Monthly Archives: June 2022

Since it's a day for fathers, I'm rerunning this long article I published here on 7/29/13 about mine. It's actually more about me than it is about him but when I think about him, I often think of the closing scene of this story. It's one of my most precious memories of my father and I can't tell you properly about it without telling you how it came about. So sit back and read as I come clean about writing something dirty.

Well, not very dirty. Not by today's standards.

You'll notice down in the sixth paragraph, I mention how I wrote one article for a publisher who didn't pay me and didn't pay me and didn't pay me and I said, "If that check isn't here by 2015, I'm going to call and give that accounting department a piece of my mind." That was a funny thing, I thought, to say when I wrote this in 2013.

Needless to say, 2015 has since come and gone. The check never arrived and I never called the accounting department. I didn't really intend to do that since the company went out of business in 1973 and there's now a McDonald's on the land where its office used to be. I did though hit the drive-thru recently and got a McDouble and a Medium Fries free because of all the points I'd accumulated on the McDonald's app. So I received something of value from that address.

And that has nothing to do with my father so here's our story for today…

I started writing professionally in 1969 and I did okay. I didn't always like what I was assigned to write but I always found someone to pay me for putting words on paper. (That's right: We used paper back then, having only recently upgraded from writing on tree bark and before that, slabs of stone.) From the start, I made a decent, if unsteady living. Since I was still residing at home with my parents, I didn't have to earn any particular amount per week but I kept applying the following test to my little ledger of bucks received: If I was on my own, could I make living expenses? The answer seemed to be yes.

But the amounts varied. Some weeks, I got in nothing; other weeks, decent sums. Different editors and employers needed or purchased different quantities of my writing each month and every one of them seemed to have a different method of taking weeks if not months to pay. A few never did. There was an editor at a local magazine who read some of the things I'd written. He called me in, offered me a number of assignments at respectable rates but impressed on me in harsh, threatening tones how vital it was that I meet every single deadline…

"I only work with professionals," he said. "And the number one mark of a professional is that he delivers on time. I cannot stand even the slightest tardiness. If you write for me, you need to do everything humanly possible to get me what I need exactly when I say I need it."

I told him I thought I could do that but he went on and on, impressing on me how Mankind as we know it would cease to exist if my draft was even a day late. Finally, I asked, "Do you then do everything humanly possible to pay me exactly when I say I need it?"

He replied, without the slightest note of irony in his voice, "No, the accounting department sends out checks when they get around to it and I have nothing to do with that."

I wrote one piece for him anyway and he assured me that pay would be forthcoming. If that check isn't here by 2015, I'm going to call and give that accounting department a piece of my mind.

Because my personal Accounts Receivable fluctuated so unpredictably, my father had trouble from the start wrapping his brain around the idea that I was off on a real career. It all sounded very part-time and temporary to him, like selling seed packets door-to-door or something. His occupation, after all, paid a firm and predictable salary. It wasn't much. Some weeks, it was less than I was making. But it was the exact same amount every Friday and he could count on it. That's what a job was to him.

While I was living there, he'd come home from work every afternoon and ask me, "Any checks today?" If one had arrived, I'd tell him what it was for and how much. Then he'd ask, "Can I see it?" Sometimes, I'd show it to him but sometimes, I'd already have walked it up to California Federal Savings and deposited it in my account. And sometimes, it was still in my room but I'd respond, "I told you how much it was for. Why do you need to see the check?"

It was years before I understood something that should have been obvious to me but wasn't. A lot of things are like that when you're that age. When he asked to see the check, I thought he was suspicious that I was lying about what I was making and he wanted to verify…but it wasn't that at all. He just loved seeing a check for any amount that said, "Pay to the order of Mark Evanier" on it. He had once dreamed of being a writer but had never pursued it far enough to yield a check with that surname on it.

My name was a big thing to him, maybe bigger than it was to me…and it was not just because half of mine was his. When I told him I'd just sold an article or a script, the first question he'd ask — even before "How much are they paying you?" — was "Is your name going to be on it?" It wasn't on a lot of the early things I wrote — which given their nature, does not displease me. I wish I could take it off some things where it did appear. I've always kind of envied writers named, like, Fred Wilson. When one of their bad jobs turns up, they can say, "Oh, that? That was by the other Fred Wilson! He's so terrible, I wish I could get him to change his name."

Years later, my name was on most of the things I wrote for print, including comic books, and that made my father happy. Seeing my name on TV made him really happy.

And seeing my name on a check? Ecstasy.

After a few years of writing television, it became prudent for me to turn my finances over to a Business Manager. Thereafter, my father couldn't see my checks because I didn't see my checks. They went straight to Mr. Business Manager. But around 1988, I had a really big one coming in — payment for a project I'd worked on for months and months. If I'd been paid weekly on it, it would have meant a lot of little, not-so-impressive checks…but I was getting one cumulative one with a lot of digits on it.

