How Shari and Lamb Chop changed children’s TV
Mallory Lewis talks about her mom’s talent and grit with lip-moving emotion
Lamb Chop has aged well.
I know this because the not-so-sheepish sheep unexpectedly appears on the Zoom screen in the middle of my conversation with Mallory Lewis. And promptly breaks into song. Not just any song, mind you, but a bracha. In Hebrew.
I can attest to two things. First, like her mom, Shari, Mallory’s lips do not move when Lamb Chop talks. Or sings. Second, Lamb Chop’s song selection was entirely appropriate, given the direction our conversation was taking.
It was about a new documentary that opened in New York last week, “Shari and Lamb Chop,” which paints a rich, engrossing picture of the woman who in many ways created modern children’s television. But the documentary, directed by Lisa D’Apolito only hints at Shari’s Jewishness, and I wanted to know more.
If you do not know who Shari or Lamb Chop are, congratulations, you are young. But for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, Shari and Lamb Chop were a precursor to Mr. Rogers and even “Sesame Street,” a warm, welcoming place where children weren’t talked down to.
In the film, magician David Copperfield says: “In the ’60s, if you saw Shari Lewis on TV, you fell in love. She was kind of our fantasy girl.” This is something I can attest to personally.
Shari was born Phyllis Naomi Hurwitz and grew up in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. Her mom, Ann, supervised all public-school music programs in the borough. Her father, Abe, was a professor of education at Yeshiva University. He was also, by proclamation of Depression-era Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, New York City’s official magician. He’d perform for kids as Peter Pan the Magic Man. By the time she was a teenager, Shari was performing tricks as part of his act. And when she wasn’t performing, she was taking lessons in art forms such as music and dance, as though a show business career was a shoo-in.
But it was an accident that ultimately determined her career. Shari broke a leg dancing, and to keep her occupied while she recuperated, her parents brought her books on ventriloquism. Shari became enthralled. She took lessons from John W. Cooper, a noted ventriloquist of the time, and mastered the art relatively quickly.
Her big break came when she appeared on and won “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” an ancestor of “America’s Got Talent.” It led in 1960 to her own show on NBC, in a time slot formerly held by Howdy Doody. There she used Lamb Chop and puppets Hush Puppy and Charlie Horse to create a comfortable, nonjudgmental environment, addressing her audience more as playmates than as her students.
The documentary is revelatory and provides context for a life I couldn’t possibly have understood when I watched the show as a child. For one thing, Shari made it seem so simple, I did not realize how difficult it was to do what she did. Not only did Shari create different voices for her puppet friends, but she’d have them talking — and singing — back and forth. She had to change her voice on the fly — and she did.
Also, as a child, I didn’t understand the largely subservient role women played in our society at the time. “Puppets are my projection onto the world,” Shari says in the film. They allowed her — specifically, Lamb Chop allowed her — to suggest outrageous things such as the possibility of a woman president.
But perhaps the biggest reveal is how resourceful and determined Shari was to succeed. Every time she experienced a setback in her career, she reinvented herself. When NBC canceled her show in 1963, replacing it with cartoons, she started appearing on television variety shows — hosted by Pat Boone, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Ed Sullivan, among others — late-night talk shows, and in Las Vegas, with more adult-oriented material.
When that work dried up, she began to appear at state fairs. No matter what, Shari refused to disappoint. And it is a testament to her dedication that the film points out that once she walked out on the stage in a giant tent only to discover just four people in the audience. She did the show anyway.
And when that work dried up, she reinvented herself again and created an act around conducting symphony orchestras, including one in Japan for which she learned to speak Japanese.
In 1992, PBS brought her back for “Lamb Chop’s Play Along,” which ran for five years, followed by the “Charlie Horse Music Pizza,” her last show.
Relying on footage from her shows and TV interviews, the documentary offers a reasonably complete, even stirring account of Shari’s career. However, what it doesn’t do (since clearly it is intended for general audiences) is discuss how or even if her Judaism fits in. Yes, she did a Chanukah special that longtime Saturday Night Live cast member Sarah Sherman says “was very important to me” growing up. (So important that she now sports a Lamb Chop tattoo on one leg.) Shari also did one for Passover.
But in the documentary, she also says, “The only meaningful religious ceremony is life itself,” and “I looked for God in my puppets but could not find one.”
To get clarification, I arranged the Zoom with Mallory Lewis, who not only worked with her mom as a producer-writer but shared an Emmy with her and periodically still tours with Lamb Chop and company.
“My grandfather used to eat bacon and say, ‘Bacon’s not pork,’” She told me. “We were not a religious family, but we were a family that is very committed and proud of being Jewish.
“My grandparents were, I don’t want to say observant, but more so than my mom. They did Shabbat dinner every Friday night and did all the holidays. My mother did not do that, but the proudest thing she ever did professionally was the Chanukah special and the Passover special.
“She was very proud of being Jewish and very defensive about being Jewish. And by defensive, I mean she was not going to hide it.”
Though her son’s father was not Jewish, Mallory was determined that the boy, Jamie, be aware of his Jewish heritage. “I didn’t do Shabbat dinners, but I did every Passover and every Chanukah. And I actually had my bat mitzvah when I was in my 40s. I wanted him to know that it mattered to me. He was too smart for me just to say you need to get your bar mitzvah. But he couldn’t argue after watching me get mine.”
In June of 1998, Shari was diagnosed with inoperable uterine cancer. She was told she had just weeks to live, but still she insisted on taping final episodes of “Charlie Horse Music Pizza.”
She died that August, at the age of 65.
comments