Electricity in my neighborhood went out at 3:03 in the afternoon and came back on at 3:06 — just long enough for all my clocks to need resetting. Then it went out again at 3:46 and stayed out until 8:08. I am showing great optimism to begin typing this but not enough to start going around, resetting clocks.
During this second outage, there was still a good amount of sunlight out but there were still two separate automotive collisions outside my house, one of which went like this: I heard the thump of metal followed by a barrage of shouted language that would have offended Larry Flynt. Then came police sirens and a fire engine and paramedics, though from my window, I didn't see anyone look seriously injured.
I wish people would learn to drive slower and more cautiously when the traffic lights are out. And why don't those things all have backup batteries that are constantly recharged by solar panels?
During the 4+ hours, I read stuff on my iPad and listened to the latest episode of Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, which has as its guest, the oft-mentioned-on-this-blog Frank Ferrante. It's a very good conversation and I'll try to embed a link to it below this paragraph. If it doesn't work, there are a half-dozen other places on the Internet where you can hear it like here and here and here.
Yesterday here, I told the story of going to see the Broadway show 42nd Street in New York in 1983 with my friends Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. I said we saw it at the Winter Garden Theatre and this morning, I awoke to an e-mail from Joe Miller telling me that by '83, the show had moved from the Winter Garden (where The Music Man is currently ensconced) to the Majestic Theater (where The Phantom of the Opera has been playing since the Crimean War and where it's expected to remain until you, I and any children or grandchildren you may have are dead and buried.)
Joe is right and I have corrected the post accordingly.
Meanwhile, Marv Wolfman wrote to tell me he recalled a slightly different scenario…and having nothing better to do with no power here, I called him and we discussed it and decided it really doesn't matter. So we agreed to disagree and if you care in the slightest, you're free to believe him or to believe me, except that you should believe me because I'm right.
And now it's 8:40 and the power's still on so I think it's safe to go start resetting clocks.
Back here, I expressed my amazement that the Senate had passed a bill — unanimously! — to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. That's the current U.S. Senate which you wouldn't think could reach total agreement on a bill that said there should be chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies. Well, we all should have suspected that unanimous vote was an aberration.
My pal Bob Elisberg, who blogs here, calls my attention to an article in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank. It seems the unanimous vote was kind of an accident…a mistake made by 100 Senators who didn't know what the heck they were voting for. Kinda scary that that can happen.
Then the other day here, I posted a link to the "Lullaby of Broadway" number from 42nd Street as performed in a London production. Bob suggests that I also offer you the number as performed by the original cast at the 1981 Tony Awards ceremony. The original cast included Jerry Orbach as Julian Marsh.
This was the first Broadway show I ever saw on or around Broadway. The year was 1983 and I was back in New York for meetings with the DC Comics folks (for whom I was writing/editing Blackhawk), ABC's Saturday morning department (for whom I was writing ABC Weekend Specials) and NBC's daytime department (for whom I was developing a gothic-flavored soap opera).
One evening, my pals Marv Wolfman and Len Wein and I went down to Times Square to the TKTS booth and picked out a show to see, bought half-price tickets, then went to dinner at a Beefsteak Charlie's — a now-extinct chain that then was about as ubiquitous in New York as Duane Reade drug stores, hot dog vendors or Naked Cowboys are today. Then we went to the Winter Garden Majestic Theatre and there we saw 42nd Street. It was everything you'd expect in a show of that sort.
The next night, some other friends of mine and I went to dinner at the Russian Tea Room, followed by the musical Nine at the 46th Street Theater, which is now the Richard Rodgers. It was snowing lightly when we went in see the show and when we came out, we found ourselves in the 13th largest snowstorm on record in the city — no cars on the streets, no trains running, howling winds blowing around the snow and the people…and we were a full mile from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel where we were staying.
I enjoyed the night before a whole lot more. Here's that number from the Tony Awards…
There would have been more posts here the last few days except that my vast computer network was undergoing the upgrade from the top speed I could get from my old Spectrum Internet Service to the top speed I am now getting from AT&T Fiber. With the former, the top speeds I logged were downloads of 230 Mbps and uploads of 12 Mbps. With the new service, I'm getting 951 down and 945 up. I did not mistype those numbers. And I still have one or two hardware adjustments to make which should bolster those AT&T stats a bit.
