He Can Part The Seas, But Chuck Can’t Speak

Never irritate a Texan, especially if you’re involved in a project that is supposed to represent the Lone Star State. But most of all, never irritate a Texan telecaster.

That’s what Charlton Heston did. The movie Moses provided the voice-over for the ABC miniseries “Texas,” based on the James Michener novel.

And CBS News anchor Dan Rather, a native Texan, was unimpressed.

“I would say the weakest part of this whole miniseries is Heston as narrator,” Rather told TV Guide. “I thought about writing him a letter. I’d tell him, ‘How dare you? This is Texas. You have to suck it up, and we want your best work here.’ He read it as if it were the directions on how to set the time on your VCR.”

Loose talk

Texan Kathleen Turner on her role in the Broadway show “Indiscretions” (in Harper’s Bazaar): “There’s nothing in the world like dying onstage. It’s wonderful. It gets them right here.”

As her friends say, ‘Happy birthday, happy birthday’

Louise Lasser turns 56 today.

Of course, Hollywood is full of Ernie Bilkos Another sign of the coming Apocalypse: Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd and Phil Hartman are making “Sgt. Bilko,” an adaptation of the 1950s sitcom called “You’ll Never Get Rich.” Martin will play the title character, which was created by Phil Silvers.

Yes, kids, there was a time when it was OK to be racist

Time magazine reports that an eye malady called strabismus, may have led to Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s radio impersonation of O.J. Simpson judge Lance Ito. “He was constantly falling down and hurting himself. He had to wear thick glasses. The neighborhood kids called him ‘Tojo’ - after the bespectacled World War II Japanese general whom even nice children in nice communities were allowed to hate.”

And then, finally, we all just said ‘No mas, no mas’

Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, summed up the pop group’s career for Entertainment Weekly. “We’re as good an example as anybody of what the early ‘80s were,” he said. “Excessive, bright and full of hope. And not realizing you were gonna get the bill at the end of the decade.”

Next up: The cast of ‘Roseanne’ takes on ‘Macbeth’

The quote: “There used to be this thing that a film actor couldn’t do television. Now the best actors work in both.” The speaker: Jessica Lange. The occasion: Lange was just finishing her role as Blanche Dubois in CBS production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

And now they’re taking the same, identical medication

Was the marriage of Fran Drescher (“The Nanny”) to Peter March Jacobson set in the stars before they even met? Maybe so. “We were both driving with our dads, and - you won’t believe this - we saw a UFO,” Drescher told TV Guide. “Years and years later we figured out that we had had the same, identical experience.”

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster