Monthly Archives: January 2021

This morning, I drove out to Dodger Stadium — my first time there since Sandy Koufax was pitching. I thought maybe they'd let me play Shortstop or at least throw out the first pitch but it turns out, they aren't playing baseball there these days. They are however giving out COVID-19 vaccinations and I figured, "Well, I'm here. I might as well get one."

Actually, I had a 12:30 appointment but we got there at Noon, "we" being me and my friend/assistant Jane. In an uncommon show of cleverness, we stopped en route at Philippe's the Original (a sacred downtown restaurant) and picked up a couple of their famous French Dip sandwiches. Waiting in the drive-thru line at Dodger Stadium is much more tolerable when you're chowing down on a double-dipped Philippe's sandwich.

So I sense some of you have questions…

How long did it take? The vast Dodger Stadium parking lot is set up with multiple lanes defined by orange traffic cones. They send you in a wild variety of "S" curves that eventually direct everyone to one of several lanes where cheery folks are only too happy to inject you while you remain in your vehicle. From the moment we got there until I got the shot was about 75 minutes. They then make you wait fifteen minutes to see if you have an adverse reaction or turn into a werewolf.

Did you have an adverse reaction or turn into a werewolf? Nope. Not yet, anyway and it's been about two and a half hours. After the fifteen minute wait, they give you a card proving you got your shot and it tells you when to get the second dose. Then you get to go.

Which vaccine did you get and did it hurt? The Moderna and no, it didn't. I didn't even know the lady had given it to me until she told me she'd done it. No pain, no soreness, no nothing. She applied a band-aid but I just peeked under it and I can barely see where I was vaccinated.

Was it crowded? Very. And I have to say I was impressed by how many people they were processing. The amount of time it took seemed very reasonable once you took that into consideration. Somebody did a real good job designing the system.

Did anything else happen? I asked one of the nurse-like people if I could get a couple of Dodger Dogs with mustard. She said, "Oh, wouldn't that be wonderful? They feed us real healthy food and that's fine but sometimes you want something greasy and fattening." Jane told her that on the way there, we'd stopped at Philippe's and got French Dip sandwiches. The nurse-like lady moaned and said, "Now I'm going to be craving one of them all day."

I am very glad I got that done and I'll get Dose #2 in four weeks. Of course, I'm still going to mask up and avoid most people but the first dose is supposed to be somewhere between 50% and 82% effective against the coronavirus. And it's 100% effective against my physician telling me I'm a friggin' idiot for not getting this done.

And today we have another one of those videos starring Broadway performers all in different places on different cameras but singing the same song with the same enthusiasm. This was posted on Inauguration Day…

I often quote a pundit named Kevin Drum here. I'll be quoting him less in the future because he's moving from a daily column to every-so-often blogging but I'm going to quote him now. He believes that the reason everyone thinks America is doomed is that everyone in America is telling everyone else in America that America is doomed.

Now, this is "apart from The Pandemic" and that's a pretty big thing to set aside. But that is (we hope) going to end soon and it is one of the few things we're actively working to fix. To quote Kevin…

Political parties that are out of power normally have a keen interest in making things sound terrible. After all, they have to promise to fix things in order to get the votes to get back in power, but nobody is interested in fixing things unless they're convinced they need fixing. So Republicans shout about the deficit and moral decay because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Democrats. Democrats insist that the middle class is dying and Medicare is under assault, because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Republicans.

This is all normal but it can become abnormal if both parties, along with pretty much every pundit, is insisting that the country is going to hell.

I don't agree 100% with that but I do think too many people approach elections with the same panic as Superman's biological father warning everyone that Krypton is about to explode and we'll all be killed. Except that Jor-El was right and everyone else was wrong.

The morning after Barack Obama was first elected, I got an e-mail from a Republican friend who warned that within four years, the same fate would befall Earth…if we were lucky. One or two years seemed much more likely. She was quite serious about this.

