Monthly Archives: April 2007

newsfromme, your full service weblog, is about to do some of you a big favor. You may recall a recent post here where I discussed the new Hostess Cupcakes that come in 100 calorie packets. Lately, I've been trying almost every 100 calorie item I've spotted in my local markets. These come in handy for me. Since my Gastric Bypass Surgery, I don't have to worry much about my weight but I have to eat in certain rhythms. It usually comes down to two or three small meals a day and three or four smaller ones. The 100 calorie packets are usually perfect for the latter, not so much because of their calorie count but their size.

I've sampled the Chips Ahoy, Oreo, Lorna Doone, Planter's Peanut Cookies, Cheese Nips and Ritz Mix packets, all from Nabisco. The Ritz Mix, I found nearly inedible and since I bought a box of six packets, I forced the other five on company. The Oreos bothered me because they weren't Oreos. It was as if the Nabisco scientists said to the boss, "No way can we configure Oreos for 100 calorie packages," and the boss said, "I don't care…I want 100 calorie packets of something I can say are Oreos." So they came up with these air-filled chocolate wafers that they claim are Oreos but which have nothing to do with real Oreos. They're probably decent cookies but who can swallow a lie like that?

The other Nabisco products were okay. So were the 100 calorie packets of Cheetos that come from that company, and I've also tried 100 calorie Hershey dark chocolate bars, 100 calorie Thomas' English Muffins, 100 calorie Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn and the aforementioned 100 calorie Hostess Cupcakes. They were all decent in that they were either tasty food or they reminded me of tasty food. But I'm here to tell you about my favorites, and some of you will thank me for this.

The Trader Joe's chain has gotten into the 100 calorie sweepstakes with several items, two of which I like a lot. One is their cheese crackers, which are shaped like little toucans. The other is their oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, which are shaped like oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. They taste pretty good, you get more product in each packet than you might expect, and the ingredients do not include too many unpronounceable chemical names.

Give 'em a try…and while you're there, you might want to sample some of Trader Joe's other 100 calorie products, just in case you like the cinnamon graham cracker toucans more than I did. They were all right but I liked the others better. The stores also have some multigrain cracker toucans that I didn't test. In my experience, Trader Joe's products are very hit and miss, and when I find a good one, I sometimes opt to not press my luck.

Craig Yoe has up some nice photos of Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, along with the first week of The Wizard of Id. Boy, that was a funny strip during its best years.

Another post about the new NBC series, Thank God You're Here. As I mentioned, last Saturday night I was with a group of people who excel at improv comedy and have studied it with the best teachers and co-improvisers in the world. There, the buzz on the new show was uniformly negative to the point of disgust. This article by Dan Kois sounds like a transcribed summary of those complaints.

I agree with everything in the article but I will add the following, not so much in defense of the show as explanation. Some of the press releases claim the show is "improv" but the producers themselves don't seem to be claiming that, and the folks using that term don't seem to mean "improv" in the classic tradition of Second City, Viola Spolin, The Groundlings, Del Close, Nichols and May, etc. In classic improv, the goal is to create a scene that is natural and organic and, if possible, funny. On Thank God, the goal seems to be to create an instant blooper reel where one player on stage (and only one) is in trouble and we can laugh at his predicament and perhaps applaud how he gets out of it.

There are some theater games in the classic tradition that revolve around one person not knowing who he is or what the scene is about…but even in those, as played at Second City, no one has any advance prep. So it's a challenge for the one naïve performer to guess what has been predetermined but it's also a challenge for the others in the scene to hint and convey that information for him. Everyone is improvising. The producers of Thank God seem to have decided that it's more fun to stack the deck against the one player. The improv vets who are criticizing the show know from past experience that the "real thing" would be more entertaining.

Jim Brochu is performing his one man show in Houston. This is the one I raved about here in which he channels/recreates Zero Mostel, right before your eyes. It's called Zero Hour and if you're anywhere near the Stages Repertory Theatre, get a ticket right away.

