Monthly Archives: December 2020

• Today's potatoes are from Van Dyke and Cedargreen Farms, Quincy, WA.

Stan Laurel (né Arthur Stanley Jefferson) and Oliver Hardy (né Norvell Hardy) are still my favorite performers of all time. Starting at 9 AM (at the least on my TV) Monday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running a festival of their comedies, many of them shorts, many of them silent.

It starts with Do Detective Think?, which was technically not a Laurel & Hardy film even though they were the stars of it as a team of inept investigators. It was a short comedy in the Hal Roach All-Stars series, which threw together various combinations of comedians then under contract to the Roach studio. This one happens to feature them in roles roughly similar to the screen characters they later developed. Later All-Stars comedies cast them but not as a team, acting much less like what they later became. But it's a good film you don't often see unless, like me, you buy every single damned DVD of them that's released.

I have a special fondness for it because it was the first silent film of theirs I saw and I saw it the first time I went to the legendary Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue here in Los Angeles. I thereafter became a frequent patron of the place and in ways I can't quite explain, that had a lot to do — for good or ill — with who I am today.

Do Detectives Think? is followed in this order on TCM by Putting Pants on Philip, You're Darn Tootin', Two Tars, Habeas Corpus, Big Business, Unaccustomed As We Are (so named because it was their first real "talkie"), Double Whoopee, Berth Marks, Men O'War, Perfect Day, They Go Boom!, The Hoose-Gow, Angora Love, Night Owls, Brats, Blotto, Pardon Us, Sons of the Desert, Pack Up Your Troubles, Babes in Toyland, The Devil's Brother, The Bohemian Girl and Hollywood Party (which has Laurel & Hardy in it but not much of them). The last seven of these are features and Sons of the Desert is the best of the seven if you only want to DVR one.

This, as I say, starts Monday morning. It runs through Wednesday morning and later Wednesday, they have a whole bunch o' movies based on books by Charles Dickens. The following Monday, TCM gives us another whole day of Laurel and Hardy goodies, again sparing me from having to turn on my DVD player to see my faves.

Here is a brief moment of Broadway history. It may be of special interest to those of you who watched the video of the 42nd Street musical that I embedded here a few days ago.

42nd Street opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York on August 25, 1980. It was produced by David Merrick, a producer who was famous (some would say infamous) for many hits, many feuds and many tales that involved him being not the nicest man in the world. Often, they involved him deliberately creating trouble to make others uncomfortable and/or to promote his shows. Some called him "The Abominable Showman."

The show was staged/directed by Gower Champion, who also had lots of hits and lots of stories of him not being too nice, though there were many who loved him and even more who considered him a great man of the theatre. He was not there for the opening night of what turned out to be his final show and his greatest hit. 42nd Street ran for 3,486 performances topping the previous holder of the "most performances" trophy, Hello, Dolly! — also directed by Gower Champion.

Champion was also not present for the last days of previews since he'd been hospitalized for cancer…and he died that morning of 8/25/80. The news was withheld from the public and also from the cast and crew at the Winter Garden.

The show was an obvious smash hit and the audience was standing and cheering and clapping through many bows at its close…and then Merrick wandered out onto the stage. He was nervous and twitchy and he didn't even think to grab a microphone as he signaled for the applause to stop so he could make an announcement. This is footage of that moment and he's barely audible.

He began, "This is a tragic night…" and the audience laughed, thinking that was Merrick's way of being funny during the huge on-stage celebration. Then he said, "I am sorry to have to report Gower Champion died."

The audience and cast were in shock. Folks who knew Champion began crying. It was very awkward until Jerry Orbach, who played the producer of the show within a show, called out to lower the curtain. Given the theme of 42nd Street, all about how "the show must go on," it was an eerily appropriate moment. Here it is but you won't be able to hear much…

That's right: Here are eight facts about the coronavirus to combat common misinformation. That's eight more than you'll get out of the current White House.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was The Magic Land of Allakazam, a Saturday morn sensation and the reason I first got interested in magic.  It starred Master Magician Mark Wilson (he's the guy in the blue tux above) and his lovely assistant/wife Nani Darnell.  She's the lady at left.  An awful lot of guys who got interested in magic then did so because Nani was so adorable and if pulling rabbits outta hats could get you a woman like that…

The gent in the center is Bev Bergeron, better known as Rebo the Clown, co-star of that show and also, when out of make-up, one of the cleverer, funnier magicians around.  He was also Ronald McDonald for a time and spent fifteen years performing in the Diamond Horseshoe Review at Walt Disney World in Florida.

