Monthly Archives: December 2021

I almost never see it these days but from the first week it turned up on PBS in 1969, I was a great admirer of Sesame Street. I may not watch but I'm very glad it's still on for the wee folks in its target audience.

My pal Charlie Kochman (also a fan) recommended the new documentary on HBO Max called Street Gang. It's about how the show came to be and its early days on the air…the period when I used to watch at least a little of it every morning before I had to go to college. I admired the ingenuity, the clever use of television and the sheer benevolence of the program. There's an awful lot in there about the Muppets…though not nearly enough Cookie Monster for my tastes. But I highly recommend it anyway.

This might be an appropriate song for today. Bernadette Peters sings "Move On" from Sunday in the Park With George. This is from a concert she gave in 1998 at the Royal Festival Hall in London…

• Let's start a rumor that Betty White's last wish was that Aaron Sorkin not be allowed to do a film called Being the Golden Girls.

• Betty White had a reputation for being very nice to comedy writers and other oft-mistreated animals.

Here is my one Betty White story, repurposed from an item I posted here in 2018..

Some years ago, I was at a party full of Hollywood-type people and I was introduced to Betty White. Told that I was the producer of The Garfield Show, she instantly said to me, "Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show?" I smiled and said, "Because you're on everything else!" I don't think any TV actor at whatever age she was then has ever been in more demand than Betty White was at the time.

We wound up talking about other things and parting. Then a little later, she came up to me and said, "I hope you know I was only half-serious when I asked you, 'Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show.'" I said, "I assumed as much but just out of curiosity…what about the other half? You're on like twenty-seven TV shows these days. We pay scale to all our guest stars. If I did want to hire you, are you even available? And are you available for that money?"

She thought for a second and said, "No, I guess I'm not. The money wouldn't matter all that much but I just don't really have the time." Then she asked me, "Do you have any experience with feral cats?"

I told her about the small herd of them I feed in my backyard. She said, "Well, then maybe you're aware of this. Looking for food is hardwired into most feral cats. Their lives revolve around finding the next meal so even if you feed one and she stuffs herself, a minute later, she's thinking, 'Where is food? Where do I find food?' They can't help themselves. I'm afraid most actors are like that. Even when they have a job, they're thinking, 'Where is my next one?'"

"When we were doing The Golden Girls, there was a point where we were picked-up for two more seasons and I had all these other things I was doing. I was turning down offer after offer because I just didn't have the time open. And still, there were moments when a little voice in me was wondering, 'What are you going to do when this ends?' Actors…at times, we're all like feral cats!"

To put this in proper context, you have to remember how few times in her career, Betty White was in the position of not being committed to a TV appearance within the next week or two. It wasn't often. An obit like this one will list some of the shows on which she appeared with some regularity. There were probably dozens more. What an incredible career…and it was all based on producers knowing how good she'd be for their programs.

A month ago in this post, I shared with you a mystery from my early days of collecting comic books. I went into a store in West Los Angeles and bought a ton of back issue Charlton Comics…one perfect condition copy of everything they'd published for two years. I couldn't figure out how or why someone thousands of miles away from the company's offices would or could assemble such a collection.

About a dozen of you sent me your guesses, none of which made me say, "Aha! That's probably it!" But then yesterday, I received an e-mail from a reader of this site named Miron Murcury. Miron sent me some scans and this message…

I have a possible and plausible answer to your question. As you can see in the scan of the inside front cover to Peacemaker number 4, Charlton had an (a-hem) "advertising office" in nearby Pasadena, CA at 495 So. Arroyo Pkwy. Murray Bothwell is the listed ad rep. The address now houses a K-9 Loft.

We'll probably never know for sure but that comes closer to a believable solution than anything that ever crossed my mind. It makes sense that a firm handling advertising sales for Charlton might receive copies of all the comics they published. It makes sense that someone at that firm — maybe Murray himself — might think, "We don't need all these comics sitting here in boxes" and take them to a used book store and trade them in. Or just give them away to someone they thought might appreciate them.

