{"id":1726,"date":"2013-02-08T11:24:21","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T16:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=1726"},"modified":"2013-03-06T16:01:26","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:01:26","slug":"the-kay-gardella-memorial-blog-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=1726","title":{"rendered":"The Kay Gardella Memorial Blog Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those New Yorkers old enough to remember when newspapers used to be relevant, may remember Kay Gardella, the television critic for the Daily News<\/em> from 1981 through 1993, known for her no-nonsense reviews.\u00a0 Strangely, in my memory she was writing about television or movies years before that, which is possible as she started with the News in the 1930’s.<\/p>\n

I wasn’t a big reader of the Daily News<\/em>. Growing up, my parents bought the Times<\/em> in the mornings and the pre-Murdoch liberal New York Post<\/em> in the afternoon. Maybe it was after the Post<\/em> became a joke that the News<\/em> would occasionally appear in my childhood home. Fixed in my memory is the fuzzy-photo of Miss Gardella’s face.\u00a0 (I’m certain it was Miss <\/em>and not Ms<\/em>.) She looked like a typical Italian matron from Bay Ridge. It was easy to imagine the body I couldn’t see \u2013 fat and short, and that she was waring a bathrobe, watching television while the ash of her cigarette grew precariously. The Kay of my fantasies had a gravel voice that twenty years earlier might have been throaty and sexy, and she never left her house. She did all of her work from on an E-Z chair, maybe with a manual typewriter on a television snack table in front of her. But when she wasn’t typing, the table was cleared. Then she’d lean back with the chair in recliner mode, so she could rest her somewhat swollen legs. Sometimes she’d yell for her husband Anthony, sounding like the mother in the classic Prince spaghetti commercial, and she’d ask him to bring her something \u2013 donuts, coffee, whiskey.<\/p>\n

There was a small round table on her left, on which rested her ash-tray, lighter, cigarettes, phone, and of course the clicker.<\/p>\n

I can’t find any of her columns, but she is remembered as being, \u201cblunt\u201d but also \u201cfair,\u201d and had a love for old Hollywood and a nostalgia for its \u201cgraciousness.\u201d The real Kay, per her obit, did not work from home. She ran her department<\/a>,\u00a0 and always showed up \u201cattired in a dress or business suit and heels, plus a fresh hairdo, full makeup and jewelry.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>But to me she’ll always be Kay in the bathrobe working from a comfy chair.<\/p>\n

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to be more like Kay, and I shall begin by writing a series of posts about what I’m watching on televisions \u2013 or rather what television shows I’m watching online \u2013 as my better-half will not permit a television machine in his home. I will also take up smoking and order a recliner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those New Yorkers old enough to remember when newspapers used to be relevant, may remember Kay Gardella, the television critic for the Daily News from 1981 through 1993, known for her no-nonsense reviews.\u00a0 Strangely, in my memory she was writing about television or movies years before that, which is possible as she started with the … Continue reading The Kay Gardella Memorial Blog Post<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[496,71],"tags":[495,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1726"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1896,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726\/revisions\/1896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}