The Worst Thing For Your Health

 What is the Worst Thing For Your Health?

Birthday candle smoke.

The doctor told me that one as he was signing my hospital discharge papers Friday.

He said a med school instructor told him and it was five years before he got it.

He was too young to understand.

I’m not too young – for anything.

Birthday candle smoke means you just got a year older. Getting old is the worst thing you can do for your health.

 

You’ve probably seen reports about the hospitals on your local news. Long lines, lots of illness, not much staff.

I can give you an Up-To-Date Report From the Front.

Before you become concerned, I’m fine. Or as fine as I will ever be. I’ve inhaled too much birthday candle smoke to be in perfect health. The best I can hope for is: "You’re in good health for a person your age." Which translates to "You're in good health for an old man."

What happened to land me in the hospital?

My doctor prescribed a new medication.

I thought it was a substitution.

It was an addition.

I was not supposed to quit taking my previous medication. But I did.

It took 2 weeks but the result of going off the medication hit me with a wallop a week and a half aago, all my bloodwork numbers were out of whack, in particular my kidney reading.

I did have pain Saturday night and most of Sunday but that was from a UTI. Modern medicine is good at knocking out that pain.

But after a Monday trip to my urologist, followed by a Tuesday trip to my family doctor, I ended up Wednesday morning sitting in the Emergency Room, surrounded by people I would never sit next to in any other situation.

Pandemic Tip: If you have to go to the ER, earlier is better. I got there at 9 a.m. and was back in a room by 11:30 a.m. That same evening a friend’s sister called the EMT. They showed up, gave her a handful of meds and told her to stay home, the wait at the ER was 30 hours.

In the ER I had an EKG, which was over before I knew it had started. Then began the endless bloodwork. In 48 hours I was pricked in each arm, between my thumb and forefinger, on most of my fingers, and on both shoulders. Some were to draw blood out, others were to put medicine in.

Needles are so tiny today that I didn’t even feel half of them.

The worst pricks were the overnight blood draws, when a nurse sneaked into my darkened room, woke me up to tell me he was going to turn on the overhead 10,000-watt klieg light, and take blood. I was 90 percent asleep but cringing: which fleshy part of my body is he going to stick? He seemed to prefer the skin between my thumb and forefinger. Sounds awful but when you are 90 percent asleep it’s over before you can threaten to call the constabulary.

What you have heard about hospitals during the current pandemic surge is true: they are greatly understaffed. My hospital had closed one entire wing because of staff shortages. One of my nurses told me it wasn’t just COVID. Lots of nurses have left the profession during the pandemic for less stressful jobs, like, oh, prison guard or skyscraper window washer. Even with a shuttered wing, there were still staff shortages.

If every RN, LPN or CNA hadn’t told me about the shortage, I could have figured it out. Quickly. I was put on an IV drip first thing. Those tubes are always getting obstructed, occluded or tangled, setting off a piercing beep-beep-beep. The first time it happened I pushed the call button and was promised help soon. An hour later it was still beep-beep-beeping. I figured out where the temporary silence button was and was able to get relief, two minutes at a time, until a nurse finally arrived.

Apparently patients are a tad testy during the pandemic.

Every previous hospital stay of mine featured the cafeteria staffer who cheerfully wakes you up at 6 a.m. with your tray. The earliest I got breakfast this time was 9:30 a.m.

Two doors down from my room was a hospital fixture: The Old Man Who Moans Morning, Noon and Night. This one did it at 200 decibels. “Help Me!!!’ “Help Me!!” The nurse assured me he was getting help. She put it nicely, “He’s confused.”

But despite the fact that every one of the nurses was being run ragged, they were all kind and helpful. I did not starve or have an IV sack run dry. People who had every right to rage never failed to stop in and ask how I was doing, did I need anything.

They are the true saints of this era.

Thursday afternoon a lady came in to empty my trash can. As soon as she told me she wasn’t going to stick me or poke me or take me for a test, I embraced her – metaphorically – as My New Best Friend. She laughed.

As she was heading out the door, she smiled and said, “I guess you’re wondering about my new haircut.” She had a shaved head but I had barely noticed.

“I’m having brain surgery tomorrow.”

I was speechless. I was able to mumble something about good luck and you’ll be in my prayers.

This woman, on perhaps the lowest rung of the hospital staff ladder, was braving COVID and cold weather to work one more shift before major, major surgery.

