Tiny Tim with Harmony Colangelo

This week, Harmony Colangelo tiptoes through the tulips with us.
 
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Transcript

Sarah: Yeah, of course it would be ideal to join a circus that doesn't have any animals and only tortures French Canadians.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. And today we are learning about one of the most important televised weddings of the 20th century and about the very confusing man who had it, Tiny Tim. Our guest today is the amazing Harmony Colangelo, co-host of This Ends at Prom, and we are so lucky to have her.

You're in for a lot of joy. If you came to either of the shows that I was lucky to do at SF Sketch Fest with Chelsea Weber-Smith, our live You're Wrong About show, or our live You Are Good show, with my co-host Alex Steed, thank you so much for coming. Thank you especially to those of you who told us about Claude the albino alligator. We are very excited to visit him. 

So many of the stories we have told before, because we are an American history and pop culture show, this is yet another story that involves our protagonist at one point making an executive decision as an adult to marry a teenage girl. So it's that kind of a story, and those are some of the themes that we're going to be getting into today.

Somewhat coincidentally, our most recent bonus episode is on the recent Oscar nominated film, May December, which is a movie that isn't, but also basically is about Mary Kay Letourneau. And I got to talk about it over there with Megan Burbank, our recent wonderful guest for our episode on the quote unquote, “pro-life movement”. You can find that episode, as always, on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions. Thanks for joining us. Here's our episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where I have a cold, you have a cold, everybody has a cold. And with me today is Harmony Colangelo. And Harmony, do you have a cold? 

Harmony: I don't have a cold. I do have sinus problems, though, because Los Angeles truly should not go from 65 degrees to 95 degrees in a 36-hour window. Don't ask me to do any falsetto singing in this. A couple days ago, maybe. Today, it's not in the pipes. 

Sarah: That's a little bit unfortunate, because of course our topic today is star of Insidious, Tiny Tim. 

Harmony: Oh, God bless Tiny Tim. 

Sarah: Yeah. Some people really know who that is. Some people don't know. Some people are thinking a Christmas Carol. But I'll tell you my impression, which is that Tiny Tim was one of the many people and events who I learned about through VH1's 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock. Which I watched many times in middle school for some reason. 

Harmony: You're trying to unpack history. 

Sarah: But what I remember from many VH1 countdown shows of old, is that Tiny Tim was a novelty act in, I want to say the early 70s maybe. It was a very tall man who played a ukulele and had long hair. And that he married a teenager on TV, as was the fashion at the time. And this was one of their most shocking moments in rock. 

Harmony: It's shocking. But then again, everything about Tiny is a bit shocking. So basically, as far as a You’re Wrong About episode is concerned, whatever you think about Tiny Tim, you're right. And you're also wrong.

Sarah: I love it. And if you don't think anything about Tiny Tim, you are also right and wrong.

Harmony: Correct. And you're going to learn a whole lot about this man and his quirks over the next period of time. But depending on how old you are, your introduction to him was either his original run of unbelievable superstardom in 1968, the biggest music star in the country that year. 

Sarah: Really?

Harmony: Basically, yes. It's absurd. Either you know him from that run, or if you're a little bit younger, you know him from a sad and painful decline as a rambling eccentric with very conservative views over the course of several sad decades. Or, if you're a little bit younger, you know him from doing the song from the pilot episode of SpongeBob. Or, if you're a little bit younger than that, then you know him as the creepy ukulele guy who sings with ghosts in the Insidious franchise. 

Sarah: The ghosts just love Tiny Tim. It's really Ghostcore, is what that movie is saying.

Harmony: Yeah. For what it's worth, that particular song goes viral pretty routinely on TikTok with girls doing creepy makeup tutorials.

Sarah: And there's something about it that I think you can frame as creepy and over the top, but it also feels just like very sincere.

Harmony: Oh, and every single thing about Tiny Tim is sincere. He is a man who lived his gimmick. 

Sarah: Would you say that he's part of the history of novelty acts?

Harmony: Oh, extremely. Everything about him is novelty, but he was not designed to be a novelty act. He didn't set out to be a novelty act. The people who were pushing him and marketing him didn't necessarily want him to be a novelty act. There was legitimate buzz around him at the time of his peak. Here's a quick little background for everybody.

So in 1968, he's the biggest music star in the country, mostly through a lot of assistance on late night television, because he was attacking both from music and comedy fronts. Tiptoe Through the Tulips is a top 20 single. it peaks at number 17. Its parent album, God Bless Tiny Tim, ends up being a top 10 hit with several critics saying that it is one of the most musically ambitious albums since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

The Beatles themselves are huge fans of Tiny Tim. He is also a huge counterculture icon up through his fame with people like Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce being huge supporters. And many of the crooners that Tiny Tim considered his idols, like Bing Crosby especially and Frank Sinatra, were also impressed. Because in addition to being a spectacle and a tremendously unique performer, Tiny Tim also had an encyclopedic knowledge and love for turn of the century pop music.

Sarah: Such as? What were some of his influences that you know about? 

Harmony: This is a little before my time. 

Sarah: Because you're not a vampire. 

Harmony: I am not a vampire. And I know these songs much more by Tiny Tim covers, but Tiny's favorites were Rudy Valli, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby, Henry Burr, and Irving Kaufman.

He was actually a very big fan of collecting 78s and sheet music as he grew up in the Heights, and spent a lot of time around Tin Pan Alley collecting very discarded 78s that nobody paid any attention to. Honestly, he spent all of his money on sheet music and 78s to the point where he would frequently be broke.

Sarah, do you want to hear about this man's miraculous birth? 

Sarah: Do I ever! Yes. How was Tiny Tim brought into our world? 

Harmony: I think it's important when understanding his obsessive nature. So Tiny Tim was born as Herbert Boutros Corey on April 12th, 1932. And his birth was a bit complicated in that he actually had birthing complications, because his mother needed to have a cesarean section in order to save her life and the baby's life. And in 1932, that is a risky procedure, to say the least. 

As a result of it, Tiny, or a young Herbert as he would have been named at the time, suffers a temporary loss of oxygen. And according to his third wife and widow, Miss Sue, she believes the circumstances left him, and I quote, “mildly autistic and palsied”.

Sarah: And I mean, this seems like a very1932 understanding of medicine. 

Harmony: I'm not out here trying to diagnose people, because I'm certainly not a doctor. But I'm going to say that he has a lot of consistencies with neurodivergences. 

Sarah: It makes sense that someone who became such a superstar kind of represented something that mainstream culture both rejected and secretly understood as important.

Harmony: Yes. Mainstream culture, the fascinating thing about that is that people definitely saw him as a joke. They were impressed by his act. They thought he was insincere, though. They thought it was a put on. They thought he was putting on these effeminate, gay affections. He would be blowing kisses, and giggling, and referring to all men and women by Miss or Mister. So it'd be like, Mr. Carson, as in Johnny Carson - who, I have many things to say about Carson later on. But I don't know how many people took him seriously. And that's the biggest tragedy of this. And this is largely why I'm fascinated by him as a character is because he is a giant tragedy. 

