Monthly Archives: May 2020

A very funny man, onstage and off…and very nice. And a good dresser. Fred was the kind of guy who showed up in a tie and jacket when jeans and a t-shirt would have been just fine.

And polite and friendly and approachable. And humble. People surrounded him once at an event I attended, all telling him how great he was on Fernwood Tonight or in This is Spinal Tap or a bit with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show or somewhere. Fred thanked them but quickly changed the subject to anything but himself.

Oh — and a great audience. I sat next to him at a show where great comedian after great comedian performed. There are comics and comic actors who either won't laugh at someone else or they give out with a kind of fake chuckle, trying to look like it doesn't bother them when someone else is scoring. Not Fred. He howled as loudly as anyone in the place and now and then the guy on stage would get a monstrous guffaw and Fred would turn to me and say, "Isn't this guy great?"

Getting back to funny: Fred was. He was fast. He was funny. From the day I first saw him in the Ace Trucking Company out at the Ice House in Pasadena, I watched as he would crawl into a character and play it for all it for every possible laugh. Every possible laugh and then some.

And loved and respected. Everyone liked him. Everyone wanted him on their show. That was Fred Willard. Wasn't that guy great?

I occasionally mention my pal Charlie Frye here and I usually say he's the best comedy juggler I've ever seen in my life. Want some proof? Every day during our isolations, Charlie has been posting a video as "The Great Quarantini," performing some silly feat in his bathrobe in his workroom. Here's an example. If you're watching on a computer monitor, take this full screen. This man does things like this all the time…

You see that cookie? When I was younger and eating things with high sugar content, those cookies were my favorite. They were sold in just about every delicatessen in the world and I bought them (or had my parents buy me them) all the time. But I never knew what to call them except "those cookies with the colored balls on them." A more detailed discussion of this mystery occurred on this blog back in 2006. Read this message and then this one.

I never got a satisfactory answer and since I wasn't eating the things anymore, the whole question slipped from my mind where there is ample opportunity for slippage. The other day though, I happened upon a recipe for them. The noted pastry/dessert chef Meghan McGarry makes them with a dash of bourbon and calls them "bourbon confetti cookies." Being an absolute non-drinker, I've never knowingly ingested bourbon but I don't think that was ever in the zillions of them I consumed. Or maybe I had an alcohol problem and didn't know it.

Anyway, I still don't think that's the name for them and have concluded that there isn't any name for them that's even vaguely close to official. Back around '06, my friend Misty Lee wanted to start a campaign to name them "Evaniers." We'd all start using that name for them on the Internet and it would spread, as things do on the Internet, and everyone would eventually call them that. Since I'd given up the cookies by then, I asked her not to.

Anyway, if you want to bake up a batch of them, here's the recipe. Don't make any for me, thank you.

Here's another one of these mass online collaborations…and maybe my favorite so far. A whole mess of performers who've been in productions of Hairspray — and there are only about nineteen folks alive who appear in musicals and haven't been in a production of Hairspray — perform the big hit number from that show. If you look closely, you may spot Randy Rainbow and Kristin Chenoweth and Harvey Fierstein and Bruce Vilanch and my friend Valerie Perri and many others.

This is all part of fund-raising efforts for The Actors Fund, which is helping save the lives and mortgages of many folks in the entertainment industry — not just actors and not just folks in live theater. It's a most worthy cause and if you enjoyed this video even a third as much as I did, do what I did and send a donation (whatever you can afford) to the Actors Fund, which I bet they rename soon so they don't have to keep explaining it doesn't only help actors…

I have about two dozen e-mails from folks who are either attorneys or think they know as much as one defending the Souplantation statement and their cavalier (to me) attitude towards anyone who's stuck with one of their gift cards now that the chain has gone bye-bye. Typical is this excerpt from a message from Don Kemp. "BK" is how lawyers refer to bankruptcies…

Once they start the wheels turning towards a BK, they really are limited as to what they can say and if (presumably) Karl or I were advising them on their BK I would not endorse the language you'd like to see. They really shouldn't give any hope or indication any bill or even gift card can be redeemed in any fashion before or after filing. The court will decide who gets what and how. Souplantation might make suggestions, but the court has to ensure the protocols are followed.

Okay. I concede the point. I just think it would have been better to say nothing about the gift cards. And yes, as just about everyone noted, a lawyer probably wrote the part that bothered me. Is it too much to think that there might be lawyers out there who could have said what they had to say in a classier manner?

Featuring Jim Meskimen, Gregg Berger, Kaitlyn Robrock, Rob Paulsen and Debra Wilson…

I received a lot of messages about the item here concerning Souplantation not making good on its gift cards. Most of them said something like what Karl Kuras wrote in this e-mail to me…

Long time fan of the blog and kid who grew up on the D&D cartoon and Garfield and Friends.

