Homer Jay's Slightly Demented World View....Mmmmm, World View

Aftermath of a Tragedy

I felt a great sense of irony this week, staying at the Showboat casino/hotel in Atlantic City—a hotel entirely themed around Mardi Gras and New Orleans—as the stories of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina unfolded in front of our eyes.  The trip had been planned long before, of course, and in the end, it wouldn’t make a difference where we were staying, but it reminded me of my one short visit to New Orleans in 2004 for a business trip.  Where I had shopped for souvenirs at River Walk and attended a conference at the beautiful convention center, I saw images of people living, and sadly dying, in conditions most of us will likely never fathom. 

As my heart broke for the victims of nature’s fury, those too poor or frail to leave the city when the warnings were issued, I also felt rising anger towards the opportunistic politicians who are trying to insinuate race into the tragedy, to further their own agendas.  To imply there was a deliberate delay in trying to get relief supplies to Katrina’s survivors because they are predominantly African American is ludicrous and despicable.

Whether FEMA and other agencies were adequately prepared to respond as quickly as needed is a fair question that we should ask when the worst of the crisis has subsided.  We can’t learn if we don’t ask hard questions, and if there are ways to do a better job the next time something of this magnitude happens, then by all means, we have an obligation to try.  None of that, however, shows one bit of racism in the way the response to Katrina has been handled. 

We’ve witnessed a disaster that dwarfed the drills and scenarios emergency management agencies go through.  By all accounts, this is the epitome of everything that can go wrong going wrong, right down to the response of some survivors who took it upon themselves to endanger the lives of those who were trying to help them. 

By their very nature, large, centralized entities react proportionally more slowly—and there’s no bigger, more bureaucratic entity than the Federal Government, especially when you need to coordinate so many different entities.  Vehicles, supplies and personnel needed to be coordinated.  There needed to be at least rudimentary plans for who goes where and does what, and some of those contingencies depended on assessing the situation.

To say the response would have been faster if predominantly white people had been victims is one of those un-provable theories that sound great in sound bites to fire up your audience.  After all, who can disprove you?  It plays to the tiresome stereotypes that fail to move our country forward.

I initially thought the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus couldn’t be topped for their media-whore shenanigans on this issue, but lo and behold, along comes a new poster child for ignorance, Kanye West, who tries to hijack NBC’s fundraising concert to babbly incoherently about racism and troops being sent in to shoot people.  Um, Mr. West…no one will be shot if they don’t threaten the law enforcement officials on site, who have an obligation to protect the law-abiding victims of this disaster, even if it means using force against those trying to turn this horror to their own profit. 

No rational person I’ve heard has criticized those who are resorting to drastic measures to obtain the necessities to sustain life, but when you have news accounts of people raiding stores shouting “TV!  TV!” it does tend to undercut the sympathy factor for those specific individuals.  Last time I checked, TVs and other luxury items aren’t essential to survival, and those few bad apples, and the gangs roaming the streets robbing people and threatening police, deserve to be dealt with accordingly.

The fact that nearly an entire major city has been wiped out, and faces years of work to be restored to what it was, should be bringing us together as a country to help those in legitimate need, not providing an opportunity for those with an agenda of their own to advance.  It doesn’t matter the skin color of anyone impacted by Katrina—it matters that they’re people, and that’s how we should be looking at this unprecedented challenge.

Come on Down: It's The Price is Right Live Stage Show

Though I Didn’t Get to “Come on Down,” seeing the “Price is Right Live Stage Show” in Atlantic City this week was a remarkable experience.  The mini-trip to see the show was my wonderful wife’s idea, and since she’s hardly a game show fan, that alone is a sacrifice.   We had tickets for the show on our first night in town, and it was fascinating to see how they reproduced the television version for a stage show. 

The scaled-down set was a faithful interpretation of the TV version, adapted for the venue, right down to having a version of the “turntable” on stage right.  The pricing games they played during our performance looked nearly identical to their Bob Barker Studio counterparts.  The first player to get to the stage played Race Game, and it was authentic down to the models’ poses as the announcer introduced the prizes.  Other games included Hole in One—or Two (complete with the push button to reveal the “or Two” sign, Cliff Hangers (and, yes, they had the yodeling music), Clock Game (speaking of that turntable) and It’s in the Bag (played for smaller denominations, of course). 

