Epiphanies

Joan Acocella has a brief review in this week's New Yorker, which can be found here, if you are able to access the digital edition? Joan Acocella is always worth the price of admission.

In this review, she's discussing Behind the Burly Q, a 2010 documentary about the world of burlesque. There's a lovely passage that I want to quote:

The audience wasn't just men. Alan Alda, one of Zemeckis's interviewees (his father was a "tit singer," the man who, with the chorus girls, opened the show) says that . . .

Okay, hold on, how amazingly happy does that make you? Alan Alda's father was a "tit singer"! Now, I've always loved Alan Alda. Most of the many celebrities and stars I've seen in the streets are skittering about with a keen sense of being watched; when I spotted Alda, he was just another tall, thin, grinning man in a crowd of mostly tourists watching a group of boys breakdance for cash outside the Plaza hotel. And his father was a "tit singer"! (That makes Jack Donaghy's grandfather a tit singer! How perfect is that?) My day has been made.

Acocella ends the review thus:

Finally, Zemeckis tells what killed burlesque: pornography, feminism, and, as with so much live theatre, television.

What can't be blamed on pornography, feminism and television?