Monthly Archives: December 2024

Norms is the name of a small chain of family restaurants in Southern California…and they just opened one in Las Vegas. They're friendly places that serve a lot of cheap food. You can get a half-pound New York Steak with six fried shrimp and it includes gumbo soup, a salad, your choice of potato and the "daily vegetable," which is usually one I can't eat. But that all costs $27.97 and even if you threw away everything other than the steak and potato…well, I've paid three times that in a seemingly-classier steakhouse for worse meat. They also have very cheap breakfasts and a lot of folks love them for that…and the fact that they're open 24 hours.

Over the years, I've eaten at maybe a half-dozen of them but the best one and the one we're concerned with here is the one on La Cienega Boulevard between Beverly Boulevard and Melrose. It's the oldest Norms still in existence — Norm Roybark opened it in 1957 — and the reason we're concerned is that it may be going away soon.

This is not the first time its demise has been announced. In 2015, the Roybark family sold the chain to an investment group and the new owners quickly secured a permit for its demolition. Various forms of public outcry prompted them to change their minds…but now it's been announced that the company that owns the Raising Cane's chain owns the property. When Norms' current lease is up in December of next year, they say, the place will stop being a Norms and will become a Raising Cane's.

If that happens, a lot of us will sure miss it. Here's a photo of my lovely friend Amber and Yours Truly eating there a few years ago…

I offered to take her to a fancier eatery (I swear) but she said, "Let's go to Norms" so we went to Norms. She really likes their variety of lemonades. They have four or five variations and you can not only get free refills but you can switch flavors with each refill.

I'm not one of those folks who is horrified at the prospect of My World changing and something that was there when I was a kid not being there anymore….but this is Norms. It has character and a friendly atmosphere and history and a wide selection of decent food at decent prices.

Though Norms would depart the premises, the premises themselves seem to be safe. The building has earned a historic landmark designation by the Los Angeles Conservancy. So if Raising Cane's moves in, they have to leave the building and its Googie architecture reasonably intact. But of course, that architecture is a small part of why people love Norms. I assume the major reasons will be aired later this week at a meeting of the city's Cultural Heritage Commission.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that at least two of three things would have to happen to save the La Cienega Norms. One would be for the Raising Cane's people to realize that the ill will generated by ousting Norms would harm their potential business at that address. The second would be for them to be able to find some other nearby business to displace — one that the public wouldn't mind seeing go away. (I have suggestions aplenty.)

And the third and probably unlikeliest thing would be for Norms to buy the land…which presumably they would have done before it came to this if they could have. Or maybe someone else would buy it and become Norms' new landlord.

I'll make my contribution to the first of these bullet points by vowing never to patronize that Raising Cane's if it replaces that Norms…unless, of course, Amber wants to eat there. She likes Raising Cane's and if they offer endless refills of the same four or five variations of lemonade and let you change flavors on each refill, that could make the place irresistible.

Here's another documentary about comedy that is, as I post this, available to watch for free, sans advertising. Either the "free" part or the "free from ads" part could change at any time so don't dawdle if you want to see it.

This is Wait For Your Laugh, a career retrospective of the great comedienne, Rose Marie. Those of you who think all she did was The Dick Van Dyke Show and Hollywood Squares have much to learn about her. There are clips and photos and reenactments by actors of many of the stories she tells…and there's a lot of Rose, who was thrilled to have this film made, telling those stories.

This was made in 2017 and it covers her amazing life right up until her last performance, which was for an episode of The Garfield Show that I voice-directed. That was in 2012. The documentary had its world premiere (Amber and I were there for it) in August of 2017 and Rose died just after Christmas of that year.

At the premiere, it ended with the caption "She is still looking for her next job" but after she died, the filmmakers added in a caption before it that says, "After the release of this film, Rose Marie decided to join Bobby," Bobby being her husband who passed away in 1964.

For some reason, YouTube has declared it "Age Restricted" which means I can't embed it and you have to watch it on their site. Here's the link. If it costs money to watch or you have to sit through ads, it's still worth it.

In 1979, Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz starred in a musical called They're Playing Our Song — Book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and music by Marvin Hamlisch. It opened on Broadway on February 11 of that year and closed (with a different cast) on September 6th of '81 after 1,082 performances. That's a pretty good run especially when you consider that the original production of The Odd Couple only ran 964 performances. They're Playing Our Song was produced and produced and produced all over America after it closed in New York.