And last year around this time, a Democratic acquaintance was telling me the same thing was inevitable if we elected anyone other than Bernie Sanders. He was just as certain of that as the QAnon supporters who are still trying to come to grips with the fact that on Inauguration Day, Biden and Harris were inaugurated and not arrested.

I'm glad Trump is outta there and I wish certain supporters would follow him. But I never bought into the joke that Jon Stewart made before the 2016 election; that we could either vote for Hillary to be the next president or Trump to be the last president.

So read Kevin Drum's piece and if you like what you see there, read this one from a week or so ago. He took on a right-winger who listed things that were going horribly wrong in this country and pointed out with some pretty sound charts and facts that most of those problems weren't problems…or at least weren't huge problems.

We love old, lost TV clips, especially when they've been lovingly restored. Here are a few minutes from The Tonight Show with Mr. Carson from August of 1964, when he'd been doing it for a little less than two years.

His bandleader then was Skitch Henderson (Doc Severinsen was probably in the band) and his announcer was, for his entire run, Ed McMahon but Ed was off this night. The monologue wasn't that long and wasn't that funny but that would change…

• Very strange. I just saw some photos on the internet that didn't have Bernie Sanders in them. You can still do that?

Here's a few minutes from a 1965 Ed Sullivan Show with impressionist George Kirby…a performer I'd always liked. I still do but let me tell you what happened when I worked with him in 1986…

The CBS Saturday Morning department persuaded me to help develop a cartoon show starring Michael Jackson. I signed on…and it was one of those jobs I knew I should have said no to and later regretted that I hadn't. Everyone involved with the project was really enthused about it with one exception: Michael Jackson, a man who loved watching cartoons but really, really didn't want to be one.

Some of it was wanting to be taken more seriously as a musician. Some of it was not wanting to be seen as a performer for children. Some of it was him wanting people to see him the way he wanted them to see him, rather than a cartoon character on a show that would have been somewhat out of his control.

I do not understand how a person who was obsessed with making sure every note of every song was done exactly as he wanted it done agreed to allow this show to proceed as far as it did; only that a lot of people around him had reasons for wanting the project to go forward and he didn't want to disappoint them. I didn't either but it was tough when they were all pulling it in different directions.

So I found myself in meetings with him where one of his associates (he had many) would say to Michael, "I really think you should do the voice of the Michael Jackson character in this show yourself." And Michael would say, "Can't you do it without a Michael Jackson character in it?"

There were many moments in the two or three months I worked on this project where I thought, "This is never going to work." That was about six of them. And then there was the George Kirby problem.

He was part of the deal. In recent years — remember this was 1986 — Mr. Kirby's career had hit the skids. Going to prison can do that to you.

He'd been sentenced to one in 1977, which is what can happen to you when you sell cocaine and heroin to an undercover police officer. He served 3.5 years and once he was out, The Industry was in no hurry to employ him, at least on a steady basis. He spent a lot of time in front of audiences but they were mostly unpaid speaking engagements where he told kids to stay the hell away from drugs…and usually threw in a few impressions.

For what it's worth, I believe he was sincere in his message. It wasn't just something he was doing to try and rehabilitate his image to get his career up and running again…but he was clearly angry that it hadn't. At some point, he hooked up with Michael who took an interest in helping the guy and when this cartoon show was proposed, someone — probably Michael — decided that George would be heavily involved.

I met with him several times. He was a delightful gentleman, filled with great show biz stories — and you know what a sucker I am for great show biz stories. But he had no idea how to do animation or television for kids, and while a fresh mind can sometimes be an asset, it can also send things wildly off in wrong or impractical directions. And he wanted to be the Executive Producer and overall head honcho and do all the voices and write all the music and…

…and that was never going to happen.

TV Networks aren't fond of giving the kind of control he wanted to someone who's never produced a show — especially a cartoon show — in his life. They also were a bit leery of a kids' show "run" (in some way) by a guy who'd served time in prison for dealing heroin.

