Thought the assembled masses might be interested in this.
Betty White made an appearance at a casino just north of me last night and the venue, not surprisingly, was packed. I don't know that anybody knew exactly what to expect, but the setup was more or less what I thought it would be: Betty, seated, taking Q&A moderated by a host who would also show clips from throughout her career. Kinda hard to screw up, right? Oh, my.
The event was about as big a travesty as anything associated with Betty White could possibly be. The clips were overly long, poorly chosen and quite likely just pulled from various YouTube pages. Not only did Betty not have any specific material of her own prepared, she seemed totally unprepared for any of the clips or the lame questions that followed. Worst of all was the host, a casino employee who typically just introduces the acts, but this time had to take responsibility for the entire show, and was in way WAY over his head. I was even annoyed by the casino's video production.
Sometimes Betty's comments didn't even make any sense. At one point, the host -- who presumably knew what was on the clips -- encouraged her to tell a story she mentioned to him backstage about how she never got to see any
Golden Girls bloopers because Bea Arthur wouldn't allow it. So the two of them make a big deal about how she's going to be seeing these bloopers for the very first time, right here on stage. They roll the clip, and it's Betty herself on some old blooper TV show introducing the bloopers she just told us she'd never seen! I can't blame a 90-year-old woman for forgetting details, but the host should have known better.
On topic, the only game show clip was a
Password episode. In another bit of weirdness, they ran a long introductory opening segment that hardly featured Betty at all, mostly involving interviews with Arlene Francis and two professional cartoonists who were serving as contestants in the special episode. No game play. The casino host also brought up
Just Men, but just when you thought there was going to be a clip, he moved on.
Betty left fairly abruptly after the host's little "time machine" finally got to
Hot In Cleveland, and some people speculated she was just as annoyed as everyone else and ended the show early. If you want to read some more nasty comments, there are plenty of them on the
Soaring Eagle Facebook page (which, ironically, you have to "like" first before reading all the "dislike"). In the last few minutes, Soaring Eagle has tried to begin damage control over the fiasco.
