Paul Random

Kelsey Grammer’s On-Screen Father Taught Him About Dads and Sons

The actor Kelsey Grammer has played Dr. Frasier Crane for more than 40 years.

Debuting the character on the sitcom Cheers, Grammer joined the cast of the Emmy award-winning show in its third season back in 1984. As the snobby, snooty, and emotionally complex psychiatrist, Dr. Crane’s pompous temperament contrasted perfectly with his lower brow bar mates wit and humor.

After Cheers went off the air in 1993 after 11 seasons, Grammer received his own show playing the same quirky shrink – but this time as the host of a call-in radio program in his hometown of Seattle. Frasier was another fan favorite, scoring high ratings for 11 seasons – and earning Grammer historic sitcom status.

Grammer reprised the erudite role once again last year, playing the same doctor – but this time focusing his attention on his adult son.

Asked about the role in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Grammer reflected:

What’s great about Frasier is, there’s an old poem by Jorge Luis Borges that I used to read, where he talks about how Shakespeare could take all of creation and treat it like a bauble in his hand. And I always thought that’s what Frasier’s like.
Frasier treats the universe like a bauble. It’s like it’s a magical gift that he can just go anywhere in the world with. He can go to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, and we can enjoy the ride with him because it’s always just a little bit funny. Which goes back to something I learned a long time ago from a very famous old actor, who said, “You have to give the audience a wink, and you just have to let them know they’re safe, that this isn’t that serious, that we’re going someplace funny.” And Frasier knows how to wink.

But one of the more profound things that Grammer has previously shared about his role as Dr. Frasier Crane in Frasier revolved around the on-screen relationship between the doctor and his father, Martin Crane, played by the actor John Mahoney.

“The greatest gift I got from the show was to understand what it was like to have a father, and a brother,” Grammer recently reflected. “These are things I did not actually have.”

That’s an understatement.

Kelsey Grammer’s parents divorced when he was two. Raised by his mother and grandmother, his grandfather, whom he was close to, died of cancer. When he was twelve, his father was murdered – assassinated, really.

A writer in the Virgin Islands, a mentally unstable man lured his father out of his house one night by setting his car on fire. Apparently, the man objected to something his dad had written.

When Kelsey was 20, his 18-year-old sister was kidnapped, raped and murdered. Five years later, two half-brothers died scuba diving.

The string of tragedies hit Grammer like a ton of bricks. Spiraling into depression, he began abusing drugs and alcohol. Of his drinking addiction, he said, “I liked the way it made me feel.”

It’s not exactly clear where Kelsey Grammer is spiritually, but he’s previous said, “I’m kind of a Bible guy. I’ve been reading the Bible all my life. I turn it over to prayer, for reflection, for information, and I just always have. It’s just always been sort of at my fingertips throughout my life, ever since I was a boy. So, I have a relationship with the Word of God.”

Kelsey Grammer is married and has seven children ranging in age from seven to 40.

But Grammer’s reflection about learning about what it’s like to have a father by playing a son on television shines a light on something worth highlighting.

Social conservatives are often mocked and maligned for advocating for wholesome television, movies, and music. We’re accused of being uptight and even puritanical. We’re told these offerings are mere works of fiction and simply entertainment, not education.

But if an actor can learn about family from playing in one on television, how much more do audiences absorb from watching?

There is power in story – especially depictions of mothers and fathers interacting with sons and daughters. As culture continues to slide and as families fracture at alarmingly high rates, Hollywood stands in an enormously powerful position to model the beauty and meaning of our fundamental and formative relationships.

When John Mahoney passed away in 2018 at the age of 77, Kelsey Grammer paid him tribute.

“John actually played my father longer than I knew my own father, so he was more like my dad,” said a teary-eye Grammer. “He was my father. I loved him.”

Image credit NBC

Harry Truman, Donald Trump and the Rise of the New Media

It’s an iconic photograph – a smiling President Harry Truman holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune heralding a “fake news” headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

The picture was snapped by W. Eugene Smith two days after Truman’s election in November of 1948. On his way back to Washington, D.C., from Independence, Missouri, aboard the presidential train the Ferdinand Magellan, Truman had stopped in St. Louis. An aide was said to have found the newspaper under a seat in a car attached to the executive entourage.

As the 1948 presidential election approached, media elites were convinced New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey would easily defeat the incumbent Truman. The former senator-turned-vice-president had assumed the presidency following Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

After an initial honeymoon period as World War II wound down, the former haberdasher had struggled politically.

