Leaving Liberace

This is a cruel year for Nevada. Vision-care and dental programs for the elderly are being cut back, funding for treatment of problem gambling is in short supply, entire degree programs (you read that right) at UNLV are being eliminated and the Nevada State Archive has been closed. Yet none of this has been sufficient to get people up in arms.

But you’ve to draw a line in the sand somewhere and, by jingo, the closing of the Liberace Museum is it. A group of Liberace adherents plans to rally today, in hopes of basically forcing the money-losing museum to stay open. Education and health care may be expendable but rhinestone-covered pianos are sacrosanct, dammit! (Of course, the fate of the Liberace Museum ought to be an object lesson to all those mugwumps who write to the newspapers to say history is overrated, who needs state parks anyway and the private sector will take up the slack. Except sometimes it doesn’t.)

There is only one appropriate response to this mishegas and that is to remember Liberace as he was portrayed so unerringly by Dave Thomas on SCTV. (If anything, Thomas is less creepy, more avuncular.) He receives not a little help from the late, great John Candy as Orson Welles and future Tony Award-winner Andrea Martin channeling Ethel Merman. Then there’s my favorite SCTV clip of them all — and that’s going some.

We’ll be right back.