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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Maya Rudolph is referenced in the song “Loving You.”

Maya Rudolph was a cast member of Saturday Night Live from 1999 until 2007.

She’s appeared in a number of films, perhaps most notable as the bride in Bridesmaids…

She is currently co-staring in the sitcom Up All Night with Christina Applegate and Will Arnett…

Rudolph is the daughter of songwriter and producer Richard Rudolph and singer Minnie Riperton.

Riperton tragically died of breast cancer at the far too young age of 31 when Rudolph was just shy of her seventh birthday.

Riperton’s biggest hit was the lovely tune, “Loving You,” whose lyrics appear on her gravestone (“Loving you is easy because you’re beautiful.”

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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Bob Holness played saxophone on Gerry Rafferty’s hit, “Baker Street.”

It’s rare that we can actually pinpoint where a legend began, but in the case of the story behind who played the sax on “Baker Street,” we can!

Gerry Rafferty was the lead singer of the band Stealer’s Wheel, known almost entirely nowadays for their hit single, “Stuck in the Middle With You” (which found a new life when it was used in Reservoir Dogs)…

After leaving the band, Rafferty was stuck in legal limbo for a few years before finally being able to release his 1978 album, City to City.

The album went platinum, backed mostly on the incredibly successful single off of the album, “Baker Street.”

The song is mostly known today for its striking saxophone solo, a solo that has certainly appeared to increase the amount of usage of saxophones in television and movie soundtracks in the 1980s by a factor of ten.

Rafferty did not credit anyone for writing/performing the sax solo, so that allowed some people to run wild with jokes/rumors about who performed the solo.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: Cookie Monster was originally created as the “Wheel-Stealer” for a cheese snack commercial.

An interesting aspect of Jim Henson’s career is that before the debut of Sesame Street, while Henson made a number of appearances on late night television (and his character Rowlf was a regular on The Jimmy Dean Show during the early 1960s) his Muppets were best known in the country for their appearances in various commercials around the country (in the Washington D.C. area, where Henson got his big break doing the puppet television show Sam and Friends in the 1950s, he did over 300 ads for Wilkins Coffee). These early commercial works helped Henson to develop the style that he would later use on both Sesame Street as well as The Muppet Show. However, as you might imagine, these ads also gave him the freedom to develop new characters and one of the most amusing character developments was the evolution of one puppet called the “Wheel-Stealer” that went from being one of three puppets in an unaired ad campaign for a long-forgotten cheese snack to one of the most famous Muppets of them all, the Cookie Monster.

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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about music and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the music urban legends featured so far.

MUSIC URBAN LEGEND: Carly Simon auctioned off the identity of who “You’re So Vain” was about for $50,000!

One of the great mysteries of pop music is who is the “mystery man” behind Carly Simon’s 1972 smash hit, “You’re So Vain.”

The song rips apart a vain man and has the striking chorus, “You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”

Various suggested targets have been Simon’s ex-husband James Taylor, actor Warren Beatty and musician Mick Jagger (who sang back-up on the song).

Beatty is the only one of those three who Simon has not said “no” to over the years (although, who knows if she was being genuine when she turned down the others)

In any event, in 2003, Simon offered up for a charity auction the secret behind the song.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: The actress who played Judy on Family Matters went into adult films.

Family Matters was a spin-off from the ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers.

In the 1987-88 season of Perfect Strangers, the main characters got a job working at a newspaper where Jo Marie Payton played Harriette Winslow, the elevator operator.

That same season, Hariette’s husband, Carl (played by Reginald VelJohnson) made his first appearance.

The couple appeared sporadically over the next season and a half, and in 1989, Hariette and Carl were given their own sitcom, Family Matters, which starred them and their three children, Eddie, Laura and Judy, as well as Carl’s mother, Estelle, and Hariette’s younger sister, Rachel (and her son, Richie).

However, that might have been what the show was INTENDED to be about, but very soon into the series it became apparent that that would not be what the show would be about. You see, in an early episode, we meet the nerdy next door neighbor, Steve Urkel, played by Jaleel White, and soon, the over-the-top comedic stylings of White as Urkel would become THE spotlight of the program.

In many ways, it was similar to how Fonzie took over the spotlight of Happy Days. But in this instance, there was no Ron Howard to keep Urkel from taking over completely.

And just how the character of Richie Cunningham’s older brother Chuck was written out of Happy Days when Fonzie made him superfluous (as Fonzie would be where Richie would go for advice), so, too, did some of the characters on Family Matters become a bit superfluous.

One of these characters was Jaimee Foxworth’s Judy Winslow, the youngest child of Carl and Harriette.

As the show became centered around Urkel, Eddie found his role as Urkel’s friend, Laura was Urkel’s love interest and Carl and Harriette served as surrogate parents. That really left Judy with little to do.

