In 1956, when Paramount Pictures was releasing the Alfred Hitchcock film The Trouble With Harry, someone got the idea of getting different recording artists to record different versions of the title song. It was some sort of promotional idea that I really don't understand. One of those versions came out on Liberty Records and it was performed by, as you can see on the label, "Alfi and Harry." This recording appears nowhere in the film but it was "inspired" by it.
Does Alfi's voice sound familiar to you? It might if you're old enough to remember Ross Bagdasarian who also made records under the name "David Seville." He did a lot of novelty records like this before he hit big with "Witch Doctor" and later with his sped-up friends, Alvin and the Chipmunks. This may be my favorite of all that he put on vinyl. CAUTION: It may also be an earworm that will move into your head and live there for days/months/years…
I've officially been an orphan since October of 2012 when my mother passed away. As I've detailed here, her death was not a tragedy. The tragedy — if you can call it that with a woman who lived far longer than any doctor would have expected — was how her health deteriorated the last ten years or so. Inability to walk much or see much or eat anything she liked or go three months without being carted off to an emergency room had left her wishing it would end. She just wanted it to end. If there had been a legal, painless way to make that happen, she would have eaten three chili dogs, then pushed the button.
(Actually, in her condition, if she'd eaten the three chili dogs, she might not have lived long enough to push the button.)
On March 3 of that year, one day after I turned 60, I held a big birthday party for my little ol' self and invited 120 of my friends. If you felt you should have been among them, I apologize…but I have way more than 120 friends and that's about all the restaurant could hold. I chose that particular one because of her — because she liked it and it was close to her home. As if all the other problems I mentioned in the first paragraph didn't restrict her ability to enjoy life, there was this: She sometimes and without much warning got incredibly tired and had an urgent need to go to bed and stay there for 8-10 hours. One day, I took her on a day trip to a place she'd always wanted to go that was about a two-hour drive from her bedroom. The fatigue hit her there and it was quite an ordeal to get her home and safely under the covers.
After that, she was unwilling to ever be in a situation where she was more than about twenty minutes from that bed. She wouldn't let me take her to the theater or to a show because, as she put it, "What if we get there and the show is just starting and I suddenly need to be home?" She agreed to come to the party because I assured her that (a) if she suddenly needed to go to sleep, someone would immediately take her home and (b) it would not be me. I convinced her to let me take her to the party since we would be getting there before it started but she made me swear I wouldn't leave my own birthday party in progress to chauffeur her back to her abode.
With all that agreed-upon, she agreed she'd attend my 60th birthday party. She said, "I guess I should since I was there for your last one, fifty years ago." Actually, she was there for all of them but the previous one was, indeed, fifty years before.
I don't recall my first few. My earliest memory would be of one that was around age five or six. I remember a lot of neighborhood children and their mothers, we kids dressed up nicer than we wanted to be. I remember sandwiches and cake and presents and paper hats. That's really all that stayed with me about the next few and about all I recall about going to the birthday parties of friends of mine unless they were cruel enough, as some were, to hire a clown.
Clowns do not belong at kids' birthday parties. They belong at circuses and in cartoons and Red Skelton paintings and nowhere else.
Mostly, I had tiny, family-only parties at ages seven, eight and nine…and then when I turned ten, my mother insisted on throwing a big gala birthday celebration for me. I had not asked for one. She just felt it was something a parent was supposed to do for a child and she seemed way more excited about it than I was. It was only in ostensible adulthood that I began to not hate being the center of attention of anything. Still, I somehow felt obligated to go along with this party thing so at her request, I specified twelve friends I would like to have attend. She contacted their parents and arranged the kids' presence and the assistance of a few moms.
It was all planned as an afternoon of events. The first was that with the aid of some other parents and their autos, we all caravaned to a miniature golf course on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica and played a round of miniature golf. Then we drove to our house and there was food — hamburgers, hot dogs, lemonade and (of course) cake — and then a Badminton tournament in the backyard. Somewhere in there, I unwrapped a lot of presents.
Fun? Not one bit. I hated the entire day. Could not wait for it to be over.
