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6-4-2017

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley
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June 4, 2017 12:35 pm

6-4-2017

CBS Sunday Morning / Jane Pauley

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June 4, 2017 12:35 pm

36 Years and counting: AIDS in America

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I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday morning. Once again, terror has struck in Great Britain, this time in London. Seven are dead, dozens wounded.

We'll have the latest just ahead. It's 36 years and counting since health officials first reported the outbreak of the disease we know as AIDS. Though much progress has been made in fighting it, complacency among a new generation may be undermining the effort, as Rita Braver will report in our cover story. And then it's on to the Golden Boys, some familiar, even beloved entertainers who never got that memo to retire.

They'll be talking shop this morning with our Tracy Smith. Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, Norman Lear, still funny after all these years and still working well into their 90s. There's something about hitting 90.

I know I can get applause just standing up. The legends who'd rather inspire than retire coming up on Sunday morning. A summer song is ahead for us this morning. From Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, he'll be looking back and ahead with Anthony Mason. From the dark side of the moon to the wall, Pink Floyd pushed the boundaries of music and the man at the center of it, Roger Waters, is pushing himself again. One more time.

I can't imagine I'll do another one after this, but I'm going for it. Ahead on Sunday morning, one more tour with Roger Waters. Row, row, row your boat is just one way to win the competition Luke Burbank will tell us about.

There's no race on land or sea that is weirder or wilder than the race to Alaska. The tides run really fast, the wind howls. It's a 750-mile boat race with only one rule, no motors. Removing the ability for you to depend on a little button that starts a motor, it changes your relationship to the water. It's a little bit like a boat. It's a little bit like a motor.

It changes your relationship to the water. Later on Sunday morning, we go against the tide. The Tony Awards honoring the best on Broadway are just one week from today. This morning, Mo Rocca goes backstage with the nominated actress who's helping to update a classic drama. Look here's your ringback.

Give me mine. Henry Gibson's landmark play A Doll's House stunned audiences when it opened in 1879. Now almost 140 years later, there's a sequel. There have been other men, several after you. I've had lovers. I've had a life. I kept on telling people someday I'm going to write a sequel to A Doll's House just because it sounds audacious to do that. Actress Lori Metcalf and the story behind Part Two later on Sunday morning. Alex Wagner shares the boundary-breaking paintings of Kerry James Marshall. Steve Hartman takes his seat with a 99-year-old ballpark usher. Faith Salie expounds on the exclamation point and more. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment and more.

Play it at play.it. 36 and counting. That's how many years have passed since AIDS first caught the attention of public health officials. Though modern medicine has done much to control the disease, the battle is far from over.

Our cover story is reported by Rita Braver. When 31-year-old Dean Karras hits the bars and maybe strikes up a new relationship, he has a level of confidence that wouldn't have been possible just a few years ago. I don't want to sound cynical, but I don't have to trust somebody 100% because I know for myself that I'm protected. That's because Karras, who is HIV-negative, begins his day with PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, which reduces the risk of transmission of HIV by more than 90%. And from a generation where condom use was 100%, that was safe sex. When you said safe sex, that meant you used a condom.

And now? You can kind of remove that level of protection should you want to and know that you're not going to become HIV-positive. Karras, who gets a check up every three months, says he's well aware of how much has happened since June of 1981. That's when an infectious disease researcher at the National Institutes of Health first started noticing reports that clusters of young gay men were being diagnosed with highly unusual infections. It became clear to me that even though we did not know what this was, it almost certainly was a sexually transmitted infection. It would take a few years before Dr. Anthony Fauci and colleagues in the international medical community would identify HIV, which, left unchecked, can develop into the deadly syndrome known as AIDS, which destroys the human body's resistance to infections. We saw that it was contained in the semen, it was contained in the blood. Doctors learned that HIV could be transmitted through blood transfusions and that women can get HIV and pass it on to babies in the womb or through breast milk.

Intravenous drug users who share needles are also at high risk, but HIV is most often transmitted through sex between men. Quickly, a lot of myths began to spread. I remember when people said you could get it from touching someone if there was perspiration on their arm.

Of course. You could get it from breathing air. Hugging someone, casual contact. Even though the overwhelming evidence indicated that that was not the case, there were still people who were propagating that falsehood. You would see guys on Fire Island carrying their boyfriends in their arms saying, can you have any idea what's wrong with him? I went to so many doctors and nobody knows what's wrong with him. And many heartbreaking kinds of moments like that. Perhaps no one expressed the anguish of AIDS better than New York writer Larry Kramer. This is a national emergency. This is an epidemic. It's a plague. It's a plague.

