Monthly Archives: December 2013

This is an interview with Stephen Sondheim from a year or so ago. The interviewer is a little clumsy but a lot of the questions are ones I haven't seen Mr. Sondheim answer before, including a discussion of songwriting software for the computer. Caution: The volume gets louder around the four-minute mark…

• Dick Cheney was visited last night by 3 ghosts. He didn't change but the ghosts are now engaged in waterboarding and war profiteering.

• Carolyn just informed me it wasn't roast beef. It was roast beast. In that case, it was perfect.

• Christmas dinner in Whoville. The roast beast was a little overcooked but I liked the part where we all sang without any presents at all.

Brian Wong wrote to ask me what I could remember about a Flintstones Christmas comic I wrote back in 1977. There's not a lot there to remember, I'm afraid. I was writing comics for Chase Craig, who was my editor back when I worked for Western Publishing on Gold Key Comics. Chase had retired and then had come out of retirement to edit a line of comics for Hanna-Barbera which were published by Marvel. We were all working for H-B, not Marvel, on conventional-sized funnybooks.

Then one day in mid-August, Chase called me in and said, approximately, "Someone at Marvel just decided they want to put out a tabloid comic for this Christmas. It's got to be 48 pages and feature all the Hanna-Barbera characters in some sort of storyline that ties them all together but they want it to be mainly a Flintstones story."

I was never fond of intermingling the talking human characters (Flintstones, Jetsons) with the talking animal characters (Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear) but by then, I'd already learned a basic truth: When a company owns multiple properties and thinks there's a buck to be made by crossing them over, they cross over. End of discussion. Save your breath and don't bother arguing that the worlds do not quite intersect and that the mythology of each is diminished a little by homogenizing environments down to be compatible with one another. One of these days, someone at Disney will decide that the public is dying for a movie in which Darth Vader and The Hulk team up to battle Donald Duck. And it won't matter one bit that, uh, maybe those folks dwell in separate realities.

Actually, there was no time to even think about such things because the Flintstones comic had an impossibly-tight deadline. Chase, who had a fiendish but friendly glee in sending me off to write scripts overnight, sent me off to write a script almost overnight. I did the first 24 pages that night and the second 24 pages the next day. A few years later during a July heat wave, Joe Barbera asked me to write a prime-time Yogi Bear Christmas TV special with much the same all-star cast, also in two days. So this job was a good rehearsal for that job.

I wrote the comic in chapters — a Yogi Bear chapter, a Quick Draw McGraw chapter, etc. — so we could have different artists working simultaneously on different parts. As fortune would have it: When I went in to turn in the first 24 pages, Chase and I were discussing who we'd get to draw those chapters when Kay Wright poked his head in. Karran "Kay" Wright was a veteran comic book artist and animator who had worked for Chase back at Gold Key. He drew, among hundreds of comics, the Junior Woodchucks stories that Carl Barks wrote in semi-retirement.

He had recently been working as a producer for Hanna-Barbera and that very day, he had been laid off. He asked Chase, "You got any work?" Chase grinned and said, "Have I got work!" Kay was ideal for the assignment and he wound up drawing the entire book except for the Jetsons chapter which was drawn (uncredited) by Tony Strobl with inking by Joe Prince. Tony and Joe were other artists Chase had hired at Gold Key. Tony drew the Jetsons comics published in the sixties back when the TV show was first on, and he drew the best Donald Duck comics that Chase edited that were not drawn by Carl Barks.

We needed an inker for Kay's many pages and I suggested my friend, Scott Shaw!, who was just breaking into professional comics. He was good and he knew the H-B characters better than anyone except, of course, me. Soon after, I happened to be talking to another friend, Mike Royer, and he mentioned that he had a light work schedule at the moment so I persuaded him to letter the story. Our regular colorist for the H-B comics, Carl Gafford, colored it in, as I recall, record time. Anyway, it all got to press a day or two before it had to be printed.

Given the deadline, it's amazing that it got done at all, let alone that it turned out okay. At least, of the several hundred comic books I've written, it's probably in the Top Ten of those that people ask me about or want me to sign. Since so many are never mentioned at all, I figure we had to have done something right. It also sold pretty well in this country and even better in others. And that's all I remember about it except for this…

The day he sent The Flintstones Christmas Party off to press, Chase and I went out to lunch to celebrate. I said, "Well, at least that's over." He said, "Well, that one is but they called this morning and they want Yogi Bear's Easter Parade. I'll expect a script by the day after tomorrow."