So you have those two problems and then you toss in Michael J. saying he was fine with a Michael Jackson cartoon show as long as Michael Jackson wasn't seen, heard or mentioned in it. And I haven't even gotten to Michael's manager Frank DiLeo, who wanted the show to be about Michael's Pets, a line of toys based on the critters in The King of Pop's private zoo…and yes, M.J. took me on a tour of it and I met Bubbles the Chimp.

There were other people and with each new person who was involved, there were new problems and new ideas about what the show should be. I wrote outline after outline and the one that pleased Michael didn't please CBS or anyone else and then the one that pleased George didn't please Michael and then I wrote one that pleased Frank but he was the only one. Michael didn't like it, George didn't like it, CBS didn't like it, I wasn't fond of it and even Bubbles said he wanted no part of it…

…which is about when I decided I wanted no part of it either. I moonwalked off the whole project and shortly after that, CBS killed the whole development deal, which I'm sure made Michael very happy and George Kirby very unhappy. I felt bad for George because I really liked the guy. Watch this little clip of him and you will, too…

An early consensus is forming that the line I couldn't understand in the Magic Land of Allakazam opening goes…

Ride the Magic Carpet Express
Where Huck presents
Yogi Bear and Mr. Jinks
And Pixie and Dixie no less

…and I guess that's it. But even at eight, I knew that the last word should rhyme with "presents" and not with "express."

Okay, let's answer two quick queries, starting with this one from Brad Ferguson who asks about the opening I posted from The Magic Land of Allakazam…

Re the Allakazam open (and thanks so much for that), is that Jackie Joseph on the left, in the back? Sure looks like her.

That may be because it is her. She played a recurring character on the show. And hey, while we're talking about that opening…

Watching this show when I was eight, I could never quite make out the last few words in the line about the Hanna-Barbera characters in that opening. Now at the age of sixty-eight, I still can't. Can anyone figure them out?

And in the last hour or two, Gary Cundall and a couple of other folks wrote to ask, as Gary did…

In today's post about Larry King you mentioned that you were back stage at the Craig Ferguson Show. Could you tell us more about that? Why you were there and what it was like? Did you get to meet Craig?

Briefly, I did. It was the Halloween show from 2011 and I was there because my pal Neil Gaiman was on the show and I had to bring him something. You may be able to figure out what it was from this post and you can read about the experience here. You can even watch Neil's segment on that episode here.

Craig was as nice offstage as a guy can be when he's about to do a show and a musical number and he has eighty-seven things to think about. We spent about two minutes talking — which is a lot when you're that busy — and he told me he krew of Groo and loved the comic. But I don't think he recognized my name, which never surprises me. I think Neil had told him who I was.

Reading again over my post about that evening, I should have said that I was impressed by how smoothly things went; how the crew there had been doing that show so long that everyone knew how to do their job and I didn't see any of panic and angst I've seen on shows I've worked on that were one-shot specials or that just went into production.

It was that way when I poached on the set of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and later on Jay's. The warm-up guy (usually Ed McMahon in Johnny's case) knew exactly when they were going to roll tape and he knew exactly how long before that moment to begin chatting with the studio audience and he knew exactly what to say to fill that time. And I could see Johnny enter the studio at exactly the right moment in Ed's usually-the-same warm-up so as to be right in place to make his entrance at precisely the proper moment. Craig Ferguson's show had the same efficiency.

Just because a show's been in production for a while, that doesn't ensure it always goes like clockwork. I went to work on Welcome Back, Kotter in its second season and every single taping started late and with a great many screw-ups and problems.

And I recall being backstage for Letterman's show. This was in his NBC days but he'd been on for a while and most tapings were like Carson's with a good mood and a carefully-kept schedule. The one time I was there though, everything was thrown into chaos by a guest who was yelling and making demands and they had to stop tape and start over because the guest approached Dave while he was walking out to do his monologue and the guest wanted to argue.

