Want to meet her? Visit CBS Radford very soon.
When you're talking about an 80 - year - old actress who looks terrific and youthful but whose name is unknown to many young people, baiting stalkers is hardly an issue.
So I'm going to come out and say it. If you want to see her next week, visit California immediately and register as a background extra at the Burbank office of Central Casting on the morning or afternoon of Monday, April 23. Stand in line with other newcomers to that line of work. It's free. Either take a taxicab to get there or parallel park on South Flower Street. If you park anywhere on the reserved parking lot, someone from Central Casting will ban you from ever working for the company.
Then try and get booked as an extra on the season finale of Happily Divorced on which Ms. Moreno plays Fran Drescher's mother. If you can be in Burbank this coming Monday, then people will explain what to do after you register. Having an excellent cell phone with a recharging cord that you carry around with you can boost your chances of getting booked at whatever moment the Happily Divorced assistant director contacts Central Casting with instructions for how old and how tall the extras should be.
I worked there yesterday. It films at CBS Radford in Studio City. That's near Burbank. It's the same lot where Malcolm in the Middle, That 70's Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were filmed, although Happily Divorced uses a different building than the ones used by those old shows. If you want, during your lunchbreak you can walk to the building that Moore used and see an emotionally moving plaque that commemorates it.
Yesterday, Rita Moreno looked and behaved excellently during the filming of a scene that takes place inside an Irish bar on Mother's Day. Prepare yourself for a broadcast on the TV Land basic cable channel on the Wednesday night immediately before Mother's Day.
The director was a young African - American guy who treated everyone very fairly. Crew members and background extras sometimes talked too much between takes. During one of their "chatterfests," he yelled, "Everyone has to be quiet! Notice how you can hear the silence right now? That's the way I need it to be while we are counting down to 'sound speed, action.' If anyone has a problem with that, say something now and I will have an assistant director remove you from the set."
During that short speech, Ms. Moreno, Fran Drescher and this episode's guest star Rosie O'Donnell had submissive expressions on their faces. But they had been yakking much, much less than others on the soundstage.
Drescher in particular says very little off-camera. The possible reason for that is her own speaking voice is not at all like the annoying voice she has been using for her characters ever since she filmed the premiere of The Nanny eighteen-and-a-half years ago and she has to be careful not to wear it out.
Rita Moreno never blew a line during the sitcom's filming yesterday, but two male actors blew lines many times while filming a domestic scene in which they watch a football game on TV. Rita isn't in that scene. In closing, I must say she looks terrific. Her youthful presence was the only good thing about Oz, the rest of which was a twisted fantasy of Hollywood writers who put too much emphasis on the prison talent show, in my opinion. Betty Buckley sucks, also in my opinion. But Rita Moreno has a genuine talent.
After next week's filming of the Happily Divorced season finale, the series wraps for "summer vacation."
If anyone here manages to participate in next week's filming, you should know now that cell phone photography and cell phone video are strictly forbidden and whoever gets caught doing it will be banned permanently from Central Casting. But you will be allowed to type words about what you witnessed on a website as long as you don't do it in a gossipy way.
Since the late 1990's, pop culture blogs have nearly removed the boundary between gossip and information that matters, but traces of the boundary remain, and many bloggers know the difference between the two. Gay men, shmay men.
My sig file should read, "In a same-sex relationship, every night the lovers perform the same sex acts in the same order."