We had the title song from Mame here the other day. Here's the first star of that show, Angela Lansbury, performing a tune she introduced in it…

[This is a rerun of a piece I posted here four years ago…]

Christmas was never that big deal in our house, at least not after I hit age 10 or so. This was not because we were mostly Jewish. We observed every holiday we could find. If we'd known what it was, we would have celebrated Kwanzaa…but like all our holidays, with great restraint. We just never made that much fuss about any day.

My Uncle Aaron had been in the business of manufacturing store window displays and he gave us crates of leftover Christmas ornaments. So each year when I was a kid, we bought and decorated a tree, in part because we had twenty cases of decorations in the garage and it seemed like a shame to not put some of them to use. Eventually though, it began to feel more like an annual obligation than a pleasure…so we gave all the balls and snowflakes and garlands to a local charity and I'm sure the holiday baubles thereafter yielded more joy for more people than they'd ever given us. By the time I hit my teen years, we'd managed to whittle Christmas down to a family dinner and a brief exchange of presents.

I had friends who somehow managed to devote most of every December to Christmas…and often, it required a running start commencing shortly after Halloween. For them, the yuletide seemed to come with great excitement but also with all manner of stress factors relating to buying gifts, decorating homes, throwing parties and consorting with relatives who fell into the category of "People You'd Avoid At All Costs If They Weren't Family." So all the merriment was accompanied by a lot of angst and expense. A classmate once told me his father had found it necessary to arrange a bank loan that year just so he could afford a proper Christmas. That didn't sound like a holly jolly time to me.

We had none of that. No one felt pressure. No one went into debt. Everyone would somehow convey a few suggestions as to what they might like as a gift, and always an affordable one. That meant no one had to agonize too much to decide what to buy…and no one wasted their money on something the recipient didn't want or would never use or wear.

It all worked well but for a long time, I saw the huge productions that others made of Christmas and felt like I was missing out on something. Christmas was a special day but it wasn't as special to us as it seemed to be to others. I was well into my twenties when I figured out what was going on there. I was then going with a lady who dragged me into her family Christmas arrangements that year. Hours…days…whole weeks were spent planning the parties, the dinners, the gatherings. She spent cash she didn't have to buy gifts and purchase a new party-going outfit for herself…and the decorating took twice as long as Michelangelo spent painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It seemed to me more like a chore than a celebration, and one night I asked her why she went to so much trouble. She said, "Christmas is important. When I was a kid, It was the one time of the year when we all got along…or came close to getting along."

There it was. She'd come from a large and dysfunctional family. Siblings were forever fighting. Parents drank and split up and got back together and screamed a lot and separated again. There was much yelling and occasional violence…

…but not as much at Christmas. Christmas was when they managed to put most of that aside. Christmas was when they generally managed to act the way they should have acted all year. That was why, when it came around, they made so much of it.

We never had to declare a holiday cease-fire in my family. We always got along. There was very little arguing between my parents or between them and me, and what little occurred never lasted long. I never had fights with brothers or sisters because I never had brothers or sisters. And my folks and I were known to give each other gifts for no special occasion and to occasionally get the whole (small) local family together for a big meal. So Christmas wasn't that much different from the way we lived all year.

A year or two ago, I told a friend all of the above and his reaction was on the order of, "Gee, too bad for you." Because in his household, Christmas was wondrous and festive and the source of most of his happy childhood memories. I never saw it that way. I have loads of happy childhood memories. They were just no more likely to occur around Christmas than at any other time…and I liked it that way. I mean, you can have Christmas once a year or you can have it 365 times a year. Peace on Earth, good will towards men doesn't have to stop later tonight.

Because it's that time of year…

Best Christmas posting of the year so far: How today's media would have covered the birth of Jesus. This blog would probably have featured something about how the Three Wise Men were wise enough to not bring cole slaw.

I promised this some time ago but here it is. We were wondering about the orchestra in NBC's big live telecast of The Sound of Music. A lot of you sent in links to articles about this but one of the most helpful came from Dave Sikula. It's this one.

The orchestra was pre-recorded…and those tracks were used for the cast to record the CD far enough in advance for it to be released when the show aired. Then the cast sang to those tracks for the broadcast…though as the above article notes, they had a keyboard player standing by just in case the tracks failed and the music suddenly had to be played live. It wasn't necessary but boy, would that have been interesting.

None of the articles I read said this but I'm guessing the cast was hearing the playback in concealed earpieces. It would have been very difficult to adjust the volume of the actors and the music if they weren't separated out that way. Some of the press suggests that there was some remixing of them for the rebroadcast. The orchestra was recorded in a Manhattan recording studio — an assemblage of the best musicians working on Broadway. Reportedly, an awful lot of them came from the current production of another Rodgers and Hammerstein show, Cinderella.

