Holidays Celebrity Construction in Palm Springs

There are construction cranes all over Palm Springs these days, and the most alarming is the new shopping mall development by John Wessman on Palm Canyon Drive which is looking nothing like the original plans submitted to the voters four years ago. The two-term Palm Springs mayor, a handsome gay realtor named Steve Pougnet, was an honest broker for years in balancing development and preservation in the small city of 40,000, but he got greedy and began accepting "consulting contracts" in the six figures for unspecified services with more than one developer.



This was exposed by an investigative journalism series in the local paper, The Desert Sun, and eventually the FBI arrived in September and hauled away files from City Hall. Unlike San Francisco, where that kind of behavior is considered business as usual and the San Francisco Chronicle ignores institutionalized municipal corruption, Palm Springs voters recently booted out the old slate and elected a new mayor, Rob Moon above right, posing with my friend Cory Dingle.



We walked down Palm Canyon to the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Francis Stevens Park last Thursday, passing under banners created by local schoolkids who have an annual competition for the honor of having their painted signage flying over the main drag all December.



We also saw evidence of other holiday traditions, as evidenced by the Menorah bolted to the roof of the car.



At the tree lighting, there was a Palm Springs High School madrigal group singing carols...



...delicious cookies, and not-so-hot chocolate.



There are usually a bizarre selection of local celebrities in attendance, and this year it was (left to right) Palm Springs Councilwoman Ginny Foat with poodle who lost the recent mayoral election even though she was the clear favorite in money and name recognition, supermodel/actress/businesswoman Beverly Johnson, TV's Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, Mayor Moon, and Linda Gray from the old Dallas TV show edging out of the frame.



Unusual for Hollywood and Palm Springs, the 66-year-old Bionic Woman Wagner looked like she was aging fairly naturally and well.



At the Palm Springs City Council meeting the night before, disgraced outgoing Mayor Steve Pougnet made a few remarks and then it was time for public comment. The final speaker was Frank Tysen, a small hotelier who was a onetime ally of the mayor and then an adamant critic. "You threw it all away, Steve, a promising career, political allies, the trust of this town." Let's see if the new regime can alter some of the recent dumb development deals that are already in place.

Palm Springs Black History Month Parade

Downtown Palm Springs has more parades than any place I have ever been...



...and last Saturday was the occasion for the 27th Annual Black History Month Parade.



The Palm Springs High School band contingent led off the parade and was followed by a clutch of white politicians in convertibles, including gay Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet above...



...but they were all upstaged by the fabulous dance studio founder above.



Like many other places in the United States, Palm Springs has an ugly racial history that includes razing and burning down a poor downtown neighborhood called Section 14 in 1962. (Click here for a fascinating history of blacks in the Coachella Valley written by Chris Clarke in 2012.)



Though Palm Springs seems to be successfully integrated these days, the racial antagonisms and wounds are still present, as this 2001 LA Times article about a wild racial vandalism incident at Palm Springs High School attests.



Maybe the advent of a new, less bigoted Calfornia generation will help...



...and we can all aspire to being Ambitious Bad Girls.

A Carol Channing Christmas

Whenever an ancient celebrity pops up in the news, who one could have sworn had already gone through the pearly gates, they invariably turn out to be living in Rancho Mirage. Such is the case with the 90-year-old performer Carol Channing above, who was arriving in Palm Springs' downtown Frances Stevens Park to light a huge Christmas tree on Thursday evening.



Channing was seated in a plastic chair behind the podium, looking a bit like a Pekingese that had been half-swallowed by an Afghan hound. It was a bitterly cold, windy evening and the fact that she had even shown up was a testament to her indomitable trouper status.



The newly reelected gay Palm Springs mayor, Steve Pougnet above, mildly berated the small crowd for not being livelier, and told stories about his adopted children and Carol Channing, where he sounded like a handsome version of former San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty. "Carol and I did the tree lighting three years ago at the top of the tram, and while going up the mountain, my three year old daughter wrapped herself in Carol's white boa and Carol couldn't have been nicer to her."



Santa arrived on a fire truck and Channing was helped to the podium where she pushed a button to light the giant, rotating tree. We heard a rumour from a gentleman who seemed to be in the know that Channing was wiped out financially by her second husband/manager, Charles Lowe, who she divorced in 1998 after 42 years of marriage. Whether or not this is actually the case, Channing is still working at the age of 90. (Click here for details of her upcoming concert at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage.)



There's a wonderful quote from a 2006 article in the Austin Chronicle where Channing describes her initial mystic realization about the theater:

"My mother said, 'Carol, would you like to help me distribute Christian Science Monitors backstage at the live theatres in San Francisco?' And I said, 'All right, I'll help you.' I don't know how old I was. I must have been little. We went through the stage door alley (for the Curran Theatre), and I couldn't get the stage door open. My mother came and opened it very well. Anyway, my mother went to put the Monitors where they were supposed to go for the actors and the crew and the musicians, and she left me alone. And I stood there and realized – I'll never forget it because it came over me so strongly – that this is a temple. This is a cathedral. It's a mosque. It's a mother church. This is for people who have gotten a glimpse of creation and all they do is recreate it. I stood there and wanted to kiss the floorboards."

The 1956 photo of Channing by Carl Van Vechten above looked strikingly different from her 1960s incarnations, so it was fascinating to read the following in her Wikipedia entry:

"According to Channing's memoirs, when she left home to attend Bennington College in Vermont, her mother informed her that her father, a journalist who Carol had believed was born in Rhode Island, had in fact been born in Augusta, Georgia, to a German-American father and an African-American mother. According to Channing's account, her mother reportedly did not want Channing to be surprised "if she had a black baby". Channing kept this a secret to avoid any problems on Broadway and in Hollywood, ultimately revealing it only in her autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess, published in 2002 when she was 81 years old. Channing's autobiography, containing a photograph of her mother, does not have any photos of her father or son. Her book also states that her father's birth certificate was destroyed in a fire."

Suddenly, Jazz Baby in the movie Thoroughly Modern Millie makes some kind of demented sense. Click here for a Christmas treat.