As documented in his Tony and Emmy award-winning work, The Normal Heart. Gay men may have no future here on earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get. Kramer, HIV positive himself, became enraged at behavior in the gay community. Because we were dying, you know, all this business about I don't want to use a condom.

Well, sorry, fellas. That's what you got to do now. But he was even more angry at the federal government and the pharmaceutical industry. Founding a protest group called Act Up to demand quicker action on developing AIDS prevention and treatment drugs. There are a lot of sick people and a lot of angry people, a lot of scared people.

So it was okay. We're going to go out there. We're going to fight. We're going to show our faces.

We're going to protest everywhere we can. And we did. One person who felt Kramer's fury was NIH Dr. Anthony Fauci, who acknowledges Act Up's contribution. Did the scientific community, in fact, start speeding up the trials and being less rigid in what they did before they would bring a drug to market? We loosened some of the restrictions, but we never compromised our core fundamental scientific principles. And that was, I think, a great victory, a victory for the activists and a victory for the scientists because they saw they can do things better without being so restrictive. Scientists are expected to announce tomorrow proposals for expanded use of an antiviral drug, which has shown the first significant progress against AIDS. In 1987, AZT, the first medication that could slow the progress of HIV and reduce the risk of it developing into AIDS, was approved. Researchers stress that it is not a cure, nor does it work in every case, but it is the first significant progress in the battle against AIDS. And over the years, a stream of drugs has improved treatment and lengthened lives. There are now more than a million Americans living with HIV.

The rate of infection in the United States has decreased from some 130,000 new cases per year in 1985 to about 40,000 in 2015. Larry Kramer never expected to live to 82, but he remains bitter. I'm not grateful for having lost hundreds of friends, and I never forget them. I'm not grateful that gay people still are leading many of us lives that got us into the same kind of mess that we got into in 81. They're relaxing their sense of responsibility and having unsafe sex.

And because of this PrEP stuff, which is certainly helpful, people are using it as an excuse to go back and have the crazy sex lives we had in the disco days, and we mustn't do that. AIDS prevention and treatment drugs can be expensive, and though there are programs that provide them, not everyone has access to them. The rate of new HIV cases tends to be higher in the African-American and Latino communities. 22-year-old Pedro Rios was diagnosed with HIV just two and a half months ago. Were you willing to take chances because you were young and you thought nothing could happen to you? I was definitely at that stage of like, I've never had an STD before, so. A sexually transmitted disease before?

Didn't even fathom it. The first one that I got was obviously HIV. But he says the news was not distressing to him. It was very much, okay, I accept it, so what's next? Where do we go from here?

He now takes one pill a day in a clinical trial, but Rios will probably be on medication for the rest of his life. And after 36 years, Anthony Fauci is still searching for both a vaccine and a cure. We still have a long way to go. What we really need to do is to essentially put the nail in the coffin of this disease, and we are not there yet.

And when we get casual about it and assume that, well, we took care of HIV-AIDS, we can move on to something else, we're going to get HIV-AIDS, we can move on to something else, that's a big mistake. 36 years and counting. Coming up, shopping carts on a roll. And now a page from our Sunday morning almanac. June 4th, 1937, 80 years ago today, the day the late Sylvan Goldman made history. As our old friend Charles Kuralt once put it, what he did changed everything. What he did was invent the shopping cart. Sylvan Goldman rolled out that first shopping cart at his Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma City. The rest, as they say, is history. Was it shopping carts that made you rich? Well, they didn't make me poor. Thanks to Sylvan Goldman, the shopping cart became a familiar part of American life, and virtually the first means of transportation for generations of American children. Not to mention the subject of good-natured fun in the 1983 film Mr.

Mom, starring Michael Keaton. I have the right of way. Right. Sorry. Here. Settle out of court. The cart has also proved an irresistible temptation for daredevils, such as the cast of the MTV show Jackass.

Needless to say, do not try this at home or anywhere else, for that matter, least of all, at a supermarket. Now showing, you use a variety of techniques to help make that happen. Paintings by Kerry James Marshall.

Next. On display in an exhibit that's traveling the nation, the works of an artist who wants us to view the world with new eyes. Alex Wagner is our guide. Kerry James Marshall is changing the face of American art. My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great, but I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at. So for decades now, Marshall has been working on that reflection. His figures aren't just black, they are jet black.