By then, I'd come to understand what seeing my name on a check meant to him so I told the Business Manager not to deposit that one when it arrived. Instead, he messengered it over to me and when my father came to visit, I fibbed a bit to him…for a good cause. He was always offering to run errands for me and being disappointed if I couldn't send him to the post office or my local Sav-On Family Pharmacy for some floss or something. "Could you drop something off at my Business Manager's for me?" I asked. "I received a check. They were supposed to send it straight to him but it came to me for some reason."

I could hear my father's eyes sparkle. A check? "Could I see it?" he asked.

Acting as casual as I could, I showed it to him…and he was so proud, he actually started crying. Nothing I bought with that money made me as happy as showing him that check.

But that kind of moment came later, long after he'd accepted that his kid was a Professional Writer and could make a living as such. This is the story of how we got to that point and it occurred the second or third month I was writing, back when he just wasn't sure. What the hell kind of career was it where you never knew what you were going to make next week? Even with me showing him checks that totaled a decent income, he worried that I was setting myself up for a lifetime of precarious finances. This was a man who'd grown up in the Great Depression, remember.

My mother told me, "He's so worried about you…he sometimes lies awake at night. He'll read in the paper about some writer who just declared bankruptcy or there'll be a case in his office of one who's in deep financial trouble." More and more, I felt I had to do something…but what? How could I convince my father I could support myself as a writer in the long run when I was just starting out and had yet to fully convince myself? Then I got a most unusual offer.

I was at a local publishing house delivering an article I'd written and I got to chatting with another freelancer. "I hear you're real fast," he said. "Do you think you could write a novel in three days?" I asked what kind of novel — mystery? Romance? Western?

"Porn," he said.

I had never read a porn novel…and come to think of it, still haven't if you don't count the one this essay is about. Still, I couldn't imagine there was a steep learning curve there…or a need to be able to channel Dostoyevsky. The writer explained that he occasionally worked for a publisher of such material who was desperate to get a book written by the weekend. This was Tuesday morning. "I can't write what he needs that fast but if you want to take a stab at it, here's his number." I wasn't sure that I wanted to get into that line of work but I had this belief back then that you should at least look into every opportunity. Go meet with everyone and even if you say no, you might learn something in the process. I called the publisher and he told me to come right down to his office — which I did but it took a little while. I didn't drive in those days and so had to figure out how to get there by bus.

You may find this hard to believe but his office was in a seedy part of L.A. on the second floor of a building. The first floor consisted of a store that sold the kind of thing he published. Up and down the block were porn houses, including (I think) the one where Fred Willard got busted last year. That area…though it's been tidied up and sanitized a lot since 1969. Walking through it then, I felt like I wanted to spray anything and everything around me with Lysol. Including the passers-by.

Upstairs, there were no naked women, no photographers…nothing sexy at all unless you counted endless crates of dirty books and magazines. At a long table, three middle-aged women worked expressionlessly, opening envelopes and taking out rumpled currency and the occasional check. They'd address mailing labels that indicated in code what was to be sent to the purchaser, then they'd hand the labels to one of two young men who scurried about, locating the paid-for items, stuffing them into shipping envelopes, then affixing postage. It was an efficient operation but depressing…and even if you didn't know what they were selling, there was a sleazy air to it all. I momentarily calculated when the next bus home would be coming by and considered darting out and hopping on.

I hadn't quite done that when the publisher got around to explaining his dilemma to me and I was intrigued if only by the challenge. He was contracted to print four naughty novels that weekend — on a press that printed "four-up," meaning four books at a time. He'd had four ready to go, then found out that one of them was a book that its author had sold twice — once to him and once to another publisher who still had it in print. The other publisher threatened to sue and/or break legs if this publisher put it out…so this publisher needed another book and he needed it by Friday morning so he could get it typeset and ready for press on Saturday. The press run could not, for some reason, be postponed.

I asked how long it had to be. He said about 30,000 words and I did a fast mental conversion. My manuscript pages averaged 250 words a page so we were talking 120 pages in three days. Doable, I thought. I asked, "What would it have to be about?"

He said, "People having sex." I waited for him to say more but that was it: People having sex. I thought about it a second then said, "Hey, you know I think there's a movie in that" but he didn't laugh. Then before I could ask about money, he said, "Usually, I pay two cents a word for these so $600. But if you get it in by Friday morning at 10 AM, I'll make it $700. That is, if I use it."

"If I use it?" That was an ominous add-on. If the guy was telling me the truth of his dilemma, then he pretty much had to use anything I handed in that was in reasonably coherent English. I could only think of one reason why he might not use it. I asked him, "Do you have other people writing these?" My concern was that he had five guys banging out manuscripts at that very moment and would only buy the best (or first) that arrived. He swore to me, no, he didn't know anyone else who could get such a book done in time. Mostly on a whim, I said to him, "Then mine ought to be worth $800."

He grinned and agreed. "Okay, eight." Then he explained to me that I would have to write it around existing cover art he had. He showed me some bad line drawings of semi-clad people and told me to pick one. Most were of angry semi-clad people, some tying up or otherwise restraining others. The eroticism of such situations has always eluded me but, hey, whatever excites you. I've always believed that any kind of sexual activity is fine between consenting adults…but for me, most of the joy is in the consenting.

