When I was working as a sidekick to underrated L.A. radio legend “Sweet” Dick Whittington in 1977, I spent July 4th as part of the “Giving the San Fernando Valley Back(?) to the British” stunt; 64 hours from departure to return (because we couldn’t broadcast FROM there and had to run back to air the stuff we taped). We ‘hit the ground running’, so actual memories of the actual trip not committed to audio tape are permanently clouded by untreated jet lag.
But before the trip, I co-wrote a parody of the Declaration of Independence for the project we called “The Declaration of Proclamation”, my most successful comedy collaboration, and of the 3 co-writers, I contributed almost 55% of the actual jokes. We essentially went through line-by-line and deconstructed it, starting with “When in the course of humorous vents, it becomes necessary for one people to learn proper grammar and call him-or-herself ‘one person’ and break up the band which has connected him-or-her to the drummer who can’t keep a beat and the bass player who doesn’t even show up for rehearsal…”
Yes, I also contributed the wording “We hold these truths to be irrelevant” after we voted down “irreverent” as too obtuse, and I WISH I could remember the whole thing or had kept a copy, since I cannot recreate exactly how we made “all men are created equal” into a mix of intentionally awkward gender neutrality, subtle-enough-for-AM-radio reference to dick size and math joke using ‘greater-and-or-equal-to’”, but we (all male and college-age would-be comedians) did. I do recall it had a record number of hyphens for a piece written mostly for radio.
And being the representative of the show to a meeting of the San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce to bring the final caligraphed document to get signatures ala the original was mildly terrifying, but that was when I realized exactly what a beloved character Sweet Dick was in that massive suburb of the more massive L.A. metro area. Most of the leaders of a serious movement for the Valley to secede from the City of L.A. signed it, either unaware or uncaring that the whole stunt was parodying their cause. As well as three local elected officials, including a sitting L.A. City Councilman. Surreal.
Worth remembering: July 4, 1977 was one year after the orgy of American patriotism called The Bicentennial, and the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee (a year-long celebration ending with the 25th anniversary of her coronation in June 1953, which, coincidentally, my mother had been in London for, as a break from her year as an exchange teacher in Wales – she was one of “An estimated three million people lined the streets of London to catch a glimpse of the new monarch” and she did get a little Royal wave.)
On July 4th itself, a Monday and a normal working day in the UK, I made my most absurd side trip to Lloyds of London, the 300-year-old insurance exchange with which my insurance underwriter father had done business with for years, and which he offered to give me access to – how could I refuse. As I showed up with my little cassette tape recorder, my dad’s friend at Lloyds got the PR department to allow me to be the FIRST broadcast media person EVER to record audio inside the massive trading hall. When we returned to L.A. and the tapes were played, my 10+ minutes interviewing my dad’s friend at Lloyd’s was deemed boring (it was) and edited down to a formal greeting and 15 seconds of ambient trading hall noise (I sheepishly sent him the full tape).
So how are you spending YOUR Fourth of July holiday?