The new service is also, amazingly, only a few bucks more per month than Spectrum…and that's more than made up for by the price reduction I get on my AT&T iPhone and iPad service by signing up for their Internet Service. What did cost though was that to take full advantage of the new speeds, I had to upgrade some hardware, including changing from the Google home wifi system to the Eero home wifi system. (Anyone wanna buy four used Google Nest wifi points?)
Before you get too envious of my download/upload speeds, know that just browsing the web ain't that much different. It's great when I upload or download files to the cloud or Dropbox or various servers. It just doesn't make slow webpages load much faster. I haven't tried it yet for Zoom calls or video streaming. Also, it did take a long time to set up and configure — an hour on Saturday in-person with one expert and two hours on a Sunday phone call with another, both of whom charge by the hour for their knowledge and make me think I should.
This may be way more speed than you'd want to pay for and way more tech time than you could endure. So if they don't have it yet in your area, don't feel deprived. I'm still not convinced I needed it that much but we'll see.
A couple of friends who read my latest piece on COVID-avoidance suggested a point I should have made. The folks arguing that vaccines are worthless because even triple-vaxxed people have caught COVID are missing a key consideration. Fully-vaccinated human beings might get the disease anyway but the odds are strong that it will be less severe and not-life-threatening. We do not take flu vaccines to guarantee we never get the flu. They just reduce the chance we'll get it or that we'll get it bad.
Also: I wrote and deleted a paragraph I wish I'd left in. I cut it because I realized I've said it before on this blog and later decided it's worth repeating often. More and more as I get older, I think it's important in life to (a) connect with doctors you trust and (b) not take medical advice other than "Listen to your doctor" from people who haven't graduated medical school. When you get down to it, they're all like Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies, who thought she was a doctor because she said she was, and believed you could cure cancer by having a raccoon squat on your lunch. Or something.
I have what I consider a great doctor…and it has been my experience that great doctors network with other great doctors. I don't believe they know everything; just that they know a helluva lot more than I do. And when I tell that to someone who fancies themselves a non-credentialed medical expert, they say, "Aw, you can learn all that stuff on the Internet."
To which I say, "Fine. I'll read a lot of websites and I'll watch a lot of online videos and then, when you need quadruple-bypass surgery, I'll be the guy with the scalpel who cuts you open. Okay with you?"
Lastly: In the next week or two, there may be more posts than usual on this blog about the history of the comic book industry. I have no idea of the percentages but I'm well aware that I have steady readers here who couldn't possibly care less about this topic and who don't even recognize most of the proper nouns when I write about it.
When I write about something that doesn't interest you, just remember that this blog is not behind a paywall. Just skip on to the next post…or the one after or the one after. I don't need to hear that not everything I write gets your attention. I'm still amazed that anything I write ever does.
Did you see the video that Arnold Schwarzenegger made in which he addresses the people of Russia? I've never had much admiration for Schwarzenegger as an actor and certainly not as the governor of California. I thought he was a guy who had a good product (himself) and was good at marketing that product. Whether his video will change any minds in Russia, I have no idea…but it did make me see him in a new light.
Over on the fact-checking site Politifact, Angie Drobnic Holan writes about how impressed she was with the video and the way Arnold talked to its intended audience in a sincere, friendly manner. He displayed some communication skills we could all stand to learn or learn better. And if you didn't see the video yet, there's a link in there to it. Watch that before you read the article.
Here's one of my favorite magicians, Pop Haydn, performing recently at the Magic Castle. I studied with him many years ago and this was one of the tricks he taught me and the others in the class. I don't know about the others but I did it about one three-hundredth as well as Pop does…
I'm changing Internet providers. Today, I spent an hour on the phone to cancel the old subscription, discovering that the speed of their Customer Service was even slower than the speed of their downloads.
I haven't written under the above banner for a full month here. I even skipped Day 730, which I think would have been two full years since I decided to heed my physician's counsel and begin isolating myself from others as much as possible. We've all had to mud-wrestle with the question of what's safe and what isn't and for me — since Day One of this — that starts with the belief that no one's COVID predictions are worth a whole lot.