Bob Bergen is performing his one man show in Hollywood. This is the one I haven't seen yet but I know how good Bob is so I'm going to go and you should, too. It's called Not Just Another Pretty Voice and it's the story of — to use the oft-quoted line about Bob — a nice Jewish boy who grew up to be the voice of Porky Pig. It's at the Stella Adler Theatre every Wednesday through May beginning next Wednesday.

The Totally Looped show, which I've said good things about here in the past, is back in a new home…also in Hollywood. Beginning Saturday evening, April 28, they'll be appearing the last Saturday of every month at the iO West Comedy Theater, which is just a couple blocks from where Bergen's doing his show. They are great and well worth your attendance.

Finally: Recently here, I raved about the Spolin Players, a group that does genuine, 100% improv comedy in a classic tradition. Their next performance will be on Saturday, May 5 at the Westsideeclectic, which is situated on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I'm going to try to get to this one, too.

The musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway on September 22, 1964. Since then, that show and that Fiddler have never stopped playing. It is always being produced somewhere. There are actors who have literally made their livings for decades by going from one production of Fiddler to another, playing whichever role they were then the right age for.

The show was a hit all over the world and the following anecdote has appeared in almost every article ever written about its popularity. The anecdote tells of how the show opened in Japan, translated into the language there and featuring a local cast. It was a big hit and someone involved in that production went to the folks who'd originated the show and asked, "Was this really a hit in America?"

The American producers were puzzled. "Of course," they replied. "Why wouldn't it be?"

The Tokyo producer responded, "Well, it's so Japanese."

A Japanese Fiddler on the Roof? What could that have been like?

GSN will salute the life of Kitty Carlisle Hart with two reruns of To Tell the Truth that will air late Sunday night, April 22. More correctly, they're on Monday morning — at 3 AM and 3:30 AM East Coast time. I'll get them here on the West Coast at Midnight and 12:30 AM via my satellite dish.

The first is the episode from March 5, 1957 which featured her first appearance as a panelist on that show. One of the segments involved the panel guessing which of three men was the real Alan Freed. That's the disc jockey Alan Freed, who was famous for bringing rock 'n' roll to the masses, as immortalized in the movie, American Hot Wax.

The other episode they're going to air is the one I mentioned in the previous item and it's from 1973, with her son Christopher in disguise. I don't know if they got the idea from what I posted here — probably not — but either way, I'm glad they're running that one.

A classy lady, Kitty Carlisle Hart, is dead at the age of 96. She did a lot of fine movies but when you're in A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers (as she was), it's understandable that people forget all the others.

She was Kitty Carlisle then. She became Kitty Carlisle Hart when she married playwright-director Moss Hart and became his partner in every sense, even to the extent of aiding him when he directed shows like My Fair Lady. After his death, she became the guardian of his legacy, making sure that the plays and his autobiography, Act One, were kept available and treated with the proper respect.

Many people probably know her best from the game show, To Tell the Truth, where she was a longtime panelist. She had a refreshing honesty and seemed to really enjoy what she did. If anyone from GSN (aka The Game Show Network) is reading this and thinking of running some episodes as a tribute, there was one — it was on the daytime version during, I believe, the Garry Moore era — where the impostors were all under heavy make-up. When they unmasked at the end, one turned out to be her son, Christopher, and she practically fell off her chair. If GSN can dig that one out of the vaults, I think people would love to see her wonderful reaction.

The last few years, despite being in her nineties, she performed occasionally in both New York and L.A. with a one-woman show where she sang songs and told anecdotes about her incredible life. Somehow, maddeningly, I never got the chance to see her, nor was I able to accept an invite to go have a meal with her in Manhattan. We did exchange notes once. She made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's Radio Days and I wrote her a note to let her know that at the Writers Guild screening, a roar of recognition and applause had greeted her appearance on the screen. She wrote back a cordial letter that said something like, "I would rather be applauded by a roomful of writers than all the other people on the planet." Indeed.

Here's a link to one of several obits on the 'net today.

