Monthly Archives: December 2015

Yesterday, I asked if anyone could explain why I am on LinkedIn. Based on the e-mails I've received, it appears about 95% of you can't explain why you're on LinkedIn. But a few of you could so in a day or three, I'll quote some of those messages and perhaps enlighten most of us.

Last November, Joy Behar did an hour-long interview with Nathan Lane that you might enjoy. If you want to enjoy the entire thing, here's a link to it. If you want to just enjoy three minutes of it, here's three minutes that will make you want to watch the whole hour…

Disneyland is adding a whole new land — a Star Wars area. No announcement has been made as to what it will contain nor is anyone saying when it will be completed but "at least a year" seems to be the assumption.

But we do know what will be closing. My favorite place to eat in the whole park — the Big Thunder Barbecue — is closing as is the Big Thunder Ranch, the Big Thunder Ranch petting zoo and the Big Thunder Ranch Jamboree. Going away temporarily are the Fantasmic show, the Mark Twain Riverboat, the Sailing Ship Columbia, the Pirates Lair on Tom Sawyer Island, the Disneyland Railroad and the Davy Crockett Explorer Canoes, plus a whole bunch of attractions are closing simultaneously for unrelated maintenance reasons.

I'm glad they're doing all this. When you come right down to it, Disneyland is a boring place with nothing to do, plus it isn't nearly crowded enough. Oh, yeah — and they haven't raised prices, as they will doubtlessly do when the new Star Wars attractions open, for several months now. Attendance this past quarter is only up a measly 15% and there are unconfirmed reports that it takes less time to get into the Indiana Jones ride than to get into a men's room.

I actually haven't been to Disneyland for quite a while. I often think I should go but then I need to get a script finished or a knee replaced and I put it off. I think I'll try to get there before the Star Wars area opens. After that, it should be kind of overpopulated for a while. And the end of the line to get into the Star Wars Cantina — or whatever they have there — should be somewhere near my house.

A legendary Jerry Lewis film is reportedly about to join the National Film Registry…

Jerry Lewis, the slapstick comedian popular in the 1950s, completed The Day the Clown Cried in 1972, and it's believed only seven people have ever viewed it, the Sunday Times of London said. Still the legend about the Holocaust "comedy" has spread over the years — and many film scholars now believe it's the worst film ever made.

Um…how could "many film scholars" come to that viewpoint about a movie they have never seen? I mean, forgive me for asking this question but don't you kind of have to actually view a movie for your opinion of it to have any value at all?

Also, hasn't Mr. Lewis said on several occasions that he has never considered the movie a finished work? I believe the history is that the film's financiers ran out of money so many scenes were never shot. Lewis, as I understand it, briefly tried to complete it by putting up his own money but there were problems with the underlying rights to the book and legal questions as to whether the finished film could even be released. Even if it's fair to review a movie you've never seen, is it fair to review one that its director considers incomplete and which he has never put out into the world for public exhibition?

(And while we're at it: How about that description of Jerry as "the slapstick comedian popular in the 1950s"? He was one of the biggest movie stars in the sixties too and he's still revered in many circles. It's been a long time since I thought he did anything of merit and I find most of his appearances for the last few decades to be embarrassing. But give the man his due. He's setting some sort of record for longevity in a business where some folks come and go faster than you can say "Rob Schneider.")

I'm not sure why I'm trying here to be fair to Jerry Lewis, a man who's never been particularly fair to others. Some time ago, I reached the stage where his incoherent ramblings and eruptions of ego stopped striking me as colorful or entertaining in a perverse way.

This movie triggers odd attitudes in some people. I know film buffs who are sure it stinks. They've never seen it but they're sure it's an abomination. If you want to only count folks who've actually viewed the movies they're vilifying, there are a lot more moviegoers in this world who think the new Star Wars flick is an abomination. Or Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind or the last James Bond film or whatever won Best Picture last year.

So they think The Day the Clown Cried is an atrocity but do they praise Mr. Lewis for having the integrity to admit this and bury his failure? No, they're mad at him for not letting them see it. According to the above-linked article and other sources, Lewis has donated a copy to the National Film Registry on the condition that there be no public exhibition for ten years. I know many film scholars who will line up to view this movie they've hated since they first heard of it and they're pissed at Jer for making them wait this long, let alone another decade. Go figure.

