Monthly Archives: October 2020

• There's a new Saturday Night Live this weekend. Wonder if Lorne Michaels has tried to get Joe Biden to come on and debate Alec Baldwin.

So I was expecting a delivery of three items from Amazon today and, sure enough, one of their drivers delivered 'em at 8:17 this morning and even took the above photo of them. The problem: That's not my house. I don't have hedges like that.

The address on the order was correct.  The guy (or maybe it was a gal) just left them on someone else's porch.  Meanwhile, a lady who works on the Amazon Customer Support Line (and who might have learned English as a fourth or fifth language) assures me replacements will be delivered tomorrow to where I actually live.  If that's your home in the above photo, I hope you enjoy your free gifts, especially the extra-long Lightning cables.

It's been so long since I've posted one of these that I probably need to explain. When I get real busy, I declare a Mushroom Soup Day on this blog. It basically means "Don't expect a lot of content here today." There may be some but — no offense — I'm putting one or more pressing deadlines ahead of entertaining you, dear readers. You might just have to find something else on the Internet to read. I've heard there are interesting things on other websites though, God knows, I haven't seen any.

In the meantime: I have marked my ballot and am deciding whether to mail it or drop it off somewhere. You'll never-in-a-skillion-years guess how I voted for President.

I recommend reading this article by Matt Yglesias. Basically, it says that Republicans have some pretty unpopular political goals and the reason they can have them and still win some elections is that people don't believe anyone could really have those goals. But they do.

Keith Olbermann, who has been doing naught but sports, dog adoptions and lifeless James Thurber readings for lo these many years, is getting back into the news/commentary biz with a series of daily webcasts. This is probably part of a plan to get some non-web job somewhere. Here's a link to the first one which I kinda liked but not enough to make it Today's Video Link. I find myself generally agreeing with what the man says but not with how he says it. I don't even like being bullied into believing what I already believe.

I have decided to stop writing negative reviews on websites that ask you to rate goods or services. Amazon routinely deletes all the ones I post, no matter how polite or reasonable they are. The other day, I wrote a Google one about Simply Stamps, an online company that makes rubber stamps. They made $73.90 of their self-inking variety for me and I ended up throwing them away. So I guess someone figured it was okay to discard the online review I wrote. I don't think this has ever not happened to me with an online negative review. Bye for now.

Fact-checking on the Pence-Harris rasslin' match: Politifact, The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post.

Has there ever been a presidential election that was moved by the running mates debating? The only moment from any of them that most people remember is Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle "You're no Jack Kennedy"…and the ticket Quayle was on won that election. The one I just watched won't set a new precedent.

Both candidates dodged questions. Pence wouldn't say how his administration would protect pre-existing conditions if the Affordable Care Act goes down. Harris wouldn't say if Biden would pack the Supreme Court. Neither one would say what their home state should do about abortion if Roe V. Wade is overturned…though I think with that one, their answers would not have been surprises.

It seemed to me Kamala Harris was playing the game from the position of someone who's way ahead and the goal was not to create a big controversy that might shake things up. They have to be happy in the Biden camp with how things are going right now. And it felt like someone — gee, I wonder who — told Pence to keep hammering her and interrupting and not letting her finish sentences.

The one moment where I went "whoa" was when Harris pointed out that the Trump administration has appointed fifty judges and not one of them has been black. That struck a blow, especially since she was sharing a split-screen with the whitest man in America.

Other than that, let me be the one-millionth person on the Internet to say that I think the debate was won handily by that fly that landed on Mike Pence's head. All the jokes are just too, too easy.

James Corden pretends he's Paul McCartney and Donald Trump and that he's playing the piano, all at the same time…

In November of 2018, Randy Rainbow took a song from Wicked and turned it into a plea to vote. Now, the folks who wrote Wicked and many of the people who've performed in it have done their own version of Mr. Rainbow's idea…

I sure don't get what's going on with this guy — and of course, by "this guy," you know exactly who I mean. The big $2 trillion buck stimulus package is supported by, like, three-quarters of the U.S. population and Trump's biggest selling point with voters was a feeling many had that he knew how to fix the economy…and now he's killed any stimulus pack for the time being. Joe Biden, of course, heartily supports the deal Trump says he won't address until after the election.

And today, after slamming the door shut so loudly that the stock market plunged, he's trying today to pry it open a crack. So what was the point?