The miniature golf course part of it just seemed so awkward — getting thirteen kids there and dividing that prime number into smaller groups since thirteen kids cannot all play golf at the same time. The golf course was a ramshackle slum that was torn down a few years later. It might have imploded on its own on my tenth birthday if I'd had a better backswing on my niblick.
There were all these parents around taking pictures of us and…well, there were a lot of things I didn't like about being a kid and one of them was being thought of as "cute" in the same tone of voice you'd use to describe a "cute" trained dog act. It also didn't help my disposition that I finished dead last in the tournament. None of my friends were classy enough to throw a few putts and let the Birthday Boy win.
Then it was back to the house for chow with all these adults taking photos and also now 8mm movies of how cute we all looked wearing our party hats and eating cake. I made a wish and blew out all the candles with one breath but I didn't get my wish: The party continued. Some of my friends embarrassed me with spillage and mess-making and there was my poor mother running around, trying to wait on all these kids and making a special lunch for one girl who didn't want to eat a hot dog or a hamburger.
Not one of the presents was something I wanted or could use. I've rarely enjoyed getting gifts because I'm terribly hard to shop for. I'm larger than people think, I have all those food allergies and I don't drink…so probably a good 70% of all the presents I've received in my lifetime, unless I told the person what to give me, have been items of clothing that didn't fit me, food I couldn't eat or wine I wouldn't drink. I also buy or receive review copies of every DVD or book I want so there's not much chance of giving me one of those I don't have. It's always made me feel bad when someone goes to the trouble and expense to buy (or worse, make) something I can't wear, eat, drink or use. Friends have succeeded in giving me wanted gifts but not often.
That day at my tenth birthday party, I did my best to smile and thank the givers but I was as bad an actor then as I am now and I'm pretty lousy now. Then the Badminton game was chaotic with the net falling down and no one knowing how to keep score or even play…and again, I lost. The whole afternoon just felt so wrong to me in every way.
Her and me.
When all my friends had finally left, my mother came up to me and asked if I had another wish for my birthday. I yelled, "Yes! I would like to never have another birthday party as long as I live!" Then I ran to my room, slammed the door and stayed in there for about five minutes, crying and sulking.
It took the full five minutes for my ten-year-old brain to realize that my parents — my mother, mainly — had gone to a lot of trouble to give me a wonderful day and it wasn't their fault that it hadn't turned out that way. I went out into the living room. My father had gone out somewhere but my mother was sitting in her chair, crying.
It was the worst moment of the day, maybe the worst moment of my admittedly-brief life until then. I had taken a bad situation and made it worse and I had hurt my mother.
"I'm sorry," I said to her. "I'm very, very sorry."
She said she was sorry I hadn't liked my day. I told her I was sorry that she was sorry and that I really liked what she tried to do. She looked at me hard and said, "I should have known. You don't like Halloween either!"
I nodded yes. To me, Halloween was and still is a day when you disfigure yourself, go around and extort candy you probably won't eat and — again — do things adults think are "cute." Never liked it. I've just never been big on holidays. I figure if you can live life so you're reasonably happy on non-holidays, you don't need the holidays. They become less important. A friend of mine later would tell me, "I lived all year for Christmas because it was the only time there was no screaming in our house." There was almost never screaming in the house where I grew up.
That afternoon, my mother and I continued to apologize to each other for about the next ten minutes. I was sorry I hadn't enjoyed my party. She was sorry she hadn't realized I wouldn't enjoy a party…and indeed, I didn't have another one for an entire half a century.
In those fifty years, I don't think I ever had another harsh word or moment of unpleasantness with my mother. She was smart and understanding and she just accepted that her kid was not like other kids. Actually, I'm not sure there are any kids who are like other kids but if there are, I'm not one of them. So after the debacle of my tenth birthday, we had an unspoken pact…
She never did anything just because it was something other parents did. And I, because I knew just how exceptional she was and how everything she did was at least intended to be for my own good, never faulted her for anything. There was really nothing to fault but I had a good imagination. I could have made up something if I'd wanted to. Years later, I stood by as my then-girlfriend — one who was not out of my life rapidly enough — screamed at her mother. What the mother had done was immaterial. It was wrong but not destructive and certainly not malicious. Still, my lady friend yelled, over and over, "Mom, you ruin everything!"
And I just stood there, cringing at the scene and thinking, "Gee…my mother never ruined anything!"