A long, long time ago on the Internet, friends kept sending me e-mails inviting me to sign up for something called LinkedIn…so I did. Since then, I've gotten thousands of messages — some from people I know, many from people I don't know — that read like this…

Hi Mark,
I'd like to join your LinkedIn network.

Sometimes, I say yes. Sometimes, I say no. I have no idea what any of this means. I apparently have a LinkedIn network but I have no idea what it does for me or anyone.

Every now and then, someone "endorses" me as a fine writer or a good human or a snazzy dresser or something. I have no idea what this does, either. I see no way in which LinkedIn has ever affected my life or connected me to anyone except that apparently they get to be on my "network" which appears to be meaningless.

What am I missing here? Can anyone point me to a primer for this service so I can get some idea of what it's supposed to accomplish? I mean, besides getting me more e-mails from strangers who want to join my LinkedIn network. Thank you.

Here's a brief chat with Caroll Spinney who plays both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street…

When I was about six, I came down with a very, very bad case of Scarlet Fever. A couple of other kids in my class at school had it and that's apparently how I got it…but I got it really, really bad. It was so bad that for a day or two there, there was a very real worry that I might die from it. [POSSIBLE SPOILER: I didn't.]

I do not remember everything about that time but I recall my pediatrician, Dr. Grossman, making a house call to our home late one night. That scared me. Watching TV shows as I did, I had heard any number of jokes about how doctors did not make house calls anymore. And this is how my mind worked even then: I thought that if Dr. Grossman and his little black bag were at my bedside, I had to be nearing death's door.

That was one of the two things that got me worried. The other was that for the first time, I saw my father cry.

My father was a lovely, kindly man who never in his entire life hurt another human being intentionally or failed to help out one — even a total stranger — who was in need. But he was also a very nervous man who worried about everything…and especially about illness. In later years if I had some minor ailment, my mother and I conspired to hide it from him. It just got him too upset. He was upset that night when Dr. Grossman came.  At that age, I figured that if my father was upset, I should be as well.

I was bright pink from the infection, absolutely covered in rashes. My throat felt like I'd tried to swallow a porcupine and I had a temperature so high, they wouldn't let me know what it was. I think my mother just told me I had an unlisted number. But I managed to get myself mostly unscared by remembering that Dr. Grossman was a great doctor. He would know how to fix me.

And of course, he did. First thing, he ruled out taking me to a hospital. I was not part of the conversation but later, my mother quoted him as saying, "Mark's too weak to be moved and if we take him to a hospital, he's liable to infect other children or pick up something else he doesn't need now. There's nothing they can do for him there that you can't do just as well here."

It was close to Midnight — and I think it may have been a Sunday evening — when he left our house, having written several prescriptions that had to be filled A.S.A.P. At the time, pharmacies that were open 'round the clock were not common even in Los Angeles. My mother worked her way through the Yellow Pages and found a few but none of them were well-enough stocked to have what we needed on their shelves.

Finally, she called a Horton and Converse out on Wilshire that was closed but the pharmacist was still there and had what was required. He agreed to wait around if someone could come right away for it.

My father was instantly dispatched in his car to fetch the drugs. One day years later, he told me the story of driving to the pharmacy but he turned pale as he did and his hands began shaking. He said that that night, they were shaking so badly he could hardly drive. After a near-collision, he pulled over to the side of the road and thought, "I can't do this."

Then he realized he had to do it. His only child's life was at stake…or seemed to be at stake, which in this case was the same thing. He finally drove to the drugstore and waited anxiously for the order to be filled.  Then he raced home, trembling all the way and probably hearing the Lone Ranger theme song in his head.

If you'd known my father, you would understand that he did not tell me this story to impress me with any heroism on his part. Indeed, he did not think he had been heroic. He told it to me to admit a certain weakness on his part and to tell me that as I went through life, I had to try to not be like that. I have tried to not be like that.

Once he was home that night — or rather, that morning — my mother gave me the pills, which I suppose were antibiotics. They may even have been precursor drugs to what I'm taking now for the infection I had recently in my knee.

There was also an external drug which had to be administered — a purple liquid that was to be applied to my forehead and chest with compresses. Pure cotton cloths were needed and we had no rags around or cotton sheets that could be cut up — and of course by now it was around 2 AM. There was nowhere to buy any so my father's handkerchiefs were sacrificed.

