Monthly Archives: November 2017

The Price is Right is seen every weekday morning on CBS and probably always will be. Long after all of us are dead and buried, The Price is Right will be seen every weekday morning on CBS and someone will be playing Plinko. I watch once in a while…or maybe it would be more accurate to say I have it on once in a while.

Hey, a lot of people who come to this site get upset with me because I write here that I don't like Donald Trump or Mike Pence or certain other political figures. Well, that upset is nothing compared to what I'm about to cause when I tell you that I actually like Drew Carey more than I ever liked Bob Barker as host of The Price is Right. And it's not like I like Drew Carey all that much as host — he's much better as a stand-up — but he seems to understand that it's his job to let the games (and therefore the contestants) be the stars of the show, not him. Let the Hate Mail begin.

I find the show more fascinating than entertaining. Back in 2008, I was also fascinated to attend a performance of The Price is Right Live!, which was then in permanent residence at Bally's Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas. They retooled the show to be offered as a live attraction, complete with exact replicas of some of the most popular games from TV, and Todd Newton hosted, ably filling the shoes that Mr. Carey had just begun filling for Mr. Barker. I wrote about that field trip here.

The show is no longer in Vegas. It's on the road, criss-crossing America. Today, it's in Canyonville, Oregon. Tomorrow, it moves to Airway Heights, Washington for a few days and then on to Wenatchee. If you want to know when it's coming your way, here's the page with the schedule.

I'm embedding two videos that will tell you about it. The first is from a magazine-type show and it has a very enthusiastic host-lady interviewing Todd Newton, back when the show was in Vegas. The second is intended for casino operators. It's a sales piece telling you how much money you'll make if you book The Price is Right Live! into your establishment. The show doesn't only play casinos. It can be found at State Fairs and in a lot of Performing Arts Centers too. If you only have time to watch one of these videos, watch the second one. It's a part of show business that we sometimes forget about…

The musical Gypsy debuted on Broadway in 1959 and it has been revived there four times since — in 1974, 1989, 2003, and 2008. In case you're wondering, the five ladies who opened those productions as Mama Rose were, in order, Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone. Another revival which would star Imelda Staunton, has seemed imminent for a while but Ms. Staunton is currently in a revival of Follies at London's National Theatre.

Four revivals so far but it somehow feels like more. There are certain shows that always seem to be about to reopen. If you asked me to guess what show has had the most resurrections on the Great White Way, I'd say either Fiddler on the Roof or Guys and Dolls…and I'd be wrong both times. They've each had five revivals and there are two shows that have had six and one that's been revived seven times!

Do not click on this link until you've made your guesses. Then click on the link and find out.

(And if you guess Chicago, you're even wronger than I was. That show's only had one revival on Broadway. Okay, so it's been running there for more than twenty years with no end in sight…but it's still only the first revival. There may not be a second one because this one may never close.)

And we're expanding it to include Roy Moore, the people who still support him, and Joe Barton…

