Monthly Archives: September 2021

Badges went on sale this morning for the Comic-Con Special Edition which is being held November 26-28 at the San Diego Convention Center. Online chatter says it has not sold out and it might not sell out today.

I suspect the nature of this convention is that it will have a total turnout around that of WonderCon (run by the same folks), which would mean around 50,000 attendees over three days. I further suspect a low percentage of those folks will come some great distance and stay in a nearby hotel. There will be such people but a large percentage of the guests will be ones who drove to the con for a day. I may be wrong about this. I don't think even the fine staff running the convention is too sure at this point.

Unless there is some alarming uptick in COVID or a new strain that strikes mainly people who don't eat cole slaw, I plan on being there and I'll be hosting a few panels. It does not look like any of them will be Quick Draw! or the Cartoon Voices panels I so often helm but I'm not sure yet what they will be. If you'd like to be there, find out more or get into an online queue to purchase badges at this site.

Here's another video where Sergio and I answer questions from Groo fans. Got one you'd like us to address? There's a comments section on the page over at www.groo.com where you can read all the videos we've done so far…

The Tony Awards will be handed out on Sunday, unnoticed by most.  In the best of times (i.e., pre-COVID), very few Americans cared who won what and it's worse this time because so few shows were seen by so few audiences.

Here's an indicator: The nominee for Leading Actor in a Musical is Aaron Tveit in Moulin Rouge.  That's nominee, singular.  He's the only one.  Instead of picking from a list, the Tony voters were asked something like, "Should Aaron Tweit win in this category?"  If he received 60% "yes," he gets the trophy.

The telecast this year has been bisected.  At 7 PM Eastern, Audra MacDonald hosts the Tony Awards on Paramount+.  That will run two hours.  At 9 PM, everyone theoretically switches over to CBS for a two-hour show hosted by Leslie Odom Jr. This one is called The Tony Awards Present Broadway's Back!, which sounds like it'll be a two-hour infomercial for all the shows that have just opened or reopened, or are about to open or reopen. I hope it is.

The three most important Tony Awards — Best Play, Best Revival of a Play, and Best Musical — will be presented on this show. All the other awards that are going to be televised at all will be given out on the earlier show.

They tried something like this years ago and it didn't work then…but it might be a good idea now.

Not all that long ago, the Tony Awards were thought of as a loser telecast, always finishing low in the ratings. CBS was willing to air it providing the show did not run a second over two hours…and they were very rigid about that. It presented a lot of problems because it meant a lot of awards had to be presented not on the air but before the telecast or during commercial breaks. Obviously, a lot of nominees and recipients were unhappy about that.

But the time problem had another downside. Giving out the trophies is Job Two on a Tony telecast. Job One is showing scenes from what's currently playing on Broadway to perhaps lure buyers to order tickets. Some shows have been saved from having to close by a surge of ticket-buyers following the Tonys.

One year, a nominee for Best Musical was a show called Ain't Nothin' But The Blues, which starred a friend of mine named Ron Taylor. That's Ron on the right in the above photo. He's no longer with us but he had a great voice and if you ever listen to the original off-Broadway cast album of the musical of Little Shop of Horrors, that's Ron singing as The Plant.

Ain't Nothin' But The Blues was not doing great business and might have closed except that the Tonys were coming up and there was the thought that doing a rousing number from it on the telecast might boost sales and keep the show alive. We'll never know if it would have because that year, portions of the telecast ran long and the number from Ain't Nothin' But The Blues never got on. The show closed soon after.

The Tony people tried one year to work around the two-hour limit by doing two hours of the show on PBS and then the two hours on CBS — kinda like what they're doing this year. That time, it was awkward and the PBS section went largely unwatched, plus of course there were huge arguments over what would be on the CBS section. The two-hour restriction ended about the time Les Moonves took over as the Head Honcho at CBS.

We can all think of bad things to say about Mr. Moonves but he did a lot of good things and one was this: It was he (reportedly) who decreed that not only could the Tony Awards run three hours but they could even run a little past 11 PM it they had to. On most Tony telecasts thereafter, you could usually see a shot of Moonves in the audience, enjoying the hell out of the show, as a little "thank you."

