I mentioned here the other day that when I went to see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man at the Pantages Theater, the sound was kind of wonky. Some years later but still before they'd done a full upgrade, I took a lady to the Pantages to see Herschel Bernardi star in a touring company of Fiddler on the Roof. We sat in the first row of the balcony where you could hear, as we Jews say, bupkiss.

My friend kept whispering to me and asking, "What did he say?" and since I knew the show pretty well — not because I could hear what they were saying that night — I could whisper back and tell her. As the show progressed though, the people on either side of us and behind us were leaning in to hear my whispers and I started speaking louder as I "translated" the unintelligible muttering from the stage into audible dialogue for all of my date and those around us. That was how the Pantages was then.

This has happened to me often in my theatergoing. I remember seeing Tony Randall and Jack Klugman doing The Odd Couple (the original play) at the old Shubert Theater in Century City. Couldn't understand half of what they said. I ended up whispering line after line to my date. The same thing happened when I took my friend Carolyn to see Patti LuPone doing Gypsy at the St. James Theater in New York. In that case, half the problem seemed to be Ms. LuPone mumbling many of her lines but we also couldn't understand some of the other actors.

I don't know why this is allowed to happen, especially as ticket prices climb and climb.

Obviously, it was not true for everyone in the theater at the performances where we couldn't hear. But it was true for the folks in our section and for Gypsy, we were on the center aisle of the fifth row. From there, we should have been able to make out every word if they'd turned off the sound system.

I do not blame the actors. I may not even be blaming the construction of the theaters, some of which were built back in the days when the performers went unamplified. I just think the managements of theaters need to do a better job of checking for "pockets" in their buildings where the sound just plain is not as good as it should be.

If like me, you didn't watch The Emmy Awards last night, you might enjoy this eleven-minute summary of wha' happened…

I wish cell phones had a setting you could turn on and off — and when it's on and you touch a button that places a call, it stops and asks "Are you sure?" and you have to hit a "Y" or some other key before it actually places the call. I always feel bad when I accidentally dial someone because I dropped the phone or rolled over it in bed and touched it somehow inappropriately. Once in a while, it's called someone I never wanted to speak to again but I somehow still had their number.

Seems to me this would be easy to program and if you didn't want it, you could just turn it off. I wish this was an option.

On this blog, I often recommend that you go see my buddy Frank Ferrante doing his uncanny Groucho Marx tribute/impersonation. And I still recommend that when he performs it within attending distance of you. (November 19th, he'll be doing it in Minneapolis.) But Frank has other identities and other gigs.

From now until at least November 1, he's up in Alameda, California starring as his alter-alter-ego Caesar in the immersive dinner show, The Soiled Dove. An "immersive dinner show" is where they feed you and someone tries to dance on your table or swing on a trapeze over your head while you eat your salad. I have not seen this show but I saw another similar one with Frank and my date and I could not have had a better time. In this one, his co-star is Joan Baez and I'd sure like to see her and Frank and all the rest of the performers who are getting great reviews like this one.

I will be in the Bay Area up north soon for some appearances connected to my forthcoming book…though sadly, just after Frank's show is scheduled to close. To find out just where it is and to get tickets, go over to this page. I'm sorry I'll miss it.

As usual, I didn't watch the Emmy Awards but I did peek in on a few YouTube clips.  John Oliver won?  What a surprise…almost as big as Stephen Colbert winning for Best Talk Show.

And somewhere on the Internet right now, there are forums full of folks outraged because So-and-So was left out of the "In Memoriam" reel.  That's a complaint that will go on as long as they show those montages.  The Academy made a good step towards calming a few people down by posting on their web page, as they now do, a list of everyone who might have been in such a presentation because their lives or careers somehow touched The World of Television.  It's a very long list and it makes clear how impossible it is to do a segment short enough that people would sit through it that would cover everyone who could be in it.  This year's list can be viewed in a video on this page and it runs seven minutes with names just scrolling by.

I look at it every year because it always tells me that someone I knew passed away in the previous twelve months and I just plain didn't hear about it. This year, I see the names of Sandy Krinski, Lane Sarasohn and Michael Swanigan. Sad to see them there but at least I know.

Here's one I can't answer and it comes from Ira Matetsky…

Here's an "Ask Me" question that I can welcome your answering if you think it would be of interest to the readers (and if you happen to know the answer).

Beginning in the Golden Age (if not before), most if not all comic books contained a one- or two-page text story. It was formatted as text with minimal if any illustrations. These appeared uniformly enough that there was clearly some external reason for them. Although many of the text stories were uninteresting in themselves, some of them had historical significance (for example, Stan Lee's first published writing). By the Silver Age, most companies transformed the text pages into letter columns, where you in so many others broke into print, as well as “Bullpen Bulletins” or other such things.