Sarah: Yeah, and we've talked about birth, kind of what was his early life like?

Harmony: His mother, Tilly. 

Sarah: Tilly Tim. 

Harmony: Yes, of course. Tilly was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and only spoke Yiddish when she moved to the United States. His father, Boutros, was a Catholic from Lebanon, which is also quite a rarity. They were Marxists, and believed heavily in communism. 

According to their family members, they were the original hippies, because they believed in free love, they didn't like being told what to do. They ended up just freewheeling it as a couple, until they got pregnant in their late thirties. So Tiny had old parents. And one of the things he reflects upon from his youth is that his parents’ belief in free love was so strong that they did not have a door on their bedroom. So he would frequently have to walk by and see them and listen to them having sex.

Sarah: You gotta have a door at a certain point, and that's what I really think.

Harmony: Yeah, I definitely know people who are just like, you have the baby crib in the same room because you live in a one bedroom apartment. It's like, oh, they're too young to remember. But there's a certain age where they're going to remember, and they're going to be cursed by it.  

Sarah: But over the age of 25, they definitely know what's going on, you know?

Harmony: Oh, yes. Tiny's parents did not necessarily want their child. Tilly, in particular, was embarrassed of him. Because compared to his cousins, he was not as outgoing, he was not as good in school, he was not as athletic, and he did not end up leaving the house until quite a bit into his adulthood. 

He dropped out of school at 17, worked a lot of menial jobs, and would frequently get fired from them for just quitting or because he was growing out his long hair and putting on makeup and using feminine hygiene products, just like hormone cream used by old ladies to prevent aging and various lotions with feminine scents.

Sarah: Oh, who doesn't love a feminine scent?

Harmony: It's probably nicer than whatever guy scents were at the time. 

Sarah: What were guy scents at the time? What year is this? 

Harmony: The 40s and 50s. 

Sarah: Yeah. So the guy scents were like, Gun. 

Harmony: Were guys doing scents? Had we evolved to sandalwood yet?

Sarah: I don't think we had,. I feel like sandalwood, I don't know. But I mean, there's definitely cologne. But what did it smell like? If you or someone you know has worn cologne from the 40s, please file a claim at this address.

Harmony: I imagine it's one of those things where if you ever find an old bottle of Avon that's from decades old and it's just turned to pure alcohol. So you had to be there. 

Sarah: Yeah, you always had to be there. Okay. So he's considered a bit of a lumpy baby, I guess. You know how sometimes you just get a lumpy baby? And you just gotta just love that lumpy baby, because we're all lumpy in one way or another.

Harmony: Yes, absolutely. He is just the lumpiest of babies, especially because he develops appendicitis and has to get surgery. And he takes that as a humbling lesson from God. And then stops being athletic, and just does not perform anything more than walking and doing maybe five sit ups in the morning. So he becomes a very lumpy boy. 

Sarah: And it’s hard to feel like people are ashamed of you because of your lack of accomplishment because, it's a can I live situation?

Harmony: The answer is no. You're not allowed to. 

Sarah: Yeah. No, you cannot. You have to be impressive, as well. 

Harmony: Yes, exactly. Especially because there's extensive research I've read about. I've read about gramophones. I've read about the electric microphone. I came more prepared for this, Sarah, than anything in my life.

There's so much about success and cleanliness that ties in with the fact that he was a depression era baby. And his parents were of that silent generation where they don't talk, and they don't communicate things unless they're screaming. So there was a love for success to prove them wrong, just so he could get out of poverty, get out of his parent’s house.

These are all very wistful dreams to be having. That's a relatable experience. Even if you're not obsessed with soap, because you don't want to be perceived as a dirty, poor person from the Depression. 

Sarah: These are all human dynamics that recur endlessly. They show up maybe more in particular time periods, but I don't think they ever go away. When does he leave home? 

Harmony: He does not eventually end up leaving home until the 60s, so he is in his 30s by that point. He's been grinding away on nightclub circuits for all of the 50s, most of the 60s. He ends up eventually leaving home in the late 60s to go to California. By that point he is, I believe, like 36 years old.

At 36 years old, it feels like one of those things where it's like, dang, that's a little old. But then again, my generation is having to go back to live with their parents because we're all being financially ruined. So it's honestly more relatable now than it was at the time. 

Sarah: It's so true. Yeah, everything else is new again. And also, it feels like the world is really pretty intimidating to operate in, and it makes sense that it takes some people longer than others to achieve, and the kind of independence that we think of is what makes sense for everybody, but which is, pretty difficult. 

Harmony: Sometimes you're just not intersecting and In the case of someone like Tiny Tim, he's not changed that much from being a boy. He's the ultimate Peter Pan boy, who just doesn't want to grow up. When asked about his age later, he would describe himself as “ageless”, or “I feel like I'm 19 forever”.

But I don't think that he became a superstar because he was primed for it, per se. There's a whole lot of things that go into that. But I think it's just time caught up with him. For a moment he was just following the same trajectory for a long time. And eventually, him being this long haired, effeminate, flower child like person, spewing things about beautiful feelings and love, and wanting to kiss all of the girls out there that he thinks are charming, and eating pumpkin seeds and wheat germ out of a bowl with honey, and just seeming like the ultimate precious little hippie. Come the late 60s, that's exactly where the zeitgeist met him, finally. 

Sarah: Yeah. Wow. Okay, so how do things like take off for him?

Harmony: Oh god, it's just so much toiling. So Tiny tries to make it as a singer, singing at company parties for various jobs he's working at. No one pays attention to his voice. And then one dark and stormy night he's singing along to a duet of himself from the movie Manhattan Merry Go Round. Which I'm going to probably mention a lot of songs and musicals and shows that no one's ever listened to, unless you're a big music dork or very old. 

But he's doing a duet with himself and finds out he can go very high and sing in a very high voice for the female parts. And excitedly, he decides, I'm going to show this to my parents. And up till this point, they've had a tumultuous relationship. They're pretty embarrassed of him, they're not pleased with him. Especially his long hair and makeup. And they are very unamused by his high pitched, quote, “sissy” singing style. 

Sarah: So the worst thing your child can be. 

Harmony: A sissy? Oh, of course. Especially when you're supposed to be a man. A manly man at that. A 6’1” manly man. 

Sarah: Huh. Nothing better than a large sissy, I always say. 

Harmony: I have a lot of affection for sissies. 

Sarah: Do you know the part in The Celluloid Closet, where they're talking about the sissy archetype? Do you remember that? 

Harmony: Not offhand, no. 

Sarah: There's a screenwriter who’s like, it was so offensive, it was so terrible, it was just awful that they had this archetype in movies. And then it cuts to Harvey Fierstein going, “I like the sissies.”

Harmony: I feel you, Harvey. 

Sarah: It's just, I don't know. I appreciate anything showing just people having differing opinions and both of them making sense. 

