Monthly Archives: April 2019

Come to think of it, here's the dance number from the film of Damn Yankees that I mentioned in the previous post.  That's the real Bob Fosse dancing with the real Gwen Verdon, not to be confused with the folks who play them in the mini-series that starts tonight.

My DVR is eagerly waiting to suck the first episode of Fosse/Verdon off the cable tonight.  It's the eight-part series that debuts tonight fictionalizing (hopefully, not too much) the story of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon and their [insert adjective here] relationship.  Among the many adjectives you could insert in that spot would be "intriguing," "tempestuous," "fascinating," "history-making" and "stormy."  I don't watch a lot of these mini-series things but I'm going to catch this one.

I met Gwen Verdon once rather briefly and found her beautiful and charming and lovable.  That anecdote is here along with some things I wrote nineteen years ago about how it annoys me when people who had no point of insight into the Fosse-Verdon union act like they know every intimate detail of it.  I hope this limited series does not err too far in that direction.

In honor of its debut episode, the L.A. Times sought out some folks who'd worked with Bob and/or Gwen and got some remembrances.  I couldn't help but notice the photo they ran from Damn Yankees of Gwen dancing the "Who's Got the Pain?" number with chorus boy Eddie Phillips.  Part of the photo credit is "Warner Brothers," which would make you think it's from the movie…but in the movie, Gwen danced that number with her soon-to-be-husband, Bob Fosse.

For a second, I wondered if this was from the filming of the movie and it was evidence that the song was originally filmed with Phillips (who did it with her on Broadway) and then for some reason, it was reshot with Fosse.  But I don't think it is.  The pillar behind Verdon and Phillips in the photo is nowhere to be seen in the set used for the number in the movie.  I'm just mentioning this in case anyone else was wondering what I originally wondered upon seeing it.  I can think of at least two friends of mine who would.

Here's another video from the revival of My Fair Lady currently playing in New York. This is the "Get Me To The Church On Time" number as shot by a GoPro hidden on the hat of one of the performers — a very interesting angle. Danny Burstein is playing Alfred P. Doolittle in this…and if he's still in the show now, he'll be leaving soon because he's scheduled to star in the new musical Moulin Rouge, which opens June 28.

When I saw this show last year, Norbert Leo Butz was playing Doolittle and this number was one of the best musical moments I ever saw on a Broadway stage. They gimmicked it up with a lot of acrobatic choreography and scenery changes and steps that the older men who usually play the role could never have done…and I really don't think adding in drag queens was appropriate but the whole thing worked. Here's what it would look like if you were in the midst of it…

One day, week before last, I had a 3:45 appointment with a highly-recommended specialist in what ails me at the moment. And let me assure you all that I'm fine, the problem is not serious and it's already well on its way to not being a problem any longer. That's not what this is about.

Here's what it's about. I got there at 3:15, filled out forms and sat in the waiting room as patient after patient went in before me for appointments that were supposed to commence well before I got there. No one explained the delay to me but I heard snatches of conversation. The doctor, it seems, had gotten involved in an emergency surgery elsewhere that morning and was several hours tardy getting to his office and to the list of appointments that awaited him there.

Okay, that happens. But as I sat there waiting, I started to get annoyed by this thought: By Noon or 1 PM, his staff knew that once he got to this office, he was going to run at least ninety minutes behind for the rest of the day. They could have called me then and told me I could come at 5:00 or offered me the chance to reschedule for another day.

They didn't. And when I signed in, no one said, "It'll be at least an hour and a half before he sees you." I could have gone out and gotten something to eat. I could have gone to the shopping mall down the street for an hour. I could even have gone home and come back.

This kind of thing will change. Any day now, someone will invent an app where if I have this kind of an appointment, I can log in and get a realistic, continuously-updated estimate of when my appointment will actually happen. I mean, I can log into the Olive Garden app right now and find out what kind of a delay there will be before I can be seated there. We'll have this soon for appointments for professional services.

So I sat in the waiting room from 3:15 until about 5:00 at which time they showed me into an examining room, giving me false hope that I would be seeing the doctor within moments. Nope. I sat in that examining room for…well, after twenty minutes, I was starting to get pretty annoyed.

My cell phone rang and I took a call from a lady I know. I happened to tell her where I was and how long and I'd been waiting…and she got even madder than I was. She told me I shouldn't allow myself to be treated like that. I should get up and march right out of that office, pausing only to tell the staff of my outrage. "Your time is too valuable," she said…she was right. My time is valuable…

…which is why I didn't do what she suggested.