The address in Pasadena is (I looked it up) is about 24 miles from the bookshop where I bought those comics but that doesn't mean Mr. Bothwell or someone else working there or someone they gave them to didn't trade then in over in West L.A. Unless someone comes up with a more likely scenario, I'm going to hold onto this as the probable answer. Thank you, Miron.

You will notice there are no Beatles songs on my 1972 mixtape. That's because a long time before I assembled it, a friend gave me a copy of his own All-Beatles mixtape so I didn't need the Fab Four on the one I put together. There are also no Rolling Stones numbers on mine because it was only much later that I developed an appreciation of the Stones.

There was one song on mine from The Dave Clark Five, a band that briefly (very briefly) was hailed by some — and by "some," I mean "a few" — as the smarter alternative to The Beatles. Back around the time most kids in my age bracket were hailing John, Paul, George and Ringo as the most fabulously awesome band ever, some friends took the snob approach, which involves belittling what everyone else likes and insisting you've found something better.

I didn't think The Dave Clark Five were better or even equal, though I liked one song they recorded…"Catch Us If You Can." I heard it often on KHJ radio, though this was well before I began taping that channel and building my mixtape of songs they played. At the time, I considered buying the 45 RPM record of The Dave Clark Five performing "Catch Us If You Can" but before I did, I came across a cheaper alternative.

In a Von's Market one day, I spotted a rack of 45 RPM records for sale. It said "Hit Records" on the rack and indeed, they were. They were records produced by the Hit Records Company, a firm which took whatever song was big on the Top 40, had some unknown band imitate it and then put out a record at a much cheaper price. The Dave Clark version was 89 cents at my local record shop. But I could buy a version by The Jalopy Five right there at the Von's for 39 cents.

I decided to save myself a trip to the record shop and fifty cents by buying The Jalopy Five's version of it. In 1965, fifty cents could buy you four new 12-cent comic books (with two cents left for miniature Hershey bars) or that year's Superman and Batman annuals.

And there was a bonus. The flip side of the record was "Just a Little Bit Better" performed not by Herman's Hermits like the version on the charts. The Hit Records version was performed by that famous group, Hank's Hounds. It would not have surprised me if it had turned out that The Jalopy Five and Hank's Hounds were the same guys. For all I know, everyone on the Hit Records label — groups like The Roamers and The Beagles — were some of or all the same guys or same gals.

Here is "Catch Us If You Can" as performed by The Jalopy Five…

And here's the original version — the one I had on my mixtape — performed (and badly lip-synced on some TV show) by The Dave Clark Five…

At some point in the late seventies or early eighties, I noticed somehow that there was no "The Best of The Dave Clark Five" record album out. Every other one of those groups had all their biggest hits on one or two albums but there was no such thing for the DC5, as someone must have called them. I mentioned this one day to a guy I knew who was working for Rhino Records…just the kind of record company that would have put out such a thing.

I asked, "Is it just that they're so totally forgotten that there's no market for it? If there's a market for the best of Freddie and the Dreamers, I can't see why there wouldn't be one for the Dave Clark Five." He chuckled and then said approximately…

"There'd be a huge market for it and I think we went after the rights. The trouble is that Dave Clark made, like, a zillion dollars when they were hot and he's set some astronomical price for anyone who wants to put out the kind of record you describe. We could sell a lot of that record but we couldn't make any money on it."

I didn't know then if that was true but I just looked at Wikipedia and it says, "Between 1978 and 1993, none of their music was available to be purchased in any commercial format due to rights-holder Clark declining to license the band's recordings." So I guess it was true. The item also tells of a few releases that eventually did happen and it says that everything they did is available on Spotify. That's great but I'd really rather hear "The Best of The Jalopy Five."