Bold, proud, undeniably black. And he wants to fill museums with them. That body of work has to reach a critical mass so that it's no longer an exception to see things like that in a museum. You can't have one picture of a black person or two pictures of a black person.

You gotta have a lot of them. His trademark style has catapulted him into the stratosphere of the art world. 72 of his paintings were shown at New York's Metropolitan Museum earlier this year. That exhibit, a retrospective, originated in Chicago. It's now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Where do you think Kerry James Marshall fits in the canon? Helen Molesworth is the curator.

Firmly inside of it. The pictures are very much of our moment, they're of our time, and I do think that museums historically are incredibly white places. So to walk into an art exhibition in which the figures are all black, it's really revelatory. Born 62 years ago in Birmingham, Alabama, Kerry James Marshall was eight when the KKK bombed a Baptist church, killing four girls.

He would go on to live in Los Angeles during the Watts Riots, and later Harlem, and now Chicago's South Side. All those things had an impact on shaping the person that I am. It's sort of inescapable. But those are a small fraction of the kind of experience you have on a day-to-day basis. His works deal with grief, injustice, and loss, but also everyday life. Swimming pools and beauty salons, daily rituals and quiet moments. A window into a world often ignored in fine art. A lot of times in your paintings, whether it's a couple getting ready for bed, or whether it's a picnic scene, when you paint those images, are you thinking of specific memories or people? Well, I think I'm thinking in more generalized terms, but a lot of the things I'm thinking about are reflection of experiences I have myself.

Experiences like visits to a barbershop. The painting is called De Style. I think our stereotypical image of black men has been predominantly one of criminality, and I think what we're being shown here is actually tenderness, stylishness, togetherness, a brotherhood. Marshall's work is filled with references to both art and American history. I think some people will look at this and they'll see Manet's Luncheon on the Grass.

Yes. They're just layers to each Kerry James Marshall painting. And if you do know contemporary art, then you're going to be realizing, wow, he's doing something really interesting. He's putting these moments of abstract painting in a realist picture. His vision has paid off. Marshall's work has received rave reviews. He even made Time's list of most influential people of 2017. And his latest work seems to be exploring new ways to depict the world as he sees it. We were in his studio and he's painting white figures.

I know. How meaningful is that? And what are we to read in that? Well, one of the reasons I know both in my heart, belly, and mind that Kerry James Marshall is a great artist is because he continues to surprise me. And it's the first painting that has white people in it. And I don't know what it means yet. The picture isn't finished. But to me, that indicates a challenge that he set himself.

An artist intent on breaking the mold, even his own. What happens now? How do you keep evolving?

Well, it has everything to do with whether you're working because the process itself is a means of exploring. I'm interested in that. That got a lot of work to do. You know, there's a lot to do. It's amazing.

Still to come, some golden oldies. You don't act! But first, constipated. Oh. Laurie Metcalf on Broadway. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment, and more.

Play it at play.it. I have some bad news. Dad is not with us anymore. I said, Dad has passed away.

He's passed away. Dad is gone. Dad's dead. He's dead. No, Dad. Dad! He's fine.

He sends his love. Laurie Metcalf had a knack for getting laughs on TV's Roseanne. Now she's on Broadway and nominated for a Tony at next Sunday's big ceremony.

She's starring in a play that has a very famous prequel, as Mo Rocca now shows us. When a wife leaves her husband, as I am leaving you now, legally as I understand it, he's absorbed from all obligation towards her. When last we left off with Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen's 1879 landmark drama A Doll's House, she had had an awakening. Look, here's your ring back.

Give me mine. As seen in this film adaptation, she was no longer content playing wife and mother. She needed to find out who she was. And so she walked out that door, leaving her husband and her young children.

But her story didn't end there. Nora is back. In A Doll's House Part 2.

Yes, there's a sequel. Oh, Nora. Hello, Anne-Marie. Set 15 years later, but written almost 140 years after the original.

It's good to see you. Where did you get the idea to do a sequel to A Doll's House? It started with the title. I wrote the title on a piece of paper and it made me laugh. Lucas Naeth wrote Part 2, currently playing on Broadway. I kept on telling people somebody I'm going to write a sequel to A Doll's House just because it sounds audacious to do that. It was called A Doll's House Part 2 and I was part two.

I don't know what this writer is imagining that he has the nerve to call his play a part two. Just so you know, there have been other men, several after you. I've had lovers. I've had a life.