However, the show kept her around for four seasons, and they very well might have kept her for even more, but towards the end of the fourth season, Foxworth’s mother began pushing for Foxworth to have more involvement in the program. The producers responded by dropping her from the show without Judy ever being officially written out – she was just never mentioned again.

What happened next was quite rough.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: The actor who played Eddie Haskel went into adult films (sometimes the legend is more specific and it is that the actor who played Eddie Haskel changed his name to John Holmes and started doing adult films)

The TV series Leave it to Beaver was a charming sitcom that ran for six seasons in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It featured the Cleavers, a husband and wife (Ward and June) and their two sons, Wally and Theodore, who is better known by his nickname “Beaver.”

Overall, it was a cute show, if predictable at times. However, one character stood out, the supporting character Eddie Haskell, played by teen actor Ken Osmond.

Eddie was practically an archetype in and of himself – he was a total wise guy who put on a choir boy routine whenever he was around parents, a regular wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Anyhow, a persistent rumor over the years was that Osmond, who was not seen much after the shoe ended, began working in adult films.

An alternative rumor was that not only did he go into adult films, but that he took the stage name “John Holmes.” John Holmes was a very famous adult film star of the 1970s (and 1980s, to a certain extent). People tend to love those “Did you know that ‘famous controversial person X’ was really child actor Y?” things.

As noted in this legend, the concept of a child actor doing porn is not ludicrous. But is it true in this instance?
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: A perceived slight at an awards ceremony after Season 1 of the West Wing set off a chain of events that ended up with a plotline in a Season 3 episode.

After the first season of the West Wing, the show was rewarded with a plethora of Emmy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Drama and Best Writing for a Drama Series.

The writing award was given to writers Aaron Sorkin (creator of the West Wing) and Rick Cleveland for the Season 1 episode “In Excelsis Deo,” which is about staff member Toby Ziegler (played by Richard Schiff, who nabbed an Emmy that year for Best Supporting Actor) trying to secure a burial at Arlington for a homeless veteran of the Korean War.

Now, during the awards ceremony, Sorkin was the only one to speak. That event led to quite a bit of a stir eventually.
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends about TV and whether they are true or false. Click here to view an archive of the TV urban legends featured so far.

TV URBAN LEGEND: Arnold Vinick was originally going to win the election until John Spencer died, and the producers decided they did not want Matt Santos to lose his running mate AND the election.

The West Wing was a critically acclaimed drama that ran for seven seasons from 1999 until 2006. For the vast majority of the series, the show was about the staff of President Josiah Bartlett (played by Martin Sheen) and the President himself.

The sixth and seventh seasons of the show, though, held the spotlight a bit more to the two men running to become the NEXT President of the United States (Bartlett, of course, still had plenty of plots on the show), Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits)

and

Arnold Vinick (played by Alan Alda)

Santos ended up choosing as his running mate Bartlett’s long-time Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry (played by John Spencer)…

John Spencer tragically passed away before the election storyline finished.

My pal Chad, wrote in with a rumor…

Arnold Vinick was originally going to win the presidency, but John Spencer’s death meant that Matt Santos would have lost both his running mate AND the election, and producers thought that would a bit too much to lay on the character, so they changed it to a Santos victory.

True?
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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to paintings and painters and whether they are true or false.

PAINTING URBAN LEGEND: Sandro Botticelli was accused of heresy for a painting he made of the Assumption of Mary.

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli, was a famous painter during the Renaissance.

Here is an alleged self-portrait of himself…

Botticelli is most famous for his work, 1486’s The Birth of Venus, which is one of the most well-known paintings in the entire world…

The great biographer of artists of the era, Giorgio Vasari, told the tale of a painting by Botticelli about the Assumption of Mary, mother of Jesus (from 1475-77)…(click to enlarge)…

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Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to paintings and painters and whether they are true or false.

PAINTING URBAN LEGEND: Pablo Picasso discovered the work of Henri Rousseau by purchasing one of his works that was being sold for the canvas, not the painting itself.

Henri Rousseau was a Post-Impressionist painter in France during the late 19th and early 20th Century who did not have very much success with his work most of his life.

His nickname was Le Douanier, which means “the customs officer,” which happened to be his main occupation.

A self-taught artist, Rousseau mostly drew scenes of the jungle.

His work had a unique, flat feel to it that was regarded at the time as being child-like.

Here’s a piece of his from 1905 (click to enlarge)…

During the early 20th Century, though, a new wave of artists were making the scene, people like the aforementioned Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

They viewed art quite a bit differently than most of the established art scene of the late 1890s/early 1900s, so in Rousseau, rather than seeing a childish painter, Picasso saw a non-conformist unsullied by academia, which was something that Picasso himself was rebelling from at the time (1908).

In addition, Picasso was interested in “primitive” artwork, art from Africa – Rousseau was also influenced by African art with his jungle work.

In any event, the tale of HOW Picasso came across Rousseau is quite amazing.
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