He had about a dozen of them and my mother, wearing the gloves she used for dishwashing, used them all up over the next few days. Each was soaked in a bowl of the purple liquid, then used to softly wipe my brow and chest. This went on most of that first night and apparently it along with the pills helped to bring my fever down and out of the danger zone by 7 AM. That was when my mother staggered off to bed and my father got up to keep an eye on me. He'd been trying without much success to sleep.

He didn't get much the next few days. He stayed home from work and he and my mother slept or took care of me in shifts. One was always at or near my bedside and when I was awake, I was read stories…but not too many because I was supposed to sleep as much as possible. Dr. Grossman phoned often and about three days after his late visit, he came by during the daylight hours, inspected the patient and announced that I was well on my way to a full recovery.

I don't recall hearing him say that. I do remember how happy my parents were and that's how I figured it out before they informed me.

I had missed enough school because of the illness and was so weak that it was decided I should skip the rest of that semester and build back my strength. I had previously skipped two semesters (one year) of elementary school so I eventually graduated one semester ahead instead of two. During my recovery, I had one interesting visitor whose visit I managed to sleep through. I wrote about that here.  And if you'd like to read more about Dr. Grossman, I wrote about him here and here.  The piece at the first of those links guest stars Jerry Lewis.

When I was awake, I read comic books. I read "real" books too.  A very inspirational one was Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit by Paul Winchell but I also read tons of comic books. My father almost never came home from work without a few, mostly Dell Comics featuring characters I also watched on television. I had read comics before getting sick but it was as the Scarlet Fever was departing that my interest in them became obsessive. Some would say I traded one illness for another…but at least I managed to turn the new one into a profession.

Finally, I was well enough to accompany my mother to the Von's Market where I could buy my own comic books, at which point my father was asked politely to cease bringing any home for me. I liked it better when I could pick them out myself. I got less Casper the Friendly Ghost and more Bugs Bunny that way. Also, though my father made notes of what he was buying for me, he did occasionally bring home duplicates.

The first time he brought me one I already had, I told him so and he got terribly embarrassed. He wanted to rush back out to the store and see if they'd let him exchange it for one I didn't have. Thereafter, I learned not to tell him. When he handed me a duplicate, I'd feign delight and if he asked, I'd lie and say I'd never seen that one before. Then I'd put it in a little pile I maintained of comics to be traded to friends at some future date.

Instead of giving me comics, he gave me money to buy my own…but I didn't spend every cent of it on issues of Looney Tunes and Yogi Bear. With my mother's help, I went to a J.J. Newberry's — a "dime store" next door to the Von's — and I bought my father a present. It consisted of two six-packs of fine cotton handkerchiefs embroidered with an "E" for "Evanier." These were to replace the dozen of his that had to be thrown away after they became permanently stained with the purple liquid. It was the second time I saw my father cry but it was a good cry.

Back in this message, I recommended you read an article by David Frum about how the Republican Party has gotten screwed-up and another piece by Peter Beinart on how he believes that regardless of how the next election turns out, this country is moving politically to the left.

In the interest of considering opposing viewpoints, I now link you to David Dayen arguing against Beinart's viewpoint. And here's Charles P. Pierce not rebutting David Frum but instead making the case that guys like Frum for responsible for exactly what they lament about the current state of their party.

The only late night shows I record regularly are Colbert, Daily Show and Nightly Show. People keep writing to ask me what I think of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. I think it compares favorably with Jon Stewart's early shows but not Stewart's later ones, in part because Noah has a much weaker crop of correspondents than Stewart ever had. I look forward to seeing his show improve just as Larry Wilmore's has.

I occasionally watch segments from Fallon, Meyers and Corden on YouTube. Can't make it through their shows but each does something now and then that I enjoy, especially James Corden's musical bits which show a lot of hard work. This is how he opened his last show of the year and though he's a bit off-key, I think it's terrific. He has an advantage over his competitors because he usually does only four shows a week instead of five, leaving him time for more elaborate pre-records and remotes. This must have taken the kind of time that someone doing a five-a-week show simply doesn't have…

"K Bhatia" sent this to me regarding the Johnny Carson episodes that Antenna TV will be running…

The 1974 episode with Don Rickles which you referenced has two oddities…It was during the musicians' strike, so the music is all canned, and the audience is mostly NBC affiliates in town for their convention. There are several jokes about Bob Howard and Dave Tebet that probably will be understood only by you, me and 6 other people on Guam.