Laurie Metcalf plays Nora. But I thought, but it's probably got some guts to it, but the fact that he chose to title it that way. And it probably had some humor to it. If you've ever wanted to get married again, haven't you ever wanted that? No.

Not even the possibility? No, Nora, I haven't. You sort of killed that for me. She's right.

Unlikely as it sounds for a play about a broken family, there's humor in almost every scene. You don't get angry. Of course I do. Maybe once. Right now I feel angry.

Even intense marital fights like this one between Nora and her estranged husband Torvald, played by Chris Cooper. You don't act. Constipated. The word you use to describe him is constipated?

Yeah. I mean, see, that coming out of this character's mouth, who's in this period costume and in a corset, you know, it's just so funny. Funny is no surprise coming from Laurie Metcalf. Roseanne, I have a problem. You probably know her best from the 1990s sitcom Roseanne. You're rolling a joint after yelling at David for bringing pot in the house? As Roseanne's sister Jackie.

You're doing it all wrong. But Metcalf was dead serious when it came to acting in A Doll's House Part Two and wrestling with a famously complicated character who made a still controversial decision to leave her family. In this scene, she and her daughter Emmy, played by Condola Rashad, confront that decision together.

I actually think it's a good idea to have a conversation with Rashad, confront that decision together. I actually think in a lot of ways things turned out better because you weren't around. I think I'm better at life because of it. I had a lot more responsibility. I had to deal with some difficult truths about life at an earlier age than you usually have to deal with those types of things. I feel bad for the kids who growing up had the usual life.

I feel special. Is it hard to wrap your head around that when you're acting this? Yes, when I'm acting it and to this day it's hard for anybody to wrap their head around it, let alone in 1879 when it happened and audiences were so jarred that whole countries wouldn't even produce the play.

It's still really hard to wrap your head around. She closed the door behind her not knowing if she could even survive. Spoiler alert, not only has Nora survived, she's now a very successful writer.

Playwright Lucas Naith. Take me through the different scenarios you considered for what happened to Nora after that door slam. Overwhelmingly, people thought she either died, went to work in a factory and died, became a prostitute and died. Like it just dismal, dismal ends for her. Once I started hearing from people what they expected, all I knew is I had to do the opposite of that. I had to like, she needed to walk in the door and she needed to be doing absolutely great. To honor original playwright Henrik Ibsen's Norwegian heritage, I met the full cast, all of them Tony Award nominees for the new play at a Nordic restaurant in New York City.

Oh my goodness. And we gabbed over gravlax. Has working on this play enlightened you about what makes a marriage work, what makes a marriage not work? For Oscar winner Chris Cooper, the secret to his marriage was an early litmus test back when he was a struggling actor. In New York, I was a carpenter. I had a toolbox on wheels and a big job I had in New York. My wife helped me take four by eight sheets of sheet rock up eight flights of steps and that was the night that I said she's my girl.

That's a good definition for what makes a marriage work. She'll help me with the sheet rock. You bet. You left. You left me.

But making a marriage work was not Nora's top priority in 1879. And when she returns 15 years later, she isn't exactly greeted warmly. And when I think back on what happened, I think to myself that I have one big regret.

I wish I left you. Nora comes breezing back home to get something and not realizing I think a lot of the damage that has been done in the 15 years. Each person gets to take their punches at Nora and they all get to say this is what you did when you left. After all the problems I've already fixed for you.

Even the nanny played by Tony winner Jane Howdy shell takes her whack. F*** you Nora. F*** you. You have zero gratitude. I raised your kids.

You should be coming in here. First words out of your mouth should have been thank you Anne-Marie. Thank you for abandoning your own life and your own child and raising mine so I can go off and do my little thing. It's one of those arguments that really pushes back against Nora's having made the decision to leave her children. If you'd like to talk about that.

And for Lucas and Nathan. Okay let's talk about that. That sort of heated confrontation is essential on stage and off. This is the kind of play that I think a lot of people leave arguing about.

Yes that makes me happy. I want more arguments. I think when you spend an evening hearing these long arguments it catches and you go home hopefully and start making your own case for why you think what you think. How the cookie crumbles.

Up next. Time now for some updates and we begin with these cookies. Which hail from Wisconsin. Where as we reported in a story back in April a state law bans the sale for profit of homemade treats ostensibly for health and safety reasons. Well this past week a judge ruled against that law saying it violates the Wisconsin Constitution. The state is considering an appeal.

