Chopsticks (Ross-Darwin Productionsl unsold TV pilot, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Alpha Video disc that included the one extant episode of Olsen and Johnson’s Fireball Fun-for-All also contained a bonus item called Chopsticks which I had assumed would be a TV sketch featuring Olsen and Johnson as guests on someone else’s program. It turned out to be something surprisingly different: a kids’ game show, hosted by bandleader (and Bing Crosby’s long-time arranger) John Scott Trotter with five child-prodigy piano players, all sitting at white Baldwin pianos (Trotter mentions the name and Baldwin was probably donating the instruments for the plug), one of whom was future rock star Billy Preston. The format was an odd one in which Trotter would throw out suggestions to the kid pianists and they’d have to come up with songs featuring girls’ names, famous cities (one kid made a geographical mistake and played the “Venetian Boat Song” in response to a request for a song about Rome). There was also one odd sequence in which the kids had to do a round-robin performance of “The Paddiwack Song,” each picking up the tune seamlessly from his or her predecessor. The format also included an adult guest star, who in this episode was singer June Christy, whose oddly bony face and penchant for weird hairdos probably kept her out of the glamour category, though she’d replaced Anita O’Day with Stan Kenton and become a major vocal star both with Kenton and in a subsequent solo career on Kenton’s label, Capitol, where she recorded albums with titles like Something Cool and The Misty Miss Christy. She walked down the line of child pianists and sang a brief bit of one of her hits accompanied by each one in turn – and they included the Kenton novelty “Across the Alley from the Alamo” as well as hits like “How High the Moon,” “Willow, Weep for Me” and “Something Cool” (a song about cocktails and drinking to forget a lost love that seemed an oddly sophisticated piece of material for a kids’ show!).

The date imdb.com gives for this show was 1958 – one time cue was when one of the kids was asked to play a song associated with Frank Sinatra and came up with “All the Way,” written and recorded for Sinatra’s 1957 film The Joker Is Wild – and besides Billy Preston (who was announced as the winner of the judges’ vote as the best of the five on the previous week’s show, and who got a featured solo spot on which he insisted on playing not piano but organ, the instrument on which he’d later play with the Beatles and become a rock star in his own right), there was at least one other performer who, if I’m right about her identity, went on to a substantial if not star career. She was introduced as “Janie Getz” and we were told she was 13 years old, though I suspect she was really Jane Getz, who grew up in Los Angeles, moved to New York at 17 and had a career as a jazz musician, playing with names like Charles Mingus and Stan Getz as well as appearing (and playing quite beautifully) on Pharoah Sanders’ first solo album for ESP-Disk in 1964. According to her Wikipedia page, she was born in 1942 (which would have made her 15 or 16 at the time of this show, though it’s more than possible they shaved a couple of years off her age) and is still alive; after her stint on the New York jazz scene she returned to L.A. and worked as a session musician, including on dates with John Lennon (during his 1973 “Lost Weekend” period when he was supposedly producing an album with Harry Nilsson called Pussy Cats on which Getz played) and Ringo Starr -- so Billy Preston isn’t the only performers here with a Beatles connection!