I won't tell you the name of that rude guest but as of last Wednesday, he no longer had possession of the nuclear codes. Or maybe what they told him were the nuclear codes.

I don't know about you but when I awoke this morning to the news that there was no more Larry King, my first thought was of a friend of mine who said, about thirty years ago, "I just want to be important enough in this world to be interviewed by Larry King." To the best of my knowledge, he didn't manage that.

Neither did I. Possibly, neither did you. None of what I'm writing here should be taken as any sort of insult or demeaning of Mr. King but that was a very low bar to clear. Those of us who never made it are in the minority in this world. My gardener was probably a three-time guest on Larry King Live.

I'm sorry Larry King is no longer Live. There was a time I couldn't venture into Beverly Hills without seeing Larry King. My two favorite places to eat there — both of them, like him, gone — were Nate 'n Al's Delicatessen and Wolfgang's Steakhouse. Any time I went to either one, there was Larry King.

You couldn't miss him. He looked like Larry King and he dressed like Larry King (with the braces) and he had that loud way of always making it The Larry King Show around him, talking to whoever was at his table and to everyone at surrounding tables. (Another person who was like that was Tom Snyder. Something about hosting interview and phone-in shows must make men like that.)

After two or three times at Wolfgang's of finding the impossible-to-tune-out Mr. King at the table next to me, the following happened. I arrived there early to meet a young lady with whom I had an appointment to dine. I checked in with the reservations lady who asked me if I had a seating preference. I said, "Let me have the table that's not next to Larry King." She laughed because, I guess, that was not the first time she'd heard that and assured me that Mr. King did not have a reservation that evening.

She seated me. My date arrived. We ordered. And then a party of eight came in and was seated at the table next to us. Larry King was in the party of eight and he got the chair closest to mine.

The hostess ran over, apologizing, saying she didn't know he was in that party and offering to reseat us. But it was fine. Larry King was always entertaining.

He was also always available…one of those celebrities who only declined an invite to appear before a camera or audience if he was already committed to appear before a different camera or audience.

The one time I was backstage at Craig Ferguson's show, I heard someone ask someone, "What do you do if a guest cancels at the last minute?" The answer was "We do what everyone does. We call Larry King." He was as good a guest as he was a host.

And yes, he never prepared and it showed. And yes, he sometimes asked questions that made you wonder why anyone would want to know that. And yes, there seemed to be no product he wouldn't sell, no conversation into which he couldn't inject the name of Frank Sinatra, no woman he couldn't marry and no person he wouldn't interrogate except me and maybe you. He was still a great host.  Even if the only thing he ever asked me was, "What's that you're eating?"

In my little tribute piece about Mark Wilson here, I wrote mainly about his TV show, The Magic Land of Allakazam, which ran on Saturday mornings for four years. It was, as you'll see in this clip of the opening, sponsored by Kellogg's cereals. Kellogg's also was backing Hanna-Barbera's second TV series — their first for syndication — Huckleberry Hound. So every episode of Allakazam the first season contained a cartoon from my other favorite show. (The cartoons were eliminated after the first season and they remade the opening to omit Huck, Yogi and the others.)

I started watching this show when I was eight, way back in the days when you had to be in front of the TV when your favorite shows were on. You couldn't pause the show. You couldn't slow-mo it or replay a scene. If something distracted you and you took your eyes off the screen for a moment, you missed whatever you missed…possibly forever but at least until reruns months later. Oh, if we'd had TiVo back then, I would have studied each and every trick in obsessive detail.

By that age, I was reading books…from the children's section of the Public Library. My parents were big on libraries and they went at least once a week, sometimes more often, to take books out and take books back. They also took me along and I had my very own library card.

One day, I asked the librarian if they had any books on magic tricks. They did but, alas, they were in the adult section for which my card was not authorized. I got my father to check out a few of those books on his card and this led to me, at around that age, getting a special one that let me check out books from both ends of the library. I believe we had to get a letter from the principal of my school saying that I was mature enough or smart enough or something enough…but it was arranged.