• Remember the scandalous Access Hollywood tape wherein Trump bragged about sexual assaults? At the time, he apologized for it. Now, he's trying to spread the suggestion that it's not real; that it's dubbed or it's someone else or something. Even the Trumpiest Trump supporter won't believe that though a few might find it handy to say they do. It's a lot easier than defending it, I guess. But it makes you wonder if Trump is anticipating legal proceedings against him for sexual misdeeds and somehow — God knows how — thinks it will help him to now not admit the recording is legit.
• Matt Yglesias explains why the math in the Senate Tax Bill just plain doesn't add up. And in this article, he points out that this bill is based on a lot of the same theories and predictions that were disastrous when attempted under the last Republican president.
• William Saletan reviews the evidence against Judge Roy Moore and finds it pretty solid. He also reviews the rebuttals from the Moore camp and finds them pretty feeble. I think we're about to see a lot of people who profess to be deeply moral respecters of old-fashioned family values in an evangelical sense go to the polls and vote for a child molester…and pretend it's okay because, you know, he denies it.
• Speaking of evangelicals, Thomas S. Kidd discusses who they are these days and why some who say they are aren't.
• Rod Dreher writes about Joe Barton, the latest in a series of "deeply moral" politicians who spent years scolding people for their immorality before being humiliated by some revelation about the deployment of his own genitalia. It's gotten so every time a Republican leader lectures us about our sex lives, we should just start wagering on what there is about his that he's hiding.
• Getting back to Trump: Daniel Larison says, "Arming Ukraine would be an extraordinarily foolish thing for Trump to do, and so it is probably what he will decide to do." Click on Larison's name to read more.
• Jonathan Chait wonders if Donald is intentionally sabotaging police departments everywhere. And Chait's right: Whenever Trump talks about "crime" or "law and order," he's using codewords to single out racial minorities.
• And finally for now: Matt Taibbi writes about Trump's battle with Sportsfather LaVar Ball. One of Ball's sons was among three basketball players arrested in China recently, then released via a diplomatic maneuver for which Trump is demanding a louder thank-you than he got from them. Trump vs. Ball is one of those cases where you'd rather not root for either guy but one is clearly worse than the other, if only because for the worse guy, it's just another chance to depict black athletes as spoiled and unworthy of this great nation of ours.

My favorite tweet of the last few days, by the way, came from Conan O'Brien who wrote, "Trump is already tweeting that Black Friday is the most ungrateful of all the Fridays." Good one.

My cousin David has lunch with a filmmaker I admire and a film critic I don't.

Jessica Rosenworcel is a member of the Federal Communications Commission. The F.C.C. may soon do away with Net Neutrality, the principle which means that the folks who control your Internet can't block certain portions of the 'net to you, charge you premium prices to access them, slow them down, attempt to divert you away from them, etc. Under Net Neutrality, you can go where you please to go. The argument for it — that it will encourage investment or something or other — seems very contrived and bogus to me. It's like the folks who wanted to do this couldn't think of a good reason so they're just saying, "Trust us. You'll like what it does." But even that upon closer inspection turns out to mean, "Trust us. You'll like what it does for big companies by giving them more power over your Internet." It should be opposed with all might.

I mentioned here the other day that the musical Mack & Mabel is rarely much of a hit. One exception was the recent British production. Here's a commercial for its touring company which, alas, did not tour across the Atlantic in this direction..

Donald Trump has long struck me as a guy who plays checkers, not chess — a man who doesn't have the ability to think 3+ moves ahead. He might not even see the value in doing that since time and again, he gets away with saying things that aren't true and pays little if any penalty for not being able to back them up.

But he may have out-strategized Time magazine on this "Person of the Year" thing. At first, he looks petty…

And then when Time tweets back, "The president is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year," he looks petulant and self-obsessed, as he so often does. But notice they didn't deny that they'd contacted him…or that he's likely to be their guy.

By tweeting what the man done tweeted, Trump probably figures he's set up this situation: If Time does decide to scorn him for the "honor," he's got the perfect rejoinder — "Well, of course I'm the greatest newsmaker who's ever lived but I told Time I didn't want their silly title but I told them to shove it so they had to go pick someone else."

And if they do decide they want to slap his smug face on their cover, he'll have a bargaining position to maybe influence the story somehow…maybe force them to switch back to "Man of the Year." Last year, when they named him "Person of the Year," he griped about the "political correctness" even though it made him the top of a much larger group. The point is he can maybe make them do something that will enable him to go to his base and brag, "I made that lying magazine kiss my ass." If he sits for a special photo and interview, he can put conditions on it. If he doesn't, he can say, "They had to give me the honor even though I told them to go to hell."

I don't think Trump knows beans about the law or the constitution or health care or how to deal with foreign powers…but he's really good at manipulating the press. That's why he is where he is today.

