an old book of nursery rhymes. Kevorkian wasn't just a man's name, it was a word that became part of our lexicon, used by people in all fields to describe a variety of situations. I remember the NBA coach Don Nelson commenting after his team beat the Pistons in Detroit. Nelson said it wasn't appropriate for Pistons fans to overreact to the loss, which came on open...

I'm not one to get too personal in this space but sometimes you just have to make an exception. It was 18 years ago today, at 3:57 p.m. to be exact, when the medical staff at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak cut a 2 lb, 14 oz little pipsqueak of a girl out of my wife in an emergency C-section. The screaming, wiggling little thing could have fit in a shoebox but gave the nurses all they could handle. Our daughter was a preemie, and there was no place better to take care of her than at Beaumont, which had---and still has---an outstanding neo-natal care department. My wife had been laid up with toxemia in the months leading up to the birth, which wasn't supposed to occur until sometime in June. But during a routine check-up on Good Friday, 1993, her doctor advised her to go to Beaumont, and not to pass GO and not to collect $200. We thought there were simply going to be some more tests and that she'd be home by the end of the day. Imagine my surprise when, the next time ...