“He was considered to be a sure loser,” reflected his biographer David McCullough. A week before the election, The New York Times said Dewey’s election was “a foregone conclusion.”

Only Truman believed otherwise.

Sound familiar?

During the campaign President Truman had made the decision to barnstorm the country by train. His hundreds of “whistle-stops” brought him face-to-face with regular Americans. It gave him an opportunity to look them in the eye. Many of them were also seeing a president up close for the first time. A bond formed between the president and the people.

Few experts may have given Truman a chance, but knowing the huge crowds he was drawing, the president was so confident he was going to win that he went to bed at 9 PM on Election night at the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.

“Please wake me up if anything important happens,” the president told his Secret Service detail. At four in the morning, an agent roused Truman and told him he was winning based on radio reports of election returns.

“We’ve got ’em beat,” President Truman responded confidently.

President-elect Trump didn’t retire early on Tuesday night, but like Truman, he repeatedly expressed confidence in the election’s outcome based on massive crowds at his rallies.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, the former-now-future president took his message directly to the American people via social media and alternative news sources also known as “New Media.”

“New Media” is largely considered to be digital products, podcasts, and streaming services.

Last month, we highlighted podcaster Joe Rogan’s rising popularity.

Wildly popular and often profane as an interviewer and celebrity, Rogan’s conversation with Trump garnered 40 million views on Spotify and YouTube. With 32 million subscribers between the two sites, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance also appeared on Rogan’s show. Vice President Harris and her team were never able to agree on her terms.

Focus on the Family’s rise is directly attributable to “new media” of a sort. While radio as a medium dates to the 1920s, ministry founder Dr. James Dobson pioneered the Christian-help format beginning in 1977.

Not dependent upon books, newspapers, magazines and television to communicate, the ministry’s popularity skyrocketed thanks to the launch of our flagship radio program.

Whether communicating from the back of a train, from a podium, or on a podcast that reaches tens of millions of listeners and viewers, those with a powerful Christ-filled message will find a way to get the word out to those with willing ears to hear.

Image credit: W. Eugene Smith / LIFE Picture Collection, Fair Use and Honolulu Star Advertiser 

Norman Rockwell’s Vision is on the Ballot

It was the legendary illustrator Norman Rockwell who once said, “I paint life as I would like it to be.”

That philosophy is what prompted the famed artist, inspired by a speech President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave on January 6, 1941, to sit down at his easel and begin painting what became known as “The Four Freedoms.”

Walking past prints of these paintings hanging in our foyer on this Election Day, it struck me how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” reflected President Roosevelt.

“The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.”

Roosevelt continued:

“The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.”

It’s been more than 83 years since FDR delivered that address – and 81 years since the four paintings debuted on successive Saturday Evening Post covers in 1943.

“Freedom of Speech” was published on February 20, “Freedom of Worship” on February 27, “Freedom from Want” on March 6 and “Freedom from Fear” on March 13.

The magazine received millions of requests for reprints. Over 2.5 million sets were produced, and the allotment sold out. Postage stamps were also commissioned.

Americans cast their vote for all kinds of reasons – but many are doing so this year to protect and preserve these same four freedoms.

We recognize that our Founding Fathers and countless patriots have bled and died to protect our freedom of speech. We vote to preserve it.

We are grateful we can worship at will, not just within the walls of a church, but anywhere and everywhere. We vote to protect it.

We work and we save to put food on our tables and clothes on our backs. We agree with Milton Friedman who warned, “Inflation is taxation without legislation.”

And then there was Ronald Reagan who declared, “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” We vote to defeat it.

Finally, we are committed to defending the safety and security of our loved ones. We vote to strengthen it.

Life isn’t a painting – but Rockwell’s work resonated, because pictures and paintings are worth thousands of words.

We’re voting to preserve these four freedoms for future generations. Elections have consequences long beyond a president’s term of office. Appointments and decisions ripple across the nation and world.

Yes, the Lord is sovereign – but our faith doesn’t afford us the luxury of being blasé about electoral outcomes. Evil and wickedness are on the march – and we have an obligation and opportunity to serve as His hands and feet to bring relief and hope to the world.

Image credit: Norman Rockwell, Fair Use

Jerry Seinfeld: ‘Woke Agenda Warps Children’

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld stood up to the woke mob earlier this year by debunking so-called “toxic masculinity.”

Around the same time, he also voiced his frustration with people’s over sensitivity with humor and expressed disgust for terrorist sympathizers surrounding the ongoing war in the Middle East.