So if we worked for Time and we wanted to out-strategize him, what would we do? Well, the first thing we'd do is something he probably never does, which is to understand the rules. Read this…

Person of the Year (called Man of the Year or Woman of the Year until 1999) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, a group, an idea, or an object that "for better or for worse…has done the most to influence the events of the year."

There's probably no value in pointing out that it's not always an honor and that in 1938, it was Hitler and in 1939, Joseph Stalin. That doesn't help us because in this day and age, being famous is way more important than just about anything else, especially to a guy like Trump. And if Time follows their stated criteria, he's again the obvious choice. No single person in recent history has ever been talked-about more than Donald Trump. I have friends who love him and others who hate him, both kinds unable to go three minutes without mentioning his name.

I don't think there's another individual we could name who would qualify…and before you suggest Robert Mueller, I think next year's likely to be his year. But take another look at those rules. It can be a group. We could name the vast and growing forces of Americans who disapprove of Trump's presidency. It would be a way of saying, "Yes, Trump is the core of more news stories than anyone else but mainly because so many people think he's incompetent and/or corrupt."

That might be a bit of a win for Time but Trump would just crow that that was demonstrating the hostility and bias of the Lying Media and "the failing Time magazine" so here's my other thought…

Name as "Person of the Year" — and I don't know exactly how you'd phrase this — the many women who have come forth to complain about sexual harassment and assault. They've sure generated plenty of news, especially the last few months. And if there's anything Trump doesn't want right now, it's a focus on all the women who've reported his behavior.

Maybe somebody reading this can help me. I have a PC and an iPhone and an iPad. I download a number of podcasts and listen to them on all three devices.

I use a program called Roboform that stores all my passwords and keeps them in sync on all three. I use a program called Evernote that stores all my short little notes and keeps them in sync on all three. I'm wondering if there's a program that will store all the podcasts I download and keep them in sync on all three…and the "sync" would include tracking which ones I listen to and where I pause them. The idea would be that I could listen to half a Marc Maron or Gilbert Gottfried podcast (or whatever) on the computer in my office, then get on an airplane with my iPad and say, "Oh, I haven't finished that one! I think I'll listen to the rest of it" and then click and resume playing!"

Has anyone invented this and if not, why not?

There are a lot of cable TV channels that rerun a lot of pretty old TV shows. Some of those programs hold up, some don't. For example, Jewish Life TV runs old episodes of The Soupy Sales Show — some from the sixties, some from the seventies. In the sixties, I loved that show and if I were still twelve, I probably still would but…well, they don't quite hold my attention the way they did back then. (I got to hang out on the set of his seventies show during tapings and those bring back good memories but, again, the actual content doesn't quite delight me the way it once did.)

JLTV reruns Candid Camera, which I never liked, not even when I was twelve. They run The Jack Benny Program, which is a lot like The Soupy Sales Show for me. I'm fond of the star and admiring of his talents but I don't have the patience to wait for the moments when they're as good as I'd like to think they always were.

They rerun That Show with Joan Rivers, a late-sixties talk program which was sometimes interesting because of its guests. I found Joan Rivers impossible to watch in her later years when she became so nasty and so committed to plugging her financial enterprises, but it's nice to see her when she was the Joan Rivers I liked. And they run The Danny Kaye Show.

There are a lot of stories around about Danny Kaye not being a very nice person. My dear friend, the late Howard Morris, was a semi-regular on that series for a while and he hated Danny Kaye almost as much as he hated Jack Carter. It is not humanly possible for one human being to hate another human being more than Howie Morris hated Jack Carter. Then again, my friend Ron Friedman who was a writer on The Danny Kaye Show loved its star.

When I watch these reruns, I elect to side with Ron. Mr. Kaye is so funny and magical and delightful to watch and the writing, which was done by the best in the business at the time, is quite good…and durable. It generally holds up. Danny's performances generally hold up. The guests are great. And when Howie wasn't the second banana, Harvey Korman was and he was sensational.

