Boss Radio

There's an Austrian word which will be familiar to all readers of Mad magazine. 'Ecchh'. You know that line in the Adams Family song that describes them as 'Icky'? Well that's roughly what 'Ecchh' means. In fact it's pronounced 'Ick'. There's been a lot of argument in the circles that argue about stuff as to whether 'Icky' comes from baby talk (Oo, is 'oo feeling icky den?) or is derived from 'Ecchh'. Well I think the reverse is true and I don't care anyway, the point is these moose leave behind them a... substance, as indeed do all animals. This is fortunate. If we were built differently and pooed from in front we'd walk into it, which wouldn't be nice. But I digress...

This particular substance is so toxic that it burns grass a strange dark brownish - yellowish, tawny green, and smells so bad that the locals are convinced that it is the stuff from which the levels of hell are created. They have a song, 'The hells are olive with the mounds of moose ecchh'. This is thought to be the song which Maria Kutschera actually sang all these years ago whilst shoveling moose dung off the mountains and into her organic garden.

Some of you may think that is a load of bull-ecchh, but it's no more unlikely than the young lady cast to play the part of Maria in Andrew Lloyd-Whatever's version of 'The Sound of Music'. This is, of course, no fault of Connie Fisher, who appears to be a nice person who can sing and dance and works for considerably less than Scarlett Johansson would have wanted, in addition to being a bigger star than Miss Johansson by the time she had gone through the seemingly endless TV audition process, which was carefully balanced so that the viewing public paid for the right to pick one of Mr. Lloyd-Wunderkindt's preferred candidates for the job and also picked up the tab for the whole audition process along the way.

The problem is that, although Miss Fisher is about the right age to play the real Maria, the one in the musical version of the story would have had to be considerably older, which in turn is why the original cast featured Mary Martin in her mid-40s, and the movie version starred the 30 year old Julie Andrews, following the Hollywood tradition of always casting the female lead under age. Another interesting thing about this musical is that Maria is always billed as either 'Maria von Trapp', or just plain 'Maria'. Back in those days they were coy about certain things, like the fact that in the musical the leads don't actually get married until the end of the show, once again in keeping with tradition.

Yes, it's true. Showbiz Has Its Traditions, and while the acronym of that saying may describe what the mooses I invented (For the purposes of the shaggy dog story I concocted to begin this tirade) left great shards of on the mountains, there's really a whole lot more of it in showbiz itself.

The author wishes it to be known that he has never actually seen 'The sound of Music' but neverthless still thinks that Julie Andrews has nice knockers.