If you are a professional in the comic book field, this would be a good time to take a moment and vote online in the Eisner Awards.
Subtle hint: In the category of "Best Archival Collection/Project — Strips," you might want to pick Pogo, vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash, by Walt Kelly, edited by Carolyn Kelly and Kim Thompson (Fantagraphics). Why? Because comic strips don't get any better than that.
Hey, remember the specialty number last night at the Tonys? The one with Neil Patrick Harris, Andrew Rannells, Megan Hilty and Laura Benanti all singing about their experiences in television? Well, you can read the lyrics here…and see a clip of the performance.
Still can't get over that opening number. I've watched it about fifteen times and just the logistics of making all that happen — live! — seem impossible.
Wow. Who would have thought you'd ever see a Tony Awards broadcast where Mike Tyson got more camera time than Nathan Lane?
I hope you tuned in if only for that opening. I'm serious when I wrote earlier it was the best production number I've ever seen on an awards show. The big problem with it was that the rest of the ceremony couldn't follow it. Host Neil Patrick Harris wore us all out in the first few minutes and thereafter, the opening of envelopes — and some of the production numbers from current shows and nominees — seemed like a letdown.
The critic for the New York Times said of the song from Matilda, "If that show's number didn't produce an instant spike in ticket sales, there's no hope for the theater." Sure didn't make me want to rush for the box office and neither did the performance from the show that won Best Musical, Kinky Boots. The revival of Pippin, maybe…and didja notice that as it picked up award after award, it wasn't until the final one that an accepter gave a proper shout-out to Bob Fosse? I kinda liked the scenes from Motown, A Christmas Story, Cinderella and Annie; didn't like the others.
I didn't much care for the idea of having songs introduced by "characters" from ongoing musicals…and I felt sorry for the actors who were not identified by their names but only by their roles. I see a few folks on the 'net complaining that too many acceptance speeches are delivered by producers and not by the people who actually wrote and created the winning shows. I agree with that. But I think my biggest kvetch was the disappearance of Mr. Harris from so much of the proceedings. He was great whenever he appeared but he didn't really host the show. Announcer Randy Thomas did and Harris popped up now and then.
Still, I enjoyed the show tremendously. There were some wonderful thank-yous…Billy Porter's and Cicely Tyson's, in particular. There was a genuine love of theater in the room. There were no dull moments. And even though I haven't seen Kinky Boots, I was delighted to see Cyndi Lauper win and be so visibly moved.
Many years ago, I co-produced a CBS special with Ms. Lauper and two other folks. The show came out okay but I didn't get along with Cyndi. I was a tremendous fan of her as a performer and I'm sure she never believed that. She was new to TV production and it fell to me to correct her mistakes and tell her that so much of what she wanted to do was technically and/or financially impossible. I've worked with people I didn't like or respect so I was unbothered by them not liking or trusting me. I liked Cyndi Lauper — liked her a lot — so I was unhappy that we argued so much and wound up not speaking. I expect she's forgotten the whole, unpleasant experience but I haven't…and I'm not the least bit surprised to see her become an important and successful composer for the Broadway stage.
Anyway, the Tony Awards were great…and one more thing about Mike Tyson: I know there are people in America who catch a little of this show and are appalled to see so many gay people on their television screens. I wonder if any of them were bothered by the violent, convicted rapist. Say what you will about Harvey Fierstein but he never bit anyone's ear off. I don't think.
Just saw Neil Patrick Harris do the best damn opening number in the history of award shows.
My friend and birthday-sharer Laraine Newman recently starred in a web video parody of the TV series, Girls. Here's part of what she wrote about it over on Huffington Post…
I am a fan of the show Girls. I've seen every single episode. I think Lena Dunham is an astonishingly talented writer and performer. My older daughter, also named Lena, is around the same age as the girls portrayed on the show and about to be in that no man's land of "We've graduated college, now what are we supposed to do? There are expectations of us, not to mention the ones we have of ourselves and we're trying to find our way." It's so well presented and heartbreakingly funny I feel hurled back to that time as I watch it.