I have frequently read that these text pages existed because there was a U.S. Post Office regulation or requirement that a publication must contain some textual (non-comics) content in order to qualify for second-class mailing privileges, without which mailing copies to subscribers would be much more expensive. On its face, this seems plausible enough. We know that post office regulations or practices affected comics in other ways, such as when various E.C. titles were changed as minimally as possible, even when a book was changing contents completely, in an effort to benefit from the same mailing deposit. And outside the realm of comic books, there are plenty of other instances in which the postal regulations affected the format of newspapers and magazines (for example, in the early 1900s, there was a period when newspapers got much lower postal rates than magazines, so there was constant skirmishing over how each category was defined).

However, I've done some poking around and have never been able to locate anywhere the postal officials ever put such a text-page requirement in writing. Do you know whether this requirement ever existed and was documented, or where the first references to it can be found? Is there any record of a comic book being rejected for mailing because it didn’t contain a text page? Or was this just something that publishers assumed might be required, or came from the mind of one postal person and then spread by word of mouth?

Any information would be welcome. And if you don’t happen to know the answer, can you suggest someplace I might ask where someone might?

I'm not an expert on postal regulations but I think it all came down to however the post office defined a "magazine." The rules also seem to have varied from place to place and maybe from time to time. For example, I was told that to qualify for second-class mailing rates, a comic book had to have "other" material in it. An issue of Superman couldn't contain nothing but Superman in it.

DC met this requirement by including little one-page gags, mostly drawn by Henry Boltinoff and those Public Service pages. But Dell at one point had to do things like putting a four-page Gyro Gearloose story in each issue of Uncle Scrooge or a four-page Oswald the Rabbit story in each issue of Woody Woodpecker. I suspect this was a matter of the postal officials with whom DC dealt and the postal officials with whom Dell or Western dealt having different interpretations of the rules.

But I don't know this stuff for sure. So this is a public appeal for anyone with hard info to come forward.

The great Stan Laurel passed away on February 23, 1965. A friend of his named Gene Lester felt that there ought to be a big hour-long TV special saluting and remembering the great comedian — and by obvious extension, his late partner Oliver Hardy. As I always heard the story, Lester had something serious and historical in mind — lots of clips of Stan and Ollie along with interviews with surviving co-workers and current comics who discuss the impact of The Boys on modern comedy.

But then, others got involved and the network started demanding an all-star variety special and…well, Mr. Lester was said to have been very unhappy with what resulted as was the show's host, Dick Van Dyke. The show aired but once — on on November 23, 1965 — in Red Skelton's Tuesday night time slot. It also used Red's stage and a lot of his crew. I certainly recalled being disappointed in how so much of it had so little to do with Stan Laurel.

Clips of the show have circulated for years on YouTube but this is the first time I've been able to link you to the whole thing. There are some good moments but a lot of the bits (and the folks who did them) are just wrong for A Salute to Stan Laurel…

J. Benedict asks me something…

I've always been fascinated by your stories of sneaking into movie and TV studios when you were younger to watch rehearsals and tapings. Most of your sneaking seems to have been at NBC to watch Laugh-In or Johnny Carson but what other studios did you do this at?

Not as many as I'd liked…but I'll take slight issue with the verb here. I didn't "sneak" that much. The first two times I got into NBC, I had actual passes which I arranged through my connection with Laugh-In magazine. I wrote briefly for its publisher just before the publication was terminated. Thereafter, with a chutzpah I probably could not generate now, I just walked in, waving to the guards like I knew where I was going, hoping they remembered me from my previous visits. Maybe they did. Maybe it was my attitude. Maybe it was that I'd carry a copy of Variety. Maybe it was all three. I dunno. I just know no one ever questioned me.

And I do know that even if I did have the chutzpah, that would not work today. All the studios have tightened security to the point where it's sometimes difficult to get in even when you the right credentials and clearance.

NBC in Burbank was my most frequent field trip because I had as much access as I had and because I was then freelancing for Disney Studios a few blocks away. So I'd spent the morning on that lot, fully authorized to be there of course, then walk over to NBC in the afternoon. You can call my entrances into NBC "sneaking" if you like but the security guards always saw me go in and I never lied, at least verbally.

I got into CBS a few times — again with real passes — once to watch one of Red Skelton's infamous "dirty hours." He was supposed to be rehearsing the show they'd tape the next day and he did a little of that…but mostly, his aim was to break up his co-stars, his crew and an audience largely made up of studio personnel. It was dirty joke after dirty joke after dirty joke and I couldn't understand how that helped them get a show taped. One of Skelton's writers — Martin A. Ragaway, mentioned here recently — told me, "It was just something Red needed to get out of his system before he could focus on the actual script."