Meanwhile, his position on masks is opposed by around 70% of the country — might be 80% by now — and he's doubling-down on it. He stands as inarguable proof that he couldn't handle the coronavirus problem in his own life but, sure enough. he's insisting he's had it right all along and can save all of us.

He sure sounds like a person full of experimental drugs. But then, he always did.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is the latest Trump crony to test positive for COVID-19. I had Rudy Giuliani in the pool.

I'm going to watch the Kamala/Pence smackdown or debate or Plexiglass display or whatever it is tonight. Eric Levitz has some interesting thoughts about what these two people represent.

Randy Rainbow is back — and he has a special guest star…

Just watch this…

So now, Trump is congratulating himself on getting COVID-19 and quickly beating it…and suggesting anyone can do what he did. This might be his new low in presuming total stupidity on the part of the voters. Or maybe it's just his knee-jerk reaction to any kind of negative news to either claim it's fake (which he couldn't very well do after being checked into Walter Reed Hospital) or say, "I meant to do that and I was wildly successful as I always am." One of these days, he's going to trip, fall flat on his face and insist it was all part of his brilliant plan.

Every presidential election, I pick out one of the many Electoral Vote Aggregators to watch and track which states are swinging which way. Last time, I used Nate Silver's 538 which called the election pretty well if you understood that an 80% chance of Hillary winning did not mean a 0% chance of Donald winning.

This year, Mr. Silver has fancied up his site with bells and whistles and I find it awkward to get to the info I want to see so I'm consulting this section over at The Economist. At this moment it says there — I'm cutting and pasting this — "Right now, our model thinks Joe Biden is very likely to beat Donald Trump in the electoral college."

States to watch: They give Biden a 65% chance of winning Arizona, a 70% chance of winning Florida and an 88% chance of winning Pennsylvania. Mr. Trump will have a hard time getting to 270 without all three of those states. Biden, on the other hand, might be able to lose all three and still win.

Lastly for now: This kind of stuff is really silly…

The commission organizing general election debates will allow Mike Pence to participate without plexiglass barriers around him at Wednesday's contest after the vice president's team objected to their planned use, a member of the debate commission tells CNN. But Kamala Harris and the debate moderator will be allowed to erect barriers separating them from the vice president.

In 1960, when it took some technical expertise to make it happen, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon did one of the presidential debates with Kennedy debating from New York, Nixon debating from California and the moderator moderating from Chicago. Today, almost every one of us could set that up with our cellphones and a decent WI-FI connection but still, someone wants to get the combatants into the same studio for no real reason.

Biden should say he will gladly participate in the next two debates as long as the two of them are in separate locations. Trump would no doubt object because (a) he doesn't want to give in to anything Biden wants as a show of macho and (b) he figures to have a better chance of rattling Biden if he can scream directly at him. He might also be afraid of being in a situation where his microphone could cut out. But Biden's way ahead. He doesn't need the debates and frankly, if Trump were to debate an empty podium, he'd lose even worse than he did last time.

Don Kemp wrote me about this post about people being "banned" from TV shows…

I have a book called Live From New York, an oral history of SNL written by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. It covers the history of the show from its inception through 2014-2015 or so. In it, the topic of "people that will never be back" is discussed and Berle is covered. You're technically correct, he wasn't banned, but he made it to a list of people they knew who would not be asked back. He felt free to give advice to anyone at anytime about how he thought the show should go that week.

He also proudly assumed his reputation preceded him and he felt entirely free to unzip and plop on the table the Berle "anaconda," as one writer called it, if any poor soul admitted before thinking that they had never seen it before. The final straw for Berle though was he arranged to have his own standing ovation at the end of the show. He was singing "September Song" and in the balcony ten people, the amount of seats he was given, stood up and cheered. Lorne Michaels made certain the camera never cut to them. Michaels dislikes the Berle show so much it has never made it to repeats.

For what it's worth, Louise Lasser is briefly mentioned in the book, too. Her drug use was too much, even for them. One former staffer recalls her on her hands and knees coming into an office looking for pot. Why she was crawling no one knew. On show day she demanded a sketch be cut and refused to go on until it was. Aykroyd was all for going on without her and had a plan to do the entire show without a host.