Oh, I thought about it. I gave myself a time limit: "If the doctor doesn't see me by 5:30, I'm going to walk out and tell them why I'm walking out!" But then at 5:30, I came to my senses and didn't walk out. I just sat there and at 5:37, the doctor came in and apologized profusely for the delay. We then settled down to discuss why I was there and when I walked out of there fifteen minutes later, I had been helped a lot and my problem was, as I said above, already well on its way to not being a problem any longer.

And here is what this post is really about: I have lately observed a number of cases where friends of mine got angry about some way in which they were wronged or felt they'd been wronged.  Those are not the same thing but they felt wronged and they got angry and they did something that harmed them even more. I'm going to go back and put that last phrase in boldface because it's key to what I'm saying here. It was like they got mad and said, "You hurt me so I'm going to hit my own head with this baseball bat. That'll show you!"

I am more and more conscious of how this happens and how I've sometimes done it to myself. I don't do it often because I don't get mad that often but I am aware that the actions we take when angry, sometimes are quite self-destructive.

Example: I had a friend who was paying $1750 a month rental on his apartment. His rent was raised to $1800 and he blew up at the landlord, called him names and announced he was moving out of that overpriced shithole. What was the outcome? Well, the landlord had no trouble renting the room to a new tenant, probably for more than $1800. Meanwhile, my friend went through the hassle of finding a new place and moving…and the cheapest apartment he found was $1810 for not as big or as nice an apartment.

Yeah, he sure showed that landlord, didn't he?

Lately, I see this thing occurring time after time. There are moments when anger is justified and perhaps even effective…but often it is neither and you just wind up making things worse for yourself.

In the case of my doctor visit, if I'd walked out, I might not have been able to get another appointment with this specialist, My regular physician sent me to him because he thought this guy was the best in the business at solving problems like mine. It was tough to get the appointment and the next opening might have been months off. He's very busy and certainly would not have missed having me as a patient.

I might have wound up waiting two weeks to go to someone not as good…and going to that appointment, filling out the New Patient forms, waiting for that doctor to be able to see me, having the consultation and going home might have taken two hours.  It might have taken more.  By not letting my anger control the situation…by not seizing on some momentary feeling of punching back, I got good help seven minutes later.

Yes, I should not have had to wait close to two hours for a fifteen-minute appointment but I couldn't do anything about that.  My only choices were to stay or go and I think "stay" was the right option for me, whereas "go" would have been like that baseball bat thing I mentioned.

And I guess the reason I don't get mad very often is that I've learned it usually causes me to do the wrong thing.  That's something I need to remember for my own good.  You might want to think about whether it would help you to remember it too.

As longtime readers of this blog have probably figured out by now, I love A Cappella singing — voices blending, no musical accompaniment. If I wasn't busy next Saturday, I would be at the 35th Annual Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival down at the El Segundo Performing Arts Center. There, some of the many groups that practice this wonderful art form will be demonstrating their skills and competing. You can find out more about the event at this page and you can hear a number by one of the performing groups below.

These are the returning champs, Business Casual, who also won the national finals. I think you can hear why…

If you're interested in what may or may not be in the famed Mueller Report, take a look at this piece by William Saletan. He's compiled a list of things that Trump and various supporters are saying is in the report which apparently none of them have seen. You might also want to take a look at the actual memo that Attorney General Barr penned disclosing some of what's in the 300+ page report. Barr's letter is presumably the source of all these claims of what's in the Mueller Report but I don't find most of those claims in the letter…and some of the assertions contradict each other.

Apparently, it's okay to just make up whatever you want and say it's in Mueller's findings so I'll play along. I say that the Mueller Report states unequivocally that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin repeatedly dressed in women's clothing and toured the Ukraine in dinner theater productions of The Vagina Monologues. I have just as much proof of that as Lindsey Graham has for anything he says is in the report.

It may not work this way in other cities but when you serve in Los Angeles, you bring your jury summons with you on the day you report for service. They send it to you well in advance, you register by phone or online and then you bring the summons to the jury room on the morning on which you're told to show up.

The summons has questions on it which you answer in writing and then, at the end of the orientation, they tell you to pass your filled-out summons down to the person at the end of your aisle. Someone on their staff comes by and picks them up and that's how they know who has reported for duty that day. The nice lady who conducted the orientation told us about this at least five times. Over and over, she said, "If you don't hand in your summons, we have no way of knowing you're here. You will not get credit for your service today if you don't hand in your summons."

As I was sitting there, I was somewhat amazed at how everything was explained to us not once but several times…and especially we were told we had to turn in our summonses in order to get credit for being there. Were there really people who were so stupid that you had to tell them this five times?

Turns out the answer to that is yes. And they still wouldn't get it.