She certainly didn't ruin my 60th birthday party. Quite the opposite. She was the star attraction, getting way more attention than I did — which was fine because I intended it to be less about me and more about her getting to meet a whole lot of my friends she had not met and vice-versa. I knew she wouldn't be in any condition to do that by #61 so I had the party and I planted her at the first table by the door. It didn't matter if guests congratulated me on entering my seventh decade but they all had to talk with my mother. As it turned out, I had a good time because she had a great time.
Biggest thrill of that evening for her? Talking with so many of my friends and especially Stan Freberg. Stan was not only there but though I'd admonished all there were to be no gifts and no performing, he wrote and insisted on reciting a poem about me. And then since he'd broken the rules, someone else insisted they all sing guess-which-song.
She didn't get exhausted. She wound up staying for the entire evening and then Carolyn and I drove her home. After she passed, I realized it was the last time she'd left her house for non-medical reasons.
The morning after the party, she called me up to thank me for, as she put it, "wheeling me there." I made like I was annoyed she'd upstaged me at my own party and she laughed, then said, "Well, I'm more important than you are!"
She said, "People kept saying to me, 'Oh, I can see where Mark got his sense of humor.' I told them, 'No, I got my sense of humor from him.'" That's something we both believed. She explained to them, "Mark started picking up all these funny things from comic books and books he read and TV shows he watched. I had to start talking like him so we could communicate. It was like if your child suddenly began speaking Swedish, you'd have to learn Swedish." At one point, Freberg asked her where I got my sense of humor and she said, "I think he stole some of it from you."
Today, as you're probably well aware, is Mother's Day. My mother never wanted to do anything on Mother's Day. The restaurants were always too crowded, she said, and she preferred to get flowers and gifts from me when she didn't expect them and they didn't seem like an obligation. It was pretty much the same attitude I have about all holidays. If you always treat your mother like it's Mother's Day, there's really nothing out of the ordinary you can do for her on the second Sunday in May except wish her a happy Mother's Day. So I'd do that and then I'd take her out to dinner the next time she felt like leaving the house.
The last Mother's Day she was around, she didn't want to go out. She didn't want to go out the next day or the next day or any day for weeks after…and then she was in the hospital for a week. Finally in late June, I gave her an ultimatum: Redeem your Mother's Day "coupon" now or forfeit it. She said, "Okay, if you insist, you can bring over some El Pollo Loco this evening and we'll eat together here."
I said, "That's not a Mother's Day dinner. I brought you El Pollo Loco last week…and I think, the week before."
She said, "Yeah, but it wasn't Mother's Day then."
I said, "It's not Mother's Day today."
She said, "Hey, I'm your mother and if I say it's Mother's Day today, it's Mother's Day today. I want four drumsticks and a couple of thighs — enough to have some for tomorrow. I have a feeling it's going to be Mother's Day tomorrow, too."
How could you ever find a reason to get mad at someone like that? How?
Over the years, I've occasionally featured little essays on this blog called "Tales of My Mother" or "Tales of My Father" or "Tales of My Childhood" and so on. For today, I decided to pick out a Tale of My Mother to rerun here so I went back and started reading over them. Later today, I will post the one I selected but given what's in the news these days, it seemed appropriate to run just the beginning of Tales of My Mother #7, which originally ran here on 11/8/12. Here it is…
I was an only child. When that fact came up in conversation, I used to tell people, "My folks figured that if you get it right the first time, don't press your luck." The truth is that I was a very difficult birth. I was due on February 29, 1952 and my mother spent most of that day and all of March 1 in a hospital in agonizing pain, unable to deliver. Finally on March 2nd, they went in and got me. She was a month shy of 31 at the time and after I was out, the doctor who'd poked around inside her in order to deliver me told her, "Do not under any circumstances let yourself get pregnant again. You will never make it through another birth alive."
Her gynecologist later concurred. That little fact is always on my mind when I read debates about abortion and come across someone who believes they should be illegal with no exceptions. What would have probably happened if my mother had gotten pregnant again is that either she would have aborted or both she and that fetus would have died. The latter option doesn't sound particularly "pro-life" to me.
