In March of 1994, a revival of the musical Damn Yankees opened at the Marquis Theater where it played for 519 performances, though not continuously. At one point, it closed for two months while the show was retooled to bring in a new star. I wound up seeing it four times, which I believe beats my record for seeing a Broadway show on Broadway more than once by about two times. Two of those times were on consecutive nights.

It was one of those revivals that changed the original a lot…in most cases for the better, I thought. Starring initially were Jarrod Emick as Joe Hardy, Bebe Neuwirth as Lola and Victor Garber as Applegate, aka The Devil. They were all sensational. So, but in different ways, were their replacements who I saw the fourth time I saw the show.

I shall now attempt to explain why I wound up seeing it four times. This article is mostly about TIME #3.

TIME #1 was just to see it. This was very shortly after it opened and I liked it a lot but did not leave the theater with any particular yearning to see it again.

A couple months later, I was back in New York on business and TIME #2 occurred because I was dating a lady who lived in that fine city and she wanted to see it. No, let me amend that: She really wanted to see it. No, let me amend that further: She really, really wanted to see Victor Garber, who had been on some TV show or something she'd loved. I decided if it would please her that much, I could sit through it again so I got tickets for a certain night and we arranged to meet at the J.R. Steakhouse for dinner at 6 PM before the show.

When I got to the restaurant that evening, the hostess had a message for me from My Date. She was very sorry but there was a family emergency…a dire family emergency. She could not meet me for dinner or the show. Okay, these things happen. But I had the tickets and nothing else to do that evening so I decided to go anyway.

I remembered that my friend Jerry Beck was then living and working in New York…working out of an office about a block (literally) from the Marquis Theater. I called him there and asked if he wanted to see Damn Yankees with me. He did and we wound up having dinner first — not at the very expensive J.R. Steakhouse but at the cheapest place in the world to get what purported to be a steak…a chain that was then in New York called Tad's. Anyone who ever ate at a Tad's is now chuckling over the very mention of its name.

When I got back to my hotel that evening, there was a message to call My Date. She had just gotten home from a hospital where a close relative was in serious trouble and she apologized over and over for standing me up. I forgave her for doing that…and I was really good at it because in my dating life, I'd had a lot of experience being stood up. At that, I was a seasoned pro. She asked me if there was any way I'd be willing to get another pair of tix to Damn Yankees and she swore that no matter what, she'd be there. She would even reimburse me for the tickets, she said.

I agreed and that brings us to TIME #3. We'd meet at 6 PM the next night at the J.R. Steakhouse, just as we hadn't the night before. Oh — and I need to explain here that the lady I'm referring to as "My Date" was very active in the comic book business. You'll see in a second why that's relevant to this story.

The next day, I procured the tickets and that afternoon, I had lunch with a longtime editor at DC Comics, Julius Schwartz. If will surprise no one who knew Julie that he insisted we go to a particular diner that he frequented, not so much for the food but because of the waitresses. They were all pretty cute and they liked to engage in a certain amount of flirting with the customers…or at least didn't mind it if the tips were generous. This was 1994 and that kind of thing was a little more acceptable then than it is today.

Julie knew that while in New York, I liked to go to Broadway shows and asked me if I was going to one that evening. I thought but did not say out loud, "If I tell him yes, I have tickets for one this evening, he's going to insist I tell him who I'm taking and it's really none of his business." I wasn't sure that My Date wanted others to know we were going out, even though it was just dinner and a show, nothing more. So I fibbed a bit. I said, "I might if I can find someone to go with."

Longtime readers of this site are probably aware that my life abounds in weird coincidences. Julie said, "Hey, I know who'd just love to go out with you tonight!" and he mentioned the name of My Date. That's right: It was the lady who'd stood me up the night before and was promising to show up that evening. Before I could say anything, he called over to one of the waitresses, "Bring me a phone" and began thumbing through a little address book he always had with him. It contained contact info for damn near everyone in the industry.

This diner had phones that could be plugged in at any table if a customer wished to make a call. In half an instant or less, he had My Date on the line and he said to her, "I'm sitting here with Mark Evanier. How about going to a show with him tonight?"