Harmony: I feel like the most compelling thing is where you can see where someone's coming from and it's not totally unfounded. Also, just there's a lot of camp to be found in sissy archetypes and very effeminate male characters to the point of exaggerated characteristics, that obviously you could say is homophobic to an extent, but they're also sometimes really funny. Sometimes they're really endearing. It's not a one size fits all in that sense.

Sarah: And I feel like two different people can look at the same piece of media to produce during a time of general discrimination and can differ as to whether it's laughing at or laughing with. And that's, I don't know.

Harmony: I think that's good. I think that's a user error, or just like any art, it's all interpretive. Speaking of that, he learns to play the ukulele mostly so that he can accompany himself when he goes to ill-fated auditions for a show like My Fair Lady or South Pacific. Because then he doesn't have to suffer the indignity of going and giving the sheet music, then playing a few bars, and then going next and rejecting him immediately and then going, “Okay, can I get my sheet music back” really awkwardly and then leave. He learned to play the ukulele so that he didn't have to deal with that. 

Sarah: Incredible. That's really smart. 

Harmony: Here's the thing, he's got a lot of little, clever eccentricities that I think are great. As a boy when he was playing baseball, he's right-handed, but would play ukulele left handed and would bat left handed, because he was not a very fast runner, and it would give him an extra step or two towards the plate.

Sarah: Ha! Oh my god. 

Harmony: There's just these charming little things that I just think are neat. But come his many failed auditions in show business and paying on street corners, and for amateur singing nights and being viciously heckled by people who do not care for whatever it is he is doing. He ends up securing a paying gig at a lesbian owned bar called, Page 3, in the early 60s. 

Sarah: Of course he does. 

Harmony: Oh, the gays love him. They think he's the best. 

Sarah: And what is his repertoire like when he's a live performer? 

Harmony: It's primarily Tin Pan Alley numbers. So a lot of these rah America songs and a lot of classic romance songs. Particularly when he's performing at Page 3, they love these very American numbers. They love these female numbers. One of the most popular, and there's a very old bootleg performance of this, is the song, I'm Happy Being a Girl, from the musical, Flower Drum Song. 

Sarah: Oh, I enjoy being a girl, I think, right? Yes. Yes. Oh my God. Shall we read those lyrics? I think that would be very fun.

Harmony: Oh, I have them up already. The lyrics are, “When I have a brand-new hairdo and my eyelashes all in curls, I float as the clouds on air do. I enjoy being a girl. When men say I'm cute and funny and my teeth aren't like teeth but pearls, I just lap it up like honey. I enjoy being a girl.”

Sarah: Ah, it's such a great song. I remember spending a lot of time in about 8th grade singing both this song and I Feel Pretty from West Side Story. 

Harmony: Also popular in his repertoire during this time. 

Sarah: And of course, Sweet Transvestite. Of course. But okay, so I love this. So he's like a sissy Broadway novelty act.

Harmony: Yeah.  He's like a Norman Rockwell drifter version of a Broadway act, performing these very classic hetero numbers with a lot of machism, and these duets and these American songs in the singing style that he is. Everyone is convinced he's making fun of heterosexuality and gender norms, and the entire country.

Sarah: Perfect. Which deserves it. 

Harmony: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's fascinating. It's so fun to think about because he's being totally sincere. 

Sarah: Because these songs are fun to sing. And one does enjoy being a girl. If Ronald Reagan had seen this act, he would have had a heart attack and died right there.

Harmony: God, if only. 

Sarah: History would be completely different. 

Harmony: Yeah. So unfortunately, Tiny being sincere as he is, and I'm not fully sure he understands how brilliant his act is at this point. In much the way that when he first started putting on makeup, girls stopped ignoring him and started to point and laugh at him, and he thought that was better than nothing. Just being a clown, yep. 

But Tiny was not a flower child. He was not this far left radical like everyone seemed to think he was. He actually was quite conservative and deeply religious. Now, despite his parents taking him to church and synagogues as a youth, he didn't get into religion until he got a bit older. That was 20 years old, I believe. Because he hears the sermons of Reverend Jack Wurtzen? Wartzen? I don't know exactly how to pronounce his name. But this man is very much a Billy Graham type. He's very fire and brimstone. 

And Tiny, being a very lonely boy who doesn't go outside and stays in his bedroom, avoiding his parents having sex and fighting and all of the unpleasantness of the outside world that is mean to his little effeminate self. He stays inside and comes up with fairy tales,, and idolizes a young Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Temple, and reads comic books and sings songs. But it’s very lonely and makes him a very easy mark for religious indoctrination.

Sarah: Yeah, and there's just, I don't know. There's always going to be scary social movements trying to take advantage of lonely boys. 

Harmony: Right? Everyone's just lost and scared and looking for answers, and some of them end up in QAnon. 

Sarah: And I guess it's based on a lot of factors, and one of them is what kind of stuff is available.

Harmony: Now, fortunately he mostly is keeping this to himself. It's very much a, I'm not going to judge people for their beliefs, I will let God judge them, and is being cool about it. It's not a problem. He's very lovely to be around. Everyone always has nothing but good things to say about his polite company.

All of the women who love women at Page 3 like to invite him to parties because they think he's just a hoot. And Tiny likes to be invited, because those women have no interest in having sex with him, and he doesn't have to give over to temptation. This is going to be recurring things for his personal life moving forward, by the way.

Sarah: And I don't feel optimistic about it, I gotta say.

Harmony: This is a step up from him previously working in a flea circus as the Human Canary, where he worked with lobster boys and bearded women and elephant men and various other, quote, “freaks” of the day. This is better. This is a good period for him up to this point in the 60s.

He eventually becomes such an after-hours icon. He starts working at clubs called the Fat Black Pussycat and The Scene, which are very happening places in the Greenwich Village area. He appears in alternative avant garde films around this era, like Flaming Creatures and You Are What You Eat. He was filmed by Andy Warhol, who thought he was just, again, fascinating.

He became friends with Bob Dylan in a passing friendship. And Bob Dylan intended on making a movie about a circus where Tiny was going to be the ringmaster. So he's just hobnobbing and doing all this stuff and is just an overall lovely man. Then he has his big break and moves out of his parent’s house in California. And now we're caught up to here. How are you feeling about this story? 

Sarah: Oh boy. I don't know how a person seeks emotional balance in all this, but I both want him to and suspect that he won't. 

Harmony: I suppose I gave it away early that his life is a tragedy. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's true. It's not exactly like I'm an arch detective.

Harmony: I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze someone, but one of Tiny's biggest faults is that he's very trusting of authority. And that's why he trusts cultish pastors. That's why he has a little too much faith in America. That's why he loves God as much as he does. Most of this information, if you're curious, is either documented from archives, or is catalogued in the book, The Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim, by Justin Martel, which I read 450 pages of for this, and it was a lot.

But Tiny ended up keeping a journal through most of his life about his relationship with God. It was his personal way of talking to God. And for the most part, it's sincere, because he's not writing it with the understanding that anyone is going to read it at any point. So it's mostly him just being tortured and lonely and feeling the need to fall to sin, while also wanting to make it in the big time.