Well, that's one way to overcome music clearances. For those who don't know, Bob Howard was the president of NBC at the time. Dave Tebet was an NBC vice-president who specialized in talent relations. Tebet was often cited as the guy who suggested hiring Johnny to host The Tonight Show and handled the signing of him.

I keep thinking how much it would help old shows like this if the channel hired some guy to "host" the show; to come on at the beginning for a minute to explain references like that…or why everyone's laughing at mentions of Wilbur Mills or Ralph Williams. I suppose it was discussed at Antenna TV but vetoed by someone noting how much they're already spending to acquire these shows and clear all that has to be cleared. Oh, well. At least six folks on Guam, Mr. (or Ms.) Bhatia and I will be laughing.

Starting January 1, the cable channel Antenna TV is running old Tonight Shows with Johnny Carson. Weeknights, they have one-hour episodes at 11 PM which rerun at 2 AM Eastern. That's 8 PM and 11 PM Pacific. Weekend nights, they have 90-minute episodes starting at 10 PM and they rerun them at 1:30 AM Eastern, so 7 PM and 10:30 PM Pacific. The shows are not being run in chronological order.

The first hour episode on Friday night, January 1, is a 1982 episode with Eddie Murphy and McLean Stevenson. The first 90-minute episode on Saturday night is from 1975 and the guests are Foster Brooks, Victor Buono, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Joan Embery with animals from the San Diego Zoo.

If you want to take a Season Pass on your TiVo or set your DVR to grab them all, the name of the show seems to be Johnny Carson, not The Tonight Show. And while you're at it, you might also want to record Heeere's Johnny!, a pretty good half-hour preview special that Antenna TV is running a few times over the next week or so. You might have trouble finding it on your DVR listings if you don't type that name the way I just spelled it. It features brief interviews with Bob Newhart, Doc Severinsen, Jay Leno, Ted Koppel and others.

Press info says that the shows will be almost complete; that someone went to a lot of trouble and expense to clear the rights to all or maybe almost all the music. It does worry me a tad that the preview special carefully avoids any original music, not even using Johnny's theme. But I suppose the regular reruns are what matter.

I'm not sure these old shows will stand up. There will be references to then-topical matters which even I, a devout Carson watcher with a great memory, will have trouble comprehending. Also, I'm wondering if Carson's legend hasn't been so overhyped that the actual shows will disappoint some people…or that their disconnect with today won't make them seem too distant for some people.

One of the great things about Johnny was that when something happened in the news, he was almost always the first one anywhere to have a joke about it. That lack of immediacy always made his reruns at the time a little less wonderful to me…and of course now, everything will be ancient history. Also, so much of what Johnny did has become Standard Operating Procedure for talk shows that what he did may seem old hat to many, as might his shows' slower pace.

I hope they do well. I've tried watching the old Merv Griffin Shows that GetTV is running and found that Merv spent a lot of time with guests who didn't interest me then and still don't. But then Johnny always interested me a lot more than Merv. I hope, if only for my sake, he still does.

The test for me will be on Sunday, January 3.  That's when Antenna TV is running a 90-minute show from 1974 with this guest list: Bob Hope, Don Rickles, Freddie Prinze, Michael Landon and Carol Wayne…and I suppose Carol Wayne means there'll be a Tea Time Movie.  If I don't enjoy that, I'll decide old Carson shows just don't age well.

Paul Johnson, the son of George Clayton Johnson, has announced that his father passed away a few hours ago — at 12:46 PM PST.

One of the great things about George was how utterly unconventional and unpredictable he was. The fact that he insisted on living a few days after the Internet and several major press organizations had buried him is just so perfect. What a way to end the kind of life he lived.

Mark is taking the rest of Christmas Day off from blogging. Last I heard, George Clayton Johnson was still among the living and there's nothing else that can't wait 'til tomorrow.

I hope today is a great day for all my friends. Matter of fact, I hope it's also one for strangers and even for my enemies. And I hope tomorrow is even better and that the day after is even better than tomorrow and so on. What a fine world this would be if everyone's days just got better and better.

