Beatrice Arthur, Maude
Question: What was Maude's husband's name? My husband and I have a bet going. Can you please help? Thank you.
Answer: OK, Kandi, allow me to bore regular readers with my usual admonishment that those who have bets should let me know what's at stake in their questions — I'm just snoopy like that — before moving on to the usual enlightenment.
So, here's the enlightenment. On Maude, which ran on CBS from September 1972 to April 1978, the fourth husband of Maude Findlay (Beatrice Arthur) was Walter Findlay (Bill Macy). Rounding out the family was Maude's divorced daughter, Carol (Adrienne Barbeau) and her young son, Phillip (Brian Morrison for five years, then Kraig Metzinger).
And don't feel too bad about forgetting Walter's name — it's not the first time Macy has suffered character-related ind
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Leslie Bibb has been upped to series-regular status on NBC's Crossing Jordan, where she plays police-department shrink Det. Tallulah "Lu" Simmons; read our recent Insider Q&A with the Popular star.... Adrienne Barbeau (who practically stole Swamp Thing from, you know, that big green guy) will play Judy Garland in the off-Broadway play The Property Known as Garland, opening March 23.... As part of its deal to host the FIA Formula One World Championship for an 11th consecutive year, Speed Channel will now conduct live on-camera interviews from the starting grid, which is just asking for some poor reporter's foot to get run over.
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Question: Oh, great Televisionary, I vaguely recall a game show where the contestants got a chance to play on a giant pinball machine. Who was the host and how was the game played? Thank you.
Answer: Well, I... uh...
Sorry, Jeffrey — I was stunned into pfumpfery by your shameless worship (not that there's anything wrong with that). The show you're thinking of was called The Magnificent Marble Machine and it aired on NBC's daytime schedule from July 1975 to June 1976. Hosted by Art James, it featured celebrities who teamed up with average-joe contestants to play a 50-foot-high pinball machine. Without getting into too much detail, players were supposed to light up bumpers and earn points using a regular ball and a special bonus ball in an attempt to win cars and other big prizes. Before they could do that, though, they had to defeat another contestant in an initial round, which called for them to identify mys
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A remake of The Fog smoked the box-office competition over the weekend, but only barely: Minus Adrienne Barbeau, the thriller earned just $12.2 million, narrowly defeating last week's top pic, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which scared up an additional $11.7 million. Rounding out the Top 5 are Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown in third place with $11 million; Flightplan in fourth with $6.5 million and In Her Shoes in fifth with $6.1 million.
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Bang a Gong: master of ceremonies Barris
Question: Who was the woman on The Gong Show panel? I think she was a singer at one time. Thank you.
Answer: I'll take a wild guess here, assume you don't have Phyllis Diller or Dr. Joyce Brothers in mind and answer with jazz singer Jaye P. Morgan, often introduced by cocreator and host Chuck Barris as "juicy." And I'm sure the lady would object to your "singer at one time" classification, since she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997 that despite her various entertainment credits (movies, TV, stage, comedy), "[W]hen I get up in the morning, I get up as a singer."
Morgan, born Mary Margaret but dubbed J.P. when she took the job of class treasurer in high school, started her entertainment education at the age of 3 or 4 in a family act and eventually worked her way up to hit records ("The Longest Walk" and "That's All I Want from You" in the mid-'50s), work in stage musicals, numer
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