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A Hollywood icon made an appearance on opening night of the 44th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. And by all accounts, she was freshly washed, curled and darned.
Lamb Chop, the beloved sock puppet, was in rare form on Thursday night as she interacted with media and festival attendees alike.
She was on hand to promote the opening night film, “Shari & Lamb Chop,” about the life and legacy of Shari Lewis, the legendary ventriloquist behind Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy and a host of other characters. (During the post-film Q&A, Lamb Chop quipped that it rightfully should have been called “Lamb Chop and Shari.”)
In what turned out to be a genuine highlight of my journalistic career, I had the chance to do an on-camera interview with Lamb Chop. Shari died in 1998 at age 64, but Lamb Chop lives on, perched on the arm of Mallory Lewis, Shari’s daughter, who talks about Lamb Chop as a sister.
Hoping to conduct what I only half-jokingly consider a stereotypical J. interview, I asked Lamb Chop if she identifies as Jewish. She turned directly to the camera and said, emphatically, “I 100% identify as a Jew, a proud Jew!”
I also learned that Lamb Chop’s favorite holiday is Hanukkah and that she loves latkes. Oh, Lamb Chop — she’s just like me!
You can see the rest of our conversation, including Lamb Chop’s advice for kids these days, in the video below.
At 35, I am just old enough to remember Shari’s later shows on PBS, “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along” and “The Charlie Horse Music Pizza.” What I didn’t know until watching Thursday night’s film was that those shows were the culmination of a career that stretched back to the later days of vaudeville, where she learned her craft, and the early days of national television, where she became, for a time, a mega-star.
Shari moved from stage to TV as a young woman when the world of entertainment evolved. Likewise, Lamb Chop and Mallory have moved from TV to social media — they have 153,000 followers on Instagram and 215,000 on TikTok — where they continue to speak plainly and lovingly to kids and adults about life, love and the world around them.
Often, when living relatives are involved in the production of a biographical documentary about a celebrity, we end up with a shallow telling of the subject’s life that omits the most interesting details. But this one does not shy away from Shari’s troubles, particularly marital problems and low points in her career.
One detail that was only alluded to in the film was the misogyny that Shari faced as a young woman in entertainment.
During the Q&A, an audience member asked Mallory if Shari ever experienced antisemitism in Hollywood. No, she said. But misogyny? Oh yeah. Every woman in Hollywood has been harassed, talked over, condescended to and underestimated, Mallory told the crowd — and it’s the same today as it ever was.
The film itself was well received by everyone I chatted with at the after-party. Shari’s career was so long that an interesting pattern emerged. Millennials, like me, remember the PBS shows from the late ’80s through the mid-’90s. Boomers, like my parents, remember Shari and Lamb Chop from their early TV work in the ’50s and ’60s. But Gen X missed out on the magic, coming of age during Shari’s wilderness years, when she struggled to find an audience on variety shows, with telethons and at state fairs.
And about the after-party: The spread was incredible, with tables of food from a range of local restaurants, including Oren’s Hummus, Boichik Bagels, Proposition Chicken and Iggy’s Place, which brought, among other treats, latkes. I hope Lamb Chop had a chance to grab some! There was also a signature cocktail for the event, a vodka, strawberry and mint concoction dubbed — what else? — The Lamb Chop.
With the Castro Theater, the traditional home of SFJFF opening night, closed for renovation, the vibe was a little unusual. For the first time, opening night was held at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. Missing was the usual experience of standing in line with a cross-section of Bay Area Jewry stretching halfway around the block. And, perhaps because of the somewhat harder to access location, the theater wasn’t quite packed.
If you didn’t make it to last night’s festivities, “Shari & Lamb Chop” has one more screening at the festival, at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 31, at the Piedmont Theater in Oakland.
Even if you don’t have a personal connection to Lamb Chop, it’s a fascinating look at the history of television from the perspective of a woman who profoundly shaped the medium in its earliest years.