I studied them backwards, forwards and inside-out. None of Mark Wilson's tricks were revealed in them exactly but some of the tricks taught in the book were based on similar principles so they helped me figure out a few of the feats from The Magic Land. I was proud that I could do that and even prouder that I was able to perform a few for my friends and relatives.

At the same time I was imitating Mark Wilson, I was also shadowing another magical guy on TV — Paul Winchell — trying to learn ventriloquism with my very own Jerry Mahoney figure. I don't recall ever thinking I might someday follow in either profession or even become a performer of any sort. But I do recall wanting to be able to do something that was kinda/sorta like what those two men did. And I recall how happy I was each week when this theme song played as I could spend a half-hour in The Magic Land of Allakazam…

The e-mail spam flood from Donald Trump and his minions ceased a week or two before that administration did but that flow was replaced by a very similar stream — similar in rhetoric and format — from the Republican National Committee. These aren't as amusing so I've blocked them.

Not thinking (much) about Trump has been good for my sleep and, I'd like to think, for all of us. But I don't know what the hell Joe Biden thinks he's doing all day holding planning meetings and signing executive orders. Why isn't he out on the golf course all day, stopping only to tweet childish insults at anyone who doesn't worship him? The nerve of that guy.

---

Hank Aaron died the other day. Knowing as little as I do about baseball, I'm not able to write any sort of valid tribute to him as a player. Ah, but I do know he wrested the title of Baseball's Home Run King from Babe Ruth and held it for something like three decades…and I know there was a strong burst of racist anger when he did this.

A few days before he tied the old record, I found myself in a bar — a very rare occurrence — near someone whose purchases there were making up for my abstinence and that of about ten other folks. This very loud, very drunk person was holding forth on how Mr. Aaron should "know his place." That term was only uttered about eighty times, which was a few less than the accompanying "N-word."

Apparently, Aaron's "place" was to not play to the best of his ability…an odd position for the bombed bigot who also announced that he always bet serious money on the Braves. You'd have thought he'd have liked the concept of a Braves batter belting one over the left field fence or wherever Aaron hit that one. But no. Only if that Braves batter had been a white guy. It made about as much sense as that kind of hatred ever does.

I never saw Hank Aaron play and I know very little else about his career other than that it was long and that The Babe's wasn't the only record that got shattered. But merely based on how mad he must have made that guy in the bar when he did beat Ruth's record, I liked Mr. Henry Aaron a lot.

This message is being posted at the 21st minute of the 21st hour of the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century. If only I were 21 years old and in a Las Vegas casino with $21,000 riding on a hand of Blackjack.

We've lost another great magician…and a personal boyhood hero of mine. Mark Wilson, the Master Magician of The Magic Land of Allakazam, died last Tuesday afternoon. His son Greg, who followed in his old man's footsteps, posted this on a magician's forum…

Whether you know him from his TV appearances, his Live productions, the Mark Wilson Complete Course in Magic book, or one of his many in-person Magic University classes at the Magic Castle, or through one of his many other achievements…Mom and Mike and I are so proud that he brought "Happy Magic" into not only your life, but the lives of more people around the world than he could possibly meet.

Mike is another brother. Mom is Nani Darnell, aka Mrs. Mark Wilson and maybe the loveliest assistant who ever got levitated, sawed-in-two and vanished from an endless series of boxes. To Greg's list of his father's achievements, I would add that I think Mark Wilson has the world's record for inspiring young people to take up magic and also perfecting and popularizing the presentation of magic on television.

The Magic Land of Allakazam was on CBS and later ABC Saturday mornings from 1960 to 1964. Most professional magicians have enough tricks in their repertoire to fill thirty minutes…a few can do an hour…but Mark Wilson somehow managed to fill 98 half-hours over those years. To do that, he had to be an expert at every kind of magic there is — close-up, sleight-of-hand, grand illusion, parlor magic, the works. And almost every week, he also taught home viewers a trick they could do at home with everyday objects.