I could hear a little of her end of the call and she sounded confused but said, "Well, I really want to see Damn Yankees!" Julie turned to me and said, "She wants to see Damn Yankees. Do you think you can get tickets for Damn Yankees tonight?" I — sitting there with tickets to Damn Yankees that night in my pocket — said, "I can probably arrange that."

Julie covered the mouthpiece of the phone and asked me if I wanted to take her to dinner first. I said, "Tell her 6 PM at the J.R. Steakhouse." Julie uncovered the mouthpiece and told My Date, "And he wants to take you to dinner first." I could hear her say, "Right, 6 PM at the J.R. Steakhouse." Julie said, "Fine," and when he got off the phone with her, he said, "Wow, that's an amazing love connection. She thought of the same restaurant that you did and the same time." And then he made me thank him about fifteen times for getting me a date for that evening and fantasizing out loud about post-show recreational activities that I knew were not going to occur.

That evening, My Date showed up at the J.R. Steakhouse around 6:20 — close enough — and the same receptionist as the night before said to her, "Good, he's been waiting for you for twenty-four hours and twenty minutes." When she was escorted to our table, the first thing My Date said to me was, "What the hell was that call from Julie all about?" I explained it to her over supper and then we went to see Damn Yankees, which she loved. No, let me amend that: She loved Victor Garber. After the curtain came down, I volunteered to take her someplace for dessert but instead she said, "Take me backstage to meet Victor Garber."

I told her I had no credentials or "ins" or any way of getting us backstage but she said, "Just tell them you're in show business!" Yeah, like that was going to work.

Well, it kinda did. We went to the Stage Door and I talked with the fellow guarding it. I didn't exactly lie but I stretched a few truths and dropped a name or two…and to my surprise, we got backstage and chatted with some of the performers. One was Victor Garber, who couldn't have been nicer.

A dancer in the show asked me if I was there to meet Mr. Abbott and I gasped, "George Abbott?" If you know who George Abbott was, you can skip the next paragraph which I copied off some website…

George Francis Abbott (June 25, 1887 – January 31, 1995) was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, screenwriter, film director and producer whose career spanned eight decades. He received numerous honors including six Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982, the National Medal of Arts in 1990, and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Among the many shows for which he was responsible were Pal Joey, On the Town, Call Me Madam, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, New Girl in Town, Once Upon a Mattress, Fiorello! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

That is a very partial list — about a third of all Mr. Abbott did — and it includes my favorite show, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the original production of which he directed. It also includes Damn Yankees, the original staging of which he directed and he also he co-wrote the book and co-directed the film version.

The dancer invited us to come with her to a rehearsal hall where there was some sort of photo-op taking place with Mr. Abbott. He was seated in a wheelchair and she introduced me to him and told him I was "a young playwright."

If you're wondering why Mr. Abbott was in a wheelchair, there's an easy explanation. Mr. Abbott was 106 years old. And the thought did occur to me at that moment that compared to him, Neil Simon was "a young playwright."

He shook my hand and while it was hard to make out all that he was saying, I'm pretty sure he told me to keep working on whatever play I was working on and to get it in front of "hot bodies." I figured out that meant "paying customers" — people who've purchased tickets. "Until then, you never know what you've got," he said. Then he added, "Don't give up even if it takes 35 years."

I replied, "If it takes 35 years, will you still come to the opening?" He chuckled and promised to be there.

This was thirty years ago so I still have some time to finish a play…but that was my entire exchange with the legendary — and that's an adjective I don't use loosely — George Abbott. Others were waiting to meet him and I probably shouldn't have been there in the first place but I was glad I was. I was thrilled to meet him…almost as thrilled as My Date was to meet Victor Garber. (And no, I didn't take the money she offered me for the tickets.)

TIME #4 of me seeing that production of Damn Yankees was after Mr. Garber was replaced in the role by Jerry Lewis. I wrote about that trip back to the Marquis Theater — for Jerry's opening night, no less — in this blog post long ago.