Some of the articles about this explain that the orchestra was pre-recorded because it would have been too cumbersome to have them on the premises of the TV studio during a telecast that sprawled over many sets. I don't think that's it. They could have or would have done it the way the Tony Awards usually do it, which is to have the orchestra somewhere else entirely — upstairs, in another building, wherever — and then pipe them in. I think the producers just decided it eliminated one area where things could have gone wrong to have the music locked down and done. Since the cast wasn't playing to a live audience that could laugh and applaud, the music didn't have to be as flexible.

All in all, I thought that aspect of the show worked fine. I watched some of it again the other day and I was even more impressed. I'm also all the more discomforted by some of the nasty reviews that Carrie Underwood received. I didn't think she was Julie Andrews but these days, sadly, even Julie Andrews isn't Julie Andrews. I thought Ms. Underwood was fine in a very difficult role that, as written, is not exactly brimming with personality. But I bought her as the character. Heck, I even bought Audra McDonald as an Austrian nun.

Calculate your personal dialect map. It said mine is similar to Milwaukee, Rochester and New York City. I've never been near the first two towns but I suspect I've absorbed a lot from Manhattan, not so much from visiting there as reading writers from there and watching TV shows from there. When I was about thirteen, I took one of these tests and it pegged me as Connecticut — a place I'd barely been to but my whole family was from there.

A fine bit of holiday animation by Joshua Held…

A couple of folks sent me links to articles about Rush Limbaugh defending, for example, Bill Maher after Maher was fired from ABC. They were pretty self-serving defenses, much as Maher's have been of some of Limbaugh's excesses. When I was wondering about people defending the Free Speech of those with whom they disagree, I guess I wasn't thinking about that kind of thing. I suppose anyone who traffics in excessive partisanship has a personal interest in not seeing others getting fired for excessive partisanship.

Pundits on TV and radio are sometimes fired or suspended for saying vile or offensive things. I suspect they are more often fired for having weak ratings, and that the vile thing they said just hastened their departure. MSNBC axed Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin for outrageous things they said. Would they have been ousted if anyone had been watching their shows? I think it's pretty common knowledge that when Maher was bounced off ABC, the network had already been looking for a way to get him off their schedule…in that case, not so much because of ratings as because the parent corporation just plain didn't want to be in the controversy business.

That's a very lucrative business these days. I wish there wasn't so much dough in being outraged and denouncing whatever you think your audience wants to see you denounce. We might get some honest debate…and people who saw value in arriving on common ground. But nobody wants to get to that because there's no money in it.

Don't write me on this topic. I'm going to stop thinking about this stuff for the holidays.

Recently, our friend Neil Gaiman appeared at the New York Public Library and performed a public reading. It was of an odd version of A Christmas Carol written by someone named Charles Dickens, who for some reason completely cut Mr. Magoo out of it. Why someone would want to do that, I don't know…but it actually works surprisingly well sans Magoo, and Neil gave it a colorful performance. The woman you'll hear in this recording before Neil is Molly Oldfield, a writer and researcher for the BBC…

The top 50 Fast Food chains in America are, in terms of sales…

McDonald's, Subway, Starbucks, Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell, Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Hut, Chick-fil-A, KFC, Panera Bread, Sonic Drive-In, Domino's Pizza, Jack in the Box, Arby's, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Papa John's, Dairy Queen, Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, Hardee's, Panda Express, Little Caesars, Whataburger, Carl's Jr., Jimmy John's, Five Guys Burgers & Fries, Zaxby's, Church's Chicken, Bojangles', Steak 'n Shake, Culver's, Quiznos, Papa Murphy's, Long John Silver's, Checkers/Rally's, White Castle, Del Taco, Qdoba Mexican Grill, Jason's Deli, Krispy Kreme, El Pollo Loco, Boston Market, Tim Hortons, In-N-Out Burger, Baskin-Robbins, CiCi's Pizza, Captain D's, Moe's Southwest Grill, Wingstop and Jamba Juice.

Owing to a sparsity of outlets in places where I wander and/or an aversion to Mexican food, I've never patronized 23 of these chains. Matter of fact, I've never even heard of six of them. Here's where I've never eaten…

Taco Bell, Dunkin' Donuts, Panera Bread, Sonic Drive-In, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Hardee's, Whataburger, Jimmy John's, Zaxby's, Church's Chicken, Bojangles', Culver's, Papa Murphy's, Long John Silver's, Checkers/Rally's, Qdoba Mexican Grill, Jason's Deli, Tim Hortons, CiCi's Pizza, Captain D's, Moe's Southwest Grill, Wingstop and Jamba Juice.