The legendary comic has once again said what many others are thinking but have been reluctant to say, this time concerning emotions related to the election.

Manhattan’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private K-12 institution located in the Bronx, recently announced plans to let students who “feel too emotionally distressed” with Tuesday’s night’s results, to skip classes the next day.

In a newsletter released from the $65,000 per year institution, officials noted this “may be a high-stakes and emotional time” for students.

Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, who have three children, recently removed their youngest son from the school.

“This is why the kids hated it,” Jerry Seinfeld said.

“What kind of lives have these people led that makes them think that this is the right way to handle young people? To encourage them to buckle. This is the lesson they are providing, for ungodly sums of money.”

In modern parlance, Seinfeld is referring to “snowflakes” – individuals who are fragile and overly sensitive, quick to take easy offense. It’s a term and reference attributed to a 1996 book by Chuck Palahniuk titled, Fight Club.

“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake,” says a character. “You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

Obviously, as Christians, we believe in the inherent value and beauty of every life. Each person is unique – but that doesn’t mean we need to be frail and thin-skinned when challenges and difficulties come our way.

“I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,” wrote the apostle Paul (Philippians 4:13). “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth,” wrote Paul to Timothy (2 Timothy 2:15).

Just three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffered a minor heart attack while staying in the White House. Only three days later he gave a speech in Ottawa, an address in which he declared:

We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

Neither Churchill nor the members of the World War II generation were “snowflakes” – but tough, tenacious, gutty and gritty individuals who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of future generations.

Giving children room to mourn or grieve an election by taking time off from school reveals the vacuousness of a worldview that has clearly made an idol of government. It pampers young people, preparing them for nothing but a world which better bend to their skewed and limited point of view. 

Perhaps the one bright side to students taking Wednesday off? At least for that one day, they won’t be exposed to the propaganda of the school’s radical worldview.

That is unless their parents subscribe to The New York Times – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Image credit: Jessica Seinfeld / Instagram

Mystic Sweet Communion with Saints Whose Rest is Won

All Saint’s Day, a special occasion on the Christian calendar each November 1, provides believers with an opportunity to remember and celebrate those who have gone before us on the journey.

Christians can’t always predict when emotions over love and loss may strike, but it can often come while worshipping at church. This hit me last week on Reformation Sunday as we stood to sing the great hymn, “The Church’s One Foundation.”

Written by an Anglican priest named Samuel J. Stone, this soaring anthem of the faith was composed to confront some of the many challenges facing Christians in the mid 1800s.

“Though with a scornful wonder men see her sore oppressed,” Stone wrote in verse four. “By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed. Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, ‘How long?’ And soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song!”

Some things never change.

But those weren’t the lyrics that grabbed me last week. Instead, it was the last verse:

Yet she on earth hath union with God the Three in One, and mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won. O happy ones and holy! Lord, give us grace that we like them, the meek and lowly, on high may dwell with thee.

It was the reference to “mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is one” that put a lump in my throat – and a smile on my face.

We don’t know for sure all that Stone was thinking about when he penned those words, but there’s a high probability he was referencing, among other truths, Hebrews 12:1:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

It’s a mystery whether those in Heaven can see what’s happening on earth. In popular culture, we often hear people say things like, “He’s looking down on you from above” or “She’s with us in Spirit.” But although there are a lot of unknowns regarding eternal life, many of us still feel a deep spiritual connection with our loved ones who have passed before us.

I inherited my mother’s chair – a chair that my mother inherited from her own mom. It’s been reupholstered several times and now sits in my home office. There are times when I’ll sit it in quietly, remembering the many times I found her there reading or watching television. I don’t need a chair to remind me of her, but tangible objects can spark a sweet memory unlike many other things.

Yet, union and fellowship with Jesus Christ is the sweetest of all.

It was the pastor and reformer John Calvin who said, “The mystical union subsisting between Christ and [H]is members, should be matter of reflection not only when we sit at the Lord’s Table, but at all other times.”

Another reason why that last verse grabbed me relates to the reference of winning our rest. Both of my parents lived good, long lives. Their bodies wore out before their minds did, and they were both physically spent come their last days. On the last day of my mother’s life, she talked about Psalm 23 and how much she was looking forward to lying down in a green pasture on the other side. She was eager to win her rest – and it came just as the sun was going down on the day.

On this All Saint’s Day, let’s not be oblivious to the “great cloud of witnesses” who surround us as we run.

Image from Shutterstock.