Monthly Archives: May 2021

In 1996, Nathan Lane starred in a new production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the St. James Theater in New York. Forum has been my favorite show ever since 1970 when I first saw it in a revival that starred Phil Silvers, Larry Blyden, Nancy Walker, Lew Parker, Carl Ballantine and a bevy of other fine folks including Charlene Ryan, who is now married to some cartoonist named Sergio Aragonés. (Some of you already know this but I'm going to go through this again for those who don't.)

Best evening I ever spent in a theater. From that day forward, I was like an addict trying drug after drug trying to again experience the wonders of that first high. I have been to every production of the show I could possibly see, well aware I'll probably never find one as good as that one with Mr. Silvers. But okay. It doesn't have to be that good. I'll settle for anywhere in the same ballpark.

And sometimes I've seen really good ones and sometimes I've seen really bad ones. When I started going with Amber, I warned her that our dating would include attending productions of that show now and then…and fortunately, the first one I took her to was really, really good. Less than a month later, I took her to one that was really, really bad.

One of the really, really good ones, I saw before I met her. It was the one with Nathan Lane and I saw it twice. I was in New York just before it opened and I prevailed upon one of the authors of the show, Larry Gelbart, to get me house seats. He agreed on one condition: I was seeing it before he did so after the show, I was to exit the theater and immediately text him my quickie review of it.

I told him he had a deal. So I took a lady I knew in New York to see it and on the sidewalk outside after, I texted Larry a three-word review of what I'd seen. It said: NEEDS MORE JEWS.

A few weeks later, Larry saw it and he phoned me. He said, "You were right. Needs more Jews."

Several months later I was back in New York and I again coerced house seats out of Larry. This time, the same show with the same cast was much, much better. I don't think they added any Jews to it but Lane and the other players, including the incomparable Lewis J. Stadlen, had learned how to wring every single laugh out of every single line, including many I'd never seen get laughs before.

I took a different lady I knew in New York and we loved the show. It wasn't Phil Silvers but I'd long since given up expecting anything to clear the high bar he'd set.

The next time I was in New York after that, Mr. Lane had departed the show and his replacement was…this is not a joke…Whoopi Goldberg. I am not a fan of stunt casting…of men playing roles written for women or vice-versa. I don't think I'd go see Gypsy with Nathan Lane playing Mama Rose and I decided not to see Whoopi as Pseudolus. I decided to skip it — the one and only time I could easily have gone to see a version of Forum and didn't.

Recently, someone posted this video of Whoopi doing the opening number. There are a few bad edits in this but it still makes me wish I'd given it a try…

Jonathan Chait has some wise words (it seems to me) on the matter of Liz Cheney being booted from her position of power in her party. And pretty much being told that her party is no longer her party.

I'm not spending much time watching news these days because fifteen minutes of watching news seems to turn into an hour or more of thinking about it and I have writing assignments that need my attention. Is it as simple as mainstream Republican leaders being terrified that if Trump can't call the shots in their party, he'll start his own and in so doing, take away enough voters and donors to cripple the G.O.P. for a long, long time?

No one seems too shocked by yesterday's announcement that Ellen DeGeneres is ending her very successful afternoon talk show. Still, I have a flurry of e-mail asking me to comment…and I think I did last August.

Regarding NBC's announcement that they will no longer air the Golden Globes ceremony — at least for a while: All the things they're saying about how the organization is deficient in matters of diversity are probably true but we also stand by our view that America is getting sick of shows where people who are already too rich and too famous honor each other for their awesome greatness. Frankly, the Golden Globes should have been taken off the air because no one knew who gave them out or for what or how or anything. They were on TV because someone thought they were important and someone thought they were important because they were on TV.

If you don't think politics makes for strange bedfellows, just look at some of the people who now find themselves siding with Liz Cheney.

Rob Reiner just posted the following on Twitter: "We no longer have a two party system." Yes, we do. We have the Democratic Party and the Donald Trump Party. That's two parties.