So until that's settled our home bakers still won't be selling these very delicious cookies. We received a pointed critique of our Sunday morning almanac last week from Francis Gary Powers Jr. son of the U-2 spy plane pilot who was shot down and captured by the Soviets in 1960. In our almanac we heard James Bond author Ian Fleming rather lightheartedly suggest his fictional hero would have taken a poison pill rather than allow himself to be captured.

As the younger Mr. Powers rightly points out U-2 spy plane pilots were not obliged to take their own lives in the event of capture. He also rightly points out his father who was released in 1962 and who died in 1977 was awarded several medals posthumously including the Silver Star the military's third highest honor in 2012.

The citation says in part that Francis Gary Powers exhibited quote indomitable spirit exceptional loyalty and continuous heroic actions. And finally something new you may have noticed that earlier in the morning we showed you this week's New York Times bestseller list. Lots of our viewers like to read so with our thanks to the Times we plan to continue showing you the nation's top selling books every Sunday morning and we'll be right back. Row row row your boat are more than the words to a children's song they could be the key to victory in a race that starts this Thursday. On the theory that the past may be prologue Luke Burbank takes us back one year. It's a Wednesday afternoon in port towns in Washington just hours before the annual race to Alaska gets started and sailors like Matt Johnson are nervously making final adjustments.

If you are here for the swap meet you're in the wrong place. While crew captains get a final briefing of sorts. If you are here to take a challenge make it your own and create a story that may live in your life forever you are in the right place. And what a challenge it is. The race to Alaska is one of the more unusual more punishing events in American sport. A grueling 750 mile boat race from Port Townsend to Ketchikan Alaska with just one rule no motors. So it's a gnarly piece of coast it's truly one of the last and wildest places on earth. And this is from the guy behind the race Jake Beattie. The tides run really fast the wind howls and when you get wind against tide the sea becomes incredibly angry and dangerous. Last year some 200 sailors entered the race some in row boats and pedal boats others in high-tech carbon fiber catamarans. Not to mention homemade dinghies with sails. Some people raced in teams while others went it alone.

The good thing about being alone is that you win all the arguments you don't know which which one of you wins the arguments but one of you is going to win it. One of the biggest challenges as Thomas Nielsen learned firsthand is figuring out how to get some semblance of sleep while out on the water. Since the beginning of the race I think I've gotten about seven hours of sleep.

I'm on my third day on seven hours of sleep. Food is another problem lugging it along and sometimes forcing yourself to even eat it. We've been really trying to shovel the food down which is surprisingly not that easy.

The hunger and like enjoyment of food as a ritual has just kind of disappeared. On the pedal drive. And maybe the toughest struggle of all at least for the sailboats is what to do when the wind isn't blowing. I was thinking like oh you know we might get 10 hours of rowing in throughout the whole trip and we've been doing about 16 hours a day.

Race founder Jake Beattie has been working on a little button that starts a motor. It changes your relationship to the water when there's no get out of jail free card. And no fun for Matt Johnson who may have made the biggest sacrifice of the entire race before it even started. This is all your wine and beer money. This is all my wine and beer money.

Yes. It really paid off man. Johnson, a competitive athlete, has been re-directed that money to pay for the single-seat pedal-powered boat that he worked on for months in his garage. So you do not expect to win this race with your boat? I don't expect to win.

Then some might ask why I do it. Because I want to see how far I can go or how fast I can go. As it turned out, not that far. Johnson broke a pontoon in the middle of the race. And had to turn back.

But he wasn't alone. We're going a whopping 1.25 nautical miles an hour. Almost half the teams never even made it to Alaska. And those that did endured pungent weeks at sea. I'm pretty sure the sharks are helping us go faster.

This bench is moving us along. We've got some buddies swimming with us. But there are moments of beauty out there with the dolphins and the whales. This crew, team mad dog, didn't have time to take in all that scenery though. They sailed day and night for four straight days, sleeping in 20 minutes in the sea.

And winning in record time. Their prize? $10,000. Barely enough to tow the boat home from Alaska.

Second prize, and we're not kidding here, is a set of steak knives. To reach Kachikan, you have to build your own little victory every hour, every day. Despite the dangers, no one has died in the race, yet. But limits have been and will be pushed. And then broken. Which is just how race founder Jake Beattie likes it.

