Word: flips
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tacos. Garish neon lights stare down on cameras, transistor radios and the other gadgetry that will soon be bought by gullible visitors or grace the lockers of soldiers and sailors who have been on leave in New York. Record stores blare their wares onto the street while teen-agers flip through album after album. Prostitutes, panhandlers, winos and pickpockets dot the sidewalks. One of New York's most intensive police patrols prods them from one end of Times Square to the other and back again. It is the street where every item is marked discount or clearance...
...hilarious pair, Geraldine and the Rev. Leroy, are one and the same-Clerow ("Flip") Wilson, 36, America's fastest-rising comedian, black or white. Not so long ago, Flip was scratching something like $15 a night out of low-rent nightclubs along the Eastern seaboard. Then he made a one-night stand on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The stocky, moon-faced comic became-quite literally-a star overnight. Now his own NBC-TV variety hour, The Flip Wilson Show, is the most successful new hour in an otherwise dismal fall season...
Deceptive Ease. Variety shows are currently considered prosaic and passé. But Flip and his producer Bob Henry were determined to make this show different. They have succeeded admirably by concentrating on Flip. There are no big production numbers, no lines of chorus girls, no star-spangled introductions, just Flip doing comedy sketches and bantering with such guests as Marcel Marceau or Lily Tomlin. While he occasionally joins them in a number, Flip is careful not to hog the camera. He and Henry have also made a point of spacing Flip's pet routines-the sassy Geraldine...
Aware that there had never been a successful Negro-hosted weekly network variety show, Flip began rehearsing more than a month early, working five and six hours a day on his singing and dancing. And he has mastered the deceptive ease of the first-class TV host. After appearing on last week's show, Perry Como reported: "Flip knows the things that make you comfortable...
Congeniality does not come easily to Flip. Born in Jersey City, N.J., one of 16 children, he started on the foster-home circuit when he was seven. He lived with a family of Holy Rollers and a fortune teller. At 16 he lied about his age and joined the Air Force, where a white Southern major took him in hand, tutored him in grammar and diction and sent him to typing school...