That's where I learned my first feeble feats of prestidigitation. That's where an awful lot of kids learned their first tricks and a hefty number of them went on to do that professionally. I cannot tell you how important this man was to the Art Form. One of the great perks of being a member at the Magic Castle was that you occasionally got to talk with Mark and sometimes even see him perform.

One evening when I was there with friends, we went into one of the small showrooms to see a magician perform. The scheduled gentleman had a sudden emergency and had to run so, to everyone's delight, Mark Wilson walked and did a completely-unplanned half-hour show. He hadn't gone there that evening to perform. He didn't even have any props with him but it isn't hard at The Castle to scrounge up a deck of cards and a couple of hankies…which was all he needed.

He was in his early eighties at the time but he was just as skilled and charming as the star I watched on Saturday morning when I was eight. And like everyone else in the room, I was just as entertained…and well aware we were in the presence of one of the world's great entertainers.

Antonio Prohias, who drew "Spy Vs. Spy" for MAD for many years, would have turned 100 last weekend were he still with us. Not that we need a reason, but that makes it a good time to remember his amazing story. In some places at some times, it has been highly possible to be killed for drawing cartoons. Here is how he almost did.

Let's get off the subject of politics. As you probably heard, Siegfried Fischbacher — who was one half of the popular duo Siegfried and Roy — died last week at the age of 81. His partner Roy Horn died last May.

Siegfried and Roy were superstars of magic and Las Vegas. They first played that town as the star act of the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana in 1967. In 1978, they got their own show — Beyond Belief — at the Frontier and then in 1987, Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn signed them to be the star attraction at his new hotel, The Mirage, when it opened three years later. The showroom was built to their specifications, the money end of the deal was astronomical…and suddenly, every hotel in Las Vegas was looking for its own superstar magician or team to compete and every magician who did "Grand Illusion" (big tricks) was trying to get a Vegas residency.

I saw their show at the Mirage a grand total of once. If you went in expecting to be dazzled by incredible illusions and beautiful live animals, you were not disappointed, though I think I was more impressed with the folks who designed and built the illusions than with the two men who fronted the show. I remember thinking that apart from the handling of the big cats, elephant and other creatures — which was mostly done by Roy — most of the magic was the kind that anyone could learn to "perform." You just had to stand in the right place and point to the right thing as the stage crew pulled the levers.

This may sound like a "faint praise" review and I guess it is. I'm not as fond of animal acts as I used to be and I like my magicians with more personality and I like to see them doing the tricks instead of the tech guys. But there was no denying that millions of people passed through that showroom and enjoyed the hell out of what went on in there and that S-and-R, as some called them, did a lot to promote the art form. And of course, I wouldn't expect a magician working in a show that size to be standing on stage doing sleight-of-hand card tricks.

Their long run there ended abruptly when…well, there are two versions of what happened on stage the night of October 3, 2003. One is that Roy had some sort of stroke in the middle of the show and Mantecore the White Tiger, sensing his master/friend was ill, locked his jaws onto Roy's neck to drag him offstage and in the process, caused him to lose enough blood to make the stroke worse. The other is that Mantecore for reasons unknown simply attacked and mauled Roy.

Take your pick. Either way, the result was the same: Roy seriously disabled and the end of the act. Such an awful way for one of the most popular live shows ever to come to a close.

Our video today is a 46 minute version of what they did six nights week at the Mirage, not only trimmed down but modified somewhat for the cameras. It will still give you a good idea of what the show was like and what Siegfried and Roy did to become that rich and that famous. It doesn't fully capture what was great about the performance, magic sometimes being a "you had to be there" kind of experience. But you'll see why the countless folks who went to see them thought it was well worth the price of the not-inexpensive tickets…