If you get JLTV, I suggest you check this series out but I'll warn you: JLTV is very bad at telling you what they're running when. I have a Season Pass on my TiVo for these and half the time, what it records is some other program altogether. Also, I never know which episodes they're running. If it's on twice a day, that may be the same episode twice or two different ones…I think. They have me very confused. All I know is that I enjoy watching that man, in large part because he comes across as the exact opposite of what Howie Morris said he was. If Howie was right, I don't want to know it.

Today is Black Friday, a good day to not go shopping because that's what everyone else is doing. While waiting three hours in line to check out, you might ponder the question of why this day is named like it's associated with some form of violent terrorism. Kevin Drum has an explanation.

A funny bit from Jimmy Fallon's show the other tight. He and Jerry Seinfeld duel to the death over which of them is the better Jerry Seinfeld…

I spent Thanksgiving of last year with my dear friend Carolyn, well aware that it would be her last Thanksgiving. Suffering with Stage 4 cancer, she knew it too but she was still hoping for a miracle of indeterminate origin. It was like a game we all play in some form: Once you admit bad news out loud or even to yourself, you feel like you're closing off all possibility of that miracle.

She spent the last ten months of her life in a building that was part Skilled Nursing Facility and part Assisted Living Home. It was very nice for what it was but the meals were not good and they were not in alignment with the diet Carolyn felt she should eat. Either I or my assistant John would bring her food, or sometimes I could arrange to have a restaurant deliver. I bought her a little refrigerator for her room so she could store leftovers and food which did not require heating.

Now and then, she felt well enough that I could take her out to a restaurant. Last Thanksgiving Day, we planned to do just that. I made a reservation at a very nice cafe for 4 PM but by 1:30 or so in the afternoon, it was obvious Carolyn was in no shape to leave the place where she was living. I made a dozen phone calls and finally found a restaurant that was willing to make up two turkey dinners "to go" that were configured for her dietary requirements and my food allergies. When I got to the Assisted Living Home with them, the nurses were clearing away the last of the meal they'd served the residents and patients there. It was obviously better chow than what I'd brought and it would have been fine for both Carolyn and me.

Most of the residents there were effectively alone in the world. They had each other, sort of, but there weren't a lot of relatives around. More than a few of them told Carolyn that they envied her having me visiting her several times a week and seeing how John would bring her whatever she needed. She was probably the youngest resident in her part of the complex and when she was well enough to leave her room and walk (or be wheelchaired) around, the sunniest and cheeriest.

Carolyn was simply the kind of person it was impossible not to love, even if all she'd done to deserve it was to smile in your direction. During her final weeks when she never left her bed, let alone her room, the others there would stop me in the hall and ask with true concern, "Is she any better?" The answer was always no. In her last week or so, it got around the building that the wonderful lady in room 305 wouldn't be living there or anywhere much longer. When they saw me in the halls then, they didn't inquire. They just nodded in sympathy.

I was lying in bed this morning thinking how last Thanksgiving was, to use an overused phrase, the Beginning of the End. It was around then that Carolyn dying became something that could happen shortly instead of off in some indeterminate and fuzzy future. Her very wise Palliative Care Doctor told me she would probably be unable to walk by the beginning of February and unable to talk by the beginning of March. The end, he said, would come in mid-March. If you added two weeks to every projection, he was right on target.

Every time he told me something like that, I couldn't help but think of the joke about the doctor who told a man he had six months to live and then, when the man couldn't pay his bill, the doctor gave him another six months. My thoughts shifted, as I'm told thoughts usually do in these situations, from "I don't want to lose her" to "I hope for her sake it's over soon." I was not unaware that her passing, sooner rather than later, would be for my sake, as well. You try not to connect your comparatively-mild problem with what the sick person is going through but since you suffer together over the same thing, it's silly to deny the link.

From Thanksgiving of 2016 until it was over are easily the saddest four months of my life. I hope they always will be because I'd hate to think I have four sadder months in my future.