What little trust I place in the advice of others, I place in certain Medical Professionals who have impressed me as being good at what they do for a living. A good doctor has not only knowledge of medicine but also the skill of Crisis Management. They're able to not confuse hunches with facts and to be neither overcautious nor over-reckless. And they know, when the future is not certain, to err on the side of overcautious.
Over the last two years, a number of people have tried to convince me that I've been being overcautious and they seem to think that's a much bigger mistake than I'm afraid of making. I do not find wearing a mask in public places to be a big deal. If you think it's uncomfy or bad for your breathing, maybe you need to try on different masks. I'm real happy with the one I found…but your face, if you're fortunate, is different from mine.
The masks I get may seem expensive but they're nowhere near as disposable as their packaging indicates. I get enough mileage out of each one to make them utterly cost-effective. Yes, you can find cheap masks. You can even find free masks. But, like so many things in life, you get what you pay for.
And if your discomfort at mask-wearing is political — it feels oppressive, it feels like the government is trying to control you — I think you're connecting two unrelated things. A friend who's been trying to convince me that masking is "theater" has as his primary argument that the governor of our state, Gavin Newsom, is an idiot and/or tyrant. Now, I don't think that and neither do the 62% of Californians who voted against him being recalled…
…but even if I did, I'm not wearing a mask or not wearing a mask because of my governor. My decisions about masking are based on my doctors. And it's not just that I think (correction: I know) that they know more about this stuff than my governor. They know more about this stuff than I do. That doesn't make them infallible…just closer to it than I could ever get watching YouTube videos or listening to professional politicians.
I knew a guy once who used to argue that there was absolute, undeniable proof that Climate Change was a hoax. And here, in toto, was his proof: That Al Gore said it was so. Science…rising temperatures…evidence of changing weather patters…none of that entered into it. All he had to know was that Gore said it was so. If Al Gore had warned against drinking poison, this guy would immediately have chug-a-lugged a liter-sized bottle of Drano.
So, bottom line: I have no long-term plan for ending my COVID-avoidance lifestyle. Like I said, I think long or even medium-term projections are pretty worthless…kind of like getting a wager down now on who'll win the 2024 Super Bowl. You might turn out to be correct. Hey, even Sylvia Browne guessed right once in a while when doing her phony "psychic" readings. You just shouldn't bet money (or your health) on uniformed prognostications.
I am getting out more. I am going to places I didn't go when the virus seemed to be at its peak. I'm just not quite ready yet to post the new header I have at the ready for this blog: It's a Sergio drawing of me throwing away my masks. Hopefully, you'll see it here soon.
The famous Broadway producer Julian Marsh was about to open his latest show — Pretty Lady — on the Great White Way when tragedy struck. His leading lady, the famous star Dorothy Brock, broke her ankle. Marsh thought he'd have to close the show before it opened, which would mean failure, a huge financial loss and unemployment for all the folks involved in the show.
But the cast members told him there was someone who could step into Dorothy Brock's tap shoes…someone who knew the part and could play the lead. They were thinking of Peggy Sawyer, a member of the chorus who had just been fired by Marsh. The producer was skeptical but he decided to roll the dice and take a chance on her…
…but there was a problem. Sawyer had packed her bags and headed for the train station to move back to her home in Allentown, and to abandon her dream of a career on the stage. So Marsh raced to the train station where he asked her to come back and star in the show from which she'd been fired. She said no and it was up to Marsh to convince her.
And that's where we are as you click and watch the best number from the London production of the musical about a musical, 42nd Street…
Ron Kasman read this post I put up about Wally Wood maybe inking Jack Kirby's comics for DC Comics starting in 1970. Then Ron sent me this…
At age 17 at the time of the New York Comic Art Convention, I went to the offices of DC with a few friends. Carmine Infantino took us into his office for a long visit. It might have been two hours. He showed us Kirby originals on what became know as the Fourth World Series. One of the group commented that Wood would have been the right inker. Infantino immediately responded, "Too expensive." I remember this because at that point in my life I had no idea of fiscal constraints in comics. I thought it was all done for the good of the artform.
