![]() ![]() It was just his good luck to come along during a brief, glorious period of creative flowering in America. But of course, society is rife with halfwits. Only a halfwit would be unable to look past his uniqueness and simply loathe him on the basis of his personality and how he looked. ![]() He was OBJECTIVELY an excellent performer, in terms of skill, and talent, and emotional connection. It needs to be said: only STUPID people would throw things at Tiny Tim. In performance, people threw things at him. ![]() God pity the weird in our country, in all countries. Yet the issue wasn’t just that he was queer, but also that he was, in the word of his cousin: “weird”. That gender ambiguity many now cherish had always been part of his personality. But as a child in the 1930s and ’40s, by most of the people in his life he was rrankly marginalized. It’s well known that as a performer he was someone audiences either loved or reviled. For when you are as different as he was, you are hated, and it takes a certain amount of bravery just to get up in the morning. Not that I intend that, as plenty might, from a place of judgment. When you have witnessed something crazy, it’s always reassuring to have others report that they witnessed it, too. None of it, either the uphill or the downhill parts of the journey, is at all surprising, but there is something satisfying about it all being brought out and articulated. The film fills us in on this period, as well as the early years of struggle. He was at the top of show business for a few short years, but then…his day was over. The subtitle of the film comes from a Sam Lewis song, one of hundreds of old standards Tiny Tim covered, and one with poignant meaning given the arc of Tiny Tim’s life. watching TV from 1968 through the ’70s) it serves to fill us in on the rest of the story. The film will serve as a terrific introduction for young people to this unique entertainer’s life and art. Tiny Tim’s repertoire was divided between weird old classics like “Tiptoe Through the Tulips (a Top 20 hit), the old Shirley Temple number “On the Good Ship Lollipop” and the exuberant “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight” (revived decades later on SpongeBob SquarePants), as well as then-contemporary pop classics like Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” (on which he performed both parts), and the Doors’ “People Are Strange”. He’s the guy who made a name for himself singing Tin Pan Alley covers to his own ukulele accompaniment, sung in a falsetto register, with a stage presence that was one part hippie and one part bag lady. Three enthusiastic flourishes on the ukulele for Johan Von Sydow’s new documentary Tiny Tim: King for a Day.Īs I wrote here in my earlier biographical tribute, I am a major league Tiny Tim fan, as a premiere vaudeville revivalist and as one of the most outre ’60s variety show freaks. ![]()
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