She told me more than once that if she had gotten in a "family way" then, she would not have hesitated to abort. The gamble that the doctors were wrong was not worth losing her life and leaving my father and me without her. As far as I know, it was never necessary. They were lucky…and also very careful. After my father died in '91, she asked me to clean out his drawer and not tell her about anything in there that I thought she wouldn't have wanted to know about. They had no secrets from each other but each had one small drawer in their bedroom which the other agreed to never open. I have not cleaned out hers yet though she told me once it held letters and photos of male friends who preceded my father. His had nothing I felt she'd care about but it did contain an awful lot of very old and unopened condoms.
Shortly after I posted the above here, I did get around to cleaning out my mother's "private" drawer. There were papers in there from and about a man to whom she was briefly married. That marriage was quickly annulled and then she married my father and they were inseparable and wildly happy with each other for the rest of his life.
There were no photos of any male except me. There was also a very old Bible — so old its binding had gone brittle and it could no longer hold the pages in place. And there were some photos of her mother and a $500 bill. The $500 bill would have been exciting had it not been from a game of Monopoly.
I have quite a few e-mails today from folks telling me…
That everyone in their area wears masks in public places or…
That no one in their area wears masks in public places or (mostly)…
That some people in their area wear masks in public places and others don't.
I think it's safe to say that it varies from place to place just as the density of COVID cases varies from place to place. There are probably other variables including age and what kind of public place we're talking about. Anyway, I don't need any more messages telling me how it is in your neck of the woods, thank you.
A couple of folks asked me, "How will you decide it's safe to stop wearing masks at all?" Easy answer: When my doctor tells me it is.
I've said this before and I don't know why it's controversial for some people. I think it helps in this world to have a good doctor…someone you trust. I listen to mine when he tells me to increase this vitamin or stop taking that medication. Why shouldn't I listen to him when he tells me to get a booster shot or wear a mask?
He's not infallible but it's been my experience that medical advice that comes from a real doctor — someone who has earned your respect, not just someone with a diploma on the wall — is right at least 85% of the time. By contrast — and again, this is just my experience; yours may vary — medical advice from non-doctors who think they know about medicine is right less than 25%. I actually/truly/literally believe that certain people I've known have died from following bad layperson advice.
Yes, I know a great doctor is not always easy to find, especially when decent health insurance is sometimes outta reach. I think it's worth the effort to find someone you can trust and even if you can't, don't trust someone who studied medicine at YouTube University or who says, "I read somewhere on the Internet…" Somewhere on the Internet, there are people who will insist that at this very minute, they're playing Pinochle with Elvis, J.F.K. and Andy Kaufman. And Andy's winning.
George Perez was a real good guy and real good artist and if you administered Sodium Pentothal to everyone who ever worked with or even knew him, I don't think you could find a single negative thought about the guy. Maybe — just maybe — you could find a little jealousy at his popularity and his skills. But he really was an example of how talent plus hard work can be a winning recipe for success.
George began drawing comics around 1973 and if you arranged all his work in the sequence in which he did it, you could watch a beginner just get better and better with each job. Come to think of it, there might have been some grumbling about George from the inkers who had to ink the pages he drew because he tended to put in everything. There were easier ways to draw those pages but George never took them…and the work was done with such care and dedication that no one grumbled for long.
He stopped drawing comics in 2013 due to eye problems, resumed soon after, then stopped due to heart problems. Late last year, he saddened everyone when he announced he had pancreatic cancer and had decided to let nature take its course. Everyone I saw was impressed with the mature, upbeat manner in which he handled it. His friend Constance Eza wrote this morning that George "passed away yesterday, peacefully at home." He was 67 years old and had his wife Carol and their family at his side.
The photo above is of George at the 2006 Comic-Con International, pointing with pride that a comic book cover he'd drawn had been made into a U.S. postage stamp. It was but one of many, many things this fine man had to be proud of.
The other night in London, there was a concert to honor the late Stephen Sondheim. Here's what I think is the finale with, among others, Bernadette Peters, Imelda Staunton, Petula Clark and Michael Ball…
It's 74 days until this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego…and I am here being optimistic that (a) it will happen and (b) that I will be there. I'm currently prepping panels based on both assumptions and things are looking pretty good that way.