Louise Lasser had three things working against her that prevented her from being asked back: She was difficult to work with, she wasn't very good and she stopped being a star of any note. Either of the first two might rule her out but the last one was the killer.

I've read the book you mentioned. It does say in it that Lorne Michaels would never allow the Berle-hosted episode to be rerun but he has since relented. You can pay to download it here and it's on DVDs and in the syndication package. I agree it's a pretty poor episode for Berle-related reasons but I also think it's one of those "you shoulda known when you asked him" deals. Mr. Berle was quite notorious in the industry for doing that kind of thing. It's like inviting Donald Trump to debate and being surprised when he starts interrupting everyone.

My point — and it's much simpler than some of my correspondents thought — is that on every TV show that brings in guest stars, the producer or producers say/says, "Let's not have that person on again." They say that a lot. The musical guest on the Berle episode was Ornette Coleman, who never appeared on Saturday Night Live again. Was he "banned" from the show? Two weeks before Berle, Margot Kidder hosted for her one and only time. Was she "banned?"

That season, the following people were among the hosts of Saturday Night Live: Fred Willard, Carrie Fisher, Walter Matthau, Cicely Tyson, Rick Nelson, Kate Jackson, Gary Busey and Maureen Stapleton. Now, Lorne Michaels might not have made a public vow not to have them back on but the fact remains that each of them hosted the show the same number of times Milton Berle and Louise Lasser did…which, by the way, was only one more time than you and I did. I would guess that in the thirty years Johnny Carson helmed The Tonight Show, there were several thousand times he and/or his producer declined to ask a guest back for a second visit.

And like I said in the previous piece, you don't get "banned" by a studio. You just don't get hired because the guy in charge decides not to hire you. Carson did not have Joan Rivers on again after she went off to compete with him and Jay Leno didn't invite her onto The Tonight Show either. Jimmy Fallon did. That's how it works.

My buddy Charlie Frye can do things you can't do. You can't do this, for example…

I knew this would happen: Once I started paying closer attention to The Election, it would be impossible (or nearly-so) to stop. I'd hoped to hold off that moment until a week or so before Election Day but in very short order, Trump's taxes came out, he self-destructed in The Debate and he caught The Virus. How could you not pay attention to that? It would be like if an African bush elephant took a major dump in your dining room and you sat there having supper, doing your best Sgt. Schulz impression and saying, "Nothing…I see nothing…"

I can't seem to talk to another human being without it coming up, either. For that reason, I have decided to suspend my webcasting until well after the election is settled — which, the way some folks talk, could be about the time the 2024 political conventions are held. If you marked your calendar to make sure to catch my Conversation with Floyd Norman tomorrow night, unmark it. We ain't doing it. In fact, last night when I called Floyd to discuss the postponement, we got to talking about Trump.

And I also talked to an "Acquaintance" of mine — by mutual consent, we have downgraded from being "Friends" — who's still rooting for D.J.T. He has pretty much abandoned hope that Trump can legitimately get more votes of either the popular or electoral variety. He's hoping that Trump can somehow cheat his way into four more years…and that would be okay with him. It is, after all, all about winning and you do what you have to do. It didn't used to be that way in America.

In other news: There is no other news.

I'm going to spend the day with the TV off and my Writer hat on. There is work to be done, to be done…

Some people think you haven't made it as a stage actor until you play Broadway. That's not a bad criteria but a better one would be this: You're nobody in the theater until you're friends with Jim Brochu.

And I guess I am. I've yet to play Hamlet or Tevye or even Dolly Levi (yet) but I do know Jim. We've been friends since around the time Jimmy Carter was President of the United States and if I've learned one thing about Jim, it's that he knows everyone who's ever been on or around Broadway. If I know two things about Jim, it's that he's ricocheted between being a playwright and a director and a performer, all with great success. If I know three things about him, it's that he has more trophies and award certificates in his living room than you'd find in six pawn shops.

Come to think of it, I know a lot of things about Jim but I didn't know as many as I thought until I read his new book, Watching From the Wings, which is crammed to the margins with anecdotes about the great, the near-great, the sorta-great and even a few not-great stars and all the ways in which Jim and they have interacted.  If you saw my webcast interview of Jim, you already know he's a great storyteller.  He's equally good in print as you'll see if you get a copy of said book, which you can do here.  Because if there's four things I know about Jim, it's that he's written a book you'll enjoy.