When we were dismissed at the end of the day, it worked like this: One by one, our names were read off — this was to make sure we were still in the room — and you were to answer "Here!" Then you were to go up to a clerk, turn in your plastic badge holder and pick up one of those certificates that said you'd completed your jury service. Then you were free to go. My name was among the last ones called and I made a stop in the men's room before I turned in my holder and got my certificate…so I was one of the last ones out.

The woman who passed out the certificates was talking with a befuddled lady who was holding her summons. This was a good eight hours after we were told five times to turn them in. She was being admonished as follows…

"You were supposed to turn that in at the end of the orientation this morning. We told you several times and everyone else turned theirs in. Didn't you see everyone else passing theirs to the end of the aisle? You've been sitting here all day holding onto it and now you're not going to get credit for your service! You're going to have to come back another day and do it again!"

That's kind of a frightening thought. If you live in Los Angeles, you might want to be real careful to not do anything that could cause you to be charged with a crime. That woman might be among those deciding if you go to prison and share a cell with a guy named Spider.

As readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of an L.A.-based rock 'n' roll band called Big Daddy. The group was founded on the inarguable principle that there really hasn't been any good rock recorded since…oh, about the time J.F.K. was shot. To put things right, they take songs written after that date and rearrange them into the style of songs recorded before that date. Needless to say, some of them sound better that way.

They're performing live a week from this Sunday — April 14! — at Vitello's restaurant out in Studio City. Vitello's got kinda famous as the place Robert Blake and his wife dined just before she was, uh, mysteriously murdered right nearby. It should be known as a place that serves fine Italian chow and has a great, intimate performing space upstairs. For less bucks than you might think, you can dine on their fine cuisine and take in a great show…like the one I'm sure Big Daddy will do there a week from Sunday. I've seen them there before and I will be there on the 14th. If you want to be there on the 14th, click this link and get yourself some tickets.

Want a sample of what they do? I've posted this before but the old link went bad so here it is again. This is their version of "My Heart Will Go On," the love theme from the movie, Titanic. I prefer the way they do it to the way Celine Dion did it…

Unsummoned as always.

The way this place works is that we sit all day in a big, comfortable room waiting to be called. "We" is me and maybe 200 people who either weren't able to get out of jury duty or didn't want to. I'm not quite sure which of those I am.

Every time a courtroom in this building is ready to impanel a jury, the folks who run this department have a computer here select 35 or 40 of us at random and those folks are dispatched to that courtroom to be quizzed as potential jurors. Whoever is accepted becomes the jury for that trial for however many days it may last. Those who are rejected traipse back to this room and await the next lottery.

This is, I think, my fifth stint on jury duty. I have never been dispatched to any courtroom to be interviewed. Wasn't the last four times. Wasn't the one time they sent some of us up this morning. And now it's just past 2:45.

At noon, we were released for lunch and told to be back at 1:30. I walked out of the courthouse, hopped on a Dash bus and six minutes later, I was at Philippe the Original ordering one of their world-famous double-dipped French Dip sandwiches and a sack o' chips. There is no finer lunch in this hemisphere.

And now I sit here, presumably because there's at least one case going on in this building that might be ready to start the process of seating a jury in the next 60-90 minutes. If not, we all get released and our jury service is done…for this time. Stay tuned.

We're coming to you today from one of the many Jury Rooms in Downtown Los Angeles where I'm here to do a civic duty I can no longer postpone. One time when I did this in Van Nuys, I walked in to report for what I expected would be a long, boring day and found that one of my fellow jurors was my longtime buddy Scott Shaw! That day passed in a hurry. We sat there and talked about comics and cartoons and mutual acquaintances.

No such luck today, though I did get into a not-uninteresting political discussion with a gent who made this point. He, unlike me, thinks the 2020 election will be Trump v. Biden, two men who are famous for their verbal gaffes and for getting too familiar with the opposite gender.

Says he, Democrats will fault both men for those two things, whereas Republicans will fault only Biden. "Look at the way Dems reacted to Al Franken pretending to grope someone as opposed to the GOP ignoring rape allegations against Trump, the whole Stormy Daniels thing and other charges. Since Bill Clinton, Democrats demand their guy be perfect while Republicans just demand that theirs win." I don't think it's quite that bad but the guy has a point.

I got here at 7:45 and from 8 to 9, a lady explained to us how jury duty works, how to fill out the forms we have to fill out, where the vending machines are, how to ask for a postponement of service, etc.

