...It was on ABC on Friday night from 9-9:30 from January 1975-June 1975....It was and still remains one of m
y very favorite sit-coms. It was very controversial at the time and it originally was an award winning Broadway play...Norman Lear adapted it for TV and even though it was terrific, it was buried on a Friday night at 9pm and it just didn't make it..I absolutely fucking loved it...It broke my heart when they took it off..It took p
lace in the lobby of a seedy hotel. The E had burnt out of the Hotel...giving you an idea right off that it wasn't exactly the Ritz...So it was the Hot l Baltimore...It stared James Cromwell(of Babe fame and now Jack Baurer's bad Daddy on 24)...along with Conchata Farrell, who is giving Charlie Sheen hell on 2 1/2 Men as the housekeeper..It brought sexual innuendo and racy dialogue to television.Among the cast were the desk clerk Bill Lewis and his love April Green.Bill was played by James Cromwell and April Green was played by Conchata Ferrell.There is nothing I love better than t
o here Conchata Ferrell laugh...Clifford Ainsley(Richard Masur)was the harried manager, Charles Bingham(Al Freeman, Jr.) was the philosopher, Suzy Marta Rocket(Jeannie Linero) was the Colombian prostitute, Millie(Gloria Le Roy)the unemployed waitress, Jackie(Robin Wilson) was the tomboy,Mr. Morse(Stan 
Gottlieb) the septugenarian who was always on the verge of dying....George and Gordan(Lee Bergere and Henry Calvert) played the homosexual couple, and last but not least Mrs. Bellotti played by Charlotte Rae, who had a 26-year old prankster son Moose who never appeared on screen.Moose delighted in such escapades as buttering the hallway, staging the Poseidon Adventure in the bathtub and collecting unlikely pets, like beavers..Once when the tenants protested a rent increase, Moose glued himself to the ceiling of his room in sympathy..Richard Masur's character Clifford was always being harassed by his mother, and I swear one time I heard him say "mother can get fucked.'....maybe not..maybe he said another word that was soooo similar that you couldn't tell the difference..I have always wanted to write Norman Lear and ask him what he said.
The goings on with Mrs. Bellotti and Moose was hysterical..I remember her screaming into a walkie-talkie from the lobby to his bedroom:'Blue leader to red dog, over.
. Blue leader to red dog.'...One bit that really sticks in my mind is when someone offhandedly asked what the capital of Alaska was...and Suzy Marta Rocket the Columbian prostitute says 'Whoneau!...Whoneau!...(the capital of Alaska is Juneau)and someone said :'it's Anchorage, isn't it!' and Suzy's screaming 'Whoneau, Whoneau,'..someone else says 'No, I think it's Fairbanks.'...Suzy's still yelling 'Whoneau'...finally April looks at her and says"Who cares."....It still makes me laugh..I wish they would put it out on DVD...If you never got to see it, you really missed a great TV show...I'm not for sure, but think it was the first TV that featured gays...
This was my little trip down TV's past...