I'm also aware that Girls is incredibly polarizing, which bewilders me because not only do I think it's good but I think it just gets better and better. That's why, when Gail Lerner, the writer and director of Girls: Season 38, sent me her script, explaining to me that it "wasn't just a parody but also a valentine" to the show, I was curious to read it. Without giving anything away, let me just say I think that Gail is a truly original and extremely funny writer and the script was as solid as they come. But here's the catch; she wanted me to play the role of Hannah.
I think the parody and Laraine are quite wonderful. Here it/she is…
Back in the sixties, when I lived back in the family home I just sold, there was an elderly couple that lived across the street. They were Mr. and Mrs. Stearn, though at some point they began spelling it "Stern" to feel, I guess, more a part of America. They were as sweet and nice a couple as you could find, though they lived in constant terror. Each night at sundown, they would lock their doors with steel bars, like securing a bank vault from the inside. They would turn off all lights in the house but for a bedroom in the back where the windows were sealed-over such that no one outside could see there were lights on in there. And they would huddle in that room, watching TV with the volume kept low and fighting off the fears that uniformed Nazis were coming to take Mr. Stern away…again.
This was in West Los Angeles in the sixties. There were no reports of Nazis coming to take anyone away…indeed, no reports of Nazis doing much of anything except occasionally shouting in parades. Still, it had happened to Mr. Stern when he was a young Jew living in Germany and he'd never been able to escape the nightmares.
That time he was taken away, he spent more than a year in a Concentration Camp where he was tortured about eleven different ways, including being made to believe each night that he would be executed at dawn. Each morn, someone he knew was indeed executed but his own demise was postponed…and postponed and postponed and postponed. He was moved from camp to camp and finally, the Nazis abandoned the camp he was in at the moment and he was rescued. He and his wife reunited and got the hell out of Europe forever. It was the same wife he now had — the only one he ever had — and she still had her own version of the nightmares.
During the day, Mr. Stern was a charming, friendly man who would occasionally be in the mood to sit and tell me stories of those days. He had a thick German accent and physically, he looked exactly like someone you'd cast to play a Nazi in a World War II movie. He received occasional offers. Casting directors would see him in a store and hear his accent. They'd approach him and ask if he'd be interested in a role on TV or in the movies and he'd recoil in horror and begin screaming at them. There was not enough money in this world to get him to step on a movie set resembling a Nazi encampment…not enough money in the world to get him to don one of their uniforms. He would later feel bad that he'd yelled at someone for innocently making him the offer but it was the hottest of hot buttons. He simply could not control himself on the topic.
One time in a supermarket, someone yelled at him. As I said, he looked like a caricature of a Nazi. Think Otto Preminger but taller. A man spotted him, heard the accent I suppose, and begin screaming at him, calling him a "Nazi bastard" and a war criminal and other such labels. Mr. Stern did not yell back. He merely reached over, unbuttoned his shirt cuff, rolled up his sleeve and showed the man the tattoo he'd been given, I believe, at Ravensbruck. The man stopped yelling, displayed his own tattoo from Treblinka, and the two of them fell into each other's arms, crying and bonding. They wound up in a nearby tavern drinking ale together all afternoon and discussing the different-but-similar terrors they'd lived with ever since.
The Sterns were good friends of our family and I would often take food (including tuna fish) over to them…but I had to get it there before the sun went down. Once it was dark, they would not answer the door. They would not answer the phone. On Halloween, they would just leave out a big bowl of Tootsie Rolls with a sign that said, "Help yourself." There was a kid down the block named Brett who would usually help himself to all of them.