He died two days ago, capping off a lifetime of performing and delighting young and old alike.  I had the pleasure (and believe me, it was one…and an honor too) of meeting and talking with Bev a few years ago.  Rebo never spoke but he made up for it as Bev, telling jokes, talking about magic and telling stories of an amazing career.  I'm ordinarily not a fan of the circus kind of clown but in both identities, he was so full of wit and personality and a real love of making people happy, you had to love both of them.

And starting in 1943 when he was fourteen years old, right up until last Thursday, that's what he did: Make people happy.  Thank you for doing so much of that, Rebo.

A lot of obits lately and I have one more to post after this. I was a fan of David Lander's before he ever Squigged on Laverne & Shirley. He was part of a wonderful comedy troupe called The Credibility Gap which was big — but not as big as it deserved to be — beginning in the late sixties on KRLA radio here in Southern California. It consisted of David, Richard Beebe, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Michael was David's longtime friend and later played Lenny to his Squiggy.

Individually and as a duo, Michael and David did an awful lot of television and a number of movies. I don't remember them not being good in anything. David also did an awful lot of cartoon voice jobs, starting with (I think) supplying the voice of Jerry Lewis on the 1970 cartoon show, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down. In the late eighties, he began appearing as Doc Boy, the brother of Jon Arbuckle, in the prime-time animated Garfield specials.

I didn't work on those but I worked on all the daytime Garfield cartoons, none of which featured Doc Boy so we never called David for them. In 2011 when I was working on The Garfield Show for worldwide syndication, I was asked by the execs at the studio to do a few episodes with Doc Boy. We recorded the shows here in L.A. but the studio was in France.

I told the folks there that it would be no problem to write Doc Boy into some shows but I wasn't sure if we could get the fellow who'd done the voice. By this time, it was well-known than David Lander was suffering from multiple sclerosis. He'd tried to hide it for a while but eventually, it got so serious that that was not possible. He'd even written a book about it called Fall Down Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn't Tell Nobody. It's very good but very sad and they seem to have copies of it for sale on Amazon.

The folks in France understood and suggested that roles can be recast. They're right but I felt that if David Lander was able to work, he should play the part again. This was not easy to make happen because, as I found out when I called, the Screen Actors Guild had no agent listing for David, nor could (or would) they give me his personal contact info.

I hit a few other dead ends before I thought of calling Paul Doherty, who's the head of one of the biggest agencies for voice actors, CESD Talent. He said, "No, David's not with us but I think his agent is Acme Talent." That's not the name he gave me but in light of what comes next, I thought I should disguise the real name of the agency. If there is a real Acme Talent somewhere — and there probably is — it wasn't them.

So I called the Acme Agency and the receptionist said, "No, we don't represent him." I tried some other agencies and the answer was the same.

I was running out of time and close to giving up when I chanced to talk to Paul Doherty again about something else. He asked me, "Did you ever manage to book David Lander?" I said no, Acme said they didn't represent him. Paul said, "It wouldn't surprise me if they did represent him and didn't know it." Paul is wise so I called back Acme and had the following conversation with a lady who may or may not have been the same receptionist…

HER: No, we don't represent him."

ME: Are you sure? His name's David Lander…he sometimes goes by David L. Lander and he was on the TV show, Laverne & Shirley.

HER: I'm afraid I've never heard of Laverne & Shirley, sir.

ME (after one of those "I'm older than I feel" sighs:) Maybe you've seen him around the office. He may have been in a wheelchair.

HER: I'll connect you with our Handicapped Department, sir.

That was their name for it, not mine. I was soon talking with an agent there who told me that, yes, they represented David Lander from the Laverne & Shirley show. Having multiple sclerosis isn't the only thing that can prevent an actor from getting work. Sometimes, no one knows how to find them.

