Monthly Archives: February 2013

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

I ain't watching.

Last night out at the TV Academy, they had a panel on surviving in show business at an advanced age. Folks like Marvin Kaplan, Charlotte Rae and Pat Carroll were on the dais…and a surprise addition was Jerry Lewis.

I wasn't there but my friend Gary Conrad who was reports that Lewis made an announcement: His musical of The Nutty Professor will open on Broadway on July 15.

That was apparently all he had to say about it: No theater, no pre-Broadway out-of-town booking to get the production in shape for New York, no nothing. I'll believe it when there's a credible theater named.

Folks in Southern California are about to have a rare (too rare!) opportunity to see the wonderful Shelly Goldstein perform. She's doing one night — Tuesday, February 19 — at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood. She'll be singing her way through her show, One Fine Day: The Groovy Girls of the Sixties — a tribute to Lesley Gore, Janis Joplin, Carole King, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Mama Cass and other fab femmes of that decade. Shelly sings their songs and a few of her own…and the audience has a fine, fine time. Buy your tix now at this here website.

A website called airfarewatchdog has something you'll want if you ever fly anywhere. It's a chart of the various fees that airlines charge above and beyond your basic fare to fly. It will tell you, among other things, why so many of us like to fly Southwest.

Southwest is, by the way, one of the few airlines currently posting a profit. Could there perhaps be a connection?

Hey, today I'm bringing you the PBS documentary, Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy. The window below will show you the first twenty minutes and then you can click and be transported to a PBS web page where they'll show you the rest of it. It's a good fill that features interviews and clips about the American musical theater and the role Jewish folks played in establishing and shaping it. Allan Sherman, prefacing his parody of My Fair Lady, used to say, "I got to wondering what it would be like if all the great American musicals had been written by Jews. And then I realized — they were!"

I see former New York Mayor Ed Koch has died. Not having lived in New York during his terms in office, I have no particular feelings that he was a good mayor or a bad mayor…but he certainly was a colorful, interesting mayor. You know the old joke that goes, "Where's the most dangerous place in the world? Answer: Anywhere between [Name of Person] and a camera"? I've heard that joke with a lot of names inserted but the first and most prevalent was Ed Koch.

But I kinda respected Ed Koch…for sheer honesty much of the time. I don't think he or any politician could be honest all the time — not and get elected. But Koch was sometimes delightfully unfiltered and blunt. The night he lost his bid for a fourth term, a reporter asked him to what he attributed his defeat. His answer went something like this…

I could give you all sorts of answers having to do with the changing demographics of the state and with people blaming the city for some of the labor unrest and strikes…and there might be some truth to some of that. But the real answer is that sometimes, after a while, the public just gets sick of your face.

So true, so true.