And it's quite sad, but things start to happen in ‘68. Some buzz happens. He goes to California,and he gets signed to Reprise Records, which is Frank Sinatra's label, and it's a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. 

Sarah: Okay, so this is really the big time.

Harmony: Oh, just immediately the big time.

Sarah: And is this like, how does he feel about this? What do we know about that?

Harmony: Oh, he's tickled. He just thinks this is my big break. Hopefully this one won't go belly up like all my other big breaks. Prior to this, he had been on The Merv Griffith Show, and they had intended on bringing Tiny back for more comedy appearances on that. But they were sent hundreds of hateful letters going, “Why would you put that thing on TV?” So those additional appearances did not materialize. 

Sarah: So America has really been gradually trying to catch up with his existence for many years, basically. 

Harmony: Yes. And apparently ‘68 was just the exact right time for it. So he makes his debut album. It's called, God Bless Tiny Tim. It is a dreamscape of pop songs, most of which are obscure ones from his past repertoire, but there are some contemporary ones, like him singing a duet of, I Got You, Babe by Sonny and Cher, with himself. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. Incredible.

Harmony: So he recorded his debut solo album, God Bless Tiny Tim, and as promotion, they don't really know what to do with a guy like this. There's no precedent for how to market a person like this, making weird music where he does weird voices and they're all these obscure covers, and one early Paul Williams number called, Fill Your Heart.

Sarah: None of the previous marketing models are going to really help you know what to do. 

Harmony: It seems like not even slightly. So what they do is they take him to late night, and they start showcasing him as a comedy act. So he does an early episode of Laugh In. He goes over well. Where his career really takes off is when he appears on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And Carson does not know what to do with this man. He is very confused, very baffled, very speechless. Tiny is giving a lot of effeminate hand gestures, blowing the crowd kisses. Because he saw Elizabeth Taylor blow him a kiss once as a small child, and he was like, oh, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna blow kisses to the crowd, because I love them. 

Sarah: Of course. The crowd loves kisses.

Harmony:. They do. And it makes his act cool. Kind of genius and also very bizarre for the time. And no one knows what to do with him, so they just let him talk. And that's just what people do with Tiny, is they just let him talk about whatever he wants.

So he talks about his diet, he talks about how he likes to impress girls, and he wishes to go on dates but he can't because he just has no time to go on dates. Because if the Dodgers or the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing, he has to support them. 

And at one point he gets so worked up into a frenzy, he starts cheering. And Johnny Carson just looks like, Oh God, what is this guy? Like, you see him die inside. And he performs three songs. The opening is Tiptoe Through the Tulips, which he had previously performed on Laugh In. He does Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight, which you might know from the Spongebob pilot. And he closes it with a song called, Ever Since You Told Me That You Love Me, I'm a Nut. And that three minutes of this show is one of the most perfect comedy bits you will ever see. Because It's Tiny singing lyrics about how he's got to find a doctor because there's something wrong with him, whilst also singing in a high-pitched rapid tone about birds and how the birds are coming. And people are going, what is this? 

And then there's a lyric of, “I feel so queer since you are near dear”, and the crowd just find it hilarious. And as he makes this dramatic exit to a thunder of applause, he gets trapped in the curtains and has to fumble his way out because he got lost and is now stuck in the curtains.

Sarah: That has happened to me, I gotta say. 

Harmony: Has it?

Sarah: Curtains are hard. You get a little frazzled in there. 

Harmony: Over the course of Johnny Carson's run on that show, Tiny would reappear on The Tonight Show alone 20 different times. 

Sarah: Huh! So he did win The Tonight Show, really. 

Harmony: Oh yeah. And he would be on Jackie Gleason, he was on Ed Sullivan, he was on every single late night show working circuits. And I think that's one reason, like hindsight's 20/20 as far as a career is concerned, but working these comedy shows and primarily working comedic bookings makes people not realize that Tiny was actually a well-seasoned and traveled performer of the last 15 years, who worked in seedy nightclubs forever and honed his craft. And he did very well.

He got extremely good reviews when he would perform live. Initially, crowds would be confused and maybe laugh once he hit his peak, but he actually was a very good performer. He knew how to work the crowd super-duper well. 

Sarah: Yeah. I love the idea that he had built up his abilities for years and years, and finally had a big stage to perform on.

Harmony: Oh, for sure. I think misunderstanding him as a comedy act rather than, I wouldn't say a serious artist, but a sincere artist, is definitely a big mistake with him. But also, he got too big, too quick, and they started to put him into large arenas. At his peak, he was pulling in approximately $50,000 a week from bookings in 60s money. That's a high estimate that's largely built off of a one-week engagement he had working in Vegas. 

And Tiny working Vegas showrooms, not exactly the best thing for him. Nothing ruins comedy like arenas. But the shows were still really well received. Unfortunately, Tiny being a trusting man that he is, didn't see most of that money he was making.

Sarah: Yeah, what happened? 

Harmony: Depending on who you ask, there's a lot of reasons for it. But Tiny was making about $100 a week in allowance at his peak, and some of the management said that most of the money went in to putting on the Vegas show. So you didn't actually get to see that money because it had to be put into the act.

Other people have said, “Oh, we had a bunch of legal fees because you signed 30 contracts before you signed to a reprise, because you were just willing to put your name on anything. So we have to get all of those lawsuits out of the way.” Other people say, “I'm trying to put aside money for you so you have something to rest on if this ever goes belly up.” Some people said that Tiny was being a little too lavish with his money and ordering too much room service, because he was just ordering everything on the menu and tipping the bellboys, $80 and doing that. And I think the truth is some mixture of all of these things. But the fact of the matter, is that Tiny wasn't seeing most of the money he was making.

Sarah: Yeah, which, seems pretty, if not standard for the period or for the industry generally, then at least something that recurs a lot. And we know that from watching VH1. 

Harmony: That's true. I think especially when it comes to what would be a novelty act like this, the industry has no interest in maintaining this act. They just want to make as much money as they can in the window they can, and then get in and get out. And I think that is the case for someone like Tiny. Albeit they did try to put in effort with a second album and follow up singles. 

Here's a fun story because BJ, my wife, and I were trying to unwrap a mystery about Tiny Tim's second album. So I have it here on the camera, as you can see it. This is him with his parents. They do not look pleased to be there because they're very embarrassed of their child. So something I didn't realize when I bought this, is that my copy is signed. It says, “from Bev to Diana” and it says, “To Miss Diana, a second clue for you. Tiny Tim”, with the numbers 22769. And I've spent years trying to figure out what this even said, much less what the clue means, right? My wife was like, 2, 2, 7, 6, 9. It's a date. And I had to go into this book and then unwrap the mystery of what happens on that day. And I bought this record in Cleveland, and as best as I can figure based on dates he performed in Cleveland that day, it was basically someone going oh, when are you going to be in town next? 

