Today's (Maybe This Week's) Political Post

As some of you have noted, I'm giving myself a vacation from politics. You get weary of this stuff at times and I'm especially tired of articles and discussions with friends about "What's Trump going to do?" It seems clear to me that even Donald J. can't answer that…or if he can, the answer could change tomorrow — or as often as he changes impeachment lawyers.

But I was interested in this piece by William Saletan about why Trump lost the election. A couple of his own pollsters are writing about it and they both seem to think he could have won but he made a couple of fatal mistakes. Here are two of them. ("Fabrizio" is not a detergent. It's the name of one of the pollsters.)

Fabrizio flagged two particularly foolish mistakes in Trump's response to the virus. One was ridiculing masks. In the 10 battleground states, voters who favored mask mandates (Biden's position) outnumbered those who opposed mask mandates (Trump's position) by a ratio of three to one. The enormous pro-mask constituency went to Biden by about 30 points, on average, in the five states that flipped to him. Trump's other dumb move was his persistent slander against Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the five states that flipped to Biden, 72 percent of voters approved of Fauci's job performance, and 63 percent of those voters went to Biden.

For all his detractors and death-threateners, Dr. Fauci is still the only human being on the national scene with any credibility at all to speak to the Herculean task of stopping the virus. No one else has any at all with the public…and certainly no one who isn't a doctor does.

Hal Holbrook, R.I.P.

Hal Holbrook did so many plays and TV shows and movies in his long, rich career. So many. In some ways, it's a shame that folks will say, "Oh, yeah…he's the guy who did that Mark Twain thing on stage"…though even if that was the only thing he ever did, we will still be mourning the passing of a great, accomplished actor.

He did that show for 63 years and I'm so happy that after missing many opportunities, I finally got the chance to see him do it back in 2014. I went with my friend Jewel Shepard and we met up with our friend Frank Ferrante for dinner first…and then at the theater, we hooked up with our friend, James Karen, who literally had known Mr. Holbrook since before the days of Mark Twain Tonight.

It was wonderful — one of those theatrical experiences you carry with you for a long, long time. And as a bonus, we all got to go backstage after and meet the star. Jewel was wise enough to haul out her camera and record this little video and capture the reunion of Mr. Karen and Mr. Holbrook. You'll see Frank and me grinning in the background…

Today's Video Link

From a concert at the White House back in 2012, my favorite singer — Audra McDonald — sings what is probably not the easiest song in her repertoire…

It's Vega$, Baby!

A few years ago on a panel at Comic-Con, I mentioned that I was a fan of the 1978-1981 TV detective show Vega$ starring Robert Urich. A fellow in the audience who reads this blog had an extra set of the entire series on DVD (this set) and he was nice enough to send it to me. I've been watching one or two episodes per night for long enough to get through, so far, the first season.

Have to say I don't enjoy it as much now and I did then but I enjoy it enough to keep watching. A small part of the problem may be watching so many of them back-to-back, night after night. You begin to notice a certain sameness from episode to episode. For instance, Dan Tanna — the private detective played by Mr. Urich — takes on very few cases that would pay him his oft-quoted, rarely-paid price of $200 a day plus expenses.

They're mostly cases involving friends or friends of friends or people who can't pay…as if the producers told the writers, "We want him to be personally involved in every case." Tanna seems like a great guy but if you're his friend, you're destined to be beaten up every so often, shot at and/or framed for murder.

Then again, seeing shows in rapid succession has made me impressed with how good Urich was in the part. And I'm impressed with how elaborate some of the episodes are in terms of set-ups and crowd scenes and shooting all over Vegas. It's hard to believe they could have filmed some of those in five days.

Las Vegas of 1978-1981 is one of the big stars of the show. Tanna rarely drives his red 1957 Thunderbird convertible to any hotel that still stands. The T-Bird is also a star. I used to own one of those cars and I still love 'em. There are big chase scenes involving it where I'm thinking, "Oh, I don't care if Dan Tanna gets killed. Just don't wreck that great car."

(I assume they had a couple of 'em. I actually saw the main T-Bird he drives in person some years before the show went on. It was owned by Dian Parkinson, one of the prize models on The Price is Right long ago, when she was married to the guy who later produced Vega$. It was in the valet line at a party and she was ahead of me. I never saw such a beautiful woman get out of such a beautiful automobile.)

I also like that the show has just about every familiar face from that era of television either in a starring guest spot or a cameo. The first season alone, we had Cesar Romero, Robert Reed, Sid Caesar, Molly Picon, Barbara McNair, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, Bill Dana, Nehemiah Persoff, Richard Bakalyan, Cameron Mitchell, Kim Basinger, Red Buttons,  John Marley, Henry Jones, Isabel Sanford, Shelley Berman, Pernell Roberts and everyone else who ever sailed for the same producers on The Love Boat.   Norman Alden and Andrew Duggan had major guest roles as two different people in different episodes in the first season. Muhammad Ali, Dean Martin and everyone else who set foot in Vegas did cameos.

One person I hadn't seen in the first season was this comedian I keep talking about on this site, Dave Barry. To remind you: Dave Barry was a stand-up comedian who appeared often on The Ed Sullivan Show and in clubs and hotel rooms across the country. He also had a decent career doing voices for cartoons, including a lot of vintage Disney and Warner Brothers shorts. I had the pleasure of meeting him twice before he passed away.

Vega$ filmed all over that city but was most often based at the Desert Inn and in the show, you saw a lot of the big marquee signs out front of every hotel but especially the Desert Inn. In the show's opening titles, and often in the episodes themselves, you see that WAYNE NEWTON was headlining there and in smaller letters below his name, it says DAVE BARRY. His name was on the show a lot that way.

So I figured Dave Barry would show up in an episode but he didn't. I looked him up in IMDB to see which one he'd be in…and while the credits there for the series seemed pretty complete, there was no listing for Dave Barry ever appearing on Vega$. Wayne was on the show twice — once playing a character, once playing Wayne Newton — but no Dave Barry. It seemed kinda unfair to me.

Now, since I've been writing here about Dave Barry, I've been in e-mail correspondence with two members of his family. Last night, I was watching an episode of Vega$ while I was answering some e-mail and I was about to write to his grandson when I heard a familiar voice from the screen. I looked up and there was an actor playing a bit part as a casino security guard…

The voice gave him away. It was Dave Barry without his toupee and with what may or may not have been a fake mustache.  He was not listed in the show's credits and he was not listed in IMDB, though I think his grandson is adding him in for this.  But that was Dave Barry…in a scene that was probably filmed at the Desert Inn during the day when he was opening for Wayne that night.  It's only about a minute and a half but you can see it in this video, about four minutes in.  They even found him a bald stunt double or maybe a hairy one with a bald cap.

I'm very proud that I recognized him.  That's the guy who did Humphrey Bogart in all those Bugs Bunny cartoons and was briefly Elmer Fudd and a lot of other folks.  I'm now into the second season of Vega$.  I'll let you know if anyone else interesting shows up.  I'm sure many familiar faces will.

Allan Burns, R.I.P.

My pal Ken Levine has posted a nice piece about Allan Burns, a greatly-respected TV writer who passed away over the weekend. My history with Mr. Burns consisted of a handshake and a few friendly words on a Writers Guild picket line so I'm not the guy to write a real piece about what he was like but Ken is.

And as near as I can tell, everyone else who knew Allan Burns well had the same opinion of the man and everyone else who watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show or any other show that Allan wrote, had the same opinion of his work. And hey, the guy wrote cartoons for Jay Ward!