Whipped Cream Difficulties

Things have been kind of slow on the obit front. I don’t know if it just too hot for people to die, or what’s going on, but it just doesn’t seem like there’s been a lot to report.

I have had this one in my pocket for a few days now. I’m wondering if it will ring a bell with any of my readers: Mitzi McCall.

Ms. McCall was a pretty successful entertainer. She had a comedy act with her husband, Charlie Brill.

They got a big break on the night of February 9, 1964. They were booked to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. The lists of acts that night included:

…Fred Kaps, a Dutch magician; the cast of the Broadway musical “Oliver!” (which included a then-unknown Davy Jones, soon to be a member of the Monkees); the impressionist Frank Gorshin; the music-hall singer and actress Tessie O’Shea; and, finally, McCall & Brill.

Oh, yeah, there was one other act booked that night: a group of obscure British musicians that called themselves the Beatles.

In their sketch, Mr. Brill played a producer casting a young actress for a new movie. Ms. McCall played his secretary and three other roles: a nervous former Miss Palm Springs, a pushy stage mother and a Method actor. The sketch fell with a thud, except for some chuckles when Ms. McCall tossed in an ad lib as the stage mother.
“My little girl was waiting outside, you know,” she said. “She used to be one of the Beatles.”
“Oh, what happened?” Mr. Brill asked.
“Somebody stepped on her.”

They bombed. Their agent didn’t call them for six months. But they recovered:

They performed their act — which Mr. Brill said was influenced by the comedy of Mike Nichols and Elaine May — until the mid-1980s, opening for Ann-Margret, Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich. They had a recurring role as the bickering “Fun Couple” on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”; appeared on many variety and talk shows, and on game shows like “Tattletales”; and portrayed a detective and his fun-loving wife on the crime drama “Silk Stalkings” in the 1990s.

Ms. McCall was 93. Her husband, Mr. Brill, survives her.

On her own, Ms. McCall was seen on numerous sitcoms, including “Maude,” “Roseanne” and “Ellen,” and wrote episodes of “One Day at a Time” and “ALF.”

She was also the dry cleaner’s wife in that “Seinfeld” episode. Other credits include “Twilight Zone” (both the original and the 1986 revival), “The Jim Backus Show”, “The Dennis O’Keefe Show”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and “Madman of the People”.