I was in the hospital with tubes and blood draws, complaining about beeping machines and a braying old man. But I was the lucky one. My burden was nothing, nothing compared to My New Best Friend.

My heart was broken. While I was being discharged, this woman would be undergoing the most challenging, life-altering event of her young life.

I’ll never know what happened to her.

But I kept my word and uttered a prayer for my New Best Friend. 

 

My wife Melanie with President Gerald Ford. Press Secretary Ron Nessen is in background. 

Famous People Who Have Cursed My Wife

When news broke that Bob Dole had died, the first thing I asked my wife was: Did he ever curse you? No, she said. She was around him a lot in 1976 during the Presidential campaign. My wife was deputy assistant press secretary in the Ford Administration and it was pretty much all hands on deck for the campaign. So she was around Dole a lot. But he never cursed her.

The reason I asked is we have a running joke about all the famous people who have cursed her. You will recognize the names.

I’ve been trying to get her to turn it into one of those Facebook posts: Five Famous People I Have Met –there are only four that are true. People try to guess which one is false.

Only hers would be Five Famous People Who Have Cursed Me.

Since she isn’t planning on doing it, I’ll do it for her.

Here are the names of five famous people she has met. Only four cursed her. Can you guess which one is the red herring?

Melanie was cursed by four of these five: 

Henry Kissinger

Alan Greenspan

Ron Nessen

Elizabeth Taylor

Gerald Ford.

Make your pick before reading on….

 

It was not Gerald Ford. She says he was always nice to her. Of course at that time she was a cute 23-year-old blonde. Who wouldn’t be nice to a cute 23-year-old blonde? Well, the other four.

Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State, was upset with an item in the White House News Summary. “Dammit, Melanie, I didn’t blah blah blah.” She was Managing Editor of the News Summary and had to explain to him that the News Summary was a digest of newspaper, magazine and broadcast items about the Ford Administration. She didn’t write that he did blah, blah, blah. A newspaper reporter did.

Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers at the time, cursed her for a different News Summary item. He too misunderstood what the News Summary was.

Ron Nessen, who was press secretary, cursed her because he was her boss and that’s what bosses did back then. He was also very self-important because he had been a reporter for NBC News when Ford selected him to be Press Secretary.

And Elizabeth Taylor? She was the wife of John Warner, who was running for the Senate seat from Virginia when Liz met Melanie. Taylor had started early that particular day and by evening, when Warner was to make a speech at a fund raiser, Liz was, well, snockered. This would not be a good look for a candidate for Senate, to have his wife cursing the crowd – and her husband – from the dais. So Melanie, who was press secretary for another candidate at the event, was assigned to babysit Lady Liz, keep her as far away as possible from the event and from future Senator Warner. Melanie essentially barricaded the two of them in the Ladies’ Lounge. Liz had her cigarettes and her bourbon and her sharp tongue, and between swigs and puffs, she cut loose on pretty much everyone she had ever known, met or married. Melanie was just collateral damage in her tirade.

So there you have it, Four Famous People Who Have Cursed My Wife.

As a newspaper columnist I have had my fair share of folk curse me, but none as famous as Henry Kissinger or Liz Taylor.

So I decided to do a more conventional list. I couldn’t just put together a list of Famous People I Have Met because of the nature of my job – covering the entertainment industry for much of my career – it would be way too long.

Instead I am doing a list of Famous People I Have Had Dinner With.

Here it is:

 

Five Famous People I Have Had Dinner With (one name is false; I never had dinner with that person). Pick the one you think is false.

Edgar Bergen, ventriloquist and comedian, father of Candice Bergen

Ann Miller, actress, singer and tap dancer extraordinaire in many Hollywood musicals, most famously “On the Town”

Meredith MacRae, Billie Jo on “Petticoat Junction,” daughter of Gordon and Sheila MacRae

McCoy Tyner, jazz pianist most famous for his years playing with the John Coltrane Quartet

Chubby Checker, rock and roll star most famous for “The Twist”

Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, portrayed in the recent Aaron Sorkin historical legal drama “The Trial of the Chicago 7”

 

Okay, okay, I realize that is six, not five. I couldn’t decide which real dinner companion to cut. So I didn’t cut any.