Busy today finishing an article that stubbornly refuses to be finished. The following rerun is from July 5, 2010 — which I'll remind you is about eleven-and-a-half years ago. I'm picking this to post because in the next few days, I'll have a post up here that reflects on how it changed the way I write to move from a typewriter to a computer. So don't think of this as filler material. Think of it as historical context for the upcoming post…

I got my first word processor around 1981 — not a computer…a word processor. It was a Lexowriter and it did not play games or balance my checkbook or go online or even handle graphics. It just processed words and it did that very well for about three years. I followed this with my first computer, a Toshiba with a built-in monochrome (greenish) screen and no hard disk. It had two drives for 5¼" floppy disks. One disk always had to be the DOS-based word-processing software, a program called Spellbinder. You saved your work to the other floppy, then swapped things around and backed up that floppy to another floppy. If you were prudent or paranoid — with computers of that era, you were right to be both — you then backed-up your backup to yet another floppy.

Why did I use Spellbinder? It came with the computer…and I'll say this for it: It served me well, though for the longest time, its makers issued no upgrades and no improvements. I found out later that Spellbinder had been written by one man and he'd been killed in a car crash, casting his company into a kind of DOS-based limbo for a few years there. Those of us who used it had to sit and watch the industry evolve without us. When I moved to a faster computer, Spellbinder got slower, like I was trying to drive a horse-and-buggy on the freeway.

Other programs were emerging and every one of them did oodles of things Spellbinder would not do…and another problem was that I seemed to be the only human being on the planet using it. Friends would give me discs containing things they wrote in Wordstar, Word Perfect or Microsoft Word and I couldn't open their files, nor could I convert my Spellbinder files to anything they could open on their computers. When my pal Steve Gerber and I collaborated on a script, we might as well have been writing in different languages.

Finally, Spellbinder announced a major upgrade that would morph it from plain old word processing software to full-fledged desktop publisher. I sent the money and eagerly awaited its arrival only to experience a massive disappointment. The new, improved Spellbinder was a disaster — slow, clunky, complicated and likely to crash if you wrote a word containing more than three syllables. In fact, the program not only crashed, it took the Spellbinder company with it.

Orphaned, I migrated to Wordstar 3.0. Why? Well, for one thing, it was the Number One word processing software at that time. Having felt like an alien presence in the growing world of personal computers, I yearned for maximum compatibility. Foolishly, I thought, "Well, Wordstar's never going away on me." Also: For twenty bucks, you could buy a program that would convert all your Spellbinder files to Wordstar. Wordstar 3.0 was soon followed by Wordstar 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0. Each had more features and each was less useful to me.

At one point in there, the Wordstar people came up with something called Wordstar 2000 which a lot of us bought, foolishly thinking it had something to do with Wordstar. It was a completely different program that served no purpose except to make the last version of Spellbinder look workable by comparison. If you wanted to write the word "cat" in Wordstar 2000, you had to type the "c," save the file, reboot, reload the program and then type the "a."

Okay, so it wasn't quite that bad. But it felt quite that bad.

There was also along the way, a program I thought was a great idea. It was called Wordstar Easy and it was basically Wordstar for Absolute Friggin' Idiots. An otter could have written a Harlequin romance novel on Wordstar Easy…and many probably did. It was Wordstar stripped-down to its raw skeleton — no fancy fonts, no fancy formatting, no inserting pictures. For the sheer act of writing prose, nothing I've worked on has been as fast and simple. I'd mastered the current version of Real Wordstar and it was actually fine…but I'd write in Wordstar Easy and then if I needed to format something for a fancy printout, I'd load it into the full program and make it pretty-pretty.

A great idea…but since no one else seemed to think so, its failure added to Wordstar's decline. Then came Wordstar for Windows, which wasn't even a fair fight. The Wordstar people had to compete with Mr. Gates' Word on Mr. Gates' operating system. The ref stepped in, stopped the fight and that's when we all knew it was time to abandon ship.

Battered and bloody, I fled in desperation to where I should have gone years earlier — to Microsoft Word. What had kept me from it, I suspect, was that when Gerber had me test-drive the current version on his computer, it seemed awfully mouse-oriented. The muscle skills involved in writing had not yet fully evolved for me from my typewriter days. Barring the growth of a third hand (somewhat unlikely), I didn't think I could work with a mouse…and Word then didn't seem too efficient without the active involvement of one of them little plastic rodents.