Recently, I was reminded of this whole story because our friend Shelly Goldstein sent me a link to the opening number from the 1994 Tony Awards and I've embedded it below. Victor Garber — in his guise as The Devil from Damn Yankees — hosted a medley (I guess you'd call it) of numbers from that season's musical revivals.

If you watch it, you'll see him, you'll see some numbers from Damn Yankees and other shows…and at the end, you'll see Mr. Abbott, age 106. This show was telecast on June 12, 1994 — several weeks after I met him and a little over seven months before he died at the age of 107. Make sure you watch this all the way through…

P.S. because I know some of you are wondering about this: Yes, Julie Schwartz did call me the day after TIME #3 to find out if I'd gotten laid. I told him (truthfully), "No but I got to meet George Abbott." He didn't seem to think that was much of a consolation prize.

And if you get tired of looking at the Gondwana Namib Park in Namibia, here's a webcam pointed at the Okaukuejo waterhole in Etosha National Park, also in Namibia. At this one, you will often find elephants, the occasional rhinoceros and a few other animals that don't seem to hang out much at the Gondwana Namib Park.

With both webcams, you'll often find long periods of time when no one seems to be thirsty, especially when it's the middle of the night in Namibia. But if you use the little YouTube slider and move it to the left, you can scroll back through previous hours and see who's been there lately. I'm really having a good time looking at these places. It's exciting to see animals in the wild with no humans around to impact their behavior. I feel the same about some Trump rallies…

This is kind of interesting. As I've mentioned many times on this blog when we've been discussing polls, there's one called the Rasmussen Poll which always swings wildly Republican/Right Wing. A lot of the poll aggregators don't include it in their aggregations because it always seems like such a skewed outlier. Needless to say, it's almost always the one Donald Trump cites when he wants to argue that he's way ahead and not long ago — I believe before Biden said "Arrivederci" — they showed D.J.T. winning the Presidency by ten points.

Well, the Rasmussen Poll is now showing Harris/Walz one point ahead of Trump/Vance.

I wouldn't take that as firm proof of her dominance. It is, after all, within the Margin of Error. But it's gotta be causing Trump to hurl ketchup bottles at the walls. If you're watching that webcam I linked to earlier that shows you the watering hole in Namibia in Southern Africa, you may see the animals being scared off by the sound of him screaming.

And for those of you who want to contribute to keep this blog free, free from paid ads and free from being purchased by Elon Musk…

This is such a great video link that I shamelessly stole it from the website of my friend Paul Harris. To assuage some of my guilt, please go over to Paul's website and read a few articles. This will be no hardship for you because everything he posts is of interest, especially when he hauls out an old audio file of some interview he did with someone exciting during his 40+ years of radio broadcasting.

This is a live feed — not a pre-recorded video — of a webcam focused on a watering hole within the Gondwana Namib Park in Namibia. At times, you will find no sign of life in the shot but at other times, you will be able to watch as giraffes, ostriches, hyenas, cheetahs, warthogs and other animals approach the waterhole to drink or bathe or cool off. The webcam is on 24/7 so it's just like any streaming cable channel you might watch. If you don't like what's on now, check back in half an hour. Here's the live feed…

And in case there's no wildlife there at the moment, here's a pre-recorded "highlight reel" of some of the creatures you might see there if you keep checking in. I may wind up watching this more than Comedy Central…

Here's Julie Andrews singing a jazzed-up version of a song from My Fair Lady that she didn't sing in My Fair Lady…

Hey, here's a website that might amuse you for about three minutes. It's called Random Street View and when you go there, it takes you to some random place on Google Maps. I just went there and it plunked me down in the middle of the General Anthony Clement McAuliffe 101st Airborne Memorial Highway in Easton, PA. I always wanted to visit there.

You can set it to restrict your landing spot to a specific country or you can just let it take you wherever it wants you to go. On my next try, I wound up at Toila-Oru, 41714 Ida-Viru County, Estonia…just where I was thinking of moving if Trump wins.

