Monthly Archives: March 2020

There are no human beings visiting the Chicago Aquarium at the moment…so why not let the penguins waddle around and see the place? One of these is Wellington, who is said to be the oldest penguin alive, having inherited the title from Burgess Meredith…

Well, it seems that as of this moment, there are only three men who have a real shot at being the next President of the United States and Bernie Sanders' shot is not from the free-throw line but from way out in the parking lot. The other two, of course, are Joe Biden and the guy who just told us the virus is "something we have tremendous control of" when clearly we don't and he'd say that no matter what the true situation was.

We should remember that all three of these men are in the age bracket that's supposed to now stay home and self-isolate but instead, they're traveling about, appearing in public places, not staying six feet from people. The incumbent still seems to be shaking hands and he sure doesn't look or sound well. I'm not saying he has the CO-VID19 virus; just that he doesn't look or sound healthy. That could mean something for our future.

So could the health of Mr. Biden but barring some unforeseen factor other than racking up delegates, the Democratic ticket will be Joe plus a woman to be named later. It'll probably be one who'll bring some youth to the ticket (meaning she will be under seventy), possibly a non-white presence and certainly some solid liberal credentials.

Bernie Sanders has already succeeded in pushing Biden and their party to the left in many ways, particularly on health care…and health care may well be more important in this election than anything has ever been in any other election. A lot of folks who never particularly cared if other people got sick are now barricaded in their homes or waiting in three-hour Costco lines or just plain fearing for their lives because other people got sick.

Kevin Drum summarizes some of Biden's leftward drift here and this should appease most of the Sanders/Warren supporters and get them on board, especially if they consider the alternative. Our goal (I voted for Sanders, remember) should be to keep the House and flip the Senate.

Forget about some of the stupid-ass, wrong things Biden's done in the past. You've already forgotten about some of Bernie's. President Biden with a Democratic Congress will enact more of The Bernie Agenda than President Sanders could with a G.O.P. House or Senate. And a second-term Trump would dismantle health care, Social Security, the Bill of Rights, U.S. sovereignty. the election system, the Justice League of America, the infield fly rule, all businesses without his name on them…

• What's all this fuss about "social distancing?" My first three girl friends were all really good at it.

The other day here, I linked to a video of a number from the 1997 Broadway revival of one of my favorite musicals, 1776. My buddy of half-a-century Joe Brancatelli suggested I mention that two of the three men in that video were not in those roles when that revival opened. When it opened (and when I first saw it), Brent Spiner was playing John Adams and Pat Hingle was playing Ben Franklin. The late Merwin Foard, whose passing we were noting, played Richard Henry Lee.

When I went back to see it many months later, Spiner and Hingle had departed. Michael McCormick was playing Adams, David Huddleston was Franklin and Merwin Foard was still playing Richard Henry Lee. The TV appearance I embedded was of that cast. But there was another cast replacement that intrigued me and I wanted to mention it. It involved the fine character actor, William Duell.

Mr. Duell, who passed away without enough notice in 2011, was one of those actors who worked all the time, alternating between screen and stage. The Internet Broadway Database has his first appearance on The Great White Way as 1954 with a revival of Threepenny Opera — but remember that's just Broadway. Almost no one starts a stage career on Broadway. He was born in 1923 so I'll bet you he was performing on stage for more than ten years before that.

There are many places you might have known him from. When 1776 first opened on Broadway in March of 1969, William Duell played the role of Andrew McNair, the Congressional Custodian who fetched rum for some of the delegates and who near the end of the play was sent up to ring the bell to proclaim American Independence. He repeated that role in the movie version which came out in 1972.

Two other places from which you might know William Duell: He had a real prominent role as one of Jack Nicholson's fellow inmates in the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And he played Johnny, the shoeshine man who gave Leslie Nielsen tips on how to solve every case on the short-lived, much-admired TV show, Police Squad. That's a photo of him as Johnny at right in the image at the top of this post.

As I mentioned above, in 1997 when the Roundabout Theatre Group opened their wonderful revival of 1776 at the Gershwin Theatre, Brent Spiner was Adams, Pat Hingle was Franklin and I should have mentioned that Michael McCormick was playing Caesar Rodney, the delegate from Delaware who was dying of cancer. If they thought to ask William Duell to reprise his role as McNair, they'd have been out of luck. He was not available because he was working six blocks away at the St. James.

He was playing Erroneous — a befuddled old man, abroad now in search of his children, stolen in infancy by pirates — in a revival of another of my favorite musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This was the production that starred Nathan Lane and I saw that one twice, too. He was great both times.