I thought it might be interesting to briefly (very briefly) discuss the ones I have patronized. Let's be clear I'm discussing Fast Food joints as Fast Food joints, not as places one expects to compete with real restaurants. On the other hand, I've been to real restaurants — including some that were famous and/or expensive — where I enjoyed the cuisine less than a burger at Five Guys or the turkey dinner at Boston Market. Here are the first three stops in our journey…

You know, McDonald's is still pretty good for the kind of place it is, especially if you avoid any item with a "Mc" in its name. I usually order the Quarter-Pounder without cheese. I don't like cheese on burgers and since it stopped being a regular menu item, that confuses the hell out of some order-takers. They look at me like I'm asking for an ice cream cone without any ice cream or something. I once had a girl ask, only half-kiddingly, if they could even do that and they often don't know how to ring this up on the order-taking machine. The disadvantage of ordering a Quarter-Pounder without cheese is that it takes a while since they have to make it up fresh. The advantage is that they make it up fresh. Any McDonald's burger is amazingly better if you can scarf it down within three minutes of its coming off the grill.

So I get one of them and a small fries…or once in a while when I'm in an airport and it's breakfast time, I go for a Sausage Biscuit with Egg. I like them because they defy the law — and I believe it's now a felony — that says a breakfast sandwich must have cheese on it.  I don't like cheese on breakfast sandwiches, either.  Given how few in this country don't come with it, I gather I'm among about eleven Americans who feel that way.  (Here are some other tips about eating at McDonald's. If you like their breakfast sandwiches, pay attention to the one about the "round egg.")

McDonald's and Subway have both saved my life a few times when I've been somewhere and had a desperate need to find and eat something in fifteen minutes. No, neither has great cuisine but when you have as many food allergies as I do, you appreciate a place where the food is predictable; where you're not going to order a sandwich and find out that they mix monkey gizzards into the egg salad or something. Also, neither chain serves cole slaw and that's always a plus.  The thing I like about Subway is the same thing a lot of people don't like about them: They're ubiquitous.  Wherever you are, there's one within a matter of steps.  In strange cities, I've been known to go up to hotel employees and ask, "Where's the nearest Subway sandwich place?" in the exact same delivery I use for "Where's the nearest Men's Room?"  The answer is usually about the same length of distance.

At a Subway, I usually get the Meatball Marinara with provolone cheese, toasted — and much to the disappointment/disbelief of the sandwich-maker, nothing else on it. They stare at me in disbelief: No oil? No shredded lettuce? No sprouts? Nope. As it moves down the assembly line, I have to tell each person, "It's done. Wrap it up. Don't put anything else on it!" Some of them look like they're about to cry; like if there were more customers like me, half of them would lose even those jobs. One even asked me once, almost pleadingly, "Not even a little salt?"  When I'm not in the mood for meatballs, I ask them how fresh the tuna salad is. If they don't respond with a previous day of the week, it's pretty good on their Italian bread. With nothing else on it. Not even a little salt.

I don't drink coffee. Never developed a taste for the stuff and though my parents drank it, its aroma never somehow became a comforting childhood memory for me. So the one time I was ever in Starbucks was when I had a story meeting at The Disney Channel and the person I was meeting with said she had — simply had, the way a Diabetic has to have insulin — to have a quadruple Frappuccino with extra caffeine or some such drink. Whatever it was, she dragged me downstairs to the lobby and we had our meeting in a Starbucks there. I had a very bad hot chocolate which was neither hot nor chocolate. She had this drink that looked, in size and severity, like something a Bond villain would dangle you over to make you talk.

As we went through the story, I thought she was getting more and more excited about it. Turned out, it was just the extra caffeine kicking in and the next day, when it wore off, she passed on the project. I should have asked that we have all our meetings at Starbucks and then whenever she liked something, I'd say, "Great! Hey, why don't you use your cell phone to call Business Affairs and get them to start drawing up the contract?" Other than that, I've had no use for Starbucks except it's a great topic for jokes. Hey, the other day I found an old shoebox in my closet and wouldn't you know? They'd opened a Starbucks in it!  I gather what my coffee-drinking friends like about it is the same thing I like about Subway.  "Where's the Starbucks?"  "Oh, it's next to the Subway sandwich place!"

I'll do more of these in the next few days.