"One of Ann-Margret’s most famous moments in 'Tommy' involved geysers of baked beans being shot directly at her."

"'They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!' she said. 'And it smelled!' She recalled that [Ken] Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. 'That’s fine with me!' she added brightly. Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. 'Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,' he said. 'Let’s just do it again!' For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. 'My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,' he said."

From "At 81, Ann-Margret Is Finally Living Her Rock ’n’ Roll Dream/The actress and musician, who first burst out in 'Bye Bye Birdie' in 1963, is releasing a new album of old rock covers featuring guests like her 'Tommy' co-star Pete Townshend" (NYT).

ADDED: As for the beans — to add to the endless succession of beans — Roger Daltrey got there first. Here's Rolling Stone in 1967:

"Overcharging may please the public, but it can demolish a case. While jurors can convict on 'lesser included' offenses..."

"... the credibility of the prosecution is established by the lead charge. Jurors tend to start at the top and work their way down on the charges. If the first-degree charge is wildly out of reach, they are more likely to doubt the lesser charges, too. Even with some lesser included offenses, it will be hard for prosecutors in the Rittenhouse case to make this cat walk backward. They promised the jury that it would see a vigilante rampaging in utter disregard of human life. Instead, the jury saw a much more confusing, chaotic scene in which Rittenhouse was threatened with a gun, hit repeatedly and chased down a street."

Writes Jonathan Turley in "Rittenhouse trial: Perils of weighing public opinion over evidence" (The Hill).

Is "make this cat walk backward" an idiomatic expression? Google returns only 4 results on this search, one of which is the article I've quoted above. The other 3 — 1, 2, 3 — are all from July 2014, and they are all reports of a quote — on the topic of whether members of Congress can sue the President for violating separation of powers — that came from Jonathan Turley.

"Make this cat walk backward" seems related to the expression that it's hard/impossible to "herd cats." I guess it's hard to make a cat do anything, so make up your own cat expression and try — like Jonathan Turley — to get your idea to go viral. 

What can the prosecution do to make the metaphorical cat walk backward? Find a metaphorical Roomba:

ADDED: As many commenters here are saying, you will find non-Turley examples of the phrase "walk the cat back." To walk back isn't the same as to walk backward. When you go out for a walk, in the end, you walk back home. That doesn't mean backward! 

Here are the Everly Brothers, and I assure you that they are not imploring the woman to walk backwards, just to walk — in a frontward-facing position — back to them:

Here's a Phrase Finder piece on "Walk the cat back." It begins with a usage by Maureen Dowd (in 2010) that seems to be a misunderstanding of the phrase "walk back the cat." If you think there's no significant difference between those 2 phrases, read that piece. "Walking Back the Cat" was the title of a 1997 spy thriller by Robert Littell who explained it as an expression used by spies to mean "attempting to retrace a process to its origin, when that process had been tentative and indirect in the first place." 

Love is all around.

Yesterday, I said "Love was all around, and I was able to choke back tears until I got back in the car." In the comments, Unknown said:

How can the increase of the rate of love in the world be a bad thing? I don't comment often, anywhere, but this moved me. Thank you.

And Pat said:

Long time conservative republican here, glad to see people who love each other and are willing to commit to each other, able to be married. We r's need to let this issue go and fight other fights.

But eric said:

I submit that the word love is being used in a fallacious way. Love does not mean something you feel. It means the way you behave. What we are seeing is a perversion of love. One that says, if you feel good, its love. Which is apropos of this situation. As we see both love and sex being perverter and enablers helping these people destroy their lives.

Love is not something you feel? "I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes," sang The Troggs in a song, titled with the words I used, "Love Is All Around." And here's Joan Jett and The Blackhearts singing the theme from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" ("Love is all around/No need to waste it..."):



And — to embrace tradition — here's the original show opening with Mary emoting and a gentle-voiced man singing about turning the world on with a smile. Perhaps eric will stop in to submit that the human smile cannot in fact turn on the world and, indeed, the world is not a unified, embodied entity with genitals capable of arousal, and even given the vast appeal of Mary Tyler Moore, it is fallacious to contend that the entire world possesses a sexual orientation toward a woman smiling.

The gentle-voiced man — if you're inclined to riff on what your body's ears hear as effeminacy or metrosexuality or whatever — is Sonny Curtis, who played with Buddy Holly before there were Crickets and who wrote — in addition to Mary's "Love Is All Around" — the lawyer's favorite "I Fought the Law" and the Everly Brother's "Walk Right Back." Or does Anne Murray turn you on with her smile?

Did you know Mary Tyler Moore is now 77 years old and nearly blind?

Have you heard there are none so blind as those that will not see? 

And:

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

"he was never miserable... he was always happy. shy, sweet, humble, never ever miserable."

"don't know what you've read but it 's wrong- he was happiest as a kid and teenager and had a great life, too short, but great. He was my father, my name's tracy nelson, his oldest, and so i should know. and sarah, yes, he kicks elvis' ass. :-)"

I found that after looking at List-a-Beefy's spotlight on the #2 hits of 1957. List-a-Beefy is counting down the top 100 songs in the history of the top 100 that reached #2. "A Teenager's Romance" did not make the list. The only 1957 song that did is "Bye Bye Love," by The Everly Brothers, which "establishes the forlorn bellow of the slighted teen that would grow to be the most popular of voices in the coming five years, yet it did so with rhythm and poise." 1957 was apparently a big year for teenagers. There was also — reaching #2 — "Young Love," by Sonny James and "Teen-Age Crush" by Tommy Sands.