EWE 2 : For Decades, Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop Have Been Inseparable; Now They Even Have a Hand in the Imagination Celebration

A visitor expected Lamb Chops everywhere. Lamb Chop’s portrait hung above the hearth; Lamb Chop bronzed, stationed on the breakfront; crocheted, macramed and ceramic Lamb Chops positioned around the room; the original, perhaps nappy, Lamb Chop, spot lit on a shrine of her own.

But no. There was not a Lamb Chop in sight. Shari Lewis, inventor, manipulator, alter-ego, mother-figure of the long-lashed, sock-bodied puppet, has instead decorated her ecru-tone Beverly Hills living room with all manner of primitive artifacts she’s collected while performing or vacationing around the world.

Lewis herself is as one might expect: perky, direct, ingratiating, as little as a minute, and, yes, like Lamb Chop, curly-haired and long-lashed.

“She obviously represents a piece of me,” said Lewis, known to Baby Boomers from her TV shows of the ‘50s and ‘60s. “She says things I wouldn’t say. When I came out to Hollywood for the first time to make a pilot for Desilu,” Desi Arnaz’s and Lucille Ball’s production company, “I was brought in to meet Desi, and he was sitting with his feet on the desk. Lamb Chop gave him what for--for being impolite. I mean, she just took him down one side and up another! I would never do that.”

Lewis first made Lamb Chop pout, pucker and talk back on TV more than 35 years ago, and she has been one of the country’s most popular family entertainers ever since, acting, dancing, singing, writing, recording audio and video tapes, conducting orchestras and winning awards--six Emmys among them.

She will appear May 3 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for a finale to this year’s Imagination Celebration, the annual art festival for children and teens. “The Shari Lewis Show,” with magic tricks, ventriloquism, puppetry, song and dance, will feature Lamb Chop and Hush Puppy, her droopy-eared hound, as well as a 5-foot-8 Fred Astaire puppet.

Audience participation will be a big part of the performance, the red-headed entertainer said.

“I’ll probably tell a story, and every time I talk about how quiet it is in the castle, everybody goes ‘Shhhhhhh!’ ” she said. Or she’ll play Rosie Wrong Rhyme, in which children are asked to supply the right words that rhyme with clearly wrong ones.

“I’ll say, ‘I got up in the morning, and I went in to turn on the water to take a nice warm flower , and I rub myself all over with a lovely cake of rope .’ The kids scream out the answer.”

Lewis has often employed similar anti-couch potato techniques in 11 interactive family videos she’s produced over the past four years as well as in “Lamb Chop’s Play Along,” her new Public Broadcasting System children’s series, which was released in January. (The series aired locally on KCET through early April.)

Why the emphasis on audience participation? She cites an ancient Chinese proverb:

“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. In the doing is the learning.

“Kids watch seven hours of TV a day,” she continued, but “TV is so inactive that Dr. William Dietz of Tufts University (School of Medicine) has been finding that when children watch TV, their metabolism sinks lower than when they are doing nothing. “

It appears that Lewis, 58, doesn’t know from doing nothing .

At age 2, she started learning piano from her mother, a music coordinator for the New York City Board of Education. She then picked up the violin, guitar and accordion, and before she turned 12, had begun to master many of the magic tricks, juggling, ventriloquism and puppetry skills her father performed as “official magician” of New York City, so dubbed by then-Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

“I had incredibly supportive parents; they were impressed with everything I ever did,” she said.

But Lewis herself wasn’t so impressed.

“I always did it--puppetry, magic, ventriloquism, juggling--but I thought nothing of it, nothing, nothing! I didn’t give a damn.”

Something a bit loftier captured her fancy--ballet. After studying in New York and elsewhere, she went on to join two small touring companies, one of them run by Lucia Chase, who later co-founded the American Ballet Theatre.

At 5 feet tall, however, she lacked the willowy physique and long legs often favored by ballet brass. So, she made a pivotal decision.

“I didn’t get any solos whatsoever, and I do not have a chorus psyche,” she said, “so after about a year and a half, I went to my father and I said, ‘Where’d you shove those puppets?’ ”

Three months later, in 1955, Lewis got her first break on the “Arthur Godfrey Talent Scout Show,” and a few years after that, she caught the attention of “Captain Kangaroo” producers.

“Before they booked me, they came to me and said, ‘Your dummies are so big and clunky, you’re 5 feet tall, don’t you have anything that’s dainty?’ ” So I had this lamb puppet lying around . . . .”

The demure ewe--unceremoniously constructed after Lewis’ father said one day, “If Mary has a little lamb, why shouldn’t Shari have a little lamb?”--was retrieved for the “Captain Kangaroo” debut.

At the time, Lewis was studying method acting--which, among other things, stresses reacting to fellow actors rather than emoting in a vacuum--and she did a little exercise with Lamb Chop.