I've never met a more powerful teacher than Jake Beattie. And I'm excited for more people to have those sort of crucible moments out there on the water. For those looking for a guaranteed crucible moment, this year's race starts Thursday morning in Port Townsend. No motors allowed. Coming up, please be seated. To be seated is usually no big deal. Unless you're finding your seat at the stadium Steve Hartman's been to. A lot of baseball stars can put fans in the seats, but only Phil Coyne cleans them first. There we are. I wonder if he's a bigger celebrity than anybody on the field.

He is. I think it makes their day. It tickles through our seats.

I'm like, wow, that was great, you know. Follow me. What makes Phil famous around here is how long he's been around here.

There we are. At 99, he's still working as an usher for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Feel free to get out of the sun. Seating people in sweltering heat, climbing up and down stairs that would hospitalize most any other soon to be centenarian. When I'm not working, I carry a cane. You do?

Yeah. And the reason I carry a cane, it gets me a front seat on the bus. Phil grew up near the old Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. In fact, when Babe Ruth hit the last home run of his career over this wall, Phil was one of the kids who ran after the ball. Becoming an usher was simply a rite of passage in his neighborhood.

Every kid did it for a year or two. But not Phil. He's still at it. 81 years later. Of course, he did have a day job for many years. Worked as a machinist.

He also took time off to save the world in 41. But other than that, it's been this. God bless you. Thank you. You still look forward to coming to work? Oh yeah. What do you like about it? The people. I get more hugs and kisses now than I ever got in my life.

How are you doing? To many of us, success means climbing a ladder. Always doing something different.

Something bigger. But Phil Coyne has a gift for finding joy in the same place he found it yesterday. I saw that most clearly during the national anthem. He's probably heard that song 10,000 times. And yet when it ended, he was moved to tears. That national anthem, is that emotional for you every time?

Love of country, love of people, and happiness and hard work. If you want the secret to life, now you know. Just follow the Usher. Welcome to Play It, a new podcast network featuring radio and TV personalities talking business, sports, tech, entertainment and more.

Play it at Play.it. Alan, whatever you were going to say to Laura, I would rather you said to me. Okay Rob, if that's the way you want it.

Rob, you're a beautiful girl. It's Sunday morning on CBS and here again is Jane Pauley. Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner were a team made in heaven on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

These days, together with their pal Norman Lear, they constitute a team of golden boys. Older yes, no less amusing. What's so funny? Tracy Smith is here to tell us. Once I built a tower and now it's done.

A million pair of boots slugging through hell and I was a kid with a drum. Okay I'll admit it's a little intimidating. Three legends all together in one room at Carl Reiner's Beverly Hills home. Still collaborating and still close. You all clearly have known each other a long time.

Could you say a few words about the guys sitting next to you? These two creative giants have been the biggest influence on my life. I mean Carl found me for the series, you know, which changed my life and Norman has put me in movies and specials and these two guys without them I don't know who I'd be today.

And if we didn't find him we wouldn't be talking to you. Norman Lear will be 95 in July. Carl Reiner is 95. Dick Van Dyke is 91. There's something about 90 hitting 90. I know I can get applause just standing up.

I can walk across the room get a standing ovation. They're older sure they just don't think old. The culture has age all wrong. The culture sells age as utterly going down. That's the expression going downhill and he woke up this morning to come here feeling great. I woke up this morning I couldn't wait to get here to see these guys. It's not downhill.

No it's not downhill. People are more afraid of aging than they are death these days and they don't we need to tell them there's this lot of good living to do. If you don't take care of yourself nobody else will.

And their new film does just that. You got to be the boss of your body. Call it a celebration of life after 90. I'm in my 90s. It's in the HBO documentary film if you're not in the obit eat breakfast debuting tomorrow on HBO. That title is based on a joke Carl Reiner told us in 2015. First thing in the morning before I have coffee I read the obits.

Seriously? Yes if I'm not in it I'll have breakfast. These folks say there are keys to longevity but no big secrets. If you could boil it down to one thing to what do you owe your long your long life? I think attitude has an awful lot to do with a lack of stress. You know we all have stress in our businesses but I think what most of us are kind of easy going.

We're not upside people and I think lack of stress I think that eats you up really your body and your mind. I always say I married the right woman. How does that explain me because I didn't marry her.

Well you married another person. Several. They all say laughter is important. You walk every day? Yes I walk around the block one time. And also a little workout. Mr Reiner likes to walk around the neighborhood and every morning before his feet touch the floor he does stretches like a circus performer. I wasn't going to do him today because I was late but I said wait a minute it always takes 10 minutes. I did my stretching. As he showed Mo Rocca last year Mr Lear also likes a good stretch.