Not much change anywhere. Harris is still a few points ahead of Trump but just a few. This makes his supporters nervous that she'll beat him and her supporters nervous that she won't. Trump keeps doing things like his visit to Arlington and his double-talk on Abortion that you'd think would cost him voters but I don't think any one or two missteps will. The cumulative effect might but not any one thing. It looks like the next few weeks will be a lot of anger at judges and prosecutors who want to hold the 45th President accountable for misdeeds. I wouldn't expect a lot of talk about policy except maybe on the debate stage if/when that happens.

Kevin Drum has a good explainer up about what happened with the withdrawal from Afghanistan which was not as much of a mess as some make it out to be.

Things are getting worse on the legal front for Rudy Giuliani. I suspect that will be the case every week for a long time so let this be a lesson to us all. If any major media outlet ever dubs you The Most Respected Man [or Woman] in the Country, try to live up to that label. Don't act like it's some ongoing version of The Purge for you and laws no longer apply.

And lastly for now: Trump said recently in an interview that he would win California if Jesus Christ counted the votes. Okay…but every single poll now shows him losing the state by about two-to-one — and Adam Schiff is trouncing Steve Garvey in the Senate race by about the same margin. So are all the polls rigged, too? I'd love to hear how that works.

Someone on Facebook posted this photo of Jerry Lewis and Artie Forrest, probably in Vegas, probably there for Jerry's annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Artie was at least the director and often the producer of that ritual year after year.

Arthur Forrest also may have held the world record for the most hours or live and quasi-live television directed by anybody. He was a lovely man who had done just about everything you could do in TV and nothing bothered him. If in the middle of a live telecast, the studio had been attacked by Godzilla, Artie would have calmly handled the crisis, getting everyone to safety while all the time making sure he got a good shot of the towering monster as he crushed the sets under his feet.

To direct for Jerry all those years, you had to have that skill set.

Seeing that photo got me thinking of one of those "might have been" episodes of my life that didn't happen. I had worked with Artie on a number of shows and one year, he asked me to be a writer — I think maybe the only writer — on that year's telethon. It meant about three weeks in L.A. writing intros and speeches for Jerry and then about a week in Las Vegas for rehearsals and the actual live telecast. The money offered was, at it so often is, in that "Barely Acceptable" category and that was not a surprise. He said everyone was working for minimums since, after all, the more they paid us, the less went to help Jerry's Kids.

If anyone else had told me that, I would have called Bandini on them. I'd worked one day on another telethon and the folks running it could not disguise — almost bragged, in fact — how much of what was being collected went into their pockets. But this was Arthur Forrest…as honest and straight-talking as anyone I'd encountered in the teevee biz. I instantly decided that if I did it, it wouldn't be for the money but for the experience. And ten seconds later, I decided I wouldn't do it at all, at least that year.

I'd worked with Jerry and I knew he was like that Milton Bradley Time Bomb game I'd played as a kid: You knew it was going to go off. You just didn't know when — or in Jerry's case, about what. I also had other work to do those weeks and wasn't sure if I could juggle both. A live show has all sorts of "This has to be written right this minute" situations and I couldn't be sure how many of those I might encounter.

There were a few other reasons not to do it but the ones in the above paragraph were enough. I told Artie no but said, "Maybe next year?" He said he'd ask me again and then he didn't. I don't recall why. Maybe he didn't produce the telethon the following year.

In any case, I watched much of the telethon I didn't work on and kind of regretted my decision. There were guest stars it would have been fun (or at least interesting) to be around. There were some Special Musical Material spots — songs written for the show — that were the kind of thing I liked to do. I kept thinking of spontaneous jokes I wished I could teleport onto Jerry's cue cards. I really felt like I'd made the wrong decision.

Then a week or two after, I had dinner with a lady I knew who'd worked on the telethon as a Production Assistant. I asked her how Jerry was and she started telling me stories about yelling and fighting and making impossible demands and what the guy who took the job I declined went through…and I decided I'd made the right decision. That show was a lot more fun to watch than it would have been to work on.