“I gave her something she wanted of me and a perfectly solid reason why she wanted it, and I gave myself an equally solid reason why there was no way she was going to get it. And then we improvised, and at the end of an hour of work in front of the mirror with her, I called my daddy and I said: ‘Hey, Pop, this is it. You watch and see; this is it.’ It was quite clear. She just came to life like no puppet I had ever worked with before.”

Lewis, who gave puppet one of her own high school nicknames, then developed Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy and went on to national fame, starring in the NBC Saturday morning series “The Shari Lewis Show” from 1960-63. In 1975, she had a syndicated series, “The Shari Show.” She’s had series and specials in several English-speaking countries and performed live around the globe as well.

“I’ve done my act in Farsi for the Shah of Iran,” she said. “Lamb Chop said to the Shah, ‘I’m honored to be in a country where lamb is the national dish, and you can honor me, sir, if you’ll stand up and swear that you are a vegetarian.’ ” (She won’t say how many Lamb Chops there have been over time. “I take the Fifth on that.”)

She has written or co-written more than 50 books, most for children, taken her act to Las Vegas, performed in various musicals and a range of TV shows, and performed and conducted with more than 100 orchestras. She learned conducting from her longtime musical director Stormy Sacks. These days, those gigs are much harder to come by, however.

“Many of the symphonies have gone belly-up because of Reaganomics,” she said, referring to the former President’s federal arts funding policies. “I used to be doing 30 to 50 a year, now it’s more like a dozen,” she said of conducting engagements.

Lewis, who has one grown daughter, largely attributes the focus of her career to parental influence.

“Both my parents were very focused on children,” she said. “I have never been a teacher per se, but my instincts are very pedagogical because of my upbringing.”

She rejects the idea that she’s devoted her life specifically to children’s entertainment, though.

“I’ve devoted my life to performing, and I consider all kinds of entertaining on a continuum. When I write a book, people are taking my performance home between the covers. When I conduct a symphony, it’s performing; and if I do a talk show--or what I’m doing now (giving an interview) is performing.”

Variation is how she’s managed to elude burnout and keep her performances fresh and genuine, for herself and the audience, she said.

“I don’t understand how somebody can do the same thing for 40 years, so I try to vary what bookings I take and where I do them. . . . Also, I like what I do. Sometimes in the middle of my work, I (suddenly realize) how lucky I am to be having fun.”

Keeping current with the times has been important to her success, Lewis said. For instance, in her recent series, Lamb Chop sang rap and Charlie Horse used words such as “dweeb.”

The changes haven’t always gone over well with parents, who have sent letters suggesting she stick to “standard English” and dispense with slang.

“You’ve got to be where the people are, and this is where the kids are,” Lewis said. “There’s a joke about how God goes to Moses and he says: ‘Here are my 10 commandments on two stone tablets. I would have given them to you on videocassette, but I didn’t know if you had VHS or Beta.’ ”

Lewis, who on Monday entertained at the annual White House Easter Egg Hunt, has contracts to write eight more books, upcoming appearances with six orchestras from Buffalo, N.Y. to Sacramento, and is developing a sitcom with her husband, book publisher Jeremy Tarcher (“Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” “Women Who Love Too Much”). She coordinates it all through Shari Lewis Enterprises Inc., headquartered at her Spanish-style home, aflutter with six full-time staffers.

Maintaining both family and work has been life’s greatest challenge, said Lewis, who has one SLE assistant all to herself as well as domestic help.

“Bringing up a child when you’re a working woman and not around from 8 to 6 is a challenge, and maintaining a marriage when you’re out of town a lot is a challenge. Getting a meal on the table, making sure the house is just so; it doesn’t happen by itself.”

But “I’m very organized, I’m extremely disciplined, and I think every woman has to be. It is unfortunately a trait that women turn away from because they are afraid they will frighten the men around them.”

Lewis never had the slightest doubt she’d endure as she has, professionally and personally, however. Again, she credits her roots.

“My father brought me up with a lot of eternal verities. Everybody else used to scoff at Daddy, but I knew that even though they were cliches, they were accurate: The day begins the night before; if you can’t take it, you can’t make it; you are what you eat. I can go on for half an hour, and I live by all those things. I get eight hours of sleep a night, I’m not a workaholic, I’m careful with what I eat. I don’t think survival is an accident, at any point.”

What: “The Shari Lewis Show,” starring Shari Lewis, with Stormy Sacks and the Ken Jennings Orchestra. (Part of the seventh annual Imagination Celebration of Orange County running Saturday, April 25, through May 3.)

When: Sunday, May 3, at 2 and 5 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $5.

Where to call: (714) 556-ARTS, Ext. 888, or Ticketmaster, (714) 740-2000.