Monthly Archives: March 2003

In case no one has sent you a link to this mind-reading trick, here's one.

In the past, I've raved about the shows down at the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities.  Each year, they do a quartet of fully-staged musical productions for a mere two dozen performances apiece.  This is possible largely because they work with a pool of experienced directors and (usually) cast actors who have done the shows before.  Their staging year before last of Peter Pan, for instance, was basically the long-touring Cathy Rigby production with Cathy Rigby's understudy in lieu of Cathy Rigby.  Ordinarily, shows done with minimal rehearsal for short runs look like…well, like shows done with minimal rehearsal for short runs.  With a few minor exceptions, theirs do not.

They did a superb job with their most recent offering — a production of Ragtime which I'd urge locals to run see but for the fact that the performance I caught last night was the last one.  It's a shame, if only because I think half the audience would have eagerly purchased tickets to see it again.  I would have.  Apart from slightly less fancier sets (though still impressive for a three-week stint), this was a Broadway-quality mounting.  Here's the L.A. Times review which says much the same thing but goes into greater detail.

Ragtime is a lovely show, especially if you can get past the way several disparate storylines wander until they too-conveniently intersect.  It captures something quite beautiful about the aspect of America that promises the chance for immigrant and minorities to better themselves — and it does not idealize that promise beyond reality or suggest that it will always be honored.  Ragtime music underscores much of it, and other quite lovely music underscores the rest.  Indeed, the music almost never stops, creating a symphony of human interaction.

The next show the Civic Light Opera is staging down there is Smokey Joe's Cafe and I have no reason to expect it won't be another first-rate production.  My friends who live in Los Angeles or the Valley might well go, "Redondo Beach?  I don't want to travel that far."  But it's not as distant as it sounds; about ten minutes south of LAX.  It's a very comfortable theater with good parking — two things I can't say for too many theaters in Southern California.  It's kind of disarming to realize that some of the best theater in Los Angeles isn't in Los Angeles.

Many thanks to those of you who sent birthday greetings for yesterday.  I'll get around to sending individual messages as I get the time.  Also, there are a couple of folks who've sent cash donations to this site lately but when I've written to thank them, those messages have come back as undeliverable.  (The money seems to be good; it's the thank-you note that bounces.)  All of this, please be aware, is appreciated.

That's a Jeep — the kind you can own without helping the terrorists.  The Jeep was an occasional pet of Popeye the Sailor and experts disagree as to whether the vehicle was named after the character or not.  I don't want to get into that.  I just wanted to plug a terrific website that I learned about by visiting Jerry Beck's terrific website.  The one I want to plug is the terrific website run by the Calva Brothers, devoted to the early Popeye cartoons produced by Max Fleischer Studios.  Great stuff there, with more to come.

We have several pages on this site about Cartoon Voices and on most of them, I say
something like…

Please do not send me voice demos or requests to hear your samples or to hire you or to refer you to an agent.  I get way too much of this and have had to vow never to hire or refer anyone who approaches me this way.

That's pretty straight-forward but for some reason, I get about six e-mails a week that say something like this actual example…

Hi.  I can do dozens of great voices and have always dreamed of becoming a cartoon voice actor like Mel Blanc.  Can you give me a job or help me to get one?

These messages always leave me a bit puzzled: Did this person read this site?  If I'd always dreamed of doing something like that, I'd search out and devour every available nugget of info I could find.  But perhaps they didn't bother to look.  I get an awful lot of e-mail from people asking me trivia-type questions that they could have answered for themselves with a twenty second visit to any good search engine.  Many people do not seem to realize that the Internet is a tool to do your own research, rather than to merely e-mail someone else to see if they can give you a fast reply.

Or perhaps they did read the articles here and thought, "Hmm…that sounds too hard.  I'll just ignore that and see if there's an easier way.  What have I got to lose?"  That's one of the downsides when a means of communication, like the Internet, becomes too easy.  It doesn't cost anything to send out a zillion e-mails to strangers, asking if they'll send you their bank account numbers.  It doesn't cost anything to write to strangers and ask if they'll make your dream come true.  It's kind of like buying a lottery ticket because it makes you feel better to be "doing something" to change your life — but deep down, if you're at all honest with yourself, you know you're not going to win and that it's not a substitute for taking real steps.

Either way, I've decided to stop taking those e-mails seriously, and to stop presuming that those folks are really serious.  Maybe someday, some of them will be.  Until that time, I'm not going to allow them to bother me, any more that I'm bothered by all those messages from beautiful Russian women who want to marry me.  I figure the success ratio is about the same.

Apologies for a tech problem (not my fault) that made this page difficult for some to reach for two brief periods over the last few days.  And thanks to all those who wrote to alert me to it.  It shouldn't happen again — but then, I thought that after the first time it was fixed.

Goldie Hawn wasn't there but many other folks involved in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In were present last evening as the Museum of Television and Radio honored a breakthrough comedy series of the sixties.  The dais consisted of producers George Schlatter and Ed Friendly, writer Chris Bearde, musical contributors Ian Bernard and Billy Barnes, and performers Dick Martin, Ruth Buzzi, Lily Tomlin, Arte Johnson, Alan Sues, Gary Owens and Joanne Worley.  Ms. Worley allowed others to talk, but not often.  As usual for these events, clips from the show were run and then the panel talked about what it was like to work on the series.  Among the sizzling revelations we heard were that Arte Johnson got in trouble with the Polish Anti-Defamation League for telling a gibberish joke in double-talk Polish (they assumed it was dirty); that Alan Sues once stuck his head up Kate Smith's dress; that Richard Nixon used the "f" word; that the censors gave them a lot of hassle; and that Judy Carne never wore underwear.

I was a big fan of Laugh-In, and I enjoy watching the reruns that air now on the Trio cable channel — or, actually, I did enjoy watching them until I realized they only have about 40 shows that they run over and over and over.  (Someone let me know if they ever get more.)  But then I always enjoyed the show.  In my teen years, when I started writing comic books for Disney, I'd take the bus to Burbank, drop my work off at the lot, then walk over to NBC and talk my way into a Laugh-In taping.  Only a few segments ever had a formal audience but when they were taping short comedy bits, as they always seemed to be, you could sit in the bleachers if you seemed even remotely connected.  So I can verify what they all said last night, which was that their tapings were enormous fun which transferred to the air.  Years later, I worked on a Laugh-In imitation that was taped in the same studio.  Its tapings were not a lot of fun, and I think it showed.

Not much else to report about the evening.  Lily Tomlin is brilliant, but you already know that.  It was nice to see George Schlatter and Dick Martin together, proving that old feuds can be buried.  I was a little bothered that so many folks who worked on the show — in front of and behind the camera — went unmentioned: Not a word about Larry Hovis or Richard Dawson or Johnny Brown or Teresa Graves or Chelsea Brown or Barbara Sharma or Dennis Allen or about three dozen more, plus most of the writers.  But other than that, I had a great time, and so did a whole auditorium of people who remember Laugh-In fondly.

By the way: If you can't get Trio and want to see old episodes of Laugh-In, they're coming out on video.  The initial push — via a Gunthy-Renker website and upcoming infomercials — seems to be towards getting folks to sign up for a subscription.  You know the kind: First one's cheap, then every month or so they send you another volume and bill your credit card at a higher price.  I don't go for those and, if you have a lick of sense, neither do you.  But the tapes and DVDs should be available soon after on a pay-as-you-go basis.  I'll let you know when I see them being sold that way.