One night, Mr. Stern got home from somewhere just as the sun was setting. He raced inside and bolted the door…and a half-hour later, I noticed he'd left the lights on in his car. We tried phoning and knocking but that didn't do any good. So I went over with a wrench, popped the hood open on his old Pontiac and unhooked one of his battery cables from his battery. I left a note on the car telling him what I'd done and said that in the morning, he should phone me and I'd come over and reattach it so he could drive. I have never been thanked for anything I've done so much as I was thanked for that. He hugged me. He gave me gifts. He thanked me every time I saw him for the rest of his life. There was a time I thought that when I died, the opening line of my obit would read, "Mark Evanier, who once stopped Michael Stern from having a dead battery, is dead himself tonight at the age of…"
The rest of Mr. Stern's life after that incident was not a long time. I think it was two or three years…and when he went, we all knew Mrs. Stern would join him before long. I think she lasted about two months.
One evening early in those two months, my mother answered the phone and was startled to hear the voice of Mrs. Stern. It was dark outside and we were used to her and her husband hiding from the entire world when it was dark out. She asked if I could perhaps come over and help her with something. Over I went…and it was an odd feeling going in that front door into a totally dark home. She asked several times if it was me and I had to holler to be heard so she was certain it was. Then came a scene you may recall from The Producers where Zero Mostel is visiting one of the li'l old ladies he hopes will invest in "Springtime for Hitler." He waits and waits while one lock and chain after another is unfastened from within. I waited the same way.
Finally, I got inside and she led me by the hand, holding one tiny flashlight, to the rear bedroom with the sealed windows. This was the only time I ever saw it and the only time in all the years I knew them that I (and probably any neighbor) saw any more of their home than the front hall. She sat me down in a chair which I believe had been his chair and she said, "Please…just talk to me." I did…about anything and everything I could think of. What I said didn't matter. I just had to get her mind off the feeling that she was alone there because Michael was back in that Concentration Camp. A few days later, she moved out of that house and went to live in another city with relatives…and before long, we heard that she had died.
I wish I'd thought to take a tape recorder over on those occasions when Mr. Stern got to talking about his past. He was rarely in the mood…and never when he was approached by researchers and scholars. I don't think he ever told his story anywhere and I'm not sure I even remember the details of where he was imprisoned correctly. What I will never forget is the horror and passion in his voice…how he shook all over when he told me of things he witnessed, inhuman acts performed on human beings for no rational reason. It was more than two decades earlier but the way he spoke, you would have thought he'd seen it all last night…as perhaps he did.
Robert Reich on the polarization of America. Nothing's getting done in Washington and too much is getting done on the state level.
Here's a terrific 20-minute documentary on Johnny Carson's early days in Nebraska with an emphasis on his Nebraska roots. It was produced by students in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film and includes interviews with Johnny's brother Dick, Ed McMahon, Dick Cavett, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, David Letterman and a number of Johnny's friends from college…
I've been posting things about my knee problems here because, well, when you commit to blog almost every day, you wind up writing about most things in your life, especially when you think you have some interesting or funny things to say about them. It also saves time. Friends of mine read about it here and then I don't have to tell them or have them later say to me, "Why didn't you let me know about this?" I am absolutely not asking for sympathy or pretending it's important that I can't climb stairs without wincing a bit.
Something I've learned about injury and illness is that it's important to keep these things in perspective. When you're sick, you can make your problems worse — even make yourself actually sicker — by living in an overdramatized mindset. Recovery can have a lot to do with not thinking like a sick person…but at the same time, you have to be realistic and not set yourself up for constant disappointments by expecting that broken leg to be fully-healed by Thursday. A friend once said to me of another friend, "He's making his condition worse because he doesn't know how to be sick."
Every indicator suggests my knee will be fine in a month or two. I have to accept the pain and inconvenience that I will experience in that time and decide that I'm not going to let it encroach on my life and work any more than it has to. If I resent it…or if I see it as a bigger problem than it is, it can become a bigger problem than it is.
