Monthly Archives: November 2016

• So how long before Trump claims that he won the election unanimously and that all those votes for Clinton, Johnson and Stein were bogus?

Advance footage of Donald Trump's inauguration…

Jonathan Chait ghost-writes an apology to Donald Trump from Mitt Romney.

It's kind of amazing how there are almost no prominent Republicans who stand behind any criticisms they made during the election. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz called each other liars and worse…and are now quite prepared to trust each other and work together. And you don't hear any of them say, "I was wrong about that guy" or "I've changed my mind about him" or even "I've decided to give him another chance." It's more like, "Yeah, I may have said that about him but that was during the election so it doesn't count."

I always thought that when politicians of any party told us what they really believed, they were saying what they felt they had to say at that moment to get elected or get some bill passed or something. I can't recall anyone offhand who struck me as totally sincere, especially the guys about whom his supporters said, "He always speaks his mind." If I ever saw anyone I thought actually spoke his mind, it was probably someone who lost in a landslide.

But I used to figure that somewhere in that 95% of malarkey, there was 5% of honest belief. And now I'm thinking 5% was high.

Here's an interesting story that someone's going to make a movie about. Two guys found a glitch in a Video Poker machine — the kind you find in casinos. It enabled them to "win" hundreds of thousands of dollars…and then Las Vegas came after them.

There's kind of a Catch 22 about winning money in Nevada: You get to keep the money as long as it's "a game of chance" but if you figure out a method that moves the odds in your favor, the casino can say, "That's not a game of chance" and prosecute you. This is the principle on which they prosecute those who count cards at Blackjack, which is something I used to do. I did not give it up for fear of being beaten up and/or arrested. I wasn't winning or playing at that level. But I sure understand the temptation.

A few decades back, some sort of tourism council in New York City did a series of commercials to promote Broadway and package tours to New York to see shows. They had an amazing array of performers in them as you'll see. I've set up a little player below which should play five of these spots, one after the other. Some clips turn up in more than one of them because, I guess, they updated the commercials as different shows closed and opened. But just look at who's in them…

Matt Taibbi thinks Barack Obama's popularity will soar during a Trump presidency. It'll have a lot to do, he thinks, with the contrast between him and his successor. Here's one key excerpt…

Think of the discipline and equanimity it must have taken [Obama] to not show anger and maintain an air of positivity given the vicious absurdities he had to work through, including the ones emanating from none other than Donald Trump about his birth origin. The birther controversy was racism and profiling elevated to a Wagnerian level: Here was a black man who'd made it all the way to the Oval Office, and a giant portion of the population still considered him to be literally trespassing.

That such an idiotic campaign may have launched Trump into the White House to succeed Obama is an incredibly bitter pill, but this story isn't exactly over yet. When Trump takes over he will immediately have to reckon with Obama's example, and this is a historical popularity contest His Orangeness seems doomed to lose.

I don't think even Trump's most enthusiastic supporters expect him to go through his first year in office without a number of childish tantrums and financial scandals. The first wave of scandals, in fact, already seem to be lining up. Get ready for the moment when Republicans in the House and Senate — who kept demanding more and more investigations of Benghazi and Hillary's e-mails each time the last round of investigations produced no evidence of wrongdoing — have to explain why they don't want to look into how rich Trump and his cronies are becoming in office.

I haven't plugged Frank Ferrante lately. He's been touring Australia with his wonderful show, An Evening With Groucho, in which he masterfully replicates the grouchiest Marx Brother. I've recommended his show a lot on this blog and this earns me a lot of e-mails from folks who went to see him and want to tell me I was absolutely right. We all like being told we were absolutely right, do we not?

Frank's first performance when he returns to the United States will be in his hometown of Sierra Madre, California. It's a benefit for the Sierra Madre Playhouse and it's a rare chance to see him near Los Angeles, where he rarely performs. (Your next chance is a Wednesday matinee in La Mirada, next March.) Since the Sierra Madre show is for charity, tickets are a bit pricey but include a champagne reception and a meet 'n' greet. Find out all about it at this website.

And watch out if you live near Bonita Springs, Florida. Frank is heading your way very soon.

Well, you know that they say. They always go in threes: Robert Vaughn, Florence Henderson and Fidel Castro.

I wouldn't expect the recount in Wisconsin to flip that state — and even if it did, it wouldn't flip the presidential election. But it won't be surprising if it shows that the first count wasn't as accurate as we'd like to think all our vote counts are. And Hillary's mounting lead in the popular vote does do a lot to remind everyone that most voting Americans didn't want Donald Trump or the political agenda that comes with him. I suspect that in the days since the election, a lot of folks who voted for the guy have started to wonder if they made the wrong decision. The celebrations of white supremacists at their new supposed power is doing some of that as are the lousy cabinet selections.

The best things about having Thanksgiving Dinner in a restaurant is that you have no hassle to get the food purchased and prepared, no clean-up after and you don't feel obligated to invite over a lot of people who have nowhere else to go that day but who you'd rather not see that day.

The worst thing about having Thanksgiving Dinner in a restaurant is that you don't wind up with two-thirds of a roast turkey in your refrigerator for the next few days of sandwiches and nibbling. I partially solved that. I remembered last night that in previous years, the Whole Foods Market near me had tons of very good leftover turkey in its Hot Food Bar for days after. I ran over and bought a few pounds worth. It's just about the only prepared chow I've ever found in a Whole Foods that's as good as it looks.