And, speaking of telethons…

In 2017, September 1 was designated as "Letterer Appreciation Day." I actually don't know who designated it as such but reportedly, they picked the first of this month because that was the birthday of the late Gaspar Saladino, who is/was (I guess) the favorite letterer of whoever made the decision. Actually, there have been many great letterers in comics and that list would include Ben Oda, Artie Simek, Rome Siemen, Howard Ferguson, Sam Rosen, Abe Kanegson, John Costanza and so many more.

I am pleased that we appreciate letterers on September 1 because they sure don't get sufficient recognition the rest of the year. It has always been one of the two most unheralded jobs in comics, the other being the coloring. Letterers, especially in the era when it was all done by hand instead of computers, often had to do emergency, stay-up-all-night services or a comic would be late for the printers and/or some artist might have nothing to do (and therefore no way of earning a living) for a few days.

And their work is a vital part of the artistry of any page on which it appears. I remember once when Jack Kirby was looking at a page of original art that he had penciled and Joe Sinnott had inked. It was the first page of a story and there was a big, bold story title on it lettered by Artie Simek. Jack pointed at Simek's handiwork and said, "That is the most skilled part of this page!"

Any list of great present-day letterers would certainly include Stan Sakai…and it's easy to overlook him because most of the time, he does comics where he writes, draws and letters. Thus, we tend to think of him as a full service creative talent, not a letterer. But he of course letters and often wins awards for so doing, and also for the comic he does on his own, Usagi Yojimbo.

Since Sergio Aragonés and I began producing Groo the Wanderer back in the late seventeenth century, Stan has done all the lettering save for a small number of pages (like eight or so out of thousands) and always (ALWAYS!) on time, usually overnight. That he does it so efficiently is amazing. That his work is always so perfect is a great bonus. Here's a video of Stan at work in honor of Letterer Appreciation Day…

If, like me, you have trouble understanding why a guy who seeks the highest office in our land would go to a military cemetery and grin and give a "thumbs up" signal…well, Jonathan V. Last has what seems to me like a good explanation. Simple summary: Because wherever Trump goes, it's not about where he is or what others might be feeling. It's only about him.

And speaking of what I was speaking about in the previous item here: In 1970 when Jack Kirby quit Marvel Comics and defected to the enemy — otherwise known as DC Comics — one of the first of many characters he created for his new publisher was Morgan Edge. Mr. Edge was the slimy, mob-connected Chief Exec of the massive entertainment conglomerate that owned, among other things, The Daily Planet and the Galaxy Broadcasting System…those places where Clark Kent worked. And here, I'll quote Wikipedia quoting me about the guy…

Morgan Edge first appeared in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #133 and was created by Jack Kirby Kirby based his physical appearance on actor Kevin McCarthy, while his personality was inspired by television executive James T. Aubrey. According to Kirby's production assistant Mark Evanier, Kirby "wanted to explore the theme of organized crime gaining a foothold in corporate America — particularly a giant media conglomerate. Given the shady background of the company that acquired Warner Bros. and DC [i.e., Kinney National Company], it was something of an inside joke." However, under prodding from editorial staff who preferred Edge to be an ongoing supporting character rather than a villain who would ultimately have to be brought to justice (and thus written out of the series), the "Morgan Edge" connected to Intergang was revealed to be an imposter.

Actually, I think the editorial folks (and some above them) were just plain uncomfy with connecting a big media conglomerate like theirs to organized crime. That's why they turned the Morgan Edge that Kirby created into that freshest of all plot ideas…an evil twin.

Jack had read much about James Aubrey in the news and it really didn't matter for Jack's purposes if it was true or not. To him, it was just an idea with great story possibilities and he thought that DC had missed out on a lot of them by nicening up Morgan Edge. Aubrey at the time was getting a lot of bad press and alienating a lot of creative talent doing things like…well, for one, cutting 28 minutes out of Blake Edwards' latest movie.