I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing lately because I have so many friends who are not well. I have a lot of that in my life and it's not just because I'm 61. As you get older, you expect more and more of the people around you to have medical problems and even die. What I'm observing goes beyond that and I think it has something to do with the economy…and with the cost of health care. My torn meniscus will end up costing me around $8000 even with pretty decent health care. I asked a lady at the surgical center what something like this could wind up costing someone with no insurance. She said that in her experience it was roughly a factor of ten — $80,000 — and could go even higher. Needless to say, there are folks out there who simply don't have the eight grand, let alone the eighty.
That's bad but like I said, my problem should be over in a month or two. The real tragedy is with people whose conditions are open-ended and which could persist for a long, indeterminate period.
Each morning, I awake to e-mails and calls from sick friends telling me the latest. I log into various forums and read updates…like I just read the latest from Stan Sakai about his wonderful wife Sharon. I've known the two of them since before Stan began lettering Groo the Wanderer, which was before he created his own, highly popular comic book character, Usagi Yojimbo. They are great people and it breaks everyone's heart that Sharon is suffering with a benign but inoperable brain tumor. "Benign" is better than "Malignant" but it has still caused her just about every conceivable health problem one can have: facial paralysis, anemia, rapid heart rate, double-vision, difficulty in breathing, difficulty in swallowing, difficulty in speaking, massive weight loss, etc.
I read all that and I have two kinds of reactions, one of them a bit selfish. The selfish one is that I think, "Jeez…and here I am thinking it's a tragedy that my right knee is going to be hurting for a few more weeks." The non-selfish one is to feel for Sharon…and for Stan and what he must be going through. They're smart, strong people and they have insurance — but smart and strong people have their limits and so do insurance policies.
I am one of those people who doesn't like "Obamacare" because it is not Single-Payer. It's better than what we had before and infinitely better than the Republicans' "repeal and replace" goal which seems to largely sidestep the "replace" part. When I hear John McCain acting like he's offended there's a war we could be in and aren't, and you think what those wars cost us just in terms of dollars, it's a real head-shaker. The most conservative estimates suggest Afghanistan and Iraq will wind up costing U.S. taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion and we'll spend the rest of our lives trying to explain what we got for our money. Some estimates say that single-payer would more than pay for itself and lower the over-all costs of health care in this country. Even if it didn't, ten years of it couldn't cost more than we spent to rid the world of those Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein didn't have.
Will this happen? Someday. 'Til then, we put up with it and people will continue to suffer and die because they can't afford to get things fixed. I have at least two friends who I believe died unnecessarily because they couldn't afford good insurance. In the meantime, I'm glad for mine…and glad that my problems are so minor compared to some. I hope I don't give the impression that I think this knee thing is anything more than a minor annoyance.
We're looking forwards to the Tony Awards tomorrow evening if only to see what Neil Patrick Harris and his crew come up with this year. About the excerpts from current or recent productions, we are less enthused.
This was not a great season for Broadway. No show has had the impact of Book of Mormon or The Producers or even Spamalot. There's actually a bit more suspense than usual about who will win so if N.P.H. is doing one of those "recap" songs at the end, they've probably had to prepare more alternate lines than usual. Best New Musical seems to be a race between Matilda and Kinky Boots. Best Play could be Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike or Lucky Guy or maybe one or two others. Musical Revival looks like Pippin but Best Play Revival could be almost any of the nominees. And maybe the real suspense is in the category of Best Actor in a Play which appears to come down to a battle between two big stars, Tom Hanks and Nathan Lane. (I've seen none of these but then neither has 99% of the audience that might be tuning in to watch.)
According to this article, many Broadway theaters have been — or still are — empty, waiting for some show to have its act together enough to occupy their stages. This was not the case just a year or two ago. Every theater was booked solid and a lot of producers who tried to find a place to play couldn't. If the folks behind the musical of The Nutty Professor had their financing in place, they could have their pick of several fine houses in New York but obviously they don't…and if they don't now, it's hard to imagine when they would. The last we heard of that show was Jerry Lewis announcing anywhere that would listen to him that it would open on Broadway on July 15th, which of course ain't gonna happen. There are probably another fifty shows that were reportedly "Broadway-bound" in the last few years that never got there and never will. When it was difficult to get a theater, they had an excuse. Now, they don't.