I had already decided that my book would be set in high school — write what you know, they say — and there was one drawing of a cute girl who was around the right age. More important to me was that she looked like she expected to enjoy what she was about to do with a young man of similar age…so I picked that one. The Porn King told me I needed a title and an author name. I made up one of each, he laid a few "rules" on me and I went off and caught the bus home.

On the way there, I wondered what I'd gotten myself into…but at least I knew I'd be clearing a pretty low bar. I also knew the timing couldn't have been better: That very day, my parents were driving to Las Vegas for a four-day vacation. It would be a lot easier to write a dirty book without my folks in the next room.

By the time I got home, I had a rough plot in my head. My father and mother were loading the car and I gave them a hand. It was polite and I was in a hurry to get them on their way so it would be just me and my typewriter. Moments before they departed, my mother said the same thing to me she always said when they left me alone for a few days. She said, "Okay, while we're gone, no orgies." The previous times she'd said that, I'd smiled and thought, "If only." This time, I smiled and thought, "If only you knew." Then they left and their son commenced writing smut.

Well, not really smut. Not by today's standards and maybe not even by 1969's. One of the rules I'd been given was that I couldn't use the "f" word or anything close to it. I could set the story in high school but I couldn't explicitly say that anyone having sex was under the age of consent. I was also not to make any mention of bodily fluids, saliva included, that might pass between lovers. Bill O'Reilly has written far dirtier books than I produced.

And I was operating under one other handicap: As I described the sublime feeling of sexual intercourse, I had to kinda guess what that felt like…so I probably didn't handle those pages very well. On the other hand, I did some really superb writing in the scenes about the teenage male virgins who were eager, verging on desperate, to find out for themselves. Sometimes, there's just no substitute for first-hand experience. Had I but written this book two weeks later…

I remember two main things about those long days. One was how much fun I had. This was only weeks after my high school experience had ended so I still had a lot of emotion about my classmates. I selected several of them, changed their names and had them do what I wished had happened. I more or less cast myself in the lead…but I also played any male character who got the gal of his dreams. I'd had a gym coach who hated me, mainly because he had the I.Q. of a jock strap and I kept pointing up the dumbness in his dumber utterances. He became Mr. Brick, the world's stupidest physical education instructor.

There was a guy at school I hadn't gotten along with, in no small part because he was dating a young lady over whom I drooled. He became the villain, Biff, and in my story, she left him for the hero and then later walked in on Biff cross-dressing like a cheerleader and having sex with Mr. Brick. Naturally, every girl I'd fantasized over in high school became a character and those fantasies were put to good use. It was all very childish and adolescent and self-indulgent but I've never enjoyed writing anything more, nor have I felt more powerful. Alice Manning wouldn't even talk to me back at University High School…but you should hear what her doppelgänger asked of "me" in the book.

That was one thing I recall. The other was the extraordinary mix of adrenalin and teenage testosterone that kicked in. I barely slept. I barely ate. I just sat there night and day at my little manual Olivetti-Underwood, pounding out page after page after page. Every hour or so, I'd stop and refigure my pace: Okay, I've done this many pages in this many hours. If I sleep X hours and write at this pace for Y hours, I'll finish at 11 PM on Thursday. As it turned out, I finished around 8 PM that evening — 122 double-spaced pages.

The Porno Publisher had given me his phone number and told me to call — at any hour — when I was finished. I called and told him I was done and I'd be in with it first thing in the morning. "No, no," he said. "Tonight. Bring it down right now!"

I looked outside. It was dark and I thought of the long bus ride down to that grungy neighborhood. "I'm exhausted," I said. "I haven't eaten all day, I've barely slept…"

He insisted. "Bring it in right now and if it's what you say it is, you can walk out of here with cash," he said, vocally italicizing the word, "cash." There was a pause and then the man added, "You know, I do have a backup plan. I had to. I have this other manuscript I could use…"

I knew that was a lie. Just knew it. But I also wasn't sure I'd be able to sleep if I was worried about getting paid. And given how others were making me wait forever and a day to be paid, there was something awfully appealing about Same Day Compensation. "Okay," I said. "But it might take me two hours to get there."

"I'll be here," he promised.

I showered, dressed and walked up to a deli on Pico Boulevard with the manuscript in a manila envelope. I was trying to think of some way I could get it copied before handing it over but there didn't seem to be a way. All the Xerox places were closed and I couldn't see myself going into the nearby drugstore where there was a coin-operated copier, and standing there for at least an hour copying all 122 pages, one at a time for a dime apiece. So I ate a sandwich, then hopped on the first of three buses. All the way there, I edited, scanning the pages for typos or spots where I could have said something much clearer.

As sketchy as that area had been during the day, it was scarier after 10:00 at night. I saw women I was reasonably sure were hookers. Actually, I was surer they were hookers than that they were women. I saw men I instantly assumed were pimps and/or drug dealers. Maybe it was my imagination but I felt like they were all eyeing me and thinking I was the freaky one on that block. I wanted to wave my envelope at them and yell, "I belong here! I just wrote a sex novel!" I finally reached the publisher's office. He answered the door, snatched the manuscript from me and said, "Have a seat. I'll go in the next room and start reading."

