Whipped Cream Difficulties

Betty Rollin, journalist and author.

In “First, You Cry” (1976), Ms. Rollin dealt candidly, and at times irreverently, with her cancer diagnosis, which was delayed a year after she first felt a lump in her left breast. She wrote that her internist had dismissed it as a cyst, and that her mammographer had looked at the images and told her to come back in a year for another look.

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In the book, Ms. Rollin wrote about her mastectomy, a divorce and the love affair that followed it, and her acceptance that her life did not end with the loss of a breast. Her frank writing in “First, You Cry” was part of a growing openness about discussing breast cancer publicly and the need for early detection, as was highlighted dramatically in 1974 when Betty Ford, the first lady at the time, spoke of her radical mastectomy.

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Readers’ response to “First You, Cry” was strong. “The letters I loved were from women who had it, sending me their cancer jokes,” Ms. Rollin told The Times in 1993, when the book was rereleased. “That kind of laughter is my favorite thing — it’s such a diffuser.”
She added: “Somebody once said that I was the first person to make cancer funny, which was the best compliment I ever had. I mean, cancer isn’t funny, but if you’ve got it and if you’re able to make jokes about it, I think that keeps you sane.”

Marty Krofft. THR. Thing I did not know: Sid and Marty got their start in the 1950s doing puppet shows…adult puppet shows.

Marty joined his brother full-time in 1958 after Sid’s assistant left, and they opened Les Poupees de Paris, an adults-only burlesque puppet show that played to sold-out crowds at a dinner theater in the San Fernando Valley.
“Les Poupees took us from an act, Sid’s act, to a business,” Marty said. Shirley MacLaine was there on opening night, and Richard Nixon came during his run for president.
Les Poupees went on the road and played world’s fairs in Seattle in 1962, New York in 1964 and San Antonio in 1968. It featured 240 puppets, mostly topless women, and Time magazine called it a “dirty puppet show.”
After that, it was so popular, “we couldn’t even get our own best friends in the theater,” Sid said. It drew an estimated 9.5 million viewers in its first decade of performances.

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Pufnstuf‘s psychedelic sets and costumes were a big hit with college kids, and The Beatles asked for a full set of episode tapes to be sent to them in England. The look of the show prompted many whispers that the brothers took drugs (pot for sure, maybe LSD as well?), something Marty denied.
“You can’t do a show stoned,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2016.
The Kroffts followed Pufnstuf with The Bugaloos (1970-72), the Claymation series Lidsville (1971-73), Sigmund and the Sea Monsters (1973-75) and Land of the Lost (1974-76), which spawned an ill-fated Will Ferrell movie adaptation released in 2009. Those shows were wildly popular in syndication as well.

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In “Lost,” which premiered on NBC in 1974, a family plunges into another dimension populated by dinosaurs, primates called Pakuni and dangerous lizard-men called Sleestaks. Like “Pufnstuf,” the show was about the family’s attempts to get home while navigating their strange new surroundings.
Episodes were written by seasoned science fiction writers like Ben Bova, Larry Niven and Norman Spinrad, and a linguist developed a language of sorts for the Pakuni.

Question: is Land of the Lost the earliest TV show with a constructed language? (No, don’t say it: according to Wikipedia, development of the Klingon language didn’t begin until ST3, so LotL precedes.)

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