And as you can see in the recent music video for the band Dust Bowl Revival Mr Van Dyke hasn't lost a step. I make a list every morning. Every morning I'm full of ideas and plans. Then by 10 o'clock I'm not out of gas. But I go to the gym take a drink a cup of coffee and go or I'll talk myself out of it.

So I just go. He also says his wife Arlene whom he married in 2012 helps keep his heart in shape. How do you define a good life? I think the bottom line is you have to have someone to love.

I think you really must. If you love a person and love the thing you're doing that makes a world for you. I think it helps too to love yourself.

That's the hardest one. Having a good marriage and good children. A good life is what you send out to the world. I have three children non-toxic children all have done great things and are continuing to do great things and I had a marriage of 65 years. That's the only thing that really defines me.

Estelle Reiner passed away in 2008 at 94. These days lifelong friend Mel Brooks who turns 91 this month keeps Carl company. You know if you have one good friend you're lucky at this age and Mel comes over every night and I don't know what I would do if he didn't come over. I have no more these guys live too far away. I don't go. I don't drive anymore. I eat though. And he still gets out like this HBO event a few weeks ago. The funniest brain that exists today is in that head.

And he's the only one who can do a cat noise. What'd you do on that one? So if you could give advice to people out there what's the best advice you can give folks? Do something that you love to do. Don't be living a life of what is a quiet desperation that people working in jobs that they hate to go to and that's that to me is a ruin as a person.

Find something you like to do and please God do it. And that's something they all seem to live by. More than five decades after Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke will be in the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns. Back in 1975 Norman Lear developed One Day at a Time for CBS.

Now the show's been reimagined for Netflix with stars like Rita Moreno and he's an executive producer. Making people laugh it would seem never gets old. You stand behind an audience I've done this thousands of times literally standing behind an audience when they barely laugh and they have a tendency to come out of their seats a little and come forward and then go back and there's I've never seen anything more spiritual. I've never seen anything more spiritual. I've never seen and there's I've never seen anything more spiritual than that. Than the communal laughter.

Everybody together on. What does that do for you when you know that you're the source of that? I think it added time to my life. And Carl Reiner is probably writing as we speak.

His latest title says it all, Too Busy to Die. You think about the end. And no I think about how I'd like to go. I'd like to go to my sleep.

What a show this would be if I was talking to you. Kidding aside if there's any real secret to a long and happy life it may be just keep looking ahead. I think there are two little words we don't think enough about over and next when something is over it's over we're on to next.

Smell the room. This is the moment. If you have something to get up for you'll get up. You won't die.

You won't die in the middle of the night if you have something in the morning you gotta do. So here's to what's next. Faith Salie gets to the point.

The exclamation point. Next. Listen up.

Here's contributor Faith Salie. Does it seem like I'm shouting at you or I'm excited? Happy?

Crazy? That's because I wrote what I'm saying with a bunch of exclamation points. See exclamation points are everywhere more than ever. Surely you've noticed your emails and texts the ones you receive or compose are bursting with enthusiasm.

Mine are and I feel funny about it. I don't think in my entire 18 years as a student I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper and now I probably use them in 80 percent of my missives. Serious business people pepper their memos with them. A freelancing pal tells me part of her onboarding process is to assimilate into the exclamation culture of her new colleagues and high school teacher friends report their students are using them with abandon. How do those essays read?

So in conclusion it was totally the best of times and the worst of times. Why the exclamation escalation? Well we're such a text-based society. Instead of old school talking on the phone or meeting in person situations in which our voice reveals our true meaning we now communicate mostly by typing texts emails social media posts to to add emotional nuance we resort to extreme punctuation to suggest I like you or I want you to like me or just kidding. Can you imagine ending an email like this?

Thanks. Of course you cannot because you are not a cold blooded monster you are a human being who writes thanks. Exclamation is the new normal. A recent study found that text messages that end in periods are perceived as less sincere than those ending with a this gives periods a bad name. We need periods more than once a month. A period is self-possessed. It has dignity which is something we could all use nowadays. I know some of you will exclaim none of this matters and you're right the world's not ending because of exclamation overpopulation but what if we all took it down a notch made things a little less urgent saved exclamation points for when they really hit the spot. I for one vow to limit myself to one exclamation per exchange.