I gasped, "You're going to make me sit here while you read it?" I wanted very much to be home, preferably with my $800.

He said, "I'm not going to pay you until I see what I'm buying" and he left me there in a room with crates of porn and an old, black-and-white TV. I turned it on and watched the last half of The Dean Martin Summer Show Starring The Golddiggers. As I've mentioned here, I had a "thing" for The Golddiggers back then and one in particular. I thought they were sexier than anyone in the crates of magazines that surrounded me. (A friend of mine who knows more about this kind of thing than I do said when I told him this story once, "The difference between porn back then and porn now is that porn now features people you actually want to see naked.) At the time, all I could think was, "I hope that guy took an Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Course. I want to get out of here."

I'd watched the 11 PM News and a bit of Johnny Carson when he came back in and said to my greatest of all reliefs, "I'm not going to keep you here 'til I finish. I've read enough to see it's good. In fact, it's so good I'm going to hold it for a later run. I'm doing some books next month with larger press runs and color covers. I want to put it in that batch." Off my baffled look, he added, "Remember I told you on the phone I had another book I could print? I have books all lined up for the series with the color covers so I'm going to print the weakest one of them on Saturday and use yours in the deluxe line." I felt a twinge of pride. True, I'd just written a sleazy book…but it was a deluxe sleazy book. Then he said, "Let's get you your six hundred dollars."

I said, "Eight hundred dollars."

He looked at me strangely and I thought, "Uh-oh. We're gonna have a fight." But then he said, "Eight hundred, right" and led me into the now-vacant room where the three women had been opening orders. There was probably around two thousand dollars in piles on the table, all in fives, tens and twenties — nothing larger. He had me watch as he counted out eight hundred dollars in twenties, handed it to me and had me recount. It was all there. He offered me an envelope to put it in but I declined and instead stuffed it into various pockets in my pants and windbreaker. "If you want to write a couple more of those for me," he said, "I'll take 'em. Same price." I thanked him and got the hell outta there, walking briskly back to the bus stop. As I glanced at the hookers and their agents this time, I was sure they knew I had eight hundred dollars in small, untraceable cash on me and were deciding which one would get to knife me and take it. Somehow though, I made it onto the bus and home.

The next day, I went up to California Federal Savings with the money in an envelope. As I emptied it onto the counter in front of a lady teller, I had the horrible feeling she'd inspect the bills and then bark, "Young man! Did this money come from…pornography!??" But she said no such thing; just deposited it into my account and handed me back my now-somewhat-more-attractive bankbook. I stared at the new total for a long moment, thinking, "Well, I can't show my father the check for this, partly because I can't tell him how I earned this money and partly because there was no check." And no, I did not pay taxes on it. I couldn't figure out how to do that when my father the I.R.S. man would be checking over my return.

I was out of the bank when I had another couple of thoughts. I'd already decided I wasn't writing any more of that kind of thing, no matter how well it paid. It was enjoyable once but so are a lot of things you never want to do again. It seemed like too easy a rut to fall into and wrong for me in so many ways. My biggest regret was that I never got a copy of the book, damn it. I'm not even certain it was ever published…but here's a standing offer: Eight hundred dollars for the first copy anyone sends me of The Student Body by Mary Margaret Underburger. And if you can find a copy for yourself, I'll even arrange for Mary Margaret to autograph it.

And I also thought this: I could do it again, if not for that publisher then for someone else. I didn't want to…but I decided that if my entire writing career were to crash and burst into flame, that was always available to me and as sordid as it was, it was still preferable to not writing. I've never had to go that route but the fact that I knew it was there convinced me once and for all that I could make a living indefinitely as a professional writer.

After I'd savored that realization, the next logical question, of course, was how to convince my father of that without mentioning the grand literary career of Ms. Underburger. It took me a few more blocks of walking before I suddenly thought of something that might seal that deal. That's when I turned and marched right back to California Federal.

Five days later, my father found a large envelope from them amidst his mail. In it, he was amazed to find the deed to our house and a form letter acknowledging that the outstanding loan on it had been retired.

He couldn't understand. He went to the phone, called the bank and told them, "There must be some mistake. I have eight or nine more payments to make on our home." Someone there told him no, the loan which he'd taken out in 1953 to purchase that two bedroom home — one bedroom for him and my mother, one for his year-old son — had been paid in full via funds transferred from another California Federal account. My father and mother didn't have their personal accounts there but he could think of one person in the house who did.

I was sitting at the typewriter in my bedroom, working on something clean when he came in, crying. He hugged me like he'd never hugged me before and said, "I guess my son can make a living as a writer after all." Then he walked out and almost never worried about that again. By then, I was crying too but I felt happy he'd come to feel that way, happy I had him as a father, happy I'd done what I did…

…and really, really happy he hadn't asked me what I wrote to get the money. And, oh yes — if my name would be on it.