I would love to know how much work and what techniques Randy Rainbow did to make that new video of his we linked here yesterday. I still find it amazing that someone could whip that up on a home computer system. Wonder what it would have cost and how many technicians would have been involved if we'd tried to produce something like that back when I was doing variety shows. We might still be in post-production.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by an anonymous Brass Ensemble…

I'm a big believer in Good Real Doctors. I have found in my life that the secret to my good health is to have a good primary care physician with whom I have a rapport — someone I can talk to, someone who likes me as a patient. I have left several physicians because I felt I was merely the 10:45 AM appointment and he (or one she) had to get through with me and get to the 11 AM appointment who was already waiting in the adjoining examination room.

That primary care doc is key because he refers me to good specialists for certain needs and these men or women communicate with one another and I have my little M.M.C.N. (Mark's Medical Care Network) working for me. I do not expect any of them to be infallible but they kind of cross-check each other and they all know way more about medicine than I do and it all works fine…for me.

And I've come to feel that a key reason the M.M.C.N. works for me is that I never take medical advice from sources outside the M.M.C.N. This would include friends who think they know more than doctors. It also includes things one reads on the Internet, no matter how credible the website may look. I mean exactly what I say in the following sentence: I have had friends who I believe killed themselves by following medical advice from sources other than Good Real Doctors. That's "killed themselves" as in "died" and some of them didn't have to.

So I don't follow the advice of non-doctors or of online sources even if they are doctors. At most, I may take what I get from those sources and then ask the appropriate person within the M.M.C.N. about them…and sometimes, they say, "Yeah, that's right" but I don't assume that until they say so. I think when it comes to your health, you have to trust those who know more than you do, not those who merely claim to know more than you do.

I've been thinking about this lately as I watch Dr. Anthony Fauci go about his current assignment, which seems to consist of arguing with people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. I think when this whole Pandemic thing is over with, he will be seen as the True Hero of it all, which is not to say he was right about everything from the get-go but nobody was or could have been.

One of the things I've come to admire about doctors — especially the ones I dealt with during my mother's and my friend Carolyn's illnesses and deaths — was the skill to say just the right thing. There is a diplomacy and a sense of scale involved in telling the patient what he or she needs to hear and not to give false hopes or false fears. And you have to make sure that when you err, as is inevitable, you err on the side of caution and restraint.

And poor Dr. Fauci is trying to do this in an environment where people with personal and/or political agendas are desperate to misinterpret or misrepresent his words…or to corner him into saying words they would prefer. Here's an article about Dr. Fauci and others in his profession discussing the challenge they face in this area.

Clearly, among the abilities a Good Doctor needs to have is the ability to select just the proper words. It kinda figures a writer would be impressed by this since that's the main thing we do…or try to do.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is a rhythm guitar version by Carlo Bacalla…

I'm kind of intrigued by this guy (this Pillow Guy) Mike Lindell. He reminds me of certain folks I've observed or encountered in life who had loads of money, insane ideas and the willingness to write a check to anyone who indulged their whims and wishes, no matter how looney. When Howard Hughes was sitting naked in a bed in a blacked-out hotel room, ordering his well-paid employees to preserve his urine in Mason Jars, none of them said, "Uh, Mr. Hughes, I don't think you want to do that."

Here, Zachary Petrizzo writes about Lindell's recent rally in South Dakota where he expected 30,000 people to show up in a hall that could accommodate 3,200…which turned out okay because only 1,500 showed up. Interesting that his opening act was Joe Piscopo. That was probably a real good booking for Joe.

I've been watching CNN's The Story of Late Night as it attempts to cram nearly seventy years of TV history into six hours, each interrupted by ten minutes of commercials. You could do six hours just on Jack Paar and not say half of what oughta be said. It's like a lot of documentaries I've seen lately or even been in. You can almost hear the filmmakers saying to each other, "Wouldn't it have been great if we'd done this fifteen years ago when 85% of the people we'd like to have interviewed were alive?"

