Word: rats
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...University of Maryland, he learned that a local station needed someone to perform with puppets on a children's show. Henson wasn't particularly interested in puppets, but he did want to get into TV, so he and a friend made a couple--one was called Pierre the French Rat--and they were hired...
...heart. Did anyone know his? He sang and made us all believe we did. And then, just when we had his assurance, he changed and kept us guessing. How could the guy who made an album as naked, turbulent and forsaken as Only the Lonely get into all that Rat Pack huggermugger, knocking back drinks with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. and flattening intrusive photographers? How could the exuberance of Come Fly with Me, the joyful, rapturous carnality of I've Got You Under My Skin (the '56 version, with the brassy transcendence of Nelson Riddle's arrangement...
...while. He survives as the last word in a hipster style all the more fascinating for its plain links to squaredom. The minute that grunge thing came along, circa 1990, you knew it was only a matter of time before Sinatra and the Rat Pack came back into fashion. Uncombed hair and flannel shirts cried out for a counterattack of sharp dressing and flip courtliness with women. Thus "lounge music," cool and dressy, then swing music, hot and dressy, plus a bar scene where lounge lizards aren't dinosaurs anymore. Then the film Swingers, about two guys making their...
...sleeve, connected him from the first to the big feelings that the '60s passed along to the decades that followed. We just didn't see it at the time. And by now, baby boomers who once turned away from him are old enough to recognize how he created the Rat Pack in part as a defense against his own aging, a way to keep the party going as he reached his mid-40s. What do they have that compares? Seinfeld? It died a few hours before Sinatra...
...first version of the Rat Pack dates to the mid-'50s, when it convened around Humphrey Bogart. But the name entered the collective consciousness only after Bogart's death in 1957, when Sinatra assumed leadership and gathered in new buddies like Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford. Their supreme moment arrived in early 1960, when Sinatra, Davis, Lawford, Dean Martin and Joey Bishop gathered in Las Vegas to film the casino-robbery caper Ocean's Eleven. Every night for three weeks, after the day's shooting was over, they all played--and played!--the Sands, a Mob-connected casino...