Our friend Anna "Brizzy" Brisbin has posted Part Three of her ambitious three-part History of Voiceover series. You can watch Part One here. You can watch Part Two here. And you can watch Part Three below…

And of course, when I say "Set the TiVo!" here, I'm referring to any recording device, be it D.V.R. or V.C.R., you use to capture a program off television to view at a time convenient to you. In any case, you might want to set whatever you use to record Jon Stewart: The Mark Twain Prize, which debuts on PBS next Tuesday.

Previous recipients of this honor include Richard Pryor (1998), Jonathan Winters (1999), Carl Reiner (2000), Whoopi Goldberg (2001), Bob Newhart (2002), Lily Tomlin (2003), Lorne Michaels (2004), Steve Martin (2005), Neil Simon (2006), Billy Crystal (2007), George Carlin (2008), Bill Cosby (2009, rescinded in 2018) Tina Fey (2010), Will Ferrell (2011), Ellen DeGeneres (2012), Carol Burnett (2013), Jay Leno (2014), Eddie Murphy (2015), Bill Murray (2016), David Letterman (2017), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (2018), and Dave Chappelle (2019). For reasons you can probably guess, there were no awards in 2020 or 2021.

This is not a bad list but when I see it, I always think that Mark Twain was known for two things: Writing and contemporary social commentary through humor. Very few of these recipients could be said to have done both, though Jon Stewart comes closer than most.

Comedian Stewie Stone has died at the age of 88 following a long battle with Parkinson's.  There was an online fund raiser for his medical expenses last year.

Stewie was one of the great opening actors and in his day, he opened for everyone.  Back in this post, I had the following to say about him…

In 1978, I was the head writer on a Bobby Vinton special for CBS. The network flew me and two other writers back to meet with Bobby and see him perform at the Mill Run Playhouse in Niles, Illinois. His opening act was Stewie Stone…and Stewie had been doing it for years by then. He was one of those guys — and there have never been many of them — who expertly mastered the art of being an opening act: He kept the audience entertained for a solid twenty minutes and then finished his set right on time without having in any way upstaged the star to follow. That is only meant as a compliment.

Never a big star but he had a very long career and I doubt he was unemployed much during it. If some really famous singer dies in the next few days, let's all pause and think, "Stewie was opening for him…"

The Las Vegas News Bureau, which maintains a huge collection of photos of that city, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. And to celebrate, they've put up a gallery of 75 great photos from the history of the town Go take a look.

When I go to New York — something I haven't done in quite a while — I have sometimes seen shows at the Palace Theater in the heart of Times Square. It's a great old place, dripping with history, and I once got a fascinating backstage tour that intensified my love of the venue. So I winced a few years ago at reports that it might be torn down.

Well, it won't be — at least not for a long time. But you won't believe what they're doing to it instead…

Bryan Wong (and about nine of you) read this piece here and then wrote to ask…

You said that when you worked on Garfield and Friends, the CBS censor only had about five requests in all the years it was on and you found them reasonable and easy to comply with. Do you remember what any of them were?

Yeah. One of them was to not choke anyone by the neck. Another was not to electrocute anyone, especially by having someone stick something like a screwdriver or wire into an electric outlet. There were a couple of those where they had some reason to believe that kids might either imitate such actions and be hurt or they might do it on their own and then the cartoon would be blamed.

There were one or two others in this category and I don't recall clearly if these things had happened or if there was some good reason to think they might. On the other hand, it was fine to drop a sixteen-ton safe on someone because impressionable children were not likely to do that. I thought these were reasonable requests.

Another was to make sure that when the characters were driving somewhere, they wore their seat belts. Okay, fine.

More than once, I wrote a joke that mentioned Tabasco Sauce and at least one wasn't noticed before the Standards and Practices guy called and said, "That's a brand name. Would you mind switching it to hot sauce?" I decided that was better for the joke because (probably) more kids today know the term "hot sauce."

In 1991 when "Operation Desert Storm" was suddenly in the news, he called me and said, "We've been asked to make sure none of our childrens programming has any reference to war or combat." He explained that CBS News was occasionally cutting into programming at all hours — yes, even Saturday morning — with "Special Reports" about the conflict. Someone high up at the network was concerned that when one of those reports ended and they cut back to regular programming, there could be cartoon characters making light of war.

I suppose one could debate whether that was a silly thing to care about…and it is. But there are times when you think one of those silly things is an even sillier thing to spend time arguing about.

Garfield and Friends was in reruns at the time but I went over the scripts of the episodes that were scheduled for repeating and found one joke which could be construed as a reference to combat. I think it was Garfield and Odie pretending they were in a war movie, sneaking up on some enemy to try and capture their lasagna. Something like that. We moved that episode out of the rotation so it wasn't rebroadcast for a while…and that was that. That may have been the most the Standards and Practices department ever impacted the content of our show.

Since then, one Garfield and Friends cartoon has been pulled from the rerun packages because of what someone called an Asian stereotype. Folks are more sensitive about that kind of thing than they once were and it does no good to point out that since the series was animated in Taiwan, that alleged Asian stereotype was drawn by Asians.

