Monthly Archives: September 2024

Here's Julie Andrews singing a jazzed-up version of a song from My Fair Lady that she didn't sing in My Fair Lady…

Hey, here's a website that might amuse you for about three minutes. It's called Random Street View and when you go there, it takes you to some random place on Google Maps. I just went there and it plunked me down in the middle of the General Anthony Clement McAuliffe 101st Airborne Memorial Highway in Easton, PA. I always wanted to visit there.

You can set it to restrict your landing spot to a specific country or you can just let it take you wherever it wants you to go. On my next try, I wound up at Toila-Oru, 41714 Ida-Viru County, Estonia…just where I was thinking of moving if Trump wins.

Not much change anywhere. Harris is still a few points ahead of Trump but just a few. This makes his supporters nervous that she'll beat him and her supporters nervous that she won't. Trump keeps doing things like his visit to Arlington and his double-talk on Abortion that you'd think would cost him voters but I don't think any one or two missteps will. The cumulative effect might but not any one thing. It looks like the next few weeks will be a lot of anger at judges and prosecutors who want to hold the 45th President accountable for misdeeds. I wouldn't expect a lot of talk about policy except maybe on the debate stage if/when that happens.

Kevin Drum has a good explainer up about what happened with the withdrawal from Afghanistan which was not as much of a mess as some make it out to be.

Things are getting worse on the legal front for Rudy Giuliani. I suspect that will be the case every week for a long time so let this be a lesson to us all. If any major media outlet ever dubs you The Most Respected Man [or Woman] in the Country, try to live up to that label. Don't act like it's some ongoing version of The Purge for you and laws no longer apply.

And lastly for now: Trump said recently in an interview that he would win California if Jesus Christ counted the votes. Okay…but every single poll now shows him losing the state by about two-to-one — and Adam Schiff is trouncing Steve Garvey in the Senate race by about the same margin. So are all the polls rigged, too? I'd love to hear how that works.

Someone on Facebook posted this photo of Jerry Lewis and Artie Forrest, probably in Vegas, probably there for Jerry's annual Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon. Artie was at least the director and often the producer of that ritual year after year.

Arthur Forrest also may have held the world record for the most hours or live and quasi-live television directed by anybody. He was a lovely man who had done just about everything you could do in TV and nothing bothered him. If in the middle of a live telecast, the studio had been attacked by Godzilla, Artie would have calmly handled the crisis, getting everyone to safety while all the time making sure he got a good shot of the towering monster as he crushed the sets under his feet.

To direct for Jerry all those years, you had to have that skill set.

Seeing that photo got me thinking of one of those "might have been" episodes of my life that didn't happen. I had worked with Artie on a number of shows and one year, he asked me to be a writer — I think maybe the only writer — on that year's telethon. It meant about three weeks in L.A. writing intros and speeches for Jerry and then about a week in Las Vegas for rehearsals and the actual live telecast. The money offered was, at it so often is, in that "Barely Acceptable" category and that was not a surprise. He said everyone was working for minimums since, after all, the more they paid us, the less went to help Jerry's Kids.

If anyone else had told me that, I would have called Bandini on them. I'd worked one day on another telethon and the folks running it could not disguise — almost bragged, in fact — how much of what was being collected went into their pockets. But this was Arthur Forrest…as honest and straight-talking as anyone I'd encountered in the teevee biz. I instantly decided that if I did it, it wouldn't be for the money but for the experience. And ten seconds later, I decided I wouldn't do it at all, at least that year.

I'd worked with Jerry and I knew he was like that Milton Bradley Time Bomb game I'd played as a kid: You knew it was going to go off. You just didn't know when — or in Jerry's case, about what. I also had other work to do those weeks and wasn't sure if I could juggle both. A live show has all sorts of "This has to be written right this minute" situations and I couldn't be sure how many of those I might encounter.

There were a few other reasons not to do it but the ones in the above paragraph were enough. I told Artie no but said, "Maybe next year?" He said he'd ask me again and then he didn't. I don't recall why. Maybe he didn't produce the telethon the following year.

In any case, I watched much of the telethon I didn't work on and kind of regretted my decision. There were guest stars it would have been fun (or at least interesting) to be around. There were some Special Musical Material spots — songs written for the show — that were the kind of thing I liked to do. I kept thinking of spontaneous jokes I wished I could teleport onto Jerry's cue cards. I really felt like I'd made the wrong decision.

Then a week or two after, I had dinner with a lady I knew who'd worked on the telethon as a Production Assistant. I asked her how Jerry was and she started telling me stories about yelling and fighting and making impossible demands and what the guy who took the job I declined went through…and I decided I'd made the right decision. That show was a lot more fun to watch than it would have been to work on.

And, speaking of telethons…

In 2017, September 1 was designated as "Letterer Appreciation Day." I actually don't know who designated it as such but reportedly, they picked the first of this month because that was the birthday of the late Gaspar Saladino, who is/was (I guess) the favorite letterer of whoever made the decision. Actually, there have been many great letterers in comics and that list would include Ben Oda, Artie Simek, Rome Siemen, Howard Ferguson, Sam Rosen, Abe Kanegson, John Costanza and so many more.

I am pleased that we appreciate letterers on September 1 because they sure don't get sufficient recognition the rest of the year. It has always been one of the two most unheralded jobs in comics, the other being the coloring. Letterers, especially in the era when it was all done by hand instead of computers, often had to do emergency, stay-up-all-night services or a comic would be late for the printers and/or some artist might have nothing to do (and therefore no way of earning a living) for a few days.

And their work is a vital part of the artistry of any page on which it appears. I remember once when Jack Kirby was looking at a page of original art that he had penciled and Joe Sinnott had inked. It was the first page of a story and there was a big, bold story title on it lettered by Artie Simek. Jack pointed at Simek's handiwork and said, "That is the most skilled part of this page!"

Any list of great present-day letterers would certainly include Stan Sakai…and it's easy to overlook him because most of the time, he does comics where he writes, draws and letters. Thus, we tend to think of him as a full service creative talent, not a letterer. But he of course letters and often wins awards for so doing, and also for the comic he does on his own, Usagi Yojimbo.

Since Sergio Aragonés and I began producing Groo the Wanderer back in the late seventeenth century, Stan has done all the lettering save for a small number of pages (like eight or so out of thousands) and always (ALWAYS!) on time, usually overnight. That he does it so efficiently is amazing. That his work is always so perfect is a great bonus. Here's a video of Stan at work in honor of Letterer Appreciation Day…