Sarah: Aww, that's nice. I do hold out the theory that this is the clue to the location of Tiny Tim's treasure, though.  

Harmony: Oh, if only. The label did try to make an effort with a second follow up single. They released a song called, Bring Back Those Rockabye Baby Days. And it's a single that was largely probably chosen by Tiny because its original iteration is a Mammy song, but I don't think that he knew much about why that would be a problem to release as a single in the 60s.

The follow up single is, Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis. It also stalls out in the lower end of the top 100. The follow ups that they also released at this time is an album called, Concert in Fairyland. It is an unofficial bootleg that sells 100,000 copies before it is pulled from shelves. It is a previously shelved album from a past Tiny Tim alter ego called Derry Dover, in which he was very upset with the recording conditions and decided to tank the recording session by singing off key. And then they sped it up to match his falsetto now, and added crowd noise, so it sounds like it's actually a real concert.

Sarah: That sounds hellish to listen to. 

Harmony: It's not good. Again, hindsight is 20/20. There's a lot of things wrong with some of the releases. Some of which are absolutely the fault of management, some are Tiny's fault, some are beyond their control. But, n any case, the second album does not take off. That said, Tiny is still a very hot property.

He does successful tours in England. He performs at the Royal Albert Hall with a 72-piece orchestra. He writes a book, calling it a memoir might be generous. It's more of what would be a blog entry in the internet age, because it's just him with a lot of rambling thoughts about beautiful things.

He does a book tour, and while he's on this book tour, he meets a woman in the crowd. Her name is Vicki Budinger, and she goes on to be known as Miss Vicki. The woman that he would marry on Johnny Carson with 50 million people watching. 

Sarah: Unbelievable. So Johnny Carson got over his initial distaste enough to let him have a wedding on his show. That's kind of nice.

Harmony: It was Carson's idea. 

Sarah: Oh, Johnny. Oh my God. And okay, what's Vicky's situation? We simply must know. 

Harmony: Vicky is a 17-year-old girl. She is, by all accounts, cute, but very plain, a very normal girl. Tiny is smitten with her immediately, falls head over heels in love with her, and says very quickly on in them interacting, “We should be married.” At this point, she is 17, he is 37. 

Sarah: I shouldn't really have to say what's wrong with that, but I guess let's just do it anyway. Just don't marry children if you're not a child. Don't have relationships with them romantically. Just don't do it. Just don't do it.  

Harmony: I agree. I suppose for clarity's sake, I do not like this. I don't like a lot of things about Tiny as a man. I find him fascinating and pitiable, that's my sentiment on him. Also, there is this little sensation of, but someone could have saved him. 

Sarah: I know. That's how I feel about a lot of them that I've spent a lot of time learning about, like Robespierre.

Harmony: I don't know, but Vicky's parents seem to think he's quite lovely, and they want their daughter to have a happy life. They're like, you know what? He's rich. He's famous. Sure. He comes over for family dinner. He's very polite. He gets along with everyone. Tiny, publicly, is very evasive about his age, because he's a Peter Pan boy.

Sarah: But sweetie, come on, there's a limit to how much you can fudge that. 

Harmony: Oh, I agree. They were originally going to have a modest wedding. And Johnny Carson, I think, not being serious about it said, “Tiny, why don't you have the wedding on the show?” And he was like, “Oh, that's great. Then we don't have to pay for it.”

Sarah: That's a good point. I think we need a clip right about now, don't you? 

Harmony: Oh, absolutely. 

Sarah: Nice. Okay. Three, two, one, go. 

*recording*

Here's the moment you've been waiting for, which a lot of people thought would not come to pass on this show, but it did. The wedding of Mr. Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki Budinger.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the presence of Christ to join this man, Herbert Buckingham Corey, and this woman, Victoria May Budinger, in holy marriage. Let us pray. Now, by the authority committed unto me as a minister of the Church, I do now declare that you are husband and wife, and whom therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Lord bless thee and keep thee this day and unto the end. Amen. You can kiss the bride.

Vicki, how do you feel? These are dumb questions to ask newly married people, I know that. But somebody always does. How is the bride supposed to feel? Was it easy enough for you? Were you comfortable? 

Tiny, I didn't get to kiss the bride. Is that all right? Oh. Oh. Would you? No. It's just customary, she's a good kisser. 

Sarah: This poor, ugh! This poor, tiny child. Wow. According to this random YouTube description, this was the second highest rated TV broadcast of the 1960s. 

Harmony: Behind the moon landing. 

Sarah: You never hear about that. 

Harmony: That's, I think, why it made it onto your most shocking things in rock and roll list.

Sarah: Why did so many people want to watch the novelty act of a little girl get married? 

Harmony: Oh, who knows? But sources would later estimate that a whopping 45 to 50 million people tuned in to watch the pre-recorded program. Because they originally wanted to get married on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and they couldn't because the show was going to be on break during that, so they got married during the day on, I believe, the 18th and then it aired that night.

In New York, 84% of the people who have TV and were watching it that night tuned in to the wedding, and Con Edison had to provide extra power to handle the overload. In Chicago, the police reported a reduced crime rate, while in Los Angeles there was reportedly less traffic on the road. This was the zenith of Tiny's career as a performer. Johnny Carson, meanwhile, would not break that night's ratings high until his final appearance on the show in 1992. 

Sarah: Why did so many people want to see a wedding? I guess people always want to see a wedding. Ross and Rachel, Luke and Laura, Charles and Diana, these guys. But why? 

Harmony: I couldn't tell you the exact reason. But part of it is that people did not think Tiny was serious. They thought this was an act. They thought he was gay. So they're like, “Oh, he's marrying someone. Oh, it's a girl. Oh, I have to tune in to see this, because I just thought he was gay the whole time.” 

People were trying to expose him throughout all of ‘68 and ‘69, going “there's got to be something about him”. And they didn't get into his politics, but as far as who he is as a person and living his gimmick, it's genuine. At one point, the FBI even investigated him because they're like, why are you so popular suddenly? And also, you're on Frank Sinatra's label. Are you connected to the mob? 

Sarah: Let's assume that Tiny Tim was working with the mob. I would love to know what he was responsible for within that. 

Harmony: Fun story, he did get involved with the mob later on.

Sarah: Okay, perfect.

Harmony: We'll get to that when we get to the ‘70s. We're not quite there yet. 

Sarah: It's like a Scorsese movie. We're hurtling toward the ‘70s and the mob stuff. 

Harmony: Yep, it's precisely that. Whilst I think that there's a lot wrong with a grown man marrying a literal child on national television like this. On the same page, Tiny writes in his diary about the age difference between Vicky and why he would even pursue her. “I pray to understand her youth”, he wrote. “Her 17 years of age, her desire for publicity, fame, fortune, prestige, and all the other things, oh lord, you have given me, in which Satan's will may have already placed in our heart.”