I am guessing that the decision to let the Tonys go as long as necessary was not because the show had become any more popular with viewers. It probably had something to do with the fact that most awards shows were down in ratings so the the Tony Awards' tune-in no longer looked as bad as it once had. Anyway, most of the televised ceremonies have been delightful since then — and probably somewhat responsible for Broadway doing as well as it was doing the last decade…up until the point when The Pandemic opened.

So this year, it's probably right 'n' proper that they turn the CBS telecast into a selling tool to lure audiences back. If you don't subscribe to Paramount+, this might be a good time to get a free seven-day trial of it, which is what I intend to do. I may or may not cancel before we get to the part where I have to start paying.

I do not expect to be back there soon. I'm still uncomfy with the idea of being on an airplane or even leaving my house for very long. I also don't see a lot playing or opening back there that lures me. The Hugh Jackman/Sutton Foster revival of The Music Man was very tempting until I saw what they're charging for good seats — and I don't mean what the scalpers are charging. I mean the price printed on the tickets. Harold Hill will not be the only con-artist in that theater.

But I'll watch all four hours of Sunday's festivities and see if anything else lures me…and I hope Broadway comes back, bigger than ever. Even when I'm on this coast, I like the idea that it's thriving on the east coast.

Here's another one of those fake text messages not from AT&T trying to get me to click on a link that will do fiendish things to my phone and/or credit rating.  This one, as any fool can plainly see, is intended for Dorothea.  That was the name of my mother who died in October of 2012 but who is apparently still paying monthly bills for the cell phone she never had.  Mom was always good about such things.

I'm curious how my cell number got connected to her.  When she was in and out of the hospital and nursing home the last year or two of her life, I often put her landline phone on call forwarding to my landline phone…and I do still get spam calls for her.  About twice a year, a live person claiming to be from a charity calls my landline and asks for her.  I ask, "What is this in reference to?" and the caller says something like, "Well, we've always been able to depend on her for a donation and when she gave us one six months ago, she asked that I call back around now to remind her to donate again."

Sometimes I say, "Really?  Six months ago, you spoke to my mother who died in 2012?"  If they didn't immediately hang up, I'd say, "Don't you feel guilty conning money out of the Deceased?"  But they always hang up before I can get to that part.

I dunno if she ever donated to the caller's "cause" but she did donate to some legit charities and I guess that got her on a pigeon list somewhere.  Her old number is not on call forwarding to mine and hasn't been in years but I guess somehow when it was, my number got linked to her.

More bizarre is how, though she never signed up anywhere to receive text messages, she does now…and they show up on my cell.  If you know how this happens, please don't tell me.  I like to keep a little mystery in my life about some things.

Several of you have sent me info on how to go about reporting spam text messages and I am now about to try some of them.  I'll report back here once I understand a little more about how this works.

Hey, remember that nakedly-partisan review of Maricopa County's 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election? The one that was supposed to prove Trump really got more votes? Well, the rumor at the moment is that when its report is released — apparently, later today — it will show that Biden got slightly more than the previous counts determined and that Trump got a little less.

And some people will go to their graves not only believing that Trump won but that there was clear evidence that proved it…even though Trump's lawyers never presented any to anyone in an official position to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, here's an article by Adam Serwer detailing the five main ways Trump has tried to seize victory in an election that he lost badly. I wonder if he's looked into changing his name to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and making Pence change his to Kamala Harris.

It's Jordan Klepper talking to parents at an anti-mandate rally…

Let's say you're in a roomful of people who are not wearing masks during The Pandemic.  Are you any safer if you wear one?  According to this article, yes, you are.  You're better off not to be in such a room but if you are, Masked is better than Not Masked.

And someone asked me what kind of mask I'm wearing when I go out.  My doctor recommended this one and I'm pretty happy with it.  I have no idea how it'll do on your face but it's comfy on mine and I like that it goes around my whole head, doesn't hook on my ears and it easily covers my chin.  Some of the masks I tried earlier were not so efficient in the chin area.

Minor drawbacks: They aren't the cheapest masks you can get.  Then again, maybe this is not the time to be wearing the cheapest mask you can get.  Also, you'll feel like the 3M company bought advertising space on your face.