Okay now, follow this. When Spiner and Hingle left 1776, they brought Huddleston in to play Franklin and McCormick moved up to play Adams. So they needed someone else to take over as Caesar Rodney and they got…William Duell. Because that production of Forum had just closed.

His last Broadway job seems to have been in the revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 2000, also with Nathan Lane and still available as a DVD and for streaming here and there. His last credit seems to have been a part on the movie, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in 2003. So he worked pretty steadily from 1952 to 2003. Going straight from one show on Broadway to another is not something a lot of actors can manage so I thought it was worth noting. It looks like his whole career was like that: One part after another.

Max Brooks and his father Mel. But what's all this nonsense about Mel being 93? Last time I heard, he was like two thousand and something…

• You know, it's not that difficult to not leave your home when there's nowhere to go.

I didn't watch the Biden-Bernie show last night but I can tell you who won the debate. A friend of mine who desperately wants Bernie to win wrote me that he mopped the floor with Biden and unquestionably proved which of them was the better man. A friend of mine who desperately wants Joe to win wrote me that he mopped the floor with Sanders and unquestionably proved which of them was the better man. When people score debates, that's more or less how it goes.

I'm assuming that barring some outta-left-field turn of events, Biden has a lock on it. And that turn of events would be something like Biden getting real sick or Martians invading the Earth. Doesn't the idea of Martians invading feel a little less implausible than it did two weeks ago? You know, back when everything in the country suddenly shutting down for a pandemic seemed about equally likely?

And I'm assuming Bernie knows it's over and like Elizabeth Warren, is just waiting to see what he can get from Biden and/or the party in exchange for being a good, Biden-backing loser. Senator Sanders has been very successful at nudging his party to the left and making some of what once seemed like wild ideas seem way more possible. He's probably still playing that game because he's good at it.

You know the old saying about how soldiers go into war with the army they have, not the army they want? We also go to warlike elections with the nominee we have. I would have preferred Bernie to Joe — and maybe one or two others to Joe — but if it's indeed Biden, I'm okay with that. I hope he picks a running mate who'll make me feel even more okay with that.

From Yes, Minister. I think this is self-explanatory…

I've been thinking a lot about erring…erring on the side of too much caution versus erring on the side of not enough. All of us — and that includes you and even me — are probably doing a certain amount of both at the moment. What's happening in this country now is so unprecedented and odd that it's impossible to not sometimes err one way if not both.

So many of the questions we have now, starting with "Exactly how bad is COVID-19?" are most properly answered by "We don't know yet" and I wish more people would admit that rather than to pass guesses off as valid information. Even educated guesses by people who have long been educated in this kind of thing are still only educated guesses.

Watching the news, you've probably seen Dr. Anthony Fauci talking about the coronavirus and being very cautious about what he says and refusing to speculate on important matters. Dr. Fauci is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. You should not be surer of what you're saying about the medical end of this than he is. You should be wary of anyone who is, especially if they drive trucks, fix computers, do cartoon voices, write comic books or deliver for Grubhub.

Their profession doesn't mean they're wrong. Their lack of expertise doesn't even mean they're wrong. We all know how often even broken clocks can be right. I think we just need to differentiate between informed opinions and wild guesses. I know people who confuse the two, especially after they make a wild guess that just happens to turn out right. I don't know how dangerous the coronavirus is but I know it's too dangerous to be guided by wild guesses…even the wild guesses of someone whose wild guesses are right once in a while.

Alton Brown on how to wash your hands…

Let's see if I've figured out how to embed this properly. Broadway's Laura Benanti, whom we all love madly, posted a message on Twitter addressing kids who were to perform in high school musicals that have now been canceled because of you-know-what. She invited them to post videos of themselves performing so she at least could see them and many have.

You can watch Laura's video and then if you click on her name, you should be able to see all the responses — videos of young men and women singing the show tunes they're not going to get to sing before an audience in their high school auditoriums, at least not now. Or you can search Twitter with the hashtag #SunshineSongs. Keep an eye out for the production of Fiddler on the Roof performed entirely by teenage girls. By God, that's the way that show was meant to be performed. What the hell were they thinking when they cast Zero Mostel?

And if I've really figured out how to configure this — doubtful, considering I'm still trying to get my Pong game to work on my TV — you should be able to see one of the more interesting entrants right below the video of Ms. Benanti.

Thanks to Bob Elisberg of Elisberg Industries for telling me about this. Many other good things await on his blog, especially for those of you who don't get enough posts on this one about what a horrible being Donald Trump is…

In early 2006, I gave up carbonated beverages. Later that year, I had gastric bypass surgery and I shed the exact same number of pounds that my friend Amber now weighs. It is not a usual side-effect of such a procedure but over the next two years, I found my "sweet tooth" going away. I had less and less — and eventually zero — craving for cake, ice cream, cookies, candy and so on…and even fruit got to be too sweet for me.