I knew people who had near-coronaries over this kind of thing back when Standards and Practices was an actual division at every network and had some power. One guy at Hanna-Barbera used to refer to their requests as "pissing on the Mona Lisa," which I thought overstated what they were doing and perhaps (just perhaps) slightly overvalued what they were doing it to. What I learned was that you can't fight over everything. You're more likely to win the battles that really matter if you don't reflexively scream about every little thing. In the case of Garfield and Friends, all the little things were little things.

This is a treasure and one that needs some explanation. In the fifties and sixties, a wonderful songwriter named Billy Barnes wrote a lot of wonderful songs, many of them quite funny and the kind of thing that performers performed in revues and cabarets. He wrote serious songs too. "Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?" was one of his bigger hits of a more serious manner. But the funny songs were very funny and they were featured in a number of revues called things like The Billy Barnes Revue, Billy Barnes' People, Billy Barnes' Party, Billy Barnes' L.A. and Billy Barnes' Hollywood.

I think all played at one time or another in Los Angeles and at least one was on Broadway for a while and there were a few touring companies. They led to Billy being hired often to do what they call Special Musical Material for TV shows, including the entire run of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. The revues also led to many of the performers in them being hired for TV shows.

(If any of this is sounding a bit déjà vuish, it may be because I wrote about Billy and one of his later shows here.)

Anyway, my pal Kliph Nesteroff alerted me to an amazing 51-minute video of numbers from The Billy Barnes Revue. It stars Joyce Jameson, Bert Convy, Patti Regan, Ken Berry, Ann Guilbert, Jackie Joseph, Len Weinrib and sketch writer/director Bob Rodgers. All of those folks went on to other things. Ann Guilbert, for example, became a regular on The Dick Van Dyke Show and I can't resist pointing out that Jameson, Regan, Berry, Joseph and Weinrib all guested on that show — and most of them, more than once.

I am not altogether certain just what this video is but it would seem to be an episode of Playboy's Penthouse, a syndicated TV series that Hugh Hefner hosted from 1959 to 1961 and which was taped in Chicago. It looks like whoever had this video lopped off the opening and whatever Hefner did until the final segment and credits.

But it seems real odd — not impossible but odd — that Hef abandoned his show's usual format for a week to devote the hour to Billy Barnes' show. And here's another interesting thing to consider and I am here quoting Wikipedia…

Following its three-week run at the Lyceum Theatre [on Broadway], rather than closing down for good, the show [The Billy Barnes Revue] moved off-Broadway again to the Carnegie Hall Playhouse on October 20, 1959. Producers George Cayley, George Brandt and Samuel J. Friedman acquired the rights from [Producer George] Eckstein, who remained with the production as stage manager and performed the role vacated by Bert Convy.

A controversy erupted when Barnes, Guilbert, Berry, Joseph, Regan, Rodgers, Weinrib and Eckstein flew to Chicago to tape an episode of ABC-TV's Playboy's Penthouse, produced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Magazine, and failed to make their flight back to New York in time for the Tuesday, October 27 performance. As a result, the Tuesday night performance was cancelled and $800 had to be returned to the ticket holders.

Eckstein sent a telegram to the producers stating that the cast had made a "frantically conscientious effort to return to New York by curtain time as numerous impartial witnesses can testify; a dispatching error resulted in misconnections," but rather than simply recognizing the value of the network television publicity, the management filed a complaint with Actors' Equity Association and the American Federation of Musicians (of which Barnes was a member). "There's no excuse for missing a show," declared the producers' lawyer, Benjamin Schankman. "They shouldn't have gone to Chicago if they could not arrange to get back in time. An agreement is an agreement."

Although one of the producers, Samuel J. Friedman, denied that their decision was a retaliatory action, two weeks later, the entire cast (except Virginia de Luce, who had replaced Jameson) was replaced by Ronnie Cunningham, Arlene Fontana, Jane Johnston, Larry Hovis, James Inman, Charles Nelson Reilly and Tom Williams.

The cast change proved to be a major mistake and the show closed on November 28, 1959 after just six weeks at the Carnegie Hall Playhouse. Ironically, the promotional appearance on Playboy's Penthouse by the original cast members did not air until Saturday, December 5, one week after the show had closed.

Some of this is a bit confusing. The Wikipedia piece says that Convy and Jameson were in the cast that went to Chicago and was fired for missing a performance. But it also suggests that Convy and Jameson had been replaced by then. Also, I don't think Playboy's Penthouse was ever an ABC network series, though it may have played in some markets on ABC affiliates.

And I really don't get why you fire the actors as if they were responsible for going to Chicago to appear and perform material from the show. They didn't even have the legal right to do that. Someone — the old producers or the new producers — had to arrange that. There's some reason, probably buried deep within the contract with the new producers, that would explain things.

But at least they went and at least we have this video of material from the show. For that, we should be very happy…

With the hearings going on (and on and on…), this is a great time to reflect on the film of the book, All the President's Men. If you were a fan of the movie, as I am, you will want to read Ann Hornaday delving into how it came to be. For some reason, she doesn't mention the character I think is the most interesting part of the whole movie…Hal Holbrook, who didn't know at the time he was portraying Mark Felt.