As I got into comics, one of the things that stunned me about the business was how nickel-and-dime it was, especially when it came to rewarding (or just keeping around) the people who created the product. I'm not really talking about Carmine here but at times, it seemed like those who owned or ran some companies didn't want to pay the writers and artists well because that would have been some sort of admission that the writers and artists were in any way responsible for the company's success.
Quick Analogy: In 1979, the comedians working The Comedy Store here in Hollywood went on strike, demanding to be paid. They weren't even asking to be paid a lot…and when they finally settled, they weren't. The Store was making millions and the guy who cleaned the rest rooms was being paid but the comedians weren't. The comedians just wanted some acknowledgement that what they were contributing had value.
And Mitzi Shore, who owned and managed the place, kept repeating like it was some sort of holy mantra, "Not one penny, not one penny," until she finally had to give in. I believe she was clinging to a faulty premise — that all those folks were flocking there because of her and what she had built. They weren't coming to spend money because of Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Jay Leno, Dave Letterman, etc.
A lot of what I observed with comic books reminded me of the Comedy Store and vice-versa. In many cases, the difference between getting your first choice artist on a comic book and your second or eighth choice was just a couple of bucks per page. In a comic containing a 22-page story, it might be $44…or way less than what some guy in management spent on business lunches that week.
It wasn't the money so much as it was a principle — that principle being that the company was successful because of management, not because of its creative talent. That's a fallacy. Success in a field like this comes from a combination of both and that is how it will always be in comic books…and for that matter, in comedy clubs.
You can learn to do all the stuff my buddy Charlie Frye can do. Just practice all day every day of your life starting when you're around six. Piece o' cake…
Let's start this by flashing back to long after my childhood — to 1994 and the movie Speed, which starred Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. You may not see where I'm going with this but just trust me. This website is free and you have nothing better to do for the next few minutes so watch this clip. If you never saw Speed, there was a lot of this in it and if you did see it, it'll refresh your memory. Here we see Keanu and Sandra and a whole pack of innocent people trapped on a bus that will be exploded by a hidden bomb if the speedometer drops below 50…
Got it? Okay, now let's flash back to the mid-fifties and begin working our way forward through that bizarre childhood of mine …
My first school was of the Nursery variety. Every morning, a private school bus service would pick me up and take me to a building on Overland Avenue for a few hours of stories, play, drawing, sandbox, swings and just kind of learning how to be in school and around others. When I started at Westwood Elementary, the same service took me to and from classes for my Kindergarten years and the first few grades there I didn't skip. Around fourth grade, I began walking to and from school.
I graduated Westwood and moved on to Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School for grades 7-9. My father drove two other kids in our neighborhood and me to Emerson on his way to work each morning. The mother of one of those kids picked us up and drove us home at the end of the school day…except that Tuesdays and Thursdays, I often chose to walk home. Why? Because Tuesdays and Thurdays were the days that the new comic books came out. If I walked, I could stop at Parnin's Pharmacy on Westwood or Pico Drug on Pico, both of which had fine comic book racks.
I spent grades 10-12 at University High School, which was too far away for walking. In the morn, my father would drop me off on his way to work. In the afternoon, I took one of two buses home, both of which were operated by the Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines, whose buses drove all over West Los Angeles, not just Santa Monica.
Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I took a special bus that was in operation only on school days — once going to school, once taking us home. It connected University High with the area in which I (and some other Uni Hi attendees) lived. On the front, over the big windshield, the window that identified which bus it was said SPECIAL.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would walk around a half a mile from the school down to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Sawtelle Boulevard and then I'd take a different, non-special bus home. If you're wondering why I did that…well, you should know me better than that by now. Between Uni Hi and that corner, there were two shops that had good comic book racks.
There was also a second-hand bookstore that sold old comic books. It's where years earlier, I'd bought all those Charlton Comics I wrote about in this post. There was also a very nice public library that came in handy at times. I liked going to all those places and I liked not taking that big blue SPECIAL bus. Some days, it was driven by a maniac…
…and now maybe you've figured out the connection to the movie Speed. The bus Sandra Bullock was stuck driving in that film was a big blue bus of the Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines.