Never even tried to get into ABC or most of the movie studios. I got to wander around the Universal lot for a few days when I did a job for the Universal Studios Tour, rewriting and punching-up the script that the tour guides rattled off for the folks on the trams. Others I hear have claimed authorship of one much-delivered joke in that loose, ever-changing script but I claim I was the one who came up with "There's the house where the movie Psycho was filmed. That little road alongside the house is called the Psycho Path."

Don't stone me. I was seventeen.

The most interesting thing that happened to me on that lot — and it's keeping with the theme of the above joke — is that I was walking by a bungalow when a man shuffled out and I recognized him instantly. How could you not recognize instantly Alfred Hitchcock? I said hello and he held up a card with the address of some other office on that vast lot and asked if I could tell him how to get to it. I was carrying around a folder of maps of the whole studio and I shuffled through them and delivered a semi-educated guess that it was on the far, far other side of the lot.

I don't know if I was right but Mr. Hitchcock assumed I was so he announced he was going to order a car and driver to take him. He thanked me and then waddled back into the bungalow and that was my entire experience with Alfred Hitchcock. It's still one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me.

The only other studio I visited more than once in that period of my life was Paramount. I remember watching some of the filming of the pilot for a short-lived series called Me and the Chimp on an exterior set. On my next visit, I watched a scene filmed on the exact same exterior set for Mannix.

On both of those visits, I watched some of the rehearsal for episodes of The Odd Couple, where anyone who wandered in seemed welcome to sit in the bleachers. Here's a scene in a finished, aired episode that I watched some of in rehearsal…

What I recall most from watching that series rehearse is that Jack Klugman and Tony Randall were so professional and so determined to find the right way to read every single line, where to stand, how to turn, etc. They'd do a few lines, then stop and discuss what was right and wrong with what they'd done. Sometimes, it involved the director and once in a while, Garry Marshall would be around and he'd be involved. But mostly it was like Randall was directing Klugman and Klugman was directing Randall. The attention to detail was total.

Once, a page of rewrite was suddenly delivered to the set, essentially negating what the two men had just spent the previous half-hour rehearsing. They bitched and moaned, then went sharply back into professional mode and began learning and discussing the staging of the new lines. Having heard the stories of another nicely-matched duo, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, barely rehearing a Honeymooners before doing it in front of a live audience, I was aware that I was witnessing the exact opposite — and probably the way most sitcoms were done.

I'll probably think of other moments of this sort in the future but this is enough for this post. Thanks for asking, J.

In 1968, The Turtles were so hot in the pop music marketplace that they could even put out a cynical parody of themselves and sell a lot of records. This was "Elenore," which I had on my mixtape not because I thought it was a good song but because I thought it was a stupid song…and I was kinda pleased that its makers intended it as such. Howard Kaylan, the group's lead singer and author of the song explains…

Kaylan's partner in The Turtles, and later as Flo & Eddie, Mark Volman died recently. They were both guys who had a healthy sense of humor about what they were doing and what had happened to them. That's one of the reasons I liked both bands, especially the latter.

Among the millions of panels I appeared on at the 2025 Comic-Con International was one hosted by Gary Sassaman, producer-writer-director of the "Tales From My Spinner Rack" YouTube series. The panel was a three-way discussion of Jack Kirby's covers for his initial run on Fantastic Four, with the other "way" provided by John Morrow, the man behind The Jack Kirby Collector.

We discussed all those covers and picked our favorites…and Gary has used that at the basis of this installment of his blog series. If you loved Marvel Comics from that period, you'll probably love this video…

We here at newsfrome.com are always grateful for donations to keep this thing approximately breaking even. By "we," I mean me and by "this thing," I mean this blog which I have enjoyed producing — and continuing to produce — since December of 2000. I'm declaring our annual September blog-a-thon closed as we've (I've) received enough to pay for the last year's expenses. If you want to get a jump on next year's expenses, there's a box on this page to do that but I've been made whole for now and I really appreciate that.

Here's another episode of The Red Skelton Hour, this one from October 26, 1965. The musical guest is Johnny Mathis, an entertainer I've always kinda liked. I once saw him in Las Vegas and he put on a very good show — nothing flashy, nothing high-pressure. His opening act was Norm Crosby and then Mathis came out and…well, he was never a huge star but he had a long, long career making audiences happy.