Today in the "I Shoulda Known" Department, we have this: Last night after watching the great Blake Edwards documentary on PBS, I noted how one of his films I'd never seen — Wild Rovers (1971) — was reportedly ruined by studio interference. Studio Head (though not for long) James Aubrey severely hacked down its length, enraging Mr. Edwards such that he packed up his family and moved to Switzerland to get away from H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D. I asked which home video release restored the film to the way its maker wanted it…and here comes the "I Shoulda Known" part…

This morning, I received this message from my real good friend, Mike Schlesinger. Mike used to work for Sony where his job basically came down to knowing which great old movies they owned and telling them how to market them for current moviegoers. Here's what Mike wrote me…

As the person who actually did "restore" it, I can tell you that the Aubrey version runs 109 minutes and Blake's version runs 137 minutes. That's the surest way to know which one you're watching. AFAIK, all releases from Laserdisc forward have been Blake's.

I put "restore" in quotes because it turns out there was one "international" negative that somehow escaped Aubrey's slimy hands, and I simply made the new prints from that. It was later used to preserve his cut.

Fun fact: This is also how I rescued Ken Russell's The Boy Friend.

And Mike didn't mention it but he also did the same thing with another Blake Edwards film, Darling Lili. I'd long thought that Edwards' later film, S.O.B. — which is about a director fighting back when his movie is destroyed by a studio head — was mostly about Darling Lili. Turns out, it was more of an amalgam of the two experiences…and Mike was also involved with Edwards getting to recut Darling Lili for home videos years after its butchering for general release. Amazingly, the Director' Cut in this case was shorter.

Amazon is offering a Blu-Ray of Wild Rovers and they say it's two hours and 17 minutes…so that would be the Edwards restoration. I just ordered a copy of it and while I may not get around to watching it right away, I will. You can click that link and get your own copy and if we both enjoy it, we'll have Mike Schlesinger to thank. Oh — and maybe Blake Edwards, too.

I just watched and can highly recommend the new American Masters profile on PBS, this time covering film director Blake Edwards. I liked a lot of his movies and, as sometimes happens with a filmmaker, felt a kind of connection to the guy. And it's a good documentary as evidenced that it made me want to re-watch some of his movies and see a couple that I've missed.

I also understand a little bit more what one of his quirkier movies — S.O.B. — was all about. It was about how a studio head — Jim Aubrey, who was widely despised when he ran MGM and before that, CBS — drastically recut and ruined Wild Rovers, a movie of which Edwards was very proud. I see online that most of the omitted footage was restored for at least one DVD release. Can anyone tell me which DVD or Blu-ray release it was?

So I recommend the profile of Mr. Edwards — and while I have your attention, I recommend clicking on the below link…

I didn't write anything when Phil Donahue passed away recently and I should have. He was the most successful of the small (and getting smaller) group of TV talk/interview hosts who have done it with some dignity and a dearth of sensationalism. If you watch the video below, you'll find moments when he talks a little too much and tries to draw unhappy memories from his guests…but he always kept that down to a minimum and tried to ensure that they felt interviewed and not exploited. I wish we had more like him today.

This is an episode of his show from 1990. The original production of A Chorus Line was soon to close on Broadway and members of the original cast — as this interview makes clear — received but a teensy fraction of its financial success for sharing their personal memories in workshops. They co-authored a book on their experiences and their appearance on Donahue was to promote it. I met one of these people at a party once and at least this performer carried a lot of resentment over how little they made off the show. So did Neil Simon who did an uncredited/uncompensated "punch-up" of the script.

If you've been reading this blog for a long time, you may remember this video. It was a link a long time ago here but that link's dead so here's your connection to a much better copy of the program…

Donald Trump, who said just days ago that he would be "great for women and their reproductive rights" now says he'll vote against a Florida initiative which would give women greater reproductive rights. He's said a great many other contradictory things about the abortion issue plus outright lies like that the pro-choice movement is pushing laws that permit executing babies after birth.

I would think any reasonable person would look at all these statements and conclude that Trump has no policy on the matter of abortion; that at any given moment, he'll say whatever he thinks will get him donations and votes, and that he'll say the opposite the following week if it will help him. No one (including Donald Trump) knows what the hell he'd do on abortion-related matters if he gets back into office.

Meanwhile, the man is also — once again — confusing himself with Superman.