For boring, silly reasons, my knee surgery has been delayed a couple weeks. I got another cortisone shot today to minimize any pain 'til then.
There was a shooting spree this afternoon out at Santa Monica College, a school I attended (sorta) from around 1973 to 1975. These things are chilling news no matter where they happen but they're a little scarier when they occur somewhere you've actually been.
Walt Patterson sent me this. The Rijksmuseum, he informs me, has just reopened its gallery with Rembrandt's stunning (and huge) painting, "The Night Watch." Here, it comes to life at a shopping mall in Amsterdam…
Posting will be light here today, then normal over the weekend, then light again on Monday. Monday, I'm directing a Garfield recording session in the morning, then having minor surgery on my right knee in the afternoon. Today, I have to do all sorts of things to prep for both.
Monday will be one month to the day since the knee, which had been a problem for a little over a week, suddenly and inexplicably went from bothering me a little to bothering me the way being hit with a baseball bat would bother one. My orthopedist doused the agony with a shot of cortisone which did wonders but now seems to be wearing off…or something. I am in zero pain as I sit here and write this. I am in minor pain when I walk on it as long as I keep moving. If I stand in one place, it hurts somewhat more. And if I go up and down stairs — like, say, the ones in my home — I need to bite on a bullet or something. Monday, I'll be in and out of surgery in an hour they say…and back here by nightfall.
Two different readers have written to say they're looking forward to my inevitable (to them) postings about how I hate my new Time-Warner cable TV set-up and, like Ike Turner pleading with Tina to take him back, will be begging DirecTV's forgiveness. Right now, the begging all seems to be on the part of DirecTV, which is sending me offers they never made me when I was an 18-year customer of their service. I don't think it's impossible I will return but so far, I'm not unhappy with Time-Warner.
The worst change for me is that on Time-Warner, shows on Comedy Central and HBO are copy-protected so I can't do what I used to do when I had DirecTV. I'd move episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Bill Maher's program to my PC, edit them down to the segments I especially liked and save them on my computer. There are workarounds for this but they're involved and time-consuming and I don't want to mess with them. I wish those networks would make those shows available for download for a buck or two an episode. I can understand them not wanting to do that with programming that might have enduring value for DVD release and such…but those three shows are topical and most of what's on them has the shelf life of Chinese Food stored in your refrigerator. I would think they'd want to make some extra bucks off them while they can.
Several folks who read my piece on our old family friends, Ben and Betty Zukor, wrote to ask if they were related to Adolph Zukor, who founded Paramount Pictures. As far as I know, no…though I must admit I never asked.
Okay, gotta go. Lots of running-around to do today. And I have to choreograph it to make as little of it as possible involve stairwells.
Wanna show your gratitude for this blog? Wanna read a real good comic book and help it become a reality?
If the answer to either question was, "Hell yes," go support Carol Lay's Kickstarter for her new comic, Murderville. Nothing Carol's ever done has been without great merit…and I say that as someone who's known her since she got into cartooning. In fact, back when I ran the Hanna-Barbera comic book division, I gave her some of her first jobs. She started as a letterer and it took her a long time before she was ready to graduate to inking. I think it took six months. Then, I blinked and she was suddenly drawing comics for me and even writing them. I never saw anyone move up in the field that rapidly.
The next step was that she moved from doing comics of other folks' characters to doing her own. I love artists who work in the grand, old tradition but I also love artists who invent their own, creating work that invents its own tradition…and she keeps doing that. One Carol Lay story does not necessarily look like another Carol Lay story. What I've seen so far of Murderville represents another step forward for the lady. So I urge you to go invest in her latest project and to do it now. To those of you who lament there aren't enough good, innovative comics around…here's your chance to do something about it.
Matt Taibbi on the Bradley Manning trial. I haven't decided how I feel about this yet but Taibbi makes some good points…