I asked as delicately as I could if David's health would allow him to do a voiceover job. The agent wasn't sure and wound up taking my number and promising David would call me. I suspect the agent didn't want to say "Of course he can" in case he couldn't and I would accuse the agency of something. This way, I could hear his client on the phone and answer the "can he do it?" decision myself. An hour later, David called and he sounded fine. He did caution me though that he might take more than a few takes to get a line right. I told him, "If you keep it under a hundred, we'll be okay."

"Hey," he said. "I'm a professional and I always get it in ninety-nine or less." So I knew there was nothing wrong with his sense of humor. "But there's another problem," he said. "I don't drive and I may not have anyone who can take me to your studio."

I asked him where he lived. He lived three blocks from me. During those days I was searching for him, I'd walked past his house at least twice. I may even have been on my cellphone, asking someone if they knew how to get in touch with David Lander as I walked past his house.

So a few days later, I picked him up and took him with me to the session. This was not long before my mother passed away and the trunk of my car always had her wheelchair in it so we used it to get David in and out of the recording studio.

There was no problem with his performance. Yes, he did take four or five tries to get some of the lines right. I've worked with actors who didn't have multiple sclerosis who took six or seven or more.

Once or twice, it took a lot more and he got way more impatient with himself than he should have…but so what? We got what we needed. In fact, we wrote Doc Boy into some other episodes and had him back. If you check out his IMDB page, you'll see that a lot of cartoon producers got what they needed from him. He was real good. He just wasn't real good immediately all the time. There's a lesson here for all of us.

So as I was sitting here one minute ago, trying to figure out how to end this, I received a text message from Jason Marsden, who did the voice of Nermal and other characters on The Garfield Show. Jason wrote, "I'm sad to hear about Mr. Lander. Thanks to you, I can say I worked with him a couple of times. What a fun talent he was." Thank you for my closing paragraph, Jason. You're absolutely right. What a fun talent he was.

My e-mailbox has lately seen the presence of a few Trump supporters who, independent of one another, have decided they must convince me that there is solid proof that Donald Trump really won the election. To these folks: If you're going to send any more of these, fine.  But please include…

1. An explanation of why the Trump administration lost most of the 40+ lawsuits they've lost because they didn't present what you consider solid proof of fraud — and even told some judges there was no fraud…
2. An explanation of why so many Republican judges, Republican governors and other Republican state officials and even the very Republican Attorney General of the United States aren't seeing what's so obvious and inarguable to you..
3. An explanation of why you're telling me this. I have no power to get your boy a second term. I write comic books and cartoon shows and things like that. Perhaps you have me confused with the State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. I'll admit we do look a bit alike.

And if you don't mind, tell me how much you've personally donated to Trump's campaign to reverse the outcome of an election he lost by…what is it up to now? Seven million votes? And let me know if you think you're getting your money's worth and if COVID went away on November 4th like he promised. Thank you.

This is a good one but it's only online for 48 hours, several of which have already gone by as I post this. It's a full production of the quintessential Broadway musical, 42nd Street.

This is from the West End revival which opened in March of 2017. it starred Clare Halse, Tom Lister and Philip Bertioli. When it opened, Sheena Easton had the role of Dorothy Brock, the arrogant "star" of the musical within the musical but by the time they recorded this video, Bonnie Langford had taken over the role. Enjoy — but enjoy quickly…

• If Joe Biden wants Trump supporters to wear masks for the first 100 days of his administration, he should probably make it illegal to do so.

I've forgotten the precise sequence of my adolescent crushes but I think Abby Dalton came a bit before Mary Tyler Moore and somewhat after Betty Rubble. Ms. Dalton did an awful lot of TV and movie appearances before I became aware of her on a TV show called Hennesey, in which she starred with Jackie Cooper. It's one of those programs I haven't seen since it first aired — in this case from 1959 to 1962 — and I'm not sure if I'd like it now but I liked it then.