None of this resulted in any vitamin deficiency — or so my doctors said. But it did leave me with a deficiency of things I could drink. I've never had any alcoholic ones and never liked coffee or tea, never liked anything with artificial sweeteners. As a kid I chug-a-lugged milk by the gallon but in late teenage, my body began a serious non-like of most dairy products. There were other reasons for shunning other liquids and eventually it came down to one and only one thing I could drink…

Water. Not a bad only choice.

What comes out of the faucets in my neighborhood tastes like a buffalo's bathwater — not that I've ever actually sampled that liquid — so I tried buying those pitchers that filter your drinking water. All were acceptable and Brita was the best…but I thought I could do better with bottled H2O. I sampled many before deciding that Crystal Geyser was the best and now I buy it in bulk and usually have 20+ gallons in a closet off my kitchen.

I also buy it under assumed names. The Crystal Geyser people bottle water for other labels. If you go to a Whole Foods around here, you can buy a gallon of Crystal Geyser for (last I looked) $1.49. The Whole Foods house brand is 365 and they sell a gallon of 365 water for 95 cents. It's the exact same water in the exact same bottles with different labels. At times, I've also scored Crystal Geyser water under at least a dozen other names including Trader Joe's, Walgreens, Sprouts and Roxane.

(How to tell: Look at the label for the name "CG Roxane." That's the parent company. And yes, I know they just paid a big fine for illegally storing and transporting hazardous waste containing arsenic. I've forgiven them.)

As you may know, there's no food or drink available at most markets these days unless you feel like chowing down on dryer sheets and plastic forks. I have plenty of food on hand and all of my favorite restaurants that deliver are still delivering…but what about drinking water? I have about ten days of Crystal Geyser under various monikers and an uncertainty as to where and when more might be obtainable. Planning ahead is a wise thing in the current Zombie Apocalypse so I had an idea, just in case…

I just ordered a couple of Brita pitchers from Amazon. They'll arrive Tuesday.

Amazon seems to have plenty of them. They won't make the local tap water delicious but it'll be eminently drinkable. And it might be prudent to always have a couple of them plus filters on hand. Here's a link to Amazon for anyone who thinks this is a good idea.

Getting depressed by all the bad news? I have just the prescription — Randy Rainbow!

A month from this weekend, we were all going to be at WonderCon in Anaheim and many of us were going to be buying artwork and publications from the gifted folks there in the area of dealers called either Artists Alley, Artist's Alley or Artists' Alley. I've never figured out which it should be and I note that most conventions just use the terms interchangeably so I will, too.

Anyway, the ever-helpful folks at The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog have compiled a guide to almost all the exhibitors who were going to be exhibiting and selling in that part of the convention. They've also provided links where you can contact those folks and perhaps buy online. What a fine service. Thanks, Kerry!

I have no idea where the strip club in the above pic is located, nor will I be heading for it or any such business. But I saw the photo on the 'net, thought it was funny and captured it for your possible amusement. And before I posted it, I heard a great story that kinda goes with it.

A young lady who sometimes works in another such establishment — and who I hope for her sake is corona-free — called me last night to ask if I knew of any work she could do for money. She meant fully-clothed work. I didn't get clear if the strip joint she's been working in is closing or might close or if she has just decided that letting strange men touch your naked body is not the smartest way of earning money at this time.

Anyway, she needs a new source of income and I was sorry to tell her I knew of no such opportunities. I've had a few other calls like this from folks who work in other, more-covered professions.

She took it well and then said, "Oh, lemme tell you what happened the other night at the club!" Somewhere there, for the safety of customers and performers, they have (and have long had) this huge gallon container of Hand Sanitizer. It has a little pump on the top that pumps alcohol-infused aloe the way you can pump ketchup or mustard onto your burger at a Five Guys. As she told the story…

This customer is there for a while just looking, sitting there, not buying dances or anything, not even tipping anyone. Suddenly, he gets up and starts casually strolling for the exit. Then suddenly, he runs over, grabs the big container of Hand Sanitizer and runs for the door with it. One of the bouncers and a couple of dancers who were topless chased him out into the parking lot. The bouncer tackled him, grabbed the Hand Sanitizer back and told him he was banned from ever coming into the club again.

The guy didn't try to rob them of money. He wasn't interested in the nude women. But the gallon of Hand Sanitizer was just too, too tempting. Like I said up top, it's come to this…