This is the 3M Aura N95 Model 9205.  I also wear their Model 9210 which is just about identical but harder to purchase in small quantities.  They say it's "disposable" but I'll bet you could wear one for many days and many nights.

Maybe you've been getting these for a while on your cell phone but it's only been the last month or two that mine has received them.  They're fake messages, mostly pretending to be from AT&T, trying to get me to click on a link that will take me…

…well, since I've been wise enough not to click, I don't know where any of them would take me but I think "to the cleaners" is a likely possibility.  Or maybe Computer Virus Hell.  Or maybe to a festival of data-mining and/or an avalanche of additional spam.  Whatever it, is, I'll bet it's not good for me.

This one wants me to click and claim some sort of money they're holding for me.  The one before told me there were serious problems with my bill and I needed to click on the provided cyberlink to sort things out.  The one before that said, "As requested, your cellphone account will be disconnected and deleted in one hour" and then it gave me a link to click if this was not what I wanted.  And so on.  How did I realize it was a fraud?

1. It has a real phone number, portions of which I have redacted.  AT&T does not need a standard ten-digit phone number to send me a text message.
2. The link they want me to click to is not to an AT&T address.
3. AT&T giving me back money?  Are they kidding me?  Are they freakin' kidding me?

And also, I keep getting these.  They have me on High Alert.

I'm not sure if there's anything I can do except to block their numbers.  I have an app that lets me report voice calls I shouldn't be getting and while I'm not sure that does any good, at least I feel like I've done something to fight back.  That's why these are more annoying.

Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who'd voted for him but viewed it less as a vote for Donald and more as a vote against Hillary. This guy really had a hate on for Hillary Clinton for reasons that struck me as having little to do with anything she'd done or might do in government. He kept comparing her to "that girl in high school who kept acting like she knew more than anyone else." At one point we had (approximately) the following exchange…

ME: Wouldn't you like to have a President who knows more than anyone else?

HIM: Not if they keep acting like they do.

It didn't make a lot of sense to me back then. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me now, especially since the guy he voted for was the guy who went around saying things like "Only I can fix it" and "nobody knows more about technology than me." Here's a list of some of the times Trump said he knew more than anyone else about something.

I think this particular friend had a problem with the concept of a woman acting like she was smarter than he was but not with a man claiming it. But a lot of people don't like anyone saying that. They're kind of "in denial" that a doctor might know more about medicine, a lawyer might know more about law, etc. They like The Internet because no matter what stupid thing you believe, you can always find an alleged expert who will agree with you.

99.99% of doctors might agree that hitting yourself repeatedly on the head with a ball peen hammer will not make you live longer but somewhere on the World Wide Web, there's gotta be someone who claims to be an expert and who advocates his "Ball Peen Hammer Longevity Treatment" — and if there isn't, there will be. Even if you don't completely buy into it, it gives you the power to say, "All the science isn't in yet" or "Experts disagree on this." Today, more than ever, we have people who believe they are indeed entitled to their own facts.

My pal Charlie Frye is back doing things that I could never-in-a-million-years do…and let's be honest. Neither could you…

A lot of people in this country would rather die than get vaccinated…and some will get their wish. Eric Boehlert writes about how the press keeps describing such people as "vaccine hesitant," which he thinks (and I think) trivializes the problem. Here's an excerpt…

A recent Wall Street Journal report on a deadly Covid surge in West Virginia driven entirely by the unvaccinated noted, "Early on, the state excelled at vaccinating people in nursing homes and others who were eager to get the shot, but then it ran into a roadblock of hesitant people, state officials say." [Emphasis added.]

West Virginia "ran into a roadblock of hesitant people," the newspaper reported, and that was it; the Journal delved no further into the how or the why. Fact: The unvaccinated phenomenon in America represents the story of Covid today. But the press tip-toes around it, pretending it's normal for millions of Americans to risk death by refusing to take a vaccine that's been administered billions of times worldwide.

But read the whole piece. Someday when all this is over — or at least contained — there will be a ghastly statistic of how many people were killed by this thing. And even folks who lived through it will shake their heads and wonder how, oh how, it got that bad.

