My lovely friend Amber and I are back from eleven days and ten nights in Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Manhattan. Those days, nights and cities were all too busy to allow me to file contemporaneous reports…so taking it one day at a time — Hey, good name for a sitcom! — I'm going to do it here. Come on along and join us on…
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
When I fly to Vegas, the odds of my luggage arriving on the same flight are about the same as the odds of winning big on Keno. This trip, Amber and I got lucky — at Luggage, not Keno. We got there with our bags but without much sleep the night before.
It was not the comfiest of flights. All the way there, I was in a middle seat with Amber snoozing to my right, which was fine…but there was this Vomiting Supermodel to my left. You have no idea how unattractive an attractive lady can be when she spends an entire 50-minute flight making grotesque moans, filling an airsick bag and apologizing to all around for making grotesque moans and filling an airsick bag.
"This always happens to me when I fly," she explained during a brief pause in the grotesque moans that sounded like a water buffalo giving birth, not that I've ever actually witnessed that. "It happens when I'm a passenger in a car too," she added, "but not when I'm driving." She was changing flights in Vegas to head elsewhere and I suggested she ask if they'd let her fly that plane.
Amber and I cabbed it to the Excalibur Hotel where, at any hour, there's always a long line at check-in. Fortunately, I'd had the good sense to sign up for their Automatic Check-In Service where you claim your room online, then you go to a kiosk and it dispenses your room keys. Sounds great, right? Well, it might be when the key dispensers are working. Fortunately, there was only a moderate wait at the special line they'd set up to service the people who were smart enough to sign up for the Automatic Check-In.
I asked one desk clerk, "Does it work when it works?" She said, "I couldn't say. I'm new here and I haven't seen it work yet." If a nickel slot machine was busted, you know they'd have had it fixed faster than you could say "Bugsy Siegel."
Upon reaching our room, Amber — operating on two hours of sleep — promptly went beddy-bye. I — functioning on almost four — hiked over to the Mandalay Bay to pick up our badges for the main reason we were in town…the Licensing Expo!
What, you may well ask, is the Licensing Expo? Well, I'll tell you. It's a convention of folks who can mainly be divided into two categories. You have your Licensors, who are people and/or companies who own properties that they exploit on t-shirts, dolls, games, posters and other kinds of what they all seem to call "merch," that word being short for "merchandise." The other category are the Licensees — those who buy the rights to exploit the brand names, characters and various properties of the Licensors. Each year at the Licensing Expo, Licensors and Licensees get together for an odd version of The Dating Game that could potentially result in mutually-profitable deals.
I am in neither category but many of those who engage my services are present so I have little biz-type meetings with them to discuss current and possible projects. The whole event looks a lot like this promotional video which, since it was released before this year's Expo, probably features video shot at last year's…
They wouldn't give me Amber's badge but I got mine and wandered around in the hall for an hour or two, getting a few of my biz-type meetings done. It's a pretty big room full of exhibits and celebrities and people in weird costumes and I had to keep reminding myself that I didn't have to rush upstairs soon and host six panels.
I attend the Expo every three years or so and I've become very skilled at separating hype from reality. I met one gent, for instance, who was promoting a new cartoon series he created that does not, by any reasonable definition of word "exist," exist. Still, if you saw his booth and heard his sales pitch, you might not know that. His characters recently beat The Simpsons for Name Recognition according to a recent poll, probably of his immediate family. Roaming the hall, I saw a lot of illusory successes, a lot of genuine well-known properties and a startling number of characters designed by Jack Kirby.
The thing I enjoyed most was in the Expo Lobby, outside the main exhibit hall. There, they'd set up a reasonable facsimile of the street and front stoop we all know from Sesame Street. And there, sitting on a stool for most of the day (and part of the next one) was David Rudman, the current custodian-actor of Cookie Monster.
I love Cookie Monster. Always have, always will. I think he's one of the funniest, most wonderful creatures ever created in any medium and if the guy who took over the role from Frank Oz wasn't doing right by him, I would be damning his name on this blog three times a week. You know how I feel about Trump? He would be the second-biggest threat to decency in the world today. Joyously, Mr. Rudman is doing C.M. as well as any human being today could do him. He sounds right, he acts right, he even ad-libs absolutely in character.
I already knew this but I got the chance to witness it up close at the Expo. I just stood there for maybe a half-hour, watching and listening as Mr. Rudman and the blue, shaggy superstar with the goo-goo-googly eyes worked the line. People — a few small kids but an awful lot of big ones in my age range — queued up for a few moments and a selfie opportunity with Cookie Monster. Rudman was perfectly "on" the whole time I watched, and also later and the next morn when I passed by, giving all comers an expert performance.
He was sitting right there in full-view with one of his hands operating Cookie Monster's mouth and the other serving as one of Cookie Monster's mitts…but the effect is so total, so complete that you can ignore that human being sticking out of the monster you came to see. And hour after hour, he did that gravelly voice which sounds hard on the throat but I guess isn't on his. I just watched one person after another have a delightful serving of quality time with Cookie Monster — an experience that they will never forget.
I entertained the notion of getting in line but the end of it would have put me out of eavesdropping/observing range for too long…and anyway, I really wanted five minutes with David Rudman more than I wanted the two minutes with Cookie Monster they were offering. Four Comic-Cons ago, I got a photo and about forty seconds with David and C.M. as one of my panels followed one he did with Eric Jacobson, another expert Muppeteer who does as-good-as-it-gets mimicry of others' characters. I only briefly got to tell them both how, because of my years working for Sid and Marty Krofft and my years directing cartoon voices, I think I really, really understand how difficult it is to do what they do…and how well I think they do it. I am now more impressed than I was then and I was pretty damn impressed then.
In my many trips to Las Vegas, I have seen many great shows by some of the world's greatest entertainers. I can't think of one I enjoyed more than watching Cookie Monster greeting his public.
I hung out for a while with Jim "Garfield" Davis and another friend who takes good care of a famous cat — Don Oriolo, guardian of Felix — and attended a cocktail party thrown by King Features. I don't drink but I do eat little delicious shrimp hors d'oeuvres…and I had a lovely conversation there with C.J. Kettler, the newly-installed president of that fine operation. Our chat got interrupted but we agreed to continue it later that week in Philadelphia, where we were both heading for the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Weekend.
Finally, Amber texted that she had awoken from her coma and I trammed back to take her out for some of that glamorous Vegas night life. We staggered to a Walgreens for supplies and grabbed barely-edible burgers at the only bad Johnny Rocket's I've ever found.
We were both still exhausted so as we chewed on our putative hamburgers, we stared at each other and said and/or thought, "This is just the first day. Can we possibly get through ten more days of this?" Reading this report, you may be thinking the same thing but it'll be better when we (you, Amber and I) aren't exhausted. So get some sleep and tune in tomorrow for more in Las Vegas with our special guests, Penn and Teller.