Among the dozen-or-so political websites I hit every day are those in Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo empire. He has several and he's expanding not only in the number of sites but in what they do. Recently, he has begun producing little online webcast segments such as the one I thought you might like to watch.

It runs seven minutes and it's in two parts, both taped the other day when John Kerry went in to appear on The Colbert Report and Marshall and his cameraman got to ride along. The first part, recorded in the back of the limousine, is a fairly unremarkable interview with the senator about his new book on the environment. The most interesting thing about it is a "blogger" getting this kind of access to someone like Kerry. The interview is, of course, entirely benevolent…but I like the potential. Bloggers roaming about with video cameras and the ability to post their reports to the Internet could do a lot to make up for "real" journalists who don't ask hard questions.

The second part is backstage at The Colbert Report as Stephen C. greets Kerry and briefs him on how the interview will go. If you watch Mr. Colbert, you may be fascinated by what he tells his guest, which I'm guessing is pretty much what he tells all of them.

The New Yorker has posted online a number of articles that appeared in that publication and discussed the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Here's John Updike on Vonnegut, James Atlas on Vonnegut, and Susan Lardner on Vonnegut.

The Mann National Theater in Westwood Village is closing this week. It opened March 27, 1970 and one of the first movies it offered — and the first I saw there — was the Mike Nichols movie of Catch 22. A bunch of my friends went to a matinee and I would describe our reaction to the movie as mixed, leaning towards the negative. But there was one scene we liked a lot. It was the one early in the film with Paula Prentiss removing her clothing. We all agreed that was filmmaking at its finest, and that we had to stay for enough of the next showing to see it again.

So we stayed…and after our favorite scene was over, we all got up to leave. So did about eighty other males in the theater, all of whom had remained in their seats after the previous showing for the same reason. If Mike Nichols had had the presence of mind to make that scene last ninety minutes, I think we'd all still be there.

I feel a certain sense of personal loss hearing that the National is closing. I spent a lot of my life back then in Westwood Village and watched them build the place. Westwood was a great "date" community back then with plenty of restaurants, movie theaters and stores to browse. Often, we'd dine at the Hamburger Hamlet and then walk over to the National. After the movie, it was one block to Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor or two to a shop called Golden Star that served great made-on-the-premises sorbets and ices. Those were, as we nostalgists call them, the days.

It's probably not surprising though that the National's closing. At 1,100 seats, it was just too big and probably too unprofitable to occupy so large a plot of prime, expensive real estate. The last time I was in it was for the world premiere of Sin City two years ago. It didn't dawn on me then that its management was considering closing the theater but now that it's been announced, I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah…it did seem a bit shabby." It was probably a matter of either shutting down or spending a few million to refurbish and maybe carve the National into a bunch of smaller theaters.

It's not old enough to mourn as one of those great old movie palaces that are works of art, themselves. Truth to tell, the National always struck me as an ugly, uncomfortable house in which to see a movie. But I did have many a great evening that included a visit there…and I'm sorry to see a reminder of those evenings going away.

Since the lawyers have been slow at getting the Garfield cartoons removed from YouTube, I can link to another one I wrote. This is called "Mistakes Will Happen" and if you're ever writing a cartoon show and you want to get the animators pissed at you, just decide it would be fun to do a cartoon that's intentionally full of errors.

Actually, I just made a mistake in the previous sentence. I don't know how the animators felt about this one since they were in Taiwan. But the people at the American studio who had to concern themselves with budgetary matters had a lot of problems, and I believe the line producer had to keep going back and having the animation crew insert mistakes they'd accidentally left out. People got very confused over which mistakes were mistakes and which mistakes were supposed to be there and when he said, "This is wrong," it sometimes meant "this is right," which of course meant it was wrong but not in the way it was supposed to be wrong. I kinda like it when the production process gets to be as silly as the cartoons.

In addition to the usual voice people (Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger and Thom Huge), this one features a line by Garfield's creator, Jim Davis. He does the voice on the police radio. I also have a line. That's me saying, "Garfield cartoon, take two." Hope you enjoy what you're about to see as soon as you click. If not, it was a mistake to post this.