Still, I felt I had to learn it even if it took forever. Forever, in this case, turned out to be about a day and a half. Also, by then Microsoft Word was a better program and we PC users were all now living in a world of Windows. I've been generally happy with Word, though I liked Word 2000, which I used until last year, better than the version I'm currently using, which is Word 2007. The main advantage though is that I no longer have to worry about being incompatible with anyone else. Almost everyone I work with can open and use a file in Microsoft Word, and for the few who can't, I merely need to export my file in Rich Text Format or import their RTF files. I can even swap with someone who works on one of those MAC things you hear so much about.

I feel oddly, and I'm sure foolishly, secure with what I have now. Intellectually, I know that twenty years from now, I'll be writing this same piece recalling the primitive, long-defunct software of 2010 and I'll be struggling to convert my current word processing files to whatever the format is then. (I still have stuff in Wordstar 4.0 I need to translate to Word.) But for now, it feels like settled law and I'm relatively in sync with everyone else in my little corner of the technological universe. This really is what it's about. The fact that I can write scripts with all this software and make a living is of secondary importance…if that much.

The good folks over at MeTV have assembled a brief end-of-the-year obit reel. It leads off with my unofficial aunt…

On New Year's Eve this week, 300,000 people are expected to crowd the Las Vegas Strip to party, get roaring drunk, ring in 2022 and watch what I'm sure will be a spectacular fireworks show. Every major hotel is expected to send a fortune in pyrotechnics aloft, starting at one end of The Strip and moving down until The Stratosphere will launch the final display.

I did N.Y.E. on The Strip one year. It was back before any of us heard the word "coronavirus" and it was still a horrible place to be. Adding in the possibility of catching a disease makes it even worse.

There were two good things the evening I was there to ring in 1997. One was some pretty spectacular fireworks…though what they're planning for this year will make what we saw that year look like a couple of guys with sparklers.

The other thing was a very impressive police presence. The Strip was crawling with 'em and they were nice and friendly and helpful and you'd wish that every encounter with law enforcement could be that pleasant. They were making necessary arrests and breaking up fights but it was wholly benevolent and very much appreciated by the masses. More than a few drunken ladies were running around trying to hug and/or kiss the male officers.

But other than that…

As you may know, I don't drink alcohol. I don't like being around people who do…and my date and I had to wade through an awful lot of them to get to the few places we were able to go. So I didn't like being there. The thought of being crammed in around those people in the time of COVID is extra-horrifying to me.

I just looked it up and, picking Caesars Palace as more-or-less the center of the party, my home is 285 miles away. I'm thinking of spending New Year's Eve on the West side of my house because that will put me a tiny bit farther away.

I love videos of stand-up comedians of the past.  Dave Astor was pretty hot in the sixties.  Reportedly, he was the first comic to perform at Budd Friedman's Improv in New York as the club morphed from a place where people sang to a place where people told jokes.  This is him on The Ed Sullivan Show for December 31, 1961…

This is from The Carol Burnett Show for 12/13/91. Ms. Burnett, Tony Roberts and Bernadette Peters perform a Sondheim medley in a roadside diner. And yes, that's Richard Kind in there…

I just watched The Super Bob Einstein Movie on HBO Max — a 75 minute tribute/retrospective about Bob Einstein, who passed away about two years ago. It's a lot of clips of his work…talk show appearances, scenes from Curb Your Enthusiasm, clips from shows he produced and/or wrote on and so forth…interspersed with interviews from those who knew and worked with him. There are even interviews from folks who were related to him, including brother Albert Brooks. It's a well-made and fitting compilation.

And there's plenty of Super Dave clips, the sum of which led me to a conclusion about the man: The funniest things he did were probably the ones that cost the least. Some of those Super Dave "stunts" must have cost a bundle and taken all day to tape…and they aren't half as wonderful as Bob Einstein just talking, especially when pissed-off about something. As he usually was.

Give it a look if you get a chance.

We have the solution to the problem of actors in Broadway shows being out. We'll get Liza to fill in for them! Here's my pal Christine Pedi…