He questioned his own desires as well. What did Vicky possess of specific value to Tiny? Just as he had silenced those who said he would never become famous, he suspected that part of him aimed to silence those who felt he could not land a beautiful woman. He worked through his thoughts in his diary, admitting that he had always wanted a beautiful woman of his own ideals, in looks and stature, which Miss Vicky is. He wondered, “Am I really using Miss Vicky as an object for my own conquest egotistically?” So he’s at least somewhat self-aware, and that kind of makes it worse. 

Sarah: Yeah, could it be the thing that it is?

Harmony: Yeah. He ends up declaring these vows on this highly rated show, that also features Phyllis Diller and Florence Henderson. And they and Johnny Carson kept rolling their eyes the entire time because they did not believe that this was serious. They thought it was just a publicity stunt and a joke. Which was definitely a publicity stunt by Tiny, but also by Carson. So there's equal parties on that. 

They go to a wedding across the street in which they are mobbed by reporters and fans. Their wedding presents are stolen. And when they go ahead and get into their limo to drive away, Tiny, who had just declared that he would always be faithful and love Miss Vicky forever, said, “Oh, by the way, there'll always be other women.” 

Sarah: Come on. 

Harmony: Yep. Yep. So Tiny's admitted biggest weakness during all of this was always women. Or more specifically, girls. Typically, between the ages of late teens, early twenties. He, at this point in his life, is a virgin. 

Sarah: He's like, “I am a virgin, but I will cheat on you.” It's really the worst of both worlds. 

Harmony: He’s in show business, what can you expect? So he ends up doing things that are of sexual natures, like how the Mormons do soaking. So he doesn't do that per se, but he'll have girls that he licks peanut butter off of or give them massages. And usually he would be engrossed in it, and then halfway through realize the horror of what he's done, and then flee or chase them out of the room, and then confess to his diary about how sinful he was.

Sarah: Men are so weird. 

Harmony: They are so weird. But again, could we have saved him if he just wasn't super religious and full of shame? 

Sarah: Yes, Harmony. If you had been able to date him, it would have been fine. 

Harmony: Oh, I don't want to date him. Absolutely not. More of what I mean is that he develops a series of avoidances over the course of his life. He has a violin teacher as a child who smacks his wrist with a ruler or whatever whenever he messes up a note, and then says, “Cool, I'm never going to take lessons. I'm going to be self-taught from here on out.” 

Sarah: Naturally. 

Harmony: Tiny is not kind to Miss Vicky. She has spoken in the years since about how bad things are, but she has reckoned with it, and is at least willing to discuss it and say there was good things about him. 

There were very bad things about him. One of them being that before they got married, he shipped her off to a week of cult-like churches and his favorite reverence thing. And she had to pray and go to multiple sermons a day, and do all of that before she would be allowed to marry him. And then after the wedding, they had to go to the Bahamas and then sit in their separate hotel rooms for three days as a commitment to God and each other. And Tiny just mostly sat in his and listened to Billy Graham. And this is where he starts to lose his mind, I think. He already was losing his mind, but this is when he really goes off the deep end. 

Sarah: What do you think is going on here with this religious stuff? Because it feels like there are aspects of his personality, or whatever he was innately born with, that are meshing with the religious stuff in an unhealthy way.

Harmony: If I were to take a guess, I think that it's his undying faith that people have his best interests at heart. Because they're supposed to. His parents are supposed to love him. He would speak in every interview about how he had a lovely relationship with his parents, and they were the best ever. Because, honor thy father and mother, even though they would get into physical fights and screaming fights for a very long time for the whole time he lived there basically, and they weren't good. 

That's why when Richard Nixon was doing all of his Richard Nixon things and Tiny grew up listening to these very pro America songs because we were fighting world wars, he's like, “Oh the president's got to be onto something. Why would he be the President then? Clearly I trust that he knows what he's doing.”

Sarah: Yeah. And if you're listening to Billy Graham a lot, you're certainly being taught blind trust and authority.

Harmony: Yes. So I think he innately had that. And then it just got doubled down on and compounded, which is why I think he ends up developing a lot of eccentricities that avoid painful scenarios he experiences. Which is why I think all of the bad things start to compound upon each other, especially as this is the peak of his career.

It's going to go downhill from here. And he's going to be very financially despondent from now until when he dies in the mid 90s. And it's just sad. This is where it just becomes a really unfortunate tragedy, because I think everything he genuinely believes in his heart, everything about his personality, is extremely contradictory to the things that he spouts out. All of his religious and conservative values are the opposite of the things he sincerely actually believes. 

Sarah: Yeah, and what do you see him actually believing? 

Harmony: He believes in love, and kindness, and politeness, and honestly very classic Leave It to Beaver kind of American values. But also, he also wasn't bigoted, really. He wasn't homophobic, really. He was like, that's for God to judge them, not me. I think that he was, by most accounts, most people who worked with him, most people who met him, he was very polite and courteous and entertaining. And according to Miss Sue, his third and final wife and widow, she's not convinced because of his upbringing and the hard times he went through, that he ever truly understood the capacity for love. And that's a woman who married him. 

This is that joke you always see go around, that's not even a joke, it's just a statement. Where it's like, “men will really X awful thing rather than go to therapy.” And therapy wasn't a thing you did at the time. The closest you got is, at least, not necessarily, in Tiny's defense, it's because of his very queer traits. 

He was almost institutionalized by his mother. And his parents would get into frequent fights going “this is your side of the family, your side of the family is the one that has all this that he got.” It's everything about him. He's the last true vaudeville star. Eerything about him is a carny, because he never really had homes. He lived out of hotel rooms for most of his life. 

And that's one thing that Miss Vicky was very upset about, is that she wanted to have a yard and a house and those hardwood floors. And I don't know what the deal is, why specifically he didn't want an apartment. I think that it was that he was addicted to the love he got from performing, and being in hotels meant he was on the road. And that meant that at the very least, he was doing something rather than giving up and settling down. 

So yeah, Tiny's career is not totally done yet. One of the highlights of him as a performer is he ends up performing at the Isle of Wights festival in 1970 alongside Chicago, and Joni Mitchell,, and Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, and Miles Davis. And apparently his set was phenomenal. Everyone ate out of his hand. He ended up being one of the reasons why the Isle of Wight's movie wasn't released for decades because apparently the person in charge who had final say was like, “I'm not putting that man in my movie.” And that would have likely given him a great deal of exposure, like it did all the people featured in the Woodstock movie.

He gets into fights with his management, he ends up dropping them, and he gets the managerial service of a man named Joe Cappie.

Sarah: He sounds really trustworthy. 

Harmony: He was very trustworthy. Tiny's father, Boutros, was very adamant that he should not sign with this man. And Tiny's defense was, “I can't, my father won't let me.”

Cappie is a Brooklyn tough guy. He has no connections with anybody in the business and he is definitely a mob kind of guy. Not like big mob, not like important mob, but definitely a guy who knows some people who could break your fingers if you wanted. He ends up strong arming Tiny into a contract that he would be in for a very long time. This ends up being a period of trying to reinvent his image. Because where I said the ‘60s intersected with Tiny at the exact perfect moment to create an ex, they are now rapidly moving away from each other. 