Starting around the eight-minute mark, there's a snazzy little number with Mathis and the Tom Hansen Dancers, which was the house dance troupe on Skelton's show for years. He also had the Alan Copeland Singers and I was never quite sure where the Tom Hansen Dancers stopped and the Alan Copeland Singers began. I think sometimes they had the singers dancing or the dancers singing…or maybe the dancers lip-syncing to the singers.

One of the dancers you'll see in this — don't ask me which one he is or what his name is — is probably the guy who did a beautiful job fixing my front door. When I moved into my house in 1980, a rather magnificent door had some bad patches in it. Someone had assaulted the door with a hammer and chisel but according to the lady who sold me the place, they still were not able to break in. She'd had a temporary patch installed but never got around to bringing in someone who could do a better job. A few years after I took up residency, I decided it was time.

I had a contractor doing upgrades on my home and he brought in a finish carpenter he said was a genius. He was right. The gent cut out the patch, installed new wood, then painted it to perfectly match the color and grain of the rest of the door. Making it good as new took a lot of his time and my money…and as he worked, we talked a lot about his career. Woodwork was what he did when he couldn't get dancing jobs and in 1982 or '83 — whenever this was — he longed for the days when he was a Tom Hansen Dancer, working every week for about half the year.

He said they had almost no contact with Skelton. Red was only around once or twice when they'd fold him into a musical number just for a gag. I had also talked about the series with one of Skelton's longtime writers, Martin A. Ragaway, and he told me Red never had the slightest interest in those segments of his show. He liked that they were there but didn't even watch them. "All he cared about was telling jokes," Ragaway said. In my several encounters with Red, that was my impression too.

Here's the episode. There's a large cast in the big Sheriff Deadeye sketch and one of the supporting players is Walker Edmiston again. Also in there — and in a lot of Skelton's shows — is Dave Sharpe, an actor and stuntman whose career dated back to movie serials and even stunt-doubling, though not for the stars, in Laurel & Hardy films. Any time on a Red Skelton Hour you see someone crash through a wall or window, it's probably Dave Sharpe.

In case you missed it, Jimmy Kimmel had Spinal Tap on his show the other night.  This is the conversation part of it but they also performed a musical number at the end of which their drummer (for some reason) did not explode.  You can watch the musical number here.

David Letterman just did an interview in which he talks about the current state of late night TV including the Colbert situation.  Quite interesting.

The chat is in conjunction with the new Letterman streaming channel which will only be available on Samsung TVs.  I don't have a Samsung TV and since there's Dave aplenty on You Tube, see no reason to change televisions.  I do have Samsung computer monitors in my little office here.  I'm staring at one as I type this.  But since they're around fifteen years old, I doubt they contain the technology to pick up the new Dave channel.  I will say though that Samsung does make pretty long-lasting monitors.

Playbill has posted some news about the upcoming 100th birthday of my favorite performer and yours, Dick Van Dyke. They also have up some photos of Dick in the 1980 stage revival of The Music Man at the New York City Center and later in a national tour. The production was directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd and it had Meg Bussert as Marian the Librarian and child actor Christian Slater — yes, that Christian Slater — as Winthrop (the Ron Howard part). Carol Arthur played Mrs. Paroo (Marian's mom) and Iggie Wolfington played Mayor Shinn. Mr. Wolfington played Marcellus Washburn and sang "Shipoopi" in the original production.

I have what I hope you'll think is an interesting story about that show.  I didn't see it in New York but — always the fan of Mr. Van Dyke and this musical — I saw it at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood during the few weeks it was camped there on a tour of the U.S. In fact, I saw it twice. At the time, I was working on the infamous TV series, Pink Lady and Jeff, and when my date for that night had to cancel on me due to illness, one of the show's guest stars happened to wander into my office just as I was trying to think who to take in her stead.

I told him I had tickets in a couple of hours to see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man and asked if he was interested in going with me. He said, as I already knew, "You know I played Harold Hill in the original production right after Robert Preston left the show." I said I knew that. He said he'd be delighted to go with me as long as I let him take me to dinner first at the Musso-Frank Grill a few blocks down Hollywood Boulevard from the Pantages. I agreed…

…and that's how I wound up dining with and then going to see The Music Man with Bert Parks. He loved the production and wished they'd asked him to do it. In fact, I believe he later contacted the producers and offered to return to the role if they wanted to continue the tour after Van Dyke left it. Which they didn't. But that night, he told me some wonderful stories about doing the show on Broadway and we got backstage after the performance, though Dick had already left.  I've been fortunate to get to know him in recent years.

