The Daily Agenda for Monday, November 30

Jim Burroway

November 30th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by: 

From ONE, August 1964, page 6.

From ONE, August 1964, page 6.

The Jacket of a Camp 45 rpm. The title refers to the ad campaign for Tareyton cigarettes.

The Jacket of a Camp 45 rpm. The title refers to the ad campaign for Tareyton cigarettes. (Source.)

Camp Records appears to have been in business in Southern California for a few years in the mid-1960s. Little else is known about the company or the artists. It’s address was a Post Office box in Hollywood, and the artists were either uncredited or were obviously made up — Byrd E. Bath, B. Bubble, Sandy Beach. Camp released two albums and about a dozen 45 rpm singles, all of them were either parodies sung with effeminate voices or, in the case of Mad About the Boy, of Broadway and cabaret numbers, sung ordinarily by women, but in this album were sung by men. You can learn more about Camp Records and listen to several MP3s here.

Robert Odeman (right) and Martin Ulrich “Muli” Eppendorf (left).

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Robert Odeman: 1904-1985. Born Martin Hoyer in Hamburg, he took his stage name when he began traveling throughout Europe performing as a classical pianist. When his playing career ended after suffering a hand injury, he turned to the theater as an actor. He met his first love, Martin Ulrich Eppendorf, at the age of 17, and they remained together for the next ten years. After his beloved Muli died in 1932, Odeman became musical director of a theater in Hamburg, and in 1935 he opened his own cabaret. The Nazis closed it a year later on the grounds that it was politically subversive. A year after that, in 1937, the Nazi’s pressured a bookseller to renounce Odeman as a homosexuals, and he was convicted under Paragraph 175, Germany’s notorious statute that outlawed homosexual acts between men.

After serving in prison for 27 months, he was released in 1940 under the terms of a Berufsverbot, or a professional ban on certain professions including public performances. He was also kept under police surveillance. In 1942, he was arrested again under Paragraph 175 and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was assigned an office job, which probably saved his life. An estimated 30,000 prisoners lost their lives there, from exhaustion through forced labor, disease, or were executed. When the Red Army advanced on Sachsenhausen, the camp’s SS guards ordered the 33,000 remaining inmates on a forced March. Thousands more prisoners did not survive the death march. But Odeman and two other “175’ers” were able to escape.

After the war, Odeman returned to Berlin where he worked as an actor, composer, and author of satirical poems. Because Paragraph 175 remained on the books, Odeman continued to be regarded as a convicted criminal and, like others convicted under the statute, he was denied compensation that was given to other Holocaust survivors. He died in 1985 at the age of 81.

 50 YEARS AGO: Ryan Murphy: 1965. The screenwriter, director, producer and creator or co-creater of Nip/Tuck, Glee, and The New Normal grew up in a writerly Irish Catholic family in Indianapolis: his father was newspaper circulation director and his mother, though a stay-at-home mom, had written five books and worked in communications for more than 20 years. Murphy ended up being outed to his parents at the age of fifteen when they discovered that he had been having a covert affair with a 21-year-old. They removed him from summer camp, sold his car, threatened to file statutory rape charges, and sent him to a therapist in the hopes of making him straight. Murphy drew a lucky card with his therapist, “who after two sessions called my parents in and said, ‘Your child is very smart and manipulative, and clearly he’s getting A-pluses in school even though this is going on, so either you deal with it honestly or he will turn 18 and you will never see him again.’ There was a long silent car ride home, and we never spoke of it again.”

Murphy wrote for the school newspaper while attending Indiana University, then got jobs at papers in Miami, L.A., New York, and Knoxville before selling his first script to Steven Spielberg in the late 1990s for something called, “Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?”. Murphy’s first television project was with the WB teen comedy series Popular, but his first critical and popular hit came with FX’s Nip/Tuck. He followed that with Fox’s Glee, which was based, in part, on Murphy’s own experiences in choir back in Indiana. In addition to his writing and producing duties, Murphy selects much of the music that gets covered on Glee, which has led to a number of public spats with Slash from Guns N’ Roses, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, and the Followill brothers of Kings of Leo, over their refusals to allow their music on Glee.

Murphy also co-created American Horror Story, which debuted in 2011 on FX. A horror anthology, each season of American Horror Story operates as a self-contained miniseries with separate casts, characters and story lines. In 2012, Murphy was co-creater of NBC’s The New Normal, about a gay couple and a surrogate who will carry their child. Again, Murphy’s inspiration for The New Normal was drawn on real life. Murphy and his husband, photographer David Miller, welcomed their first son in 2012. Their family grew with the addition of a second son in 2014.

If you know of something that belongs on the Agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

As always, please consider this your open thread for the day.

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