The 1/6 Committee Hearings for today start in seven minutes…though I wonder if they shouldn't be called "The Committee to Make Ron DeSantis the Next G.O.P. Nominee for President." I shall try not to watch but I haven't done so well not watching so far.

Much, I'm sure, will be offered to prove that Donald J. Trump knew damn well he'd lost a fair and honest election. I don't know how anyone couldn't know that unless they were the kind of person Jordan Klepper manages to find when he goes out to interview clueless people in red hats. I can understand how some people, having lost, have decided that pretending they didn't is more comforting and/or a better position from which to operate.

But the alternative to Trump not believing he lost is Trump believing he lost. He was treacherous or he was and is completely outta touch with reality. Neither is a good qualification to be the leader of our great nation.

Thinking back on Nixon and Watergate: There was a point when even the man's defenders seemed to be losing heart and trying to avoid defending him on camera. If you remember, there was a somewhat adorable rabbi named Baruch Korff, who came out of nowhere — and went straight back there after Nixon resigned — who wound up on the news all the time as "The President's Chief Defender."

Rabbi Korff was a good man with a bad cause…and because he was new to politics and outside Nixon's Inner Circle, he did a spectacularly bad job of defending the president. If I'd been on trial for littering then and Rabbi Korff had been my chief defender, I might have gotten the death penalty. But he got the job of defending Nixon because no one else — certainly no prominent Republican leader — wanted it; not with the slow drip-drip-drip of new revelations. The rabbi changed about as many minds as Mike Lindell has.

I don't think Trump will ever be abandoned by all those in his party — and it is still his party — but I think these hearings may make a lot of Republicans wonder if they might be better off putting some distance between him and them. We'll see.

This is another one of those "Tiny Desk" concerts that NPR arranged at the peak of The Pandemic and which I didn't know about at the time or I would have posted this then.  This is the cast of the current off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors — or at least the cast as it stood then — performing several numbers from the show. An added bonus is the presence of composer Alan Menken who hosts, performs, and has some interesting things to say about the show…

• Simone Biles finally got the most important honor an athlete can achieve. Forget about all those medals. She's on Wheaties boxes coming out later this month.

In response to this post, Roger Green wrote…

You noted: Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." and "one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment…was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward."

I was wondering if you thought that was a good thing, a bad thing?

Surely having someone other than white people might attract non-white viewers, and help white ones to note, "Oh yeah, there are other people. And having a strong woman (not Nell, or '50s Lois Lane always imperiled) is a good thing for women (and especially men) to see.

In this world — or in my world, at least — one often finds situations that fall under the category of "Doing the right thing for the wrong reason" or maybe "Achieving the proper goal in an improper way." I don't think it's a good thing for, in this case, network functionaries to be dictating creative content because they're afraid of advertisers who are, in turn, afraid of pressure groups.

But I also don't think it's a good thing for police officers to pull you over for speeding. That should not be necessary. You shouldn't be speeding in the first place.

I'm fine with female characters who are strong and assertive. I'm fine with characters not all being white guys. I'm fine with both those things because in real life — or in my real life, at least — a lot of women are strong and assertive and a lot of people are not white guys. Those who felt animation was deficient in representing those kinds of human beings were right.

But the Standards and Practices people we dealt with in the late seventies/early eighties were sometimes very clumsy and tyrannical and creatively insensitive. I wrote one particular ABC Weekend Special where at the last minute, they demanded major (and, I thought, injurious) changes to the script because of some crazed concern of the week. And I was arguing with someone who really didn't care if the changes disfigured the story and betrayed the book being adapted for the special.

It was like if you were adapting Moby Dick (the classic novel, not the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show of that name) and they came to you and said, "We're under fire for not having enough black women in our shows!" You might say in response, "Okay, they're right. After I finish this, we'll come up with some stories featuring black women" and they said, "No, no! This can't wait! You have to make Captain Ahab a black woman! And make sure she's a good role model!"

And then they added, "And although we haven't had any complaints about this, we need to lose the stuff about Ahab only having one leg. Just in case!" Maybe the right long-term goal but the wrong time, place and method to achieve it.

They were also, I thought, often dead wrong about their goals. As I've written elsewhere, some of the "pro-social" messaging they demanded pushed the premise that "the group" is always right; that if all your friends want to do one thing and you think that's a bad idea, you should yield to the majority. I thought that was a dangerous message — that's kind of how The Crips and The Bloods got started — and when I worked on the Garfield and Friends show, I wrote several cartoons refuting that message.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that in (roughly) the years 1977-1986 when I wrote cartoon shows, most of which were on ABC, I battled constantly with the Standards and Practices people — and one lady in particular. Sometimes, I lost. Sometimes, I won. Often, I won but the producers of the show made the requested changes anyway because they were afraid that even if ABC would let a certain joke or action in now, they might not a few years down the line and would not then buy the show for reruns.