I'm not sure but I think it was the first time one of Mr. Simon's plays did outta-town tryouts in Los Angeles. I saw it downtown at the Music Center before it went to New York and what I saw was at least somewhat different. Throughout the play, there is constant talk about a never-seen ex-boyfriend of Lucie Arnaz's character named Leon. In the version I saw, Leon died at the end. In the version that opened in Manhattan, he survived.

Anyway, what I saw was, to me, a real lightweight and predictable romantic comedy that was made somewhat enjoyable by Neil Simon's one-liners, Lucie Arnaz's great performance and Robert Klein being absolutely incredible. I had many opportunities to see other productions of it but no interest. Then in 2010, the now-defunct Reprise Theater Company, which was definitely funct at the time, put on a pretty good, improved rendition of it with Jason Alexander and Stephanie J. Block. I wrote about that here.

But getting back to that original production: The show, the book, the direction and Klein were all nominated for Tony Awards but they were beaten out that year by Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd and Len Cariou, who played Sweeney Todd. All of the characters who died in Sweeney Todd, by the way, stayed dead.

Klein and Arnaz performed the title song on the Tony Awards telecast that year. A long time later — in 2010, apparently — they performed it again somewhere. I know not where…but someone took a video of the Tony Awards performance and a video of the 2010 performance and merged them together. This is a little spooky but kind of fun to watch…

I'm still very busy so I'm going to refer you to some other folks…

I'm not writing political stuff these days because I'm not reading as much political stuff as I usually do because the political stuff I do see is running madly off in all directions. However, if I wrote a post about Joe Biden pardoning his son, it would say pretty much the same things that Kevin Drum says here. And while you're there, Kevin's remembrances about what was said about COVID match mine.

I never knew (or knew much) about screenwriter Marshall Brickman, who just left us. So I'll send you over to what my pal Paul Harris had to say ahout him.

And folks keep asking me I know what Laraine Newman felt about the Saturday Night movie. I haven't spoken to her lately but I did read this article and so can you.

I shall return…and by that, I mean I shall return to posting more on this blog, not that I shall return some of the odder things I've bought on Amazon lately, though I'll probably do that too.

The great Broadway director-producer Hal Prince died in 2019. The last show he directed for Broadway was a retrospective of his work called Prince of Broadway featuring scenes from previous shows of his including Fiddler on the Roof, Company, Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd and many others.

Despite a terrific cast and (of course) terrific material, Prince of Broadway only ran for 76 performances. It was a show that had great trouble being properly funded and it looked…well, cheap. That was the main problem with it. But my lovely friend Amber and I saw one of those performances and we both liked it a lot.

One thing I liked a lot but didn't mention in the above-linked diary entry was a song that was not from one of Mr. Prince's past successes but was written for Prince of Broadway by the fine Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown. It was called "Do the Work" and it was made up of directives from Hal Prince…advice he'd given over the years to (mostly) writers. I liked it as a song and I liked its message. It's somewhat inspirational to people who do what I do for a living. If you're a writer and you find yourself losing the urge to write, give it a listen.

Below are not one but two videos of it, neither from the cast of Prince of Broadway. If you'd like to hear how it sounded in that show, you can hear the number from the cast album here. I'm giving you three versions of it because if you're a writer or you want to be a writer, it's something you ought to hear many times. It's something I sometimes hear in my head when I'm sitting down to tackle or even re-tackle a script…

So it's like a game on YouTube now. They upload full, uncut movies and specials (like the Caesar's Writers) video and they're free to view…and then suddenly, it costs money or they have ads…and then they're free again…and I'm sure they'll switch back. The last few days, Caesar's Writers went from without ads to with ads and at this moment — maybe not three minutes from now but now — it's without ads, at least on my feed. So watch it when you can and you can decide for yourself if you want to pay or sit through commercials.

Here — on the same basis, I assume — is the 1971 movie version of Fiddler on the Roof, a very good adaptation of what may be the most often produced stage musical in history. That was quite an achievement for a show which, when first announced, everyone said of it, "It'll only appeal to Jews." And then when it opened, they said, "It'll only attract an audience while Zero Mostel is starring in it." One of the folks who reportedly said that second thing was Zero Mostel and to add to all the things he was outraged about in his world is that after he left, it went on and on and on without him. It also defied predictions that it would never mean anything in other countries.

This is a good (though a bit too lonnnnnngggg) movie and it probably would have been even better with Mr. Mostel playing Tevye…but Chaim Topol only suffers from that comparison. Otherwise, he and everyone else in it are quite fine. The whole magilla was produced and directed by Norman Jewison, who was not Jewish, and I think it's funny that he also gave us The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which could have been an alternate title for this film…