She was one of the reasons. She was very lovely and very funny so it wasn't a surprise that when Hennesey was canceled, she went directly to another series — in this case, The Joey Bishop Show. He played his wife on this sitcom and she was again very lovely and about as funny as anyone could be playing Joey Bishop's wife. I've met quite a few folks who worked on that series, including Joe Besser and Corbett Monica and not heard one extol the joys of working with Joey Bishop.

Abby Dalton worked on an awful lot of other shows — comedy, drama and game — and yes, I have a story about meeting her. It was at one of those Hollywood Show events where actors meet their fans and sell autographs and autographed photos. I went with my friend Jewel Shepard, who has herself sometimes been behind the tables there, signing still from her movies.

Jewel knows everyone I don't know and she introduced me to a stunning lady named Kathleen Kinmont, whose work I'd seen on screens large and small and we had a nice conversation. At one point, she asked me who among the celebs signing there, I most wanted to meet. I said, "Your mother." Kathleen Kinmont is the daughter of Abby Dalton, who was selling 'n' signing photos at the next table. I told her I'd had a teenage crush on her mother so she took me over and said, "Mom, here's another guy who had a crush on you." The word "another" stood out.

They're saying Abby Dalton was 88 when she died last week and I don't know how that can be. This particular Hollywood Show was in 2011 and given the way she looked then, she couldn't have been much over 65 at the time.

We talked for a while and she asked me a lot about myself. When I mentioned I did comic books, she said, "Oh, maybe you can help me." From under a stack of photos she was selling, she pulled out copies of the two issues of the Hennesey comic books that Dell published when the show was on.

She said, "Is there any chance you know who drew these? I've always wondered." By every chance, I could. I told her they were drawn by Gil Kane and she wrote the name down. (I did that from memory. If we'd opened them so I could check the art style, I would have told her that Kane did the first one and he might have contributed to the second but I didn't think so. It was a gang bang of several artists including Bob Fujitani and Mike Sekowsky.)

That's almost the end of this story except that, given what I'd heard about The Joey Bishop Show, I wanted to ask her if its star was as difficult as others had said. Before I could figure out how to tactfully phrase the question, I heard someone else ask her, "Hey, was Bishop as hard to get along with as people say?" To which she gave one of those proper, "I don't like to speak ill of the people I work with" replies…so I didn't ask her.

But a few minutes later, I was picking out one of the photos she was selling to purchase and have her sign. She had quite a selection there which reminded you how many films and TV shows she was in and what a career she had. I pointed to the ones from The Joey Bishop Show and asked her, "Are these cheaper because he's in them?" She laughed…and the way she laughed gave me my answer.

Gosh, I enjoyed meeting that woman. So lovely and smart…it's nice when they don't disappoint you in any way.

The second volume of Tex Avery cartoons is about to be released on DVD and Blu Ray. This one includes Little Rural Riding Hood, The Cuckoo Clock, Magical Maestro, One Cab's Family, The Cat That Hated People, Doggone Tired, The Flea Circus, Field and Scream, The First Bad Man, Out Foxed, Droopy's Double Trouble, Three Little Pups, Dragalong Droopy, Homesteader Droopy, Dixieland Droopy, Counterfeit Cat, Ventriloquist Cat, House of Tomorrow, Car of Tomorrow, TV of Tomorrow and Farm of Tomorrow. A lot of folks would tell you that Little Rural Riding Hood is the funniest short cartoon ever made. It's certainly up there.

You can pre-order this one from Amazon at this link. You can still get Volume 1 at this link. And somewhere on either page, there'll probably be one of those great Amazon package deals where you can order both with one click, thereby saving you…one click but no money. It's still worth it.

Here's another unusual interpretation of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the show Sweet Charity. This is an Italian group called Broadway Shots…

Assuming you want to be vaccinated for COVID-19, how long might it be before you can get one?  I do not guarantee the accuracy of this but the New York Times has an interactive page that will give you an estimate.

Before you click on it — which you will do, despite what I'm about to point out here — remember that the prioritizing may change and there may be logistic problems in getting supplies of vaccine to where they can be administered. Also, there are different polls out there about how many people are even interested in getting vaccinated. The Pew Research Center poll says 60% will get it but whatever the number is, it'll change as people see how easy it is, how many of their friends do or don't do it, if there are reports of unexpected side effects, etc.