Based on the same assumptions, my friends who run The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog are revving up with a new season of podcasts and news coverage of what's going to happen at the con. They are in no way affiliated with the actual event or the folks who run it but the Unofficial Blog site is still a valuable tool for attendees.
This coming Tuesday evening at 6:30 PM Pacific Time, they'll be launching their new season of podcasts with their very special guest, me. You can watch it live on their site or I'll have a replay later on this site. That's two chances you have to see me make the usual fool of myself.
In the meantime, I got an e-mail this morning from a fellow who I'll quote in part here. He goes on and on about how it's stupid to wear masks these days. He's angry that Comic-Con International will be requiring them and he writes, "…no one wears masks anymore at indoor businesses. No one wears masks anymore, period!!!" Which indicates to me that he and I do not patronize the same businesses. I see lots of people wearing masks at indoor businesses I frequent and I am sometimes one of them.
He quotes a Florida judge as saying masks are simply not necessary at this point and calls it all "a political power play." I suspect that judge was ruling on whether she thought certain laws requiring masks were in accord with existing laws, not whether they should be worn. There's a big difference there. Here's my simple position on this: I don't respect any opinion on the wearing of masks that doesn't come from a licensed, experienced DOCTOR (caps for emphasis), preferably one who specializes in infectious diseases.
Frankly, I think wearing a mask or not wearing a mask because of what a politician or judge or TV pundit says is stupid. You might just as well ask your plumber if he thinks you ought to have open heart surgery. (And I'm not suggesting doctors are infallible or that 100% of them agree. I just have this odd theory that they generally know more about medicine than politicians, pundits or plumbers.)
Anyway, then the fellow who wrote me wrote, "I'm sure that, as one of the main speakers and leaders at Comic-Con, you could get the fine folks running the event to reconsider the masks policy." Yes, if you want to formulate a responsible, intelligent health policy, listen to the guy who writes dialogue for Groo the Wanderer. Who could be more qualified than that?
I also don't think it's their policy. I think it has a lot to do with the state, the city and the convention center. The San Diego Convention Center, by the way, is a non-profit public benefit corporation created by the City of San Diego. And I'm fairly sure that all those agencies, in formulating the current policy, consulted with DOCTORS. Gee, I wonder why they didn't ask my opinion.
Is the policy over-cautious? Maybe. I don't know. I have several friends who currently have COVID and while their symptoms seem to be mild, there are still people out there suffering mightily and perhaps dying. Here are current stats for California. We seem to be near the end of this thing but we've thought that before and been horribly wrong so I don't think over-cautious is a terrible thing. I also don't think wearing a mask is any more oppressive than not sneezing on someone else or not coughing in their face.
What do we have here? Oh, it looks like Albert Brooks doing his ventriloquist routine on The Ed Sullivan Show for January 31, 1971. It took a lot of guts to do this routine on that show on live TV.
Comics who did Ed's show used to always tell of the agony of having to do their act earlier that afternoon at the dress rehearsal. The audience for those, they all said, was largely unresponsive…a lot of derelicts using the free tickets to get off the street for a little while, a lot of little old ladies who were out shopping just wanting to get off their feet…
Ed, it was said, would often panic over the non-response to a comic's act and order that it be cut down for the air show. He was also known to cut an act entirely. I wonder how "Danny and Dave" made the cut…
One of those folks who wanted me to answer a question without giving their name read my obit of Neal Adams and asked…
In what you wrote about Adams, you said "God Help You if you were a young kid showing him your portfolio and asking him for a critique." I gather that means he was rough on newcomers. Do you think he was right to do this? Do you think beginners should be subjected to this kind of treatment? I believe you wrote once that Bob Kane looked at your work when you were a teenager and told you to give up trying to be a writer.
Yeah, but that was Bob Kane. Even at that age, I knew not to take him seriously. I believe he offered to look at my work not to advise me on any possible career but to see if I could be of any immediate use to him. And he had no use for what I did. When someone slams your work, it helps to remember that, first of all, that's just one person…and the greatest talents who've ever lived all have at least one person and maybe even a million people who hate what they do. Also, of course, not all opinions are honest…or informed.
