Like a Virgin
Was it Groucho Marx who said
he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin?
I was way too young to see her
in her 1954 appearance on What’s My Line?
Our family didn’t even own a TV then,
but having just turned two a couple of weeks earlier,
I’d never have remembered anyway.
It was Doris’s very first appearance on television,
and after Arlene Francis guessed her identity,
John Charles Daly presented her with a framed gold record
for selling the millionth copy of “Secret Love.”
But Groucho? Saw him on all his appearances,
twice as a panelist, twice as the mystery guest.
Hilarious and disruptive as a panelist,
Groucho had my whole family in tears,
like when, mask over his eyes, he asked Anne Bancroft,
Are you Sonny Liston? and Are you an old Buick?
As the mystery guest, he talked about his new book,
his letters, his correspondence with T.S. Eliot.
Years later I wondered at the “friendship”
between the rabid anti-Semite
and the quintessentially Jewish Groucho
(“The British poet from St. Louis,” Groucho called him),
but at the time, what did I know?
I was still a virgin myself
when What’s My Line? ended.
Didn’t get laid until I was sixteen,
a year later, in a parked car in Potawatomi Rapids.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. A collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was recently published by BlazeVOX Books. His collection, The Tao According to Calvin Coolidge, has just been published by Kelsay Books.