Also, what if I want the Moderna vaccine and the only ones available are Pfizer's and AstraZeneca's? And how will this work with the vaccines that require two doses a month apart? And can my health insurance plan do anything to move me up on the list?

So now that I've told you how worthless I think the Times estimator is, I'll tell you that it told me that in Los Angeles County, 703,500 people are ahead of me in line to get the vaccine. That might not be such a long wait if 40% of the folks in my town refuse to be vaccinated. It might go even quicker if I'm successful in my campaign to get comic book writers classified as essential workers.

Here's the link where you can check it out.

Sad but not surprised to hear of the passing of our pal Warren Berlinger, who went away yesterday morning at the age of 83 after a long and awful fight with cancer. Before he hit a certain stage of life, Warren was a very talented, oft-hired leading man type on TV, in films and on the stage. After he hit that stage, he was a very talented, oft-hired character actor in all the same places. I'm going to steal the career overview from something that our mutual friend Steve Stoliar posted on Facebook…

Warren had an endless string of stories, which was no surprise, because of his lengthy, prolific career. His Broadway work goes back to the original 1946 production of Annie, Get Your Gun and he scored a big hit in Blue Denim, both on Broadway and in the film version. Other films in which he appeared include The Wackiest Ship in the Army, Spinout, The Long Goodbye, Harry and Walter Go To New York, The Shaggy D.A., Cannonball Run, The World According to Garp and That Thing You Do, amongst many others.

He was also a frequent presence on TV in such series as That Girl, Love American Style, Operation Petticoat, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, just to name a very few.

I'll add a few more: Warren was in the original Broadway cast of Neil Simon's first play, Come Blow Your Horn, and he starred in the London production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and later toured occasionally in this country. On TV, he had a recurring role on Joey Bishop's sitcom and was later in the cast of a short-lived TV series on NBC in 1971 called The Funny Side. I met him on the set of that show in a visit I wrote about here.

IMDB, Wikipedia and other online sources will tell you he was the nephew of Milton Berle, whose real last name was, yes, Berlinger. Other sites will tell Uncle Miltie was not Uncle Miltie to Warren. The truth, if you asked Warren, was that he was much more distantly related to Berle. He would sometimes however suggest jokingly that the legendary Berle phallus ran in the family. I don't know about that but having a long, successful career sure did. We're gonna miss that guy.

Here's a nice summary of where Trump's various attempts to overturn the election stand. Seems like they're just going through the motions to (a) keep those donations rolling in and maybe (b) to appease Trump's silly "never admit you lost" mantra. I'm posting that link for those of you who have, like much of America, grown bored with the whole thing and aren't following it that closely.

I've long thought that America didn't get angry enough about how the Iraq War, with all of its casualties and expense, was mounted on too many false assumptions and false premises by our leaders. I think we should be at least as angry about how much of the battle against the coronavirus has been hampered by phony claims about it going away on its own any day now, not being worse than the common cold or flu, how we won't hear a word about COVID after Election Day…

And that's about all the politics I have in me today so let me put in one of those little dividing lines and I'll move on to other topics…

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I started this blog on December 18, 2000 so we're creeping up on one of those nice, round-number anniversaries. I can't think of anything to do here to celebrate but if you want to say thanks…

Obviously, I'd welcome PayPal donations to help out with the more-expensive-than-you-think job of keeping this blog online. (You may have noticed how outages have been practically non-existent since I switched to the more-expensive-than-you-think hosting company.) But I also know how things are tight for most people and they'll only get tighter for Christmas…so I'd be happy with more plugs on other social media and more questions sent in for ASKme.

And if you're doing your holiday shopping on Amazon, you can do it via my Amazon link and we'll both be ho-ho-hoing at no extra cost to you.

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In the post before this one, I linked to a video of some folks doing an unusual interpretation of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the show Sweet Charity — not to be confused with an infinite number of other songs called "The Rhythm of Life." About eighty of you wrote in to tell me that I already linked to that unusual interpretation of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the show Sweet Charity so I've replaced it with a different unusual interpretation of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the show Sweet Charity. Stay tuned for more unusual interpretations of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the show Sweet Charity.