He's trying to figure out what do I look like in the 70s? And what ends up happening is, he does venues and is mostly playing off of the stardom that he had. But him and Miss Vicky get rebranded as a dual act.

Sarah: Oh my. How does that go? 

Harmony: Not well, cause Miss Vicky is not a singer, and she was not comfortable performing.

Sarah: Then why do that, for God's sake?

Harmony: Just capture that 50 million people from the Carson's appearance. Just chasing that dragon. But yeah, they're living on the road very early on into their marriage. She gets pregnant. That child, unfortunately, does not make it. Shortly thereafter, she gets pregnant again. And a week before she prematurely goes into labor, Tiny Tim's father dies. 

They produce a beautiful little baby girl that Tiny names Tulip, much to Miss Vicky's insistence that not be the case, because it feels like a publicity stunt. But he also was considering naming her after various soap products. Ajax, possibly. Or Dove soap. Maybe Dove soap. That might have been one that he would have gone with. Palmolive. 

Tulip is born. She did not have a relationship with her father. Miss Vicky and him end up getting divorced in the ‘70s, and Tiny very rarely sees his child. She's embarrassed of her father for much of her life, though. From what I can tell from the King for a Day documentary, she seems to have come to terms with it and seems to at least be able to discuss things in a way where before, neither her nor Vicky had very kind things to say.

Now they're just like, okay, the sand has settled, here's more of the actual story. The best you can look at in Tiny in the seventies is he's trying different looks, different sounds, mostly just trying to capture a lot of kitschy, novel-y stuff. He releases a song called, Juanita Banana, where he wears a Chiquita Banana looking outfit with a fruit hat, and it's just a bunch of loud noises that I think could have worked in the ‘60s, but definitely not in the ‘70s.

He closes out the decade with a very minor, resurgence of the song, Tiptoe to the Gas Pumps, which is a riff on Tiptoe Through the Tulips, musically and name wise, obviously, and it's about the gas shortage of the late 70s. That's about where you're looking at in terms of how high profile he is.

Sarah: So topical songs about the news, which I feel like don't even exist anymore, but used to in a weird way, in kind of a musical liminal space.

Harmony: So the ‘80s happen. Tiny's continuing to not do well. He's continuing to lose his mind, he will literally talk to anybody who will ask him anything. He will record anything anybody asks him to. He spends much of the ‘80s in Australia, working with a man who is a huge Tiny Tim superfan and is trying to make a movie about him called, Street of Dreams, that does not get released. 

I think it's one of his final appearances on Carson, he does his cover of Do You Think I'm Sexy by Rod Stewart in which he tears his clothes off and tries to take a shirt off, but it's not working. And the crowd seems to be interested, but mostly it just comes across as very sad. 

Sarah: It feels like he's getting extremely diminishing returns on doing the thing that gets him the attention he needs to have a will to live. And I say that as someone who also needs attention to have a will to live. 

Harmony: Oh yeah. I think that during this era, I'm not sure anything kept him going other than his stubbornness to have another hit record, which he was never going to have after the early seventies. And also just God, I trust that you'll take care of me, right? You won't forsake me, right? 

So that happens. He starts to really go off the deep end and records a song called, Santa Claus Has Got the Ayds This Year. 

Sarah: Oh God. 

Harmony: It's a Christmas song about how allegedly, according to Tiny in various interviews and intros, it's not about Santa being sick. He thinks AIDS is a very serious illness that's killing a lot of people, and he doesn't want anything to happen to them. But also, it might be something as a punishment for out of marriage sex. But this isn't about that. This isn't about that. This is called AIDS with a Y, and it's about a candy bar that used to exist. And the actual song has Tiny Santa Claus going, “I can't deliver presents because I'm sick this year, but don't worry, I'll be back.” And that is clearly about what it's about. It's released as a single with the B-side being a song called, She Left Me With The Herpes. 

Sarah: God, so what are you supposed to do when you're watching someone decline like this? This is the same question everyone had about Aaron Carter earlier on. 

Harmony: You can maybe correct things. But at this point, there's nothing you can do, because you can only put in as much help as someone's willing to put in themselves. So it's not good. He ends up joining the circus, which he used to be a part of, like the freak show and flea circus. 

Sarah: I guess, yeah, that makes sense. 

Harmony: He joins the Great American Circus. People are excited to see him around this period of time. Anytime I post about Tiny Tim on social media, I inevitably get people who go, “Oh yeah, I saw him touring with a circus when I was really young, and he was so nice and so charismatic.” And I don't know if it's just that they were children, but apparently people have fond memories of seeing him. Someone messaged me about this recently and was like, “Oh yeah, I saw him open for a monster truck show and it was awesome.” 

Sarah: Wow. Maybe more declining entertainers should join the circus. I hope that's an option still.

Harmony: Yeah. I don't know how many circuses we have touring these days. Also very much a thing of a bygone era.

Sarah: Yeah, of course it would be ideal to join a circus that doesn't have any animals and only tortures French Canadians.

Harmony: I would go to that show. So Tiny also ends up getting to star in a horror movie around this time. It's called Blood Harvest, and he is a scary clown. Around this time, Tiny actually has a minor career resurgence. Weirdly enough, not connected to any of this, he befriended earlier in the decade a young shock jock named Howard Stern.

Sarah: What? Well, why not? This is… okay, the cameos are really out of control here. 

Harmony: Howard Stern being a man who appreciates characters, would frequently invite Tiny on his show. And they had a very warm relationship for many years. And this is also coinciding with just the general kitsch of the nostalgia cycle coming around in a 20-year cycle where people go, oh, it's 1990? I remember this guy. He's still around? God damn. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's like Alice Cooper and Groucho Marx.

Harmony: I've learned to reckon with, and this is just my succinct way of reckoning with things is, I've started to replace ‘buts’ with ‘ands’. Where it's okay, Tiny Tim is a performer who I find very fascinating, especially from a bunch of queer aspects that I would love to end on when we get there. And usually that's where someone would say, “But he also was a horrible conservative who believed all this stuff.” But it's no, he's a performer who I like and I find very fascinating as a pitiable, tragic figure.. and, he’s all those things, not but he’s all those things. In my brain, it feels like it's more accountability on a subject than saying yeah, Stanley Kubrick tortured Shelley Duvall, but he made a really good movie.

Sarah:  Totally. And it feels like acknowledging that we are drawn to the people we are partly because they are so flawed, and that's what we seek to understand and to think about. 

Harmony: It's especially easy to be drawn to these people as a novel fascination, especially retrospectively.

Because, yeah, whatever. The dude is dead, it's not like he's going to hurt anybody else. I'm not out here propping him up as this pillar of virtue or that anybody should have listened to any of his bonkers ramblings, per se. 

Sarah: This is the thing. Yeah, you can study someone and find them worthy of attention and not claim that they had any idea how other people should live their lives.

Harmony: Maybe sometimes famous people are really wrong about stuff.