Here's a replay of a post from 2012. It's the story of my family's last Christmas tree. There might just be another one in my future. Earlier this year, I had my front lawn replanted with drought-tolerant vegetation. Instead of grass, I now have this plant that can subsist on about a minute of H2O per week from my sprinkler system. A few other stray plants are growing amidst it all — some seeds that I suppose were carried there by winds or birds and took root. And one of them is a tiny pine tree which we didn't plant but which is growing out there. In fact, it's growing in the precise location that I would have wanted it to grow if we had planted it. A few weeks ago, it had attained the size and density of the tree that Charlie Brown brought home but now that we've had a whopping half-inch of rain in the last month around here, it's starting to turn into something. Maybe by next year, it'll be something worth decorating. In the meantime, here's the tale of the last time there was something that looked like a Christmas tree in my life…

So here I was in this family where my father was Jewish and my mother was not. But she learned. Of course, all she really learned was how to cook a few Jewish staples like brisket and latkes but that was enough. More than enough.  Remind me to tell you in one of these what it was that caused both families to drop their opposition to my parents' mixed marriage. (Hint: It was the birth of me…or actually, the impending birth of me.)

In our home, we celebrated Hanukkah. I always thought that since I was half-Jewish, I should only light four candles. We also celebrated Christmas and got a big tree. The acquisition of the tree — going to the lot, picking one out, haggling with the salesguy — was a big part of the holidays. My mother, being the least Jewish of the three of us, was more or less in charge of the tree. All my father contributed was to pay for the tree and drive it and us home.

My mother was a purist: No artificial colors on the tree. No flocking. Just a plain, simple green one. We'd position it in one corner of the living room in front of the fireplace that never had a fire in it, and we'd decorate. She and I.

We had two kinds of decorations. My Uncle Aaron was in the window display business. He sold low-cost, pre-fab ones that were made in Hong Kong or elsewhere in the Orient. He'd design them and sell them to stores that needed something simple and cheap to pop into the front window. He also sometimes bid on and would win contracts to supply street decorations to cities.

Uncle Aaron had crates of Christmas ornaments. They cost him almost nothing and he'd give us boxes and boxes of them. We gave a lot of them to neighbors and sometimes, my friend Rick and I would invent a game that involved smashing a box of sixteen. I eventually outgrew thinking it was fun to break things but I enjoyed it at the time.

The hard part of decorating our tree each year was in not cluttering it with too many decorations…because we sure had too many. I'd usually put the balls in place, step back to look at my handiwork, then remove about half of them.

We also had to leave room for my mother's decorations. She had a small box of ornaments from her childhood, including a lovely star to place atop the tree. I don't think they were valuable in a monetary sense but they were priceless to her. I'd put on Uncle Aaron's ornaments and it didn't matter if I broke one or two or twenty. Like I said, we had crates. But my mother's half-dozen ornaments were handled by her and placed on the tree with great care. Then when Christmas was over and it was time for the tree to go away, the first step would be for her to carefully remove her decorations and pack them away for another year.

We did this until I was twelve. In 1964, Uncle Aaron died and we decided not to have a tree that year. It would have been festooned with his ornaments and would just have reminded us that he wasn't around. We didn't have one in '65 or '66 and a few months prior to Christmas of '68, we gave the garage-full of Uncle Aaron's ornaments — I almost just typed "Uncle Aaron's balls" — to a local charity that came and carried them away. My mother made certain that her memento ornaments were not included and I saved the lights and one box of Uncle Aaron's just in case Rick and I ever wanted to play one of our ornament-smashing games again.

As we approached Christmas of that year, my mother admitted she was a little depressed. '68 was a rough year in this country and it had finally "sunk in" for her that we were never going to have a Christmas tree again. When she'd suggested giving away the ornaments in the garage, she hadn't realized the emotional impact of that decision.

So I went out and got her a tree.

Not a big tree. A small tree. It was the symbolism that counted, not the actual tree. And besides, I didn't drive back then so I had to carry it home from the lot up on Pico Boulevard. I selected one that was under three feet, took it home when my parents were out and decorated it with the ornaments I'd saved to smash with Rick and the lights I'd kept. My mother was very happy to come home and find it…and to add her childhood ornaments to the display.

They'd been out buying the ingredients for our Christmas dinner. I think it was pot roast and latkes that year and the meal was a big hit.

So was the tree. Enough time had passed that it didn't bother Aunt Dot (Uncle Aaron's widow) to see a display that contained a reminder of him. It was, in fact, rather pleasant. And we never had another tree again. It didn't seem necessary and I didn't think we could top the short one. Maybe one of these days, I will…and I'll add in my mother's ornaments. That's assuming I can find them.

Our favorite Christmas video…