As for my fake dinner companion, I had a long list of possibilities, Famous People I Met But Didn’t Have Dinner With. On my short list that I thought might fool readers were:

Snooky Lanson of “Your Hit Parade,” just because I’ve always loved his name. I interviewed him when he was doing a daily big band radio show on Nashville radio station WAMB. But we didn’t dine together.

Original MTV veejays - Nina Blackwood in center

Nina Blackwood, the frizzy-haired blonde MTV veejay, part of MTV’s first class of on-air hosts. I did have breakfast with her. My colleague Ronni Lundy was interviewing her and invited me to tag along.

Jesse White, the Maytag Repair Man of TV commercials fame. White was also a famous character actor – the role I identified with him before he played the Maytag man was sneaky talent agent Cagey Calhoun on Ann Sothern’s “Private Secretary” TV series. I did interview him in 1978.

 

Drum roll please. Which Famous Person didn’t I dine with?

Chubby Checker.

I interviewed Ernest Evans – Chubby’s real name – in 1975 right before his show at the Flamingo Club in Bristol. And he did coax me on stage and – yes! – I did Twist with the King of the Twist, on stage, in front of about 250 people. But I didn’t have dinner with him. 

 

As for the rest….

I dined and enjoyed a cocktail – or in his case, about four cocktails – with Edgar Bergen, vaudevillian, radio ventriloquist, and star of the television game show, “Do You Trust Your Wife?” (When he retired from the series, he was replaced by the young Johnny Carson.)

Bergen was in Dayton for a morning lecture so he was downing the alcohol and telling me stories from old Hollywood. The one I didn’t print? He said Harpo Marx was famous for shaking hands with beautiful female strangers and slipping his room key into their palms.

 

I had dinner with Ann Miller after her grueling two-hour performance in the musical “Panama Hattie.” It was just the two of us in a rooftop restaurant in downtown Dayton, Ohio. I think I may have been the only person who wasn’t her husband – and she had had three - who saw her without makeup and without her raven hair teased and lacquered into a hair helmet.

She was wearing a turban and had just taken off her stage makeup. Her producer had invited me to join her at the rooftop restaurant for her post performance meal.

She showed up late but she had an excuse.

She was no longer the spring chicken who had tapped her way across the screen in “Easter Parade” and “Kiss Me Kate.”

She was 54 and clinging to the fringes of musical theater, playing summer stock in the Midwest.

I had been warned. The same producer who set up the dinner had sent me a note that said “she’s a wonderful star but she gives me ulcers.”

She was gracious and down to earth with me, apologizing for being ten minutes late. I told her I would wait an hour for Ann Miller.

 

Petticoat Junction sisters - Meredith MacRae is on left.

I had dinner with Meredith MacRae between her shows at the Dayton, Ohio supper club Suttmiller’s.

It was the waning days of the supper club era and I didn’t note the crowd size in my profile, because there wasn’t one. My recollection is the club was mostly empty. MacRae told me she was dusting off her night club act and trying to get into producing movies. I remember we mostly talked about astrology and whether we believed in it. I didn’t put that in the story.  

 

Dayton, Ohio was blessed with a wonderful jazz club named Gilly’s, owned by jazz fanatic Jerry Gillotti. He nabbed many of the jazz greats for a one-night stand as they travelled from the west coast to New York. I met many jazz legends through Jerry during my two years at the Dayton newspaper: Dexter Gordon, Betty “Bebop” Carter, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Roy Meriwether, Gary Burton, Maynard Ferguson, Art Pepper (who was late for the interview because he was at the methadone clinic) and many more.

On Friday the 13^th of August, 1976 I watched pianist McCoy Tyner, formerly of the John Coltrane Quartet, as he and his band tuned up for that night’s performance. Then we had dinner together! He talked about his new album “Focal Point,” which included a dulcimer tune. Then he gave me a copy of what he said was his favorite of his albums, “Song of the New World.” It’s now my favorite, too. And not just of his albums. 

 Bobby Seale and Huey Newton

 In 1988 Bobby Seale and I were judges at the National Rib Cook-Off in Cleveland, Ohio. He and I spent most of the day together, promoting the contest and then judging the entries. You could say we had dinner together about 20 times that day. It had been a long time since his Black Panther days. He was promoting a barbecue cookbook he had written. We never talked about his days as a Black Panther; we mostly talked about barbecue. He was an interesting companion and at the end of the day, as we parted, he shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said with a smile, “You know, Vince. I like you.” I hope that quote shows up in my obituary.