When I started doing Garfield and Friends in 1987 (it began airing in '88), all that changed for me. No one ever suggested pro-social concepts to me. No one at the network (CBS) really suggested anything. In 121 half-hours, the Standards and Practices guy had about five requests, all of them minor and reasonable and easy to accommodate. And as noted, I even got to do episodes ridiculing what Standards and Practices had demanded at all three networks in the previous ten years.

These days, very few cartoon shows face anything like what we faced way back when. My friends working on current programs do sometimes complain about notes from someone upstairs about story elements that might lessen a character's merchandising potential. But that's another matter.

The fine folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Bob Bolling, Don Rico to Receive 2022 Bill Finger Award

Bob Bolling and Don Rico have been selected to receive the 2022 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer/historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"We're excited to be back presenting awards in our original format," Evanier noted. "And we couldn't have better recipients than these two men, whose work in comics never received the recognition it deserved. Too often, they worked in utter anonymity, creating work that is fondly remembered even if those who enjoyed it were unaware of its authors' names."

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 thanks to the late comic book legend Jerry Robinson, who proposed it to honor the memory of his friend, Bill Finger. According to Evanier, "At the time, though everyone knew Batman and his supporting cast, not nearly enough knew Mr. Finger and his vital contributions to the creation of that beloved hero. Finger's name now appears on Batman movies and comic books, and we want to keep it on this award, as he's still the industry poster boy for writers not receiving proper reward or attention."

Bob Bolling was born on June 9, 1928, in Brockton, MA. His parents were scientists, but all Bob wanted to do was write and draw. He drew for his high school newspaper, then did a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, after which he studied at the Vesper George School of Art in Boston and finally at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he studied under master illustrator Burne Hogarth. Bolling worked briefly on a short-lived newspaper strip called Marlin Keel before a friend recommended him to Archie editor Harry Shorten. Shorten liked the young man's work, and in 1954 Bolling began a 50-year association with the publisher, interrupted only briefly in 1985 when he drew Wally the Wizard for Marvel's Star line of comics for younger readers.

Otherwise. Bolling worked for Archie — at first, mainly on a "Dennis the Menace"–like character named Pat the Brat. His skills at handling kids of that age led to his most esteemed work in 1956, when he inaugurated the Little Archie series, writing and drawing some of the most memorable comics to ever come from that company. It was also one of its bestselling and was quickly promoted from standard to giant-size, with additional spinoffs as well. Later, he also did many stories for the better-known teen version of Archie with work in Life With Archie, Betty, Betty and Me, Sabrina, and others, along with more tales of Little Archie that are avidly collected and treasured. Bolling began painting in the 1980s and turned to that full time after retiring in the early 2000s. He is unable to attend the awards ceremony, but he will be receiving his award plaque before then.

Donato "Don" Rico (1912–1985) was one of the first writer/artists in comic books, starting with a story in Fantastic Comics #1 (Dec. 1939) from Victor Fox's outfit, where so many began their careers. His work soon appeared in publications from Fiction House and from Lev Gleason Publications, where he worked on Silver Streak and on the first comics character to bear the name Daredevil. Many of the stories he wrote and drew there were signed with the name of Charles Biro. Rico joined Timely (now Marvel) in late 1941, in time to work on a back-up story in Captain America #13 and to later contribute many stories of Captain America, The Human Torch, the Whizzer, Sub-Mariner, the Blonde Phantom, Venus, and the Young Allies.

Beginning as a fine artist whose work is still in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums, he also wrote novels and screenplays, leaving and rejoining Timely/Atlas many times. He eventually worked there mainly as a writer and editor, contributing to their horror and western comics and specializing in jungle girl comics such as Jann of the Jungle and Leopard Girl, both of which he co-created. In the 1960s, he specialized in paperback novels but wrote three stories for Marvel under the name "N. Korok." In one, an Iron Man tale, he co-created The Black Widow, who would become one of Marvel's most popular characters. His later work was mainly for film and television, but he was a featured guest at many of the early years of Comic-Con, and he co-founded C.A.P.S., the Comic Art Professional Society, with Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. His Finger Award will be accepted by his widow, actress Michele Hart, and his son, Buz Rico.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914–1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The major sponsor for the 2022 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of San Diego Comic Convention and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con on Friday, July 22.

Angelo Torres began drawing comic books in the mid-fifties and he's still at it. He worked for EC Comics and other firms, often collaborating with folks like Al Williamson, George Woodbridge and Frank Frazetta. In the late sixties, he went to work for MAD and drew 282 articles for them, making him the mag's ninth most-prolific contributor. (In case you're interested, Al Jaffee holds the title of Most Prolific MAD Contributor, though some guy named Sergio Aragonés is on target to bypass him in the next year or so.)

If you are at all interested in the work of Angelo Torres, get thee over to this page on his website and spend 36 minutes watching My Dinner With Angelo, a delightful film that was made in conjunction with a recent exhibit of his work in New York. I could embed it here but I'd like to see his site get all the hits…and while you're over there, browse around a little. The length and breadth of this man's talents have not been properly recognized. Nice guy, too.