That said, they have a lot of great clips. Wish some of them were longer. And I'll have more to say as the series progresses.

My favorite online Food Explainer Guy, Adam Ragusea, tells us all about Vidalia Onions.  This video is way more interesting than you'd think a video about Vidalia Onions would be.  Check it out…

It's him again. With one of his best…

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is from the Metro Brass Quintet of Pittsburgh…

BuzzR is that cable channel that most of us have that reruns old game shows.  On Sunday, May 16, they're rerunning an episode of Password from 1966 with four celebrity players: Lee Remick, Peter Lawford, Audrey Meadows and Stephen Sondheim.  That's right: Stephen Sondheim.  Sure, he can rhyme all those words but can he guess them with Lee Remick giving him the clues?  The schedule says it airs at 3 PM Eastern Time, which might mean 12 PM on your cable or 3 PM or just about anything.

I make little notes about topics I want to write about on this blog and often when I get busy, I discover some other blog I follow has beaten me to one of them, saying much of what I was going to say. F'rinstance, my friend Ken Levine wrote about Rolling Stone's list of 100 Best Sitcoms of All Time.

As with all such lists, a lot depends on what criteria you use and what you decide qualifies at all. To the latter point, I agree with Ken that The Simpsons and other animated shows probably belong on a separate list. The criteria is a little muddier. The list is called "100 Best Sitcoms of All Time" but Ken and some of the selectors for Rolling Stone seem to think that means "Best, Most Influential, Beloved and Enduring Sitcoms," which is not quite the same thing.

I'd put Car 54, Where Are You? in the Top 20 if all we're considering is "best" but I don't think it was influential, beloved or enduring. If we were weighting for "beloved," I'd put The Andy Griffith Show in the Top Three and if you don't believe me, go visit the Andy Griffith Museum in Mt. Airy, North Carolina (as I did) and talk to the people who make regular pilgrimages to the place. There's no comparable museum for Friends or All in the Family or even my favorite, The Dick Van Dyke Show. (If I could, I'd open a museum for Seinfeld and I'd have a lunchroom that serves great soup but won't let you have any of it.)

Anyway, my list would be a lot more like Ken's than Rolling Stone's but I'd have The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko) in the Top Ten (Rolling Stone has it at #70!!!) and somewhere on mine, you'd see Married With Children, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Addams Family and He & She.

And did Rolling Stone omit Amos & Andy because they didn't think it was funny or because it was Amos & Andy?

Our pal Jason Graae with a timely song parody…

I'm a big fan of the stage musical of Al Capp's Li'l Abner and of the movie that was made of the stage musical. The film was released on December 11, 1959 and a month later — on January 12, 1960 — three of its stars and Mr. Capp appeared on CBS on The Red Skelton Show for an episode called "Clem Goes to Dogpatch." That's "Clem" as in "Clem Kaddidlehopper," one of Skelton's recurring characters.

The three stars were Peter Palmer (Li'l Abner), Leslie Parrish (Daisy Mae) and Stubby Kaye (Marryin' Sam). There were two songs from the show and movie: Palmer sang "If I Had My Druthers" and Kaye did a nice rendition of "Jubilation T. Cornpone" with Skelton's dancers who played the population of Dogpatch. Ms. Parrish didn't sing, perhaps because her singing voice was dubbed for the movie and the show didn't want to go to the trouble of arranging for that assist. No Stupefyin' Jones or Mammy Yokum or anyone else.

The whole thing looked kinda cheap but it's nice to see more of those actors in those roles. Peter Palmer really was so perfectly cast. And you get to see Al Capp playing the role of a decent human being, which for him was kind of a stretch…

My great pal Christine Pedi favors us with a medley from Les Misérables as it would be performed by the great ladies of the theater. With Seth Rudetsky at the piano…