Schieffer's a Sensitive Rocker

When Sumner Redstone is the featured honoree at a gala at the Waldorf-Astoria, you can pretty much figure he could bring in just about any group of musicians he wanted to, to appear on stage.

After all, he is executive chairman of Viacom, which owns MTV Networks.

So, who stepped up in front of the footlights last Thursday night at the 2008 Paley Center for Media gala feting Redstone?

Bob Schieffer, the Fort Worth, Texas, native who held down the anchorman post in the interregnum at CBS between Dan Rather and Katie Couric.

“Thank you very much Mr. Redstone for giving me the chance to say something I've wanted to say all my life: I'm Bob Schieffer and this is my band!”

The band backing him up: Honky Tonk Confidential, which hails from Washington, D.C., a town Schieffer has covered for CBS for more than 30 years.

He told Redstone the first song would be “dedicated to you, but in the true tradition of our industry, it's all about me.”

The song: “How I Became A TV Anchorman.”

In the way Schieffer tells it, he started out pumping gas at a Stuckey's restaurant on I-95, when a fellow drives up in a red Corvette and asks to look deep into his eyes.

“I said, excuse me, bud, but before you intrude, I don't understand this interlude. I'm a cowboy from out in Lonesome Dove.”

Turns out the fellow is a news consultant scouting for new TV talent and, of course, makes Schieffer part of his “Eyewitness Band.”

In the recorded version (at www.honkytonkconfidential.com/cliptvanchorman.mp3), though, there was no claim that “I don't understand this interlude.” Instead, Schieffer says, “I ain't some Brokeback Mountain dude.”

“That's how we originally wrote it, but we thought it might be more sensitive to people's feelings to change the line, and we haven't sung that line for a very long time now,” band member Diana Quinn, who also works for CBS News, told The Wire in an e-mail message.

“I don't think we played it that way more than once or twice,' ” Schieffer said Friday by phone.

Coincidentally, Paramount Pictures, a Viacom company, was one of the production companies behind Brokeback Mountain, the 2005 Academy Award winning picture about the complex relationship of two young ranch hands who fall in love. One of its stars, Heath Ledger, recently died of an accidental drug overdose at age 28.

Queens Kid Gets 'HSM2' Event

Jessica Hayden, a fourth-grader at P.S. 203 in Queens, N.Y., won a “private engagement” last Friday for her classmates with Monique Coleman, a cast member of Walt Disney's High School Music megahit franchise.

The grade-schooler hit the jackpot in the HSM2 sweepstakes sponsored by Verizon Communications and Disney, to promote the telco's online entertainment portal for kids (verizonsurround.com/kids), available only to its Internet subscribers. The companies hosted an assembly for the school's third-through-fifth grades, then threw a party with food, games and autographs from Coleman, who played science club member Taylor McKessie in both movies.

Disney says the two movies have racked up 429 million viewers worldwide to date.

Which gives us a great idea for a spinoff, aimed at pre-K audiences: Grade School Musical.

Comcast Center: Cool But Creaky

Comcast's new corporate headquarters in downtown Philadelphia is gradually being occupied by networks in the cable company's realm, such as CN8, FearNET and PBS Kids Sprout, with more (including Versus, sans Gavin Harvey) coming. As befits the tallest structure in Philadelphia, the new mailing address to reach people who've moved there is easy to remember: One Comcast Center.

It's also “green,” with a smart HVAC system, waterless urinals, a “vegetative roof” that uses plants to help funnel runoff water and no smoking allowed within 20 feet of the building.

The building's also really new — actually completion is scheduled for next month — and really tall with a lot of glass. One tenant mentioned last week it was really nice but the settling and creaking was a bit unnerving, especially on windy days.

Hopefully it and its tenants will all settle in nicely. Corporate communications director John Demming wouldn't address questions about who's in or out or how things are going. “The building's not finished yet so we're not really discussing it at this time,” he said.