How did I like the show, you may ask? Well, even if you didn't ask, I'll tell you: I loved Dick Van Dyke (of course). In a way, he was a little too nice a guy to play someone trying to swindle a bunch of Iowans outta their hard-earned savings but I bought into it. What I really didn't like was the Pantages that night. They've upgraded it considerably since the eighties and now, if you can score good seats, it's a decent place to see a show. Back in the eighties though, the acoustics were awful and we didn't have the greatest seats.

All the actors in the show wore microphones, of course, but the sound was still not great. What made it worse was that Dick Van Dyke's mike was apparently on a separate circuit or something. His voice came out of one set of speakers that seemed to be way up in The Heavens. Everyone else's voices came out of speakers on either side of the stage. It was somewhat distracting, especially when he sang a duet with anyone. He was singing live but it gave him kind of a "dubbed" feeling. Again, not the fault of the actor who, in my book, could do no wrong except for English accents.

My date who phoned in sick was this lady, Kristine. She was apologetic and a few days later she was better, she asked if I could get more tickets and take her to see the show before it, as Professor Harold Hill was wont to do, skipped town. I had a connection then who could get me great tickets to shows…and all I had to do was pay a lot for them. He got me two great tickets — well, I thought he'd gotten me two great tickets — and we made plans. On the evening in question, Kristine would take a cab to the KTLA studios which is where we were doing Pink Lady. She'd be there at 5:30 PM, by which time I hoped to be done for the day, then I'd drive us to dine at Musso-Frank, then go see the show at the Pantages at 8 PM, then go back to my place for the night and…well, it didn't all work out that way.

Working on variety shows, as I did back then, could be an all-consuming, all-demanding job.  I mean, you can get six hours sleep some nights if you're lucky, then spend every other moment at the studio, sometimes trying to write jokes at 3 AM (when nothing is funny) or at 4 AM (when everything is funny…until the next morning.)  Pink Lady was an extremely difficult show on which everything that could possibly go wrong did, along with several things that couldn't possibly go wrong…except they did.  I did not finish work at 5:30 that afternoon when Kristine arrived.

I do not remember the specific multiple crises that day.  There were so many on that show.  I do remember Kristine arriving and looking so sweet and eager to be part of  a fun evening…and I remember being so exhausted that I broke into tears.  The folks I was working with were telling me, "You can't leave, Mark.  Not until we fix this problem and this problem and this problem…"  For one of the only two times on that show, I hit my limit of overwork.  I announced that no matter what, I was taking Kristine that night to see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man.  They could fire me if they wanted to but I was going.  The producers I was working for saw that I was serious…or maybe that I was going to explode if I didn't have that evening of R-and-R.

We did some quick re-planning.  Dinner at Musso's was out.  One of the assistants on the show ran across the street to Denny's and got some burgers for Kristine and me.  She sat quietly in an empty office and ate hers.  I ate mine while helping solve the most serious of the immediate problems.  No matter what, we were heading for the Pantages at 7:30 for the 8 PM performance.

In the midst of this, I happened to check the envelope for our tickets and found not a pair of them but two pair.  Four side-by-side seats.  I called My Friend, The Scalper and he had some explanation I don't remember as to how I'd paid for two and received four.  Okay, fine.  I got on the phone and called a good friend of mine, Will Meugniot — a terrific artist with whom I did a number of comics — and he accepted the last minute invite.  He and his wonderful wife Jo would meet us outside the Pantages at 7:45.

At 7:30 with some (not all) of the critical mass problems solved, I grabbed Kristine and we sped off to the theater.  Will and Jo were waiting for us and we went in and sat in much better seats than Bert and I had…and I can't tell you how good I felt to be sitting in them.  I enjoyed the show ten times as much as before.  One of the things theater can do so well is take us away from our problems, at least for a while.

After the show, Kristine and went back to the studio.  I put her in a cab and sent her home.  Then I worked until two…maybe three in the morning, solving the remaining problems which, as I recall, involved collaborating with some of the other writers to create an entirely new main sketch for the show.  I drove myself home feeling surprisingly refreshed and I got something resembling a good night's sleep.  That was before I had to return to the studio the next day to tackle twice as many problems.

After we finished the six episodes of Pink Lady and Jeff — which was all there probably ever would have been — I moved on to other programs and occasionally, there were those work-all-day-into-the-wee-small-hours situations.  Sometimes, someone who was laboring right along with me at 3 AM asked how I was able to get through the all-nighters without drugs or drink and  I would tell them, "I just imagine I'm going to go see Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man."  Dick was no longer doing the show by then but you'd be amazed how well that fantasy worked.  When I'm slaving at this keyboard and it's approaching dawn, I still sometimes use it.  Works like a charm.