Today, I am thankful that I had her in my life for almost twenty years. I am also thankful that her death was not much, much worse for her because it certainly could have been — and again, for me as well as her. But overwhelmingly, of course, for her.

I have been deficient in my blogging duties. It's taken until now for me to tell you that last Thursday evening, my friend Shelly Goldstein and I went to a Writers Bloc event: Conan O'Brien interviewing Lawrence O'Donnell about his new book, Playing With Fire.  It's all about the 1968 presidential election in this country — an election I watched closely, vividly recall and believe changed America a lot more than most of these elections do. I also think that enough time has passed that discussion of it can occur that's about what really transpired without the partisan filters.

The most interesting thing about it is the charge — which is not a nutcase conspiracy thing as there's genuine evidence that supports this — that Richard Nixon committed a truly treasonous act; that, aware that a then-possible peace settlement in the Vietnam War would be bad for his electoral prospects, he interfered and derailed that settlement. He secretly conveyed to South Vietnam that if they didn't settle and he became President, he could give them more generous terms.

The peace talks fell apart, that opportunity to end the war was lost…and it was many years and deaths later that that war ended. O'Donnell theorizes that a lot of the weirder and criminal things Nixon did later in office were connected to a fear that his treasonous actions in '68 would be uncovered. (Among the uncoverings since then are the handwritten notes of his aide at the time, H.R. Haldeman, which seem to be smoking gun-type evidence that Nixon did what is alleged.)

Much more was covered but if the time period and topic interests you, you probably already want to read O'Donnell's book, as I'm doing these days. A copy from Amazon can be ordered via this link…and this might be a good time to do it since they won't be the least bit busy this Black Friday.

O'Donnell was interviewed by O'Brien, who did a very nice job. This wasn't that hard since I think if you asked Lawrence O'Donnell what time it was, you'd get a very interesting eight-minute answer. But I want to offer an odd observation from that evening about Conan.

I like the guy but I used to like him a lot more when he didn't think his raison d'être was to say something funny every time one of his guests gets to the end of a sentence. On his show, I think he competes too much with those he has on. Mr. Carson used to be really good at switching from straight man to comic — of playing Bud Abbott when Lou Costello was on a roll, guiding him along without stopping him. Then when the guest was somewhat serious, the guest got to be Abbott while Johnny effortlessly shifted into the Costello position.

Conan used to do that on his old NBC show quite well but at some point, it changed. It was around the time Andy Richter left and they didn't replace him with a new funny sidekick. Instead, Conan assumed the duties of being host and funny sidekick. He just became a guy who was trying too hard for me all the time.

He was fine interviewing O'Donnell but then at the end, they took questions from the audience, which meant that O'Brien was no longer an active part of the proceedings except to point to people and say, "You next!" And the change in Conan was startling, especially to those of us in the front row. Shelly noticed it, too. He began squirming and sulking and shifting his body as if he was bored out of his mind by the proceedings and couldn't wait for this misery to be over. O'Donnell seemed to sense it too because he tried to involve O'Brien in some of his responses.

No camera was shooting video so you'll have to take my word for this but it was like he was doing Tim Conway's bit about being tortured to have to listen to a boring speaker…but this was serious and O'Donnell was anything but boring. The whole event was fascinating and so far, so is the book.

Here's a number from My Fair Lady — in Spanish…

As you know, this year's Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize went to David Letterman. It was awarded on October 21 at a ceremony that was recorded for later broadcast. One of those speaking at the ceremony was Senator Al Franken. Franken, for reasons we've all heard about, was largely edited out of the telecast when it was aired last Monday night. He was in the version originally edited for broadcast but then the show was recut to take him out. The absent minutes were filled by extending some of the other segments which had been truncated for time.

Apparently, for reasons we don't know, at least one PBS station aired the version with Franken. If you prowl about on YouTube right now, you may be able to find that version, a short cut of Franken's remarks or even a version of the entire show that includes everything which was included in either version. Happy hunting.