I'm not 100% certain of the name of the man who drove the SPECIAL bus most of the time but I think it was Henry. By any name, he was a disgrace to the honorable profession of bus driving. Henry (if indeed, that was his name) drove wildly and unsafely because he thought it was fun to get a reaction out of us passengers…like he was operating a thrill ride at an amusement park. And if there was a cute lady sitting near the front — and remember, we're talking high-school-age students here — he would have his eyes on her and not on the road. He'd literally turn around and flirt with her while the bus he was driving was in motion.
He probably deserved to be fired just for commenting aloud, as he did whenever she boarded his bus, on the impressive ongoing growth of the lovely bustline of a student named Bonnie. But he should definitely have been fired for reckless driving. Henry was endangering lives — his, his passengers' and those of other drivers or pedestrians along the route.
A lot of my friends who took the bus felt the same way. A couple stopped taking the SPECIAL. Most of us could get home via other Santa Monica Bus Line buses — and sometimes, we did — but that involved transfers and waiting for another bus and way more time. And as with the bus I took home Tuesdays and Thursdays, they didn't take the heavily-discounted student bus passes.
One day, when Henry was especially outta-control, I made it home in one piece, then called the office of the bus company and told whoever answered that they needed to do something about that driver. "I'll look into it," that person told me…and I have no idea if he did or didn't or if so, what transpired. All I know is that the next time I got on the SPECIAL bus, Henry was at the wheel. And if anyone had told him to knock off the wild driving and horny comments, he hadn't listened.
There was a girl named Alice who often sat with me when I did take that bus. She was pretty concerned about Henry for the same reason I was, plus the fact that he sometimes told her how good her butt looked in the skirt she was wearing. That day, Alice and I both got off at her stop and went to her house. From there, I called the bus company to complain again, then we waited five minutes and she called them to complain for the first time.
Again, nothing changed. So I went to Radio Shack and purchased a speakerphone which could be plugged in at Alice's house and use her phone line. With, of course, her permission.
The next time Henry was driving the SPECIAL, we rounded up five friends who felt like we did and we all went to Alice's and called, one after another — seven of us spaced out over an hour or so, telling the same guy each time how awful Henry was.
I went last and when it was my turn, I made a point of getting the name of the person to whom we were all speaking and then I told him that I was writing an article for the school newspaper and I'd like a quote from him, as a spokesperson for the Santa Monica Municipal Bus Lines. "What does your company intend to do about this driver?"
This was on the speakerphone so the other six folks in the room, all of whom had just made their calls to complain, heard this man at the bus company office say, "I'll look into it. Yours is the first complaint we've had about him."
He may have heard them gasp. He certainly heard me say, "Mr. [Whatever-His-Name-Was], you're lying. There are seven of us here and I'm the seventh person to call you in the last hour and complain. Right, guys?" And he heard them all yell, "Yeah!"
To be honest, I was fibbing a bit. I didn't write for the school newspaper…but I could have. If I'd written that article and submitted it to the group that put it out, they might have printed it. So I said, again addressing him by name, "Is there anything else you'd like to say for my article?" He hung up on me — and for as long as we attended University High School, someone else drove the SPECIAL bus.
I have no reason to believe they fired Henry…and indeed, a friend told me much later that he thought he'd seen Henry driving the Santa Monica bus on Olympic. The friend wasn't certain because this driver had behaved himself. They probably just transferred Henry to other routes with maybe a little scolding and a warning that began, "If we get any more complaints about you…" Today, I'd like to think that sixteen-year-old Alice or seventeen-year-old Bonnie telling them that their driver was critiquing their body parts would have prompted them to at least look into it sooner.
That's basically the story but when I saw Speed, with that Santa Monica blue bus careening madly down the boulevard hitting cars and objects and almost hitting people, I had to think of that episode in my life. And when I heard they were making a sequel, I almost asked my agent to get me a pitch meeting with its producers. I would have started by saying, "Now, if you really want an incredible story involving danger and crazy people…" and then I would have told them about Henry.
I might have read it on your site or within the pages of Jack Kirby Collector but somewhere it was noted that Wally Wood was lobbying to be the inker of New Gods and maybe the other Fourth World titles as well. Obviously, that never happened. Was it a matter of reliability on Wood's part? Lack of control on DC's part? I think that would have been a great match!