Each topic was covered a half-dozen different ways and explained in microscopic detail, including this point: At the end of your service, you will be given a Certificate of Completion that affirms you have served and need not serve again for twelve months. If you served more than one day and are therefore to be paid $15 per day, a check for your juror pay will be mailed to you within two weeks. Do not take the piece of paper you will receive at the close of your service to your bank and attempt to deposit it. It is not a check.

No kidding. They really had to explain that, no doubt because people have made that mistake. Frightening to think that those same people sat on juries and made decisions that altered the course of someone's life. They also vote. More later.

Paul Simon, a long time ago, visits Sesame Street. He does not seem all that happy that the young lady has decided to rewrite the lyrics to his song. Hers actually make more sense than his…

From the Washington Post…

Some members of the [Mueller] office were particularly disappointed that [Attorney General] Barr did not release summary information the special counsel team had prepared, according to two people familiar with their reactions. "There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead," according to one U.S. official briefed on the matter.

Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could be made public, the official said. The report was prepared "so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly," the official said. "It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself."

Mueller's team assumed the information was going to be made available to the public, the official said, "and so they prepared their summaries to be shared in their own words — and not in the attorney general's summary of their work, as turned out to be the case."

Is there anyone who didn't see this coming? Of course the next chapter in the story of the Mueller Report was always going to be whether the A.G. summarized it accurately. If and when Barr does release some version of it, we'll have the mud-wrestling over whether the redactions are hiding things just because they make Trump look bad. And Trump and his defenders will at some point have to switch from commending Mueller for his fine, honest job back to denouncing him and his crew as partisan witch-hunters.

This kind of thing could be so much fun if the future of the United States of America and its citizens wasn't at stake.

Each year at Comic-Con, we hand out the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. In fact, we hand out two of them — one to someone we hope will be with us to accept it and one, posthumously, to someone who left us but is worthy of recognition. The award was founded by the late Jerry Robinson and it recognizes a writer of comics who produced a splendid body of work but who did not receive proper recognition and/or financial reward. At the time Jerry proposed this award, that was all too true of his late friend, Bill Finger.

These days, Finger gets his name on his great co-creation Batman but since others do not receive their due recognition, the awards continue. This is the annual announcement that as its Administrator, I am now open to receive nominations and suggestions for the 2019 presentation. Here's what you need to know…

1. This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. Every year, a couple of folks nominate their favorite artist. Sometimes, they don't get that "writer" part and sometimes, they argue that their nominee qualifies because their favorite artist has done so many comics, he must have written one or two of them so we can give him this trophy, right? Wrong. It's for a body of work as a comic book writer. Got that? Also, "a body of work" is not one or two comics you liked written by someone relatively new to the field.
2. This award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her splendid body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of financial compensation or it can, of course, be both. But this is not just an award for writing good comic books or a lot of them.
3. And it's for writing comic books, not comic strips or pulps or anything else. We stretch that definition far enough to include MAD but that's about as far as we'll stretch it.
4. To date, this award has gone to Jerry Siegel, Arnold Drake, Harvey Kurtzman, Alvin Schwartz, Gardner Fox, George Gladir, Archie Goodwin, Larry Lieber, John Broome, Frank Jacobs, Otto Binder, Gary Friedrich, Bob Haney, Del Connell, Frank Doyle, Steve Skeates, Steve Gerber, Don Rosa, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo, Jack Mendelsohn, Don McGregor, John Stanley, Elliot S! Maggin, Richard E. Hughes, William Messner-Loebs, Jack Kirby, Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly and Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk. Those folks, having already won, cannot win again.
5. If you have already nominated someone in years past, you need not nominate them again. They will be considered for this year's awards.
6. If you nominate someone for the posthumous award, try to also suggest an appropriate person to accept on that person's behalf. Ideally, it would be a relative, preferably a spouse, child or grandchild. It could also be a person who worked with the nominee or — last resort — a friend or historian who can speak about them and their work. And if it's not a relative, we would also welcome suggestions as to an appropriate place for the plaque to reside — say, a museum or with someone who was close to the honoree.

Would you like to nominate someone? If so, here's the address for nominations. Nominations will be accepted until April 15 and you can remember that because it's when your taxes are due. Of far greater importance is that it's also when all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee. Their selections will be announced soon after and the presentations will be made at the Eisner Awards ceremony, which is, as it always is, Friday evening at Comic-Con. Thank you.

I'm writing this on my iPad because the Internet is out on my home computer. My week is never complete without at least one visit from a repairman from Spectrum.

So that might be why I haven't posted more today and why I haven't answered your e-mail. And since I pay my Spectrum bill online, that's probably why I haven't done that either. If I thought any other company would be a whole lot better, I wouldn't do that last thing anymore.