Period. Thanks for listening. I mean thanks for listening. The Wall is one of many hits from Roger Waters co-founder of the legendary band Pink Floyd. Not content with a summer song he's launched an entire tour and tells our Anthony Mason all about it. For much of May Roger Waters stage crew was setting up his new show. As you can see there's a lot of this is all your gear yeah let's go up on the stage. Working out the staging in a vacant arena in the New Jersey meadowlands. You've basically booked a 20,000 seat arena just to rehearse.

Yeah. Waters last tour an epic production of The Wall. The rock opera he wrote for his former band Pink Floyd.

Ended in 2013 after taking in nearly half a billion dollars the highest grossing tour by a solo artist in history. His new show Another Spectacle. In terms of scale. Yeah.

How does this show compare to The Wall? I think this is even more complex. Really?

And more complex than more complex and bigger. The Us and Them tour kicked off last week in Kansas City and it may be the 73 year old musician's last lap. I can't imagine I'll do another one after this but I'm going for it.

I mean I'm going all over the world with this thing. You think this is the last one? Oh I would think so yeah. It's simply a matter of time says Waters. It's been 50 years since Pink Floyd released their debut album. Waters formed the band in college with his Cambridge friend Sid Barrett and fellow architecture students Nick Mason and Rick Wright. But Barrett the band's creative force soon had a mental breakdown. It happened so fast.

We just turned pro. We just had a song in the top 10 in the UK and suddenly the guy who wrote all the songs disappeared. Were you guys a bit lost for a while?

Yeah we were and of course what you do is everybody who can starts trying to write because if you don't write you're dead. Waters emerged as the band's main songwriter. The force behind two of rock's most influential albums 1973's The Dark Side of the Moon which spent a record 14 years on the chart and 1979's The Wall the fifth best-selling album of all time. Its theme is alienation and the walls that divide us.

All in all it's just a little brick in the wall. But a wall was rising within Pink Floyd as Waters and guitarist David Gilmore battled for control. In 1985 in one of the ugliest breakups in rock history Waters walked away. There's a large kind of body of people you know fans I guess of the band who sort of blame me for having destroyed something that is precious to them and I guess I can understand it to some extent but I regret it. While the other members continued on as Pink Floyd Waters went out on his own.

I was doing gigs in you know 4000 seat arenas to 1500 people when they were playing to 70,000 people in the local football stadium all the same songs they're still playing all my songs but and that was um very character forming very character forming. The bass player suddenly had to come out of the shadows. I was so scared I was just terrified. What were you terrified of? Failure, being found out. What were you afraid of being found out?

If people find out you're a wanker you know. Deep down I think everybody has that fear on some level. I'm sure that's right mine is connected very much to the whole father-son thing. Waters was just five months old when his father Eric Waters was killed during World War II. After a recent concert a veteran came up to him and he said to me your father would be proud of you and I just you lost it I lost it completely I was just and I realized that it was a uniquely kind of important moment to recognize I could still be that needy of my father's approval if you like but also emotionally entangled in that loss. At the end of his last tour for the documentary about the wall he went to the beach at Anzio in Italy where his father died in battle. You'd never been? No I'd never followed him to his death if you like.

I'd never stood on that beach staring out to sea thinking about that. And in the other war that altered Waters life with his former bandmates especially David Gilmore he's declared a fragile truce. There's kind of a peace with you guys these days? Sort of. Yeah David and I we don't see each other kind of ever. But you stopped slamming each other? Yeah which is a very good thing.

Why did that happen? Well it's kind of a waste of time you know it's a real waste of time and energy to butt heads about things that are essentially superficial. This past Friday Waters released his first solo album in 25 years. Is this the life we really want? A question he asks again in his new tour. The whole show is really a kind of musical protest against the acceptance of the state of perpetual warfare. When you take an overtly political show like this into the polarized environment of this country what sort of reaction are you expecting?

I'll let you know in a few weeks time. At a time when the American president wants to build a wall Roger Waters is still trying to tear them down. Is there still a role for the protest song?

Absolutely of course yeah. If one isn't protesting this what's going on now I think I'd rather be dead. And next week here on Sunday morning. Give my regards to Broadway. We're off to the Tonys. Tell all the folks on 42nd Street that I. I'm Jane Pauley.

Please join us here again next Sunday morning. This is The Takeout with Major Garrett. This week Stephen Law ally of Mitch McConnell and one of Washington's biggest midterm money men. List for me the two Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire. Not Georgia. Well Georgia's right up there but New Hampshire is a surprise. In New Hampshire people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-01-25 23:41:32 / 2023-01-26 00:02:22 / 21

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