The explosive thrills of American vaudeville theater will be featured this Friday at Carleton College, as Greg Palmer, the award-winning producer of the PBS documentary "Vaudeville," and father of Carleton sophomore Ira Palmer, presents the College's weekly convocation at 10:50 a.m. in the Concert Hall.
In a talk titled "From Caruso to Geeks: A Brief Illustrated History of Vaudeville," Palmer will discuss vaudeville's importance to American culture and use film clips from his documentary to showcase some of its greatest performances. His presentation is free and open to the public.
"My emphasis here is that pound for pound, minute by minute, vaudeville was the best live entertainment this country ever had," Palmer said. "I intend to show a lot of wonderful acts that most people haven't seen for 50 years."
According to Palmer, vaudeville is a highly neglected piece of American history with enormous cultural significance. "Since I started this project four years ago, I have rarely talked with a group of five people that doesn't know of a relative who was involved in vaudeville," Palmer said. His two-hour PBS special aired in November of 1997 and was labeled one of the 12 best television programs and best variety special of the year by People magazine.
Palmer is president of Palmer/Fenster, Inc., a Seattle-based writing and production company. He started his career in broadcasting at Seattle's KTW Radio, when "it was a remarkable little radio station. I did live interviews with everybody from Justice Arthur Goldberg to Gregory Peck, Jack Benny and Henry Fonda."
Palmer also did satirical comedy sketches within the station's news programs. His five-minute show earned him a Peabody Award-the highest distinction in broadcasting.
When KTW went off the air due to financial problems, Palmer moved to KING, where he earned 13 Emmy Awards as the television station's arts critic. In 1990, he completed "The Falcon," a folk tale co-produced by Georgian broadcasters and watched by 200 million people in the Soviet Union.
"Shortly after that I got a call for death," Palmer said. PBS' request for a documentary on death's social and cultural importance resulted in Palmer's production of a four-hour series titled "Death: The Trip of a Lifetime." It won the National Education Association award for "the enhancement of learning through broadcasting."
After "Death" was released, Palmer received numerous requests to speak to funeral directors associations. "Funeral directors are dying to, no pun intended, have somebody come talk to them who is not a funeral director. I mean, who do they call? They can't really call their clients," he said. The speeches led to Palmer being named the California Funeral Directors Media Man of the Year in 1994. "I didn't know who the competition was," Palmer said, "but they took me down and let me walk around Disneyland, and I spoke to their convention, and they gave me a real nice clock."
The success of "Death" also helped Palmer move into producing other documentaries. "PBS said to me, 'well, what do you want to do now?' and I said, 'well, I think a seriously neglected subject in American popular entertainment is vaudeville.'"
Palmer promises that his presentation at Carleton will include clips of 13 different acts by one of vaudeville's greatest performers-a professional regurgitator. "For his big finish," Palmer said, "he drinks a lot of water, and then you see him drinking a little carafe of kerosene. He then turns to this little wooden house on his set that has a pilot light. He throws up the kerosene onto the house-huge flames, and then he brings up the water and puts the fire out. It's amazing."