Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
I love Carl Reiner’s idea about teaching foreign languages to children when they’re young: “One of the things we should be doing is speaking to our children in at least two languages so that they are exposed to a foreign language and can grow up bilingual. If you expose a child to another language when they’re very young, they will pick it up much quicker than if you try to teach them in high school.”
Not nearly as raunchy as some of the other teen exploitation films that came out around the same time, “Summer School” is a feel-good movie in which all the characters are clueless, but also kind of likable for some inexplicable reason.
The adventurous impresarios at the Annoyance Theater have put some crazy stuff on their Wrigleyville stage, but no one could have anticipated this week’s radical stunt: They’re bringing a septuagenarian comedian to town. Charlie Callas, 71, will perform Wednesday and Thursday in the room that each weekend fills with beer-swilling twentysomethings catching the raunchy, long-running musical “Coed Prison Sluts.”
In 1958, comedian Carl Reiner wrote his first novel, Enter Laughing. Now, thirty-seven years later, the sequel Continue Laughing (Birch Lane Press, $19.95) arrives. That’s quite a gap, but Reiner hasn’t exactly been lying low in the intervening years.
“All Kinds of Love” isn’t the “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” that’s for sure. When Carl Reiner created the classic ’60s TV series, his married couple – Rob and Laura Petrie – weren’t allowed to sleep together in the same bed, much less dally with next-door neighbor Milly.