Sarah: Yeah, maybe most of the time. Just maybe, just possibly. I don't know. I don't know. 

Harmony: So Tiny does okay in the early ‘90s, at least compared to how he'd been for a couple decades. He ends up meeting a fan who had been fans of him since she was 12 years old, named Miss Sue.

Sarah: Oh, boy. 

Harmony: She leaves her boyfriend to be with him. She, I believe, is around 40 years old at the time, so this is much more age appropriate. He is in his 60s. And those two are together for the rest of Tiny's life. 

Tragically, he has diabetes that has been going unchecked for a while, because he lives out of hotel rooms eating Spaghetti-O's out of a can. And he suffers a heart attack performing one day, and the doctor basically says, “With all of your health problems, you might die if you continue to tour.” But of course, he's not willing to stop doing that. 

He stops for a little bit and then goes back out on the road. He's performing in, I believe, Minneapolis for a women's group. And during his very short set, he goes on stage, and during the last song, which is Tiptoe Through the Tulips, he suffers a fatal heart attack and dies. Which is a tragedy, but also a beautifully poetic bookend to things. He died doing what he loves. He got to entertain, and he wasn't on Morton Downey Jr. going on long rants about how much of a misogynist he is. This is the part I prefer to think about in terms of how it ends.

Sarah: It's a really good point that it's like, in you're waning years, you got to keep sharing the best of yourself rather than deciding that everyone needs to hear your thoughts on the Jewish space laser. That's some grace that you've been shown. 

Harmony: Yeah. And now that we have completed the highlights of a very long, sad story, Sarah, how are you feeling about this? 

Sarah: I just feel like I wish that weirdos had more access to environments that made them feel safe to be a weirdo, so they didn't have to then construct entire philosophies about it that were then based on wishing harm upon others. 

Harmony: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Sarah: There's so many people who turn their pain into art, and so many others who turn their pain into conspiracy theories and political movements. And it feels like I just don't know how much we're in control of whether we do one or the other. And I feel lucky for everybody who can do the art one. 

Harmony: Yeah. Isn't that ideally what you want to do as someone who exists through this life is make something beautiful?

Sarah: Yeah. Let's all do more of that, I think. But tell me about the resonances that you feel in this story, too.

Harmony: It's unfortunately really sad the way that we chew out a lot of music acts. I'm fascinated by one hit wonders. And they call them in many different forms, and they have different career trajectories, and some of them have bigger plans and schemes. Some of them produce the Monster Mash, and then the follow up to that is the Monster Mash Christmas. 

But I think that there's something that I am drawn to about preserving these niche, eclectic, weird things. In so many ways, Tiny Tim in the 50s and 60s remembering songs of the 1910s was the same kind of fascination with nostalgia and a vested interest in something that nobody cared about. I think that being aware of these little oddities, these little weirdos of music history is just so interesting in so many ways. Tiny Tim is the first androgynous rock star as we know them. 

Sarah: He's the pre-David Bowie.  

Harmony: He's before Bowie. He's before the Beatles. Had long hair. Before Kiss and Alice Cooper wore makeup, he wore makeup. He did all of this stuff in the modern sense of the latter half of the 20th century as we know it. He's the original guy. Certainly the first one to be of this scale of popularity. And I think that him doing songs like, I Enjoy Being a Girl in the most lo-fi bootleg cover you can find on YouTube, is such a fascinating and interesting part of queer history. Even though some people insist Tiny isn't queer, but he totally is. 

There is an outlier to this whole story of queerness that I do want to reference in this book. And it's that Tiny had a relationship with a man in his neighborhood. Man is being generous. He was, I believe, a boy. Tiny was, I think 22-ish. And for the sake of me not remembering exact numbers, this man named Bobby Gonzalez was probably about 16. And this is in, I believe, the ‘50s. Tiny wrote in his journal, “At first I was disturbed by having eruptions.” He would ejaculate in his pants a lot. This is a common thing for him. “But it's not impossible for two people of the same sex to have a sense of love. Spiritual love, not sexual, let me state here and now, towards each other. Did Bobby also have the same spiritual love for me I had for him? I don't know. All I know is the cause of my eruptions, especially at the touch of his hand, was one, because of the job in accepting a temptation and overcoming it for Christ. And two, because of spiritual love.”               

Sarah: I love it when I cum because of spiritual love for someone of the same gender. 

Harmony: But isn't that what love is? There's something there. He would admit later in interviews. “Oh, no, that's the only man I ever fell in love with.” He wrote in journals and they showed it to Bobby Gonzalez, who is still alive, in the documentary, King for a Day. And Tiny listed all of his traits, like he's so warm, and he's kind, and I love when we hang out together, and these are all of his good traits. And for a column of bad traits, they were all zeros. He was madly in love with this man. And I don't know, you can't be gay in the ‘50s. 

His parents caught them one time massaging with shirts off in bed, and it became a huge, very physical altercation. And these are the circumstances where I'm like, I wish that this was not a thing that you had to deal with. This is not me saying, look, I can save him, because he's too far gone. This is the things where I go, I wish these were the things that didn't happen in your life. I wish that you weren't pushed to areas where you felt shameful about this. Where you thought you needed to seek refuge in God because what you're doing is too sinful.

These are the things that make me the most sad, and the most fascinated by this story. I think that’s all I got.

Sarah: Yeah, so that's the Tiny Tim story. Part of the basis of this show is trying to understand the lives of flawed people, and people whose inability to exist comfortably in the time that they were brought into led them to be harmful to others, even in many ways. And that's where we can learn so much, I feel like, and also understand how deeply necessary it is to have access to some kind of a culture that tells you that you should be who you are. 

Harmony Colangelo, you are the premier Tiny Tim scholar in this show's universe and so much more. Where can people find more of your work and more of you?

Harmony: You can follow me on Twitter. Yeah, I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter, and Instagram at @Velocitraptor. I'm also on Blue Sky at my name, @HarmonyColangelo. But more importantly, you can listen to me on my podcast, This Ends At Prom, which I do with my wife. And it's about unpacking teen girl movies from the cis and trans perspective. It's her basically showing me movies I've never seen before, and seeing how they hold up in their time, the context they were released in, and how well they explore coming of age now. 

Sarah: Yeah, I love any exploration or celebration of girl culture. And I feel like you do such wonderful work. And I love that you are, I don't know, I love that you're doing this with someone you love in a sustained way. It's just creates such a wonderful space for us to join you in.

Harmony: Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate you welcoming me into the greater Sarah Marshall extended universe, the GSMU.

Sarah: Yeah. I'm really happy to be in the Angular universe. The snacks there are the best and the posters.

And that is our episode. Thank you so much for listening and coming on the journey with us. Thank you to Harmony Colangelo for being our guest. If you want more to listen to, you can find our bonus episode on the movie, May December, with guest Megan Burbank over on Patrion and Apple+ subscriptions. 

Thank you so much to Miranda Zickler for editing this episode. Thank you as always to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this episode. We'll see you in two weeks.