I'm also a lawyer who practiced bankruptcy law for many years. The Souplantation peoples' hands are probably tied on the refunds. Once a person or company (yeah, the Supreme Court thinks they're one and the same) begins to prepare for bankruptcy proceedings they are barred from paying any of their creditors.

The "court" they refer to is probably the bankruptcy court which will determine the priority of debtors and whether enough funds are left for the repayment.

I'm the last person to defend corporate America but this is sadly the best they can do under the circumstances.

No, I think they could have said something like, "We really appreciate all of you customers who bought gift cards and we wish we could somehow redeem them. But we're plunging into bankruptcy proceedings here and they're governed by laws that take most of that out of our hands. If it turns out there's any way we can make good on those cards, we will." They could have been much nicer about it.

I also seem to recall that there was some restaurant chain years ago that went outta business but still arranged with some other chain to offer something to gift card holders. The other chain wanted to see if they could inherit some of the loyal customers of the going-outta-biz firm so they offered to honor not the face value of the gift cards but some percentage up to a certain amount.

I knew about how bankruptcy court takes over in these situations. I was just amazed at how callous that second paragraph was towards folks who'd paid good cash for those gift cards and will probably never see a nickel on the dollar. The soft-serve frozen yogurt at Souplantation should have been that cold.

Here's a profile of our friend Frank Welker. This article way understates how much this man has worked.

Here's another one of those Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that's on YouTube for forty-eight hours, a few of which have already expired as I post this. This is Cats but not the recent movie version. It's a filming done in 1988 of the production that ran slightly less than forever at the New London Theatre on Drury Lane. It has Elaine Paige and Sir John Mills in its cast and I think it's fairly entertaining. But then I didn't hate the recent movie as much as some folks did…

Here's quite a find — and thanks to Steve Stoliar for telling me about it. It's from 1952, as am I, and it's a film made for the sponsors of Groucho Marx's TV show, You Bet Your Life, to be shown at some sort of national sales convention. Groucho, glancing often at off-camera cue cards or his secret projection screen, comes off as the kind of person who should have been ridiculed by the Marx Brothers. We are promised a backstage tour but the film never goes backstage and there's no real tour — but it's worth watching…

I find that my life is more pleasant here in the Fortress when I don't pay a lot of attention to two closely-related topics: Donald Trump and what this global pandemic is doing to our world. The trick, I think, is to pay just enough attention so you know what to do to help yourself and those around you…but to not dwell on (a) bad news that teaches you nothing and (b) bad news about which you can do nothing. Hearing that Trump said some new stupid thing falls into both categories, especially since today's stupid thing will be forgotten by Sunday and replaced by three others.

(Someone wrote to ask me about "Obamagate." I think it's a reminder that with his attacks on Hillary, Trump learned he can fire up his easily-fired-up base and convince them that his opponents should be thrown in prison without actually pointing to any actual law that has been broken. And I wonder if anyone has said to him, "Uh, Mr. President…is it such a good idea for you to be promoting the concept of prosecuting former Presidents?")

Mostly, I try to focus on things I can accomplish…like getting Volume 7 of The Complete Pogo off to press and finishing my new book on Jack Kirby. They're not as important as saving the world from COVID-19 and POTUS-45 but I can actually do something constructive about them.

For a while on this blog, I ran a running tote on how many friends I'd lost due to their hysterical support of Donald Trump. I'm thinking of starting a new one tracking how many people I've had to cut out of my life because I'm sick of hearing them rant about how horrible he is. They're not trying to convince me. They just want to vent and I don't enjoy being vented at.

You need someone to talk to? Get a mynah bird. Tell it what you just have to tell someone. We'll both be happier…me because I don't have to listen to it; you because it'll listen to you all day and all night and disagree with you a lot less than I will.

This will only interest folks in Los Angeles. Remember the sadness when it was announced that Nate 'n Al's Delicatessen in Beverly Hills was closing forever? Well, "forever" turns out to be a little less than two months.

It's back, at least for a while. The menu has been pared back and like all L.A. eateries, you can't go in and eat a meal there but you can do take-out. And if you want deliveries, they're on Postmates. I intend to try that soon.

Just a reminder: Tonight at 7 PM my time (which is Pacific time), I will be interviewing my longtime pal Paul Levitz about DC Comics, the company of which he was a vital part for thirty-something years as an assistant editor, an editor, a writer, a publisher and the president of the whole danged operation. I know a lot about DC but Paul knows a lot more. If you're interested in the firm or its comics, this is not a conversation you want to miss.

It'll be live on www.newsfromme.tv and I'm going to try and embed it here but the embeds don't always work for every browser. You can certainly watch the replay later but it may be more fun live and if you're watching on a YouTube page (like this one), you can send comments and questions our way. I can't guarantee we'll get around to answering all your questions but I can guarantee a long dialogue about the company I worked for from afar and Paul worked for from anear…