Carolyn and I had Thanksgiving Dinner (lunch, actually, given the hour) at the Tam O'Shanter Restaurant in Los Feliz. This was long one of our favorite dining spots but a few years ago, I had a couple of bad meals in a row there and, worst of all, a bad experience with a manager who treated my complaints as an annoyance. So we stopped going there.

Some places though are deserving of another chance. I'm glad we gave the Tam another chance because Thanksgiving there was delightful. If you want to go there next year, I'd phone for a reservation now because they do tend to get pretty full on the holidays. With good reason.

Here's a video about how Pringles Potato Crisps are made. They show you how they make the canisters and then they show you how they make the chips. Amazingly, both procedures use the same equipment and the same ingredients…

A forthcoming revival of the musical Company will, with the okay of Mr. Sondheim, do a gender reversal. The lead character, Bobby — an unattached man, will become an unattached woman named Bobbie. The song "Have I Got a Girl For You" will become "Have I Got a Guy For You," the female flight attendant will become a male fight attendant, etc.

Not that anybody cares what I think of this…but I don't know what I think of it. I usually see these kinds of things as stunts, not performances. The female version of The Odd Couple just plain didn't coalesce for me, for instance. Then again, Company is a play that always struck me as gender-confused in many ways…so maybe this will straighten things out. The show will be mounted in London so I probably won't see it but I'm curious about how it will work. That is, if it works at all.

• How can I tell if all these news stories about fake news stories are true or not?

Debuting this evening on Broadway is one of the touring companies of a show called The Illusionists. It's at the Palace Theater there through January 1 for the tourist crowd. At the moment, there's one other troupe of The Illusionists touring the middle of the country. It's currently in Madison, Wisconsin and heading on to Toronto and then to San Antonio and other towns.

Each show is a presentation by seven or eight great magicians who are identified as certain kinds of specialists. The company opening in New York consists of Dana Daniels (The Charlatan), Charlie Frye (The Eccentric), Mark Kalin (The Showman), Jinger Leigh (The Conjuress), Thommy Ten and Amélie van Tass (The Clairvoyants), Justo Thaus Jin (The Grand Carlini), Rick Thomas (The Immortal) and Jonathan Goodwin (The Daredevil).

The cast in Wisconsin at the moment is made up of Darcy Oake (The Grand Illusionist), Dan Sperry (The Anti-Conjuror), Andrew Basso, (The Escapologist), Kevin James, (The Inventor), Ben Blaque (The Weapon Master), Colin Cloud (The Deductionist) and Jeff Hobson (The Trickster). I gather the lineups in each troupe change from time to time. No matter how they mix and match them, you get a roster of great magicians because those are all really fine performers.

If you go see 'em in Manhattan, pay particular attention to my pal Charlie Frye, who is both a magician and the best comedy juggler I've ever seen. In fact, every time I eat with Charlie, I feel like I oughta buy a ticket because he juggles the dishes, makes the restaurant's silverware disappear, tears the check in pieces and then restores it…

And I see that he also now has apparently mastered the ability to travel back in time and change his race. Since he's on Broadway now, Playbill has added him to their database of performers who've played the Great White Way. In one section of their website, they show the Playbills for each show in which a performer has appeared.

There on the site, they have Charlie Frye appearing in The Illusionists (current) but until yesterday, they also had up the Playbill for Run, Little Chillun, a 1933 Broadway play with an all-black cast. They may have taken it down thinking it was a different Charlie Frye in that show's cast but I know how amazing my friend is. I wouldn't doubt he could somehow pull it off.

Paul R. Pillar is really worried about Donald Trump's appointments in areas like foreign policy and intelligence. He says they show a great tendency to ignore facts which do not fit with ideology. This country has tried that before and…well, you saw how well it worked with the Iraq War. But as Jon Stewart once notably chanted, "Learning curves are for pussies!"

Ben Carson has no experience running a federal agency and especially in the areas covered by the office of Housing and Urban Development. So naturally, he'll be the Secretary of that department.

I've seen a lot of comments that the pick is because Trump figures he has to have a black guy somewhere in his cabinet. But Jonathan Chait thinks the idea is to put someone there who will never let the needs of the poor and disadvantaged get in the way of enriching wealthy developers…like, say, Donald Trump and his friends.

Those who only thought of Florence Henderson as the mom on The Brady Bunch…boy, did you miss a helluva career: Broadway. Movies. Other TV programs and plenty of TV movies. Concerts. She even had a cooking show for a while. She was in some awful productions but I sure never saw her be awful in anything. She was a fine musical comedy performer and that's not easy to be because you have to be able to sing and act and dance and most actors can do one or maybe two of those things. She could do it all.

If you never got to meet her, here's what you should know: She was very smart, utterly aware of her image and quite ready to screw with it and act "against type." She had a good sense of humor about herself and everything and was totally professional.

I can't think of a single anecdote about her being difficult or stuck-up or in any way the cause of trouble. The few times I worked with her, she was an absolute delight. Sometimes, they really are as nice as they seem to be on television.