There are, as one would expect, minor differences in the rules when adapting the TV show for the stage.  Four new audience members are called to Contestants’ Row before each pricing game (of which there are five instead of six).  The “Big Wheel” is played midway through the show, but with three players called from the audience, not as a showcase showdown.  The winner (as always, closest to $1 without going over) pockets $250, and anyone scoring $1 in one spin or a combination of two gets $100 extra, with a bonus spin worth $1000 (not $10 grand) if they hit the dollar. 

The showcase also involves two players called from the audience, not the top winners (making it more fun for more people to have a chance to win).  In this version, there’s one showcase that both players bid on, and it’s a prize package on par with the television version.  For our show, it included a washer and dryer combo, vacuum, gift certificate for dinner at a hotel restaurant….and a Jeep Liberty.  Since it would be rather cost-prohibitive to be giving away cars left and right on a stage show, there’s a catch: the contestant closest to the package value without going over wins one prize (on our night, the washer & dryer), but if they’re the winner and less than $100 away from the actual retail price (sound familiar TPiR fans?), they win the whole showcase, car included.

I’ve read various message board posts and blogs suggesting CBS and “Price” producers are using the various stage show versions running around the country as a sort of audition process for potential hosts when Bob Barker retires.  I have no way of knowing if that’s true or just the game show fan universe’s version of a conspiracy theory, but if there’s any validity to the claim, Todd Newton, host of the show we saw, should earn some serious consideration.  I can’t pass any judgment on other hosts who are working the show, so this isn’t a comparative assessment, but Newton looked completely at home running Price’s carnival-like atmosphere.  Having seen his work on shows like “Whammy” and “Hollywood Showdown,” it hardly comes as a surprise—he’s a veteran of game shows among other formats, and it shows.  Seeing how well he did on a live version, with no edits and no re-takes, there’s no doubt in my mind he could take the reins of the TV version.

That said, I’d still argue that when the time comes to make a change to the daytime version (and let’s be honest, it’s not that many years in the future), they could look to the 1994 syndicated version for inspiration on how to modernize the set while still maintaining the unmistakable design.  Frankly, I would say Doug Davidson, host of the ’94 show also could do an admirable job hosting just as he did back then.  Parallels can be drawn to the “Tonight Show,” as it has changed hands over the years.  Subsequent hosts can place their own stamp on the look and feel, while the show maintains its tried-and-true formula.  To simply place any new host behind the big doors on Price is to invite the “But that’s not how Bob did it,” comparisons, and no one can be the next Bob Barker.  They need to have some freedom to try to make the show their own. 

One other observation about the stage show: the interaction between Todd Newton and announcer Randy West clearly demonstrated that Freemantle, owners of “Price” made a mistake after Rod Roddy passed away by minimizing the role the announcer can play in the show.  New announcer Rich Field has a great voice, and I wonder how much we’re missing by not including more interplay between him and Bob Barker.  Some of the showcases with Johnny Olsen and, later, Roddy, provided the funniest moments on “Price,” and they’re noticeably missed.  On the stage show, West fired off some of the great lines of the night, even cracking up Newton on a few occasions.  That kind of dynamic would add a little something extra to the TV version.

Finally, no discussion of a rendition of “Price” would be complete without some mention of the classic prize accouterments, the models.  The stage show version included two, and much like the current TV version, they’re silent parts of the set decoration (unlike the days when Holly, Janice and Dian would chip in to be part of the proceedings).  As comical as it seems at times to have someone waving in Miss America-like poses at a DVD player, it’s part of the “Price” experience. 

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Not part of the usual "Price" experience though was what some would call a wardrobe malfunction of sorts, though the male half of the audience probably felt it worked just fine.  The intense, bright white stage lights and skin-tight white tank tops combined to reveal a couple of additional "prizes" on one of the lovely models.  Hey, I wasn't complaining!

Kudos to the creators of this exciting, entertaining and engaging show.  I would have thought it would be hard to make a stage show as much fun as the “real deal,” but they did it.