Someone who signs himself "JonesR" writes to ask…

Do you know any history of the collaboration of Parker and Hart (I'm checking the obit as I write this). Because I was always curious as to, well, at least, who wrote and who drew, and if they may have both at times done either.

I figured that Hart did the character designs, then pretty much let Parker run with it. Parker may have had a history of providing gags to B.C. Or Hart may have given gags to Wizard of Id in the same sense that the Mort Walker crew might work out the gags on three different strips running, or the way some of the Simon/Kirby work seemed to leave the casual reader with a sense of not really being quite sure who may have been doing what.

My understanding is that Parker did no writing. Hart had a team of helpers — friends, assistants, gag writers, whatever you want to call them. Hart acted as Head Writer for a squadron that wrote both strips. The gags for Wizard of Id were sent to Parker and it was his job to get them drawn, which he did with increasing help over the years. The gags for B.C. were drawn by Hart with a little assistance.

Initially, the characters for Wizard were designed by Hart, Parker and a few others all sitting around a hotel room with ample drawing paper and liquor. Thereafter, sketches were exchanged by mail, fax or occasionally in person.

As anyone who's worked in a collaborative situation will tell you, there are times when contributions blur and even the guys who did the work aren't sure who contributed what. In gag-writing, it's not at all uncommon for Mutt to come up with a joke and Jeff to rephrase it and both guys to think they wrote it. I'll bet a lot of the jokes in both strips fall into that category.

The Hogan's Alley site has up a good interview with Hart in which he talks about his work, including much about the team that aided him with the writing. This chat is about thirteen years old and my understanding is that some of the aides changed in that time, plus Parker handed off more and more of the drawing duties on The Wizard of Id to others. But the modus operandi remained pretty much the same.

You might want to take a look at this extensive Washington Post poll about what the people of this nation (or at least the ones polled) think about Bush and Congress and the war and all the major issues that concern most people and don't involve American Idol. The numbers aren't so good for Bush or Congress, but it's the Congressional numbers that have me a bit puzzled. I think there's a key question that isn't being asked here.

If someone says that they disapprove of the way Democrats in Congress are doing their job with regard to Iraq, what does that mean? Does it mean they think the Democrats have been too aggressive in stopping the war or not aggressive enough? That's a big difference and it's the most important issue facing Congress (and maybe the country) today. But for some reason, those who feel the Democrats in Congress should do more in this regard are being lumped in with those who feel they should do less. I'm guessing, based on the other answers, that most of the disapproval is because they aren't doing more…but that's just a guess. It would be nice if the pollsters broke it down for us.

Last Friday, I was a guest on the Time Travel radio show. Today, you can download an MP3 file of it (it's inside a ZIP file for some reason) from this page. Beware if you go there to get it. The site plays creepy music.

This runs two and a half minutes and may be of interest only to folks who live in or around Los Angeles.

One of the last surviving "chains" of the old style coffee shop is Du-Par's. There are three of them left, down from a one-time peak of, I believe, eight or so around the Southland. The original one was in the famed Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax in L.A., and that one's still there, having recently reopened after a two year closure for remodelling. From the outside, it doesn't look all that different. (An observation: You can sometimes spot a long time Angeleno when they refer to the place as "Du-Par's Farmhouse." But it hasn't had that name since the early sixties.)

We used to say that at a Du-Par's, you could get excellent breakfasts, okay lunches, pretty awful dinners and, for dessert, some of the best pies in town. The pies were — and I guess still are — baked right on the premises. I have to guess here because even though I live within walking distance of one, I haven't been to a Du-Par's in years; not since the chain was taken over by new owners. Interestingly, the new proprietors are of the family that used to operate two other great L.A. coffee shop chains — Tiny Naylor's and Biff's. I'll have to get to a Du-Par's soon and report back on if the breakfasts are still great and the dinners are still poor.

Someone — I have no idea who — put together this little montage of stills from Du-Par's history. I believe most of the images are from the Farmers Market location. It's our thing for you to click on for today.