Peter Palmer, the living embodiment of Al Capp's Li'l Abner, has died at the age of 90. This obit has all the details. I wrote at length about him in this article about the Li'l Abner Broadway show and this article about the movie made from it. Here's an excerpt from the former…

But if finding Daisy Mae was easy, obtaining an Abner proved impossible for a time. Actor after actor auditioned for the role and the casting directors continually broadened their search area, seeking someone who was tall and muscular and who could sing. "We started to panic," [co-author Norman] Panama later recalled. "No matter how good the rest of the show was, no matter how good the rest of the cast was, we knew that without a strong Abner, we were dead." After an exhaustive search that involved auditioning Andy Griffith and inquiring on the availability of Elvis Presley, they settled on the best available candidate, actor-comedian Dick Shawn.

"We weren't completely satisfied with Shawn," Panama remembers. He lacked the brawny musculature that Kidd, Panama and Frank all felt was essential to the role, especially given the show's plotline. Shawn agreed to spend time at a gymnasium and costume designer Alvin Colt began to plan how the actor's physique might be enhanced with padding and shoe lifts.

Shawn's manager reminded his client that a hit show could mean a year or more of solid work and suggested that Shawn take a vacation before rehearsals commenced. The actor departed for the Bahamas, thinking he would begin work on the show upon his return.

The following Sunday evening, Kidd, Frank and Panama were watching Steve Allen's TV show on NBC. A commercial came on and, on a whim, Frank changed the channel over to see what was on Ed Sullivan's competing show on CBS. The threesome heard Sullivan introduce a young soldier who had won the All-Army Talent Competition. A handsome enlisted man took the stage and proceeded to sing "Granada" in spectacular voice.

"That's Abner," Kidd gasped. Indeed, apart from his blonde hair, the singer looked more the part of Abner Yokum than Dick Shawn did…and his singing was vastly superior. The next day, a secretary spent several hours on the phone, tracking down the future star of Li'l Abner. His name was Peter Palmer.

Born in Milwaukee and reared in St. Louis, Peter Palmer became a Missouri All-Star football tackle and attended the University of Illinois. There, he became the first music major to win a letter in football and probably the only gridiron hero to sing the National Anthem before games. Fresh out of college, he won a Chicago radio contest and that led him to Hollywood where most of the major studios butted heads, trying to sign him to contracts. Instead, he enlisted in the service.

Palmer's appearance on Ed Sullivan's program was but one stop in a tour of military installations. "When I got home," he recalls. "There was a message from my wife in San Antonio. She had all these messages from some producers in New York. We didn't have a phone so they'd called our neighbors.

"I called them back collect and Mel and Norman got on the phone — one was on an extension — and they said they were producing this show and they asked, 'Do you know who we are?' And I said no. And then they said, 'It's going to be directed by Michael Kidd. Do you know who that is?' And I said no.

"They asked me if I knew the comic strip and I said yes, it was my favorite. It really was but it had never occurred to me that I might someday play Abner.

"They paid for tickets so my brother and I could fly to New York. I was in my Army uniform and they had me read for them and sing and take my shirt off so they could see if I had real muscles, which I did." Palmer was 24 years old at the time. He was 6'4" and weighed 220 pounds. With his hair dyed black, he looked like he'd stepped right out of an Al Capp drawing. Panama and Frank had to call in favors in Washington to arrange for Palmer to receive his discharge two months early so he could join the cast.

Soon after, Dick Shawn returned from the Bahamas to the news that he didn't have the role he'd thought he had. He was angry but he eventually made the best of the situation by using it in his club act. "Dick and I became friends," Palmer recalls. "He'd kid me about it all. He'd sometimes do ten minutes in his show about how he was laying on the beach in the Bahamas while Peter Palmer was taking his job." (Shawn reportedly told several people that Palmer was infinitely better in the role than he would have been.)

I think that's one of the best "getting discovered" stories I've ever heard in a lifetime of devouring show biz stories. And I think Peter Palmer as Abner was just about the most perfect casting I've ever seen.

I met Peter on the set of a short-lived situation comedy called The Kallikaks that was on NBC for all of five episodes in 1976. He was a regular on the series and I was writing what would have been Episode #6 if there'd been an Episode #6. A few years later, I had a couple of long phone calls with him, interviewing him for the articles. I remember in one, he was about to go on tour with his wife, performing the musical, I Do, I Do. And he said, "We alternate playing in that and The Music Man. I got too old to do Abner." Wish I could have seen him in any of those shows.