Over the years, I knew perhaps a dozen artists who showed their work to Neal and didn't get the response for which they were hoping. And what they were hoping for was not necessarily praise. More often, it was the answer to the question, "Where do I go from here? What's my next step?" I've heard that there were times when Neal saw a new kid's work, picked up the phone and recommended him or her for a job. If he did that, good for him. What the folks I knew personally usually got from him was the answer to a question they were not asking: "What do I have to do to get a job working on super-hero comics for Marvel or DC?"
By contrast, Jack Kirby never discouraged anyone, including some youngsters who perhaps could have been helped by a bit of discouragement. He urged beginners not to draw like him or like anyone other than themselves. And if he really saw potential in you, he would tell you to aim way higher than working for DC and Marvel on material they'd own and control.
I do understand the working premise of "tough love." I understand the concept of the drill sergeant who treats you like dirt to make you a better soldier. I just don't think that's what most people need on their way up. I think they need honesty about who and where they are, a fair assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, and maybe being pointed in the right direction. If someone comes along with the potential to be the next Charles Schulz, he shouldn't be told, "Here's what you have to do if you want to get a job inking Spider-Man."
Neal was rough on some people but I didn't mean to suggest he was never of help. A lot of people got into the business because of Neal Adams even if his critiques could be kinda torturous. And a lot more made good careers for themselves by not listening to him. Just because someone has more experience than you do, that doesn't mean their evaluation of your work is valid. When people ask me how I've managed to be a working professional writer for more than half a century, I sometimes tell them the secret. It involved not listening to Bob Kane.
An outfit called Musical Mayhem Productions stages plays and theater workshops for performers ages 4-19. They're based in Elk Grove, California, which is in Sacramento County. This weekend, they're staging The Addams Family and later this month, it's The Little Mermaid.
This is from a production of Guys and Dolls Junior and the performers are Karoline Ongjoco and Henry Pullen. Sit down, you're rockin' the crib…
Longtime readers of this blog can probably guess how I feel about the impending prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned along with some other possibilities from the Far-Right Wish List. I'm not writing about it because I don't think I have anything to say that isn't being said (and said better) by countless others. If and when I do, you'll see it here.
Please don't think that if I don't write about something here, I don't care about it. That goes especially when someone notable dies and I don't write about them. I just might not have anything to say that I think is worth saying. Goodness knows I post enough that isn't worth my time to write or your time to read.
In other news: Currently, I have 4,823 "friends" on Facebook and over a thousand requests. But I can only occasionally add anyone because Facebook sometimes thinks I've already hit the 5,000 "friend" limit and won't let me. I'm not snubbing anyone. Honest.
James Corden will soon step down as the host of The Late Late Show on CBS. My view of the man is just about identical to the one expressed here by my pal Paul Harris. I like Corden in certain special bits on his show which I watch on YouTube. (I always watch his Carpool Karaoke segments just to see if my house is in them. He drives around my neighborhood a lot.)
I liked him as a host on the Tony Awards and a few other gigs. I even liked him in the movies of Cats, The Prom and Into the Woods. But I rarely watch his nightly show where everything and everyone are fabulous and wonderful and awesome and everything merits a standing ovation.
And Paul's right: It's kind of pointless to speculate who may replace him. There's sometimes an obvious choice for an 11:30 talk show slot the way some of us predicted Stephen Colbert would take over Letterman's program. But 12:30 is almost always someone no one saw coming. No one predicted Conan O'Brien or Tom Snyder or Craig Kilborn or Craig Ferguson or Seth Meyers or Mr. Corden. I would guess though that the folks at CBS are at least seriously looking to see if there's a worthy candidate who isn't white, male or neither.
There must be. But I have no idea if they'd go with that person. I'll also guess that a major requirement for the job is that the new host be real Internet-savvy and able to generate online content because that's becoming almost as important as putting a good show on conventional TV.
Paul wonders what Corden's going to do. I'll tell you what I'd like to see him do. My favorite musical comedy is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and at the time he got the call about hosting The Late Late Show, Corden was in talks about starring in a new Broadway revival of it. I believe he's occasionally said he really wants to do that someday and I'd sure like to see it. I think he'd be fabulous and wonderful and awesome and would merit a standing ovation. But he might be too busy starring in every movie Hollywood makes adapting a Broadway musical to the screen.
