🚀 go-pugleaf

At 04:56 PM 5/5/1999 EDT, Debi Oliver wrote:

>In a message dated 5/5/99 1:19:50 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
>jlupton@SAS.UPENN.EDU writes:
>
><< At 01:08 PM 5/5/1999 -0700, Brad Bechtel wrote:
>
> >Somehow I just keep hearing in my head this introduction:
> >
> >Tut? Hootie.  Hootie?  Tut.
>
> Yma, Abba...Abba, Yma
> Uta, Yma...Yma, Uta...Uta, Abba...Abba, Uta
>
> (You need to be of a certain age to know where this is coming from)
>
> ******* >>
>
>Okay, this is killing me!  It was Saturday Night Live, the chic who played
>Mr. Robinson in The Graduate......... Anne Bancroft (sp?)....... around mid
>80's ????
>
>Right?

Nope...long before SNL, goes back to the 50s, I think. I'm not even sure
who originally did it, it may have been Mike Nichols and Elaine May, but
I'm not certain of that. It was from a sketch about a woman talking to her
analyst and telling him about a strange dream she had, where she was
hosting a cocktail party in honor of the noted (in those times) Peruvian
folk singer Yma Sumac (who is said by some to have actually been a
Brooklyn-born woman named Amy Camus - see the palindromic aspect here??).
As hostess, of course, it was her duty to properly introduce the arriving
guests to the Guest of Honor, and then in turn to all the other guests
already arrived. The first to arrive was the former Israeli Ambassador to
the UN, Abba Eban - "Yma, Abba...Abba, Yma". Next arrival was the famous
actress, Uta Hagen - "Yma, Uta...Uta, Yma...Uta, Abba...Abba, Uta". Well,
you get the idea. It goes on insanely like this until at one point, at her
wit's end, she flings the door open and finds Pia Lindstrom (Ingrid
Bergman's daughter), Anna Moffo (opera diva) and Mata Hari standing there,
so she turns to the room and exasperatedly shouts, "Hey, everybody - Anna,
Mata, Pia" (a play on words, i.e. "onomatopoeia", words that sound like or
mimic what they're intended to describe - hey, like "Bangs", for example <g>).

Absolutely one of the funniest things I've ever heard, but I've only heard
the bit done a couple times over the last 40 years or so. It could be, I
suppose, that SNL dredged it up (and Anne Bancroft would have been perfect
for it), but I didn't see it if they did - no surprise, I don't watch SNL
much these last several years. I saw a video version of it done on an HBO
special back around, oh, '83 or so, but didn't own a VCR in those days. I'd
just about kill to have a copy of it.

***********************************************************************
John Lupton (jlupton@sas.upenn.edu)
"Rural Free Delivery", WVUD-FM 91.3 Newark, DE (University of Delaware)
RealAudio available at http://www.udel.edu/wvud/
Brandywine Friends of Old Time Music/Delaware Valley Bluegrass Festival
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The University of Pennsylvania - a bar with a $31,000 cover charge