Next month will be two years since Houston has been robbed of the bewigged, be-surgeried, bellowing presence of Marvin Zindler.
His friends and family are planning to mark the occasion with a special presentation of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
Which is kind of odd, really.
Zindler was forever linked with the Chicken Ranch, of course (here's KTRK's look back at that story, including clips from the original reports).
But when Larry L. King wrote a Playboy article that eventually got turned into the musical Whorehouse, Zindler wasn't all that pleased.
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King relayed the story to the Washington Post for Zindler's obit:
King, a longtime Washington resident, said that when "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" became a Broadway hit, he and his associates worried that Mr. Zindler would sue.
"The lawyers said we better have him accept some gratuities from us," King recalled, "which would indicate that he had no objections to 'Best Little Whorehouse.' So we flew him to New York first-class, bought his dinner, put him up in a first-class hotel. He was fine for a while, but when he realized how much money was being made, he wanted to sue on grounds that we were misappropriating his life."
Lawyers convinced him that he had no case, but, in King's words, "he was kinda sour that we'd made so much money. He thought we'd tricked him or something."
All is forgiven now, though. At least 25 members of the Zindler family will attend a production of the play July 18 at the Country Playhouse on the west side (tickets available here.)
We can only pray the Playhouse has no slime in the ice machine that night.