Wood applied to be Jack Kirby's inker at DC in 1970 but he applied too late. Vince Colletta already had the job. Even if Wood had applied earlier, I don't think he'd have gotten the position for a number of reasons, one being that Wood was more expensive than Colletta. For a time there, DC liked to try and balance the cost of a high-priced pencil artist with a low-priced inker.
The savings were not great — just a couple bucks per page — but they tried to do this whenever they could. For a while there, the work of Curt Swan (high page rate penciler) was inked on stories (not covers) by low page rate artists. It seemed to be hurting sales so they gave up on that idea and assigned Murphy Anderson (higher page rate inker) but that didn't mean they stopped trying to do that wherever they thought they could get away with it.
So there was one reason I don't think they'd have given the job to Wood. Another was that the two main people at DC who determined who drew or inked what at DC — Editorial Director Carmine Infantino and Production Manager Sol Harrison — both thought Colletta was terrific at inking Kirby. They could have had Frank Giacoia do it. (Giacoia told me they said he could ink as much of Kirby's art as he could handle…then gave it all to Vince.) They could have stolen Joe Sinnott away from Marvel but they didn't want him. There were other choices.
They wanted Colletta. After Mike Royer replaced Colletta, Sol Harrison kept telling Kirby that Colletta was better…an opinion, I believe, that had everything to do with the fact that having Royer ink Kirby circumvented Sol's Production Department. And I think they had other books they would rather have had Wood handle.
Matter of fact, I think if Carmine had called Jack and said, "We're going to have Wally Wood ink your comics," Jack might well have said, "Don't waste him on that. Wally Wood is a great talent. Let him create, write and draw a new comic on his own!"
Would Kirby/Wood have been a great match on Jack's DC books? I dunno. The more I look at their 1950's collaborations on Challengers of the Unknown and the Sky Masters newspaper strip, the less I like the teaming. I know some people think it was the greatest match-up of penciler and inker ever in comics and I used to love it. But my tastes have evolved and I prefer the inkers who let more of the Kirby through.
Interestingly, the first time I met Wally Wood in 1970, he told me he didn't think he'd done right by Kirby's penciled art. He felt he'd "overinked" and that what Joe Sinnott had been doing over Kirby on Fantastic Four was more the way Jack's art should be inked. Wood said that if he'd gotten the job of inking Jack at DC, he'd have tried to do it more like Sinnott. (He meant after Joe's first year or so inking Jack. Sinnott also decided he'd been changing Jack too much and dialed it down.)
Wood only got to ink Jack once after that…Sandman #6 in 1975. It was not an impressive pairing but it may not have been a fair test. It was a comic Jack hated drawing and Wood's work was quite variable at the time based on his health and who he had assisting at any given moment. Wally Wood was such a great talent and I don't think the industry usually knew what to do with him or how to treat a guy like that.
I regret that I haven't kept up with it the last decade or so but soon after it debuted in 1982, I became a big fan of Forbidden Broadway, an off-Broadway (and touring) franchise that parodies whatever's playing on The Great White Way at the moment, plus a few golden oldies. Every few years, they come out with a new edition but the truth is that the show is constantly changing in order to keep timely with what's playing in New York.
Its creator, Gerard Alessandrini, writes and directs and he used to actually perform in it. In the video clip below, he's the guy playing Tevye and Richard Burton. He's also very good at finding great performers who play in Forbidden Broadway for a few years, then go on to bigger/better things. The first song you'll see in there is sung by a young and hairy Jason Alexander. For a time, I hung around Forbidden Broadway a lot and became friendly with a lot of its players and even hired some when I was voice-directing cartoons.
We have here a half-hour-or-so of clips from the earlier days of the show. Some are from episodes of The Merv Griffin Show when he showcased the then-current production, and you'll see some songs repeated. For a while, a regular feature of every new version was some lady who was too old to play Annie dressed up as Annie, singing about how she was too old to play Annie.
There's no production of Forbidden Broadway running in New York at the moment, though someone may be doing the show somewhere near you. The shows being spoofed keep changing, the songs keep changing, the performers keep changing but this package of excerpts will still give you a good idea what it's like…