Very nice man. Very proud of his career…and humble. Well aware of the flukish nature of his entire career. It was a good one.

Every so often the last week or so, I take a break from work, turn on PlutoTV and catch some episode of Garfield and Friends that I haven't seen in more than twenty years. I just watched one that had the above title card in the end credits. As usual — and as negotiated with his agent — Lorenzo Music got special billing and then we listed the other folks who did voices in this half-hour. The additional cast for this one was Thom Huge, Gregg Berger, Howie Morris, Arnold Stang and George Foreman.

Yes, that's the George Foreman who was a two-time world heavyweight champion and an Olympic gold medalist, and current grill entrepreneur.  And that's Arnold Stang, the great comic actor who was in dozens of movies and TV shows and who voiced many a cartoon superstar including Herman the Mouse (in the Herman & Katnip cartoons) and Top Cat. The two men were not in the same Garfield cartoon, nor were they in the same recording studio, nor were they recorded on the same day.

How did we get George Foreman to do the voice of a prize fighter who can't stop eating? We had the same attorney. He told me George wanted to do a voice in a cartoon.  I told him, "I think we can arrange something" and then we arranged something.  George is a very funny, sweet man and it's difficult to believe that his main profession once was beating the crap out of people.

He took direction well and proved to be a pretty good actor.  The rest of the cast was delighted to have him there and Lorenzo brought in a pair of professional boxing gloves and got George to sign them.

How did we get Arnold Stang to do what he said was his first cartoon job in many years? I called his agent and booked him but it wasn't that simple. Arnold lived on the East Coast — in Connecticut, I think. One season late in the run of Garfield and Friends, our producer Lee Mendelson was nice enough to indulge me and spend the extra loot it cost to have me record some New York voice actors for the show and one of them was Arnold.

I was in a recording studio in Manhattan with the guest stars who came in one at a time, each to be in a different cartoon. The rest of the cast was in our recording studio in Los Angeles and we were connected so well that you couldn't possibly tell from the finished cartoon that someone was 3,000 miles away. (Nifty Coincidence: The amazing Andy Morris, who ran the studio we used in L.A., picked out the studio he'd connect with in New York. When Arnold arrived, he said, "Hey, this is where I used to record Herman & Katnip!")

Arnold was our first guest voice of the day and being a seasoned pro, he arrived an hour early. I was delighted because that meant we had an hour to sit and talk, mostly about his participation in my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I was further delighted by stories of working on Top Cat and on Milton Berle's legendary TV series, and especially by the fact that Arnold Stang looked and sounded exactly like Arnold Stang.

The lovely and brilliant Howie Morris was in the L.A. cast and he and Arnold had a very nice reunion via the phone patch. Back when Howie lived and worked in New York — and sometimes since — he and Arnold were always seeing each other at auditions. Being two funny, tiny guys, they were constantly up for the same parts. Both were up to voice the title character in the 1963 Beetle Bailey cartoons and Howie got it. Both were up to play Hysterium in the national touring company of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Arnold got that one…and so on.

I wrote more about that day here. If you click over there, you can hear the answering machine message that Arnold recorded for me.

I have a lot of writing that needs to get done this week but every so often, I can't resist clicking on PlutoTV and seeing what memories it evokes. George and Arnold were two good ones.

All the stories about Simone Biles caused me to pay more attention to gymnastics than I ever have. It was a sport that I never looked at too closely because it reminded me of how miserable I was at every single activity that falls under that category. I don't care how you've failed in your life…you have never been as bad at anything as I was at gymnastics.

Watching videos of the amazing Ms. Biles caused me to see others who do what she does. This is Katelyn Ohashi and it doesn't get much better than this. It's not just the incredible flips and turns and gravity-defiance. It's also the sheer joy in her performance and the enthusiasm of those watching her from the sidelines…

Hey, when you write me an e-mail, please include your name in it. Don't expect me to connect your e-mail address to who you are. I have a real good memory but unless your e-mail is from yournamehere.com, it's a good idea to include who you are in the body of your messages. I just put mine in a signature that is appended to every message I send.