TV Guide didn't realize this was the debut of one of the best comedy shows ever on television and my personal favorite. They also didn't realize that none of Sid Caesar's several TV shows was called The Sid Ceasar Show or that his name was not spelled "Sid Ceasar."
Down Memory Lane with Tim Conway…
Today is the 75th anniversary of the day a comic strip called Peanuts by someone named Charles M. Schulz first appeared in, at first, just a handful of newspapers around the country. It eventually became the most popular comic strip in the history of mankind…and that's putting it mildly. As you may know, I have a book coming out — apparently already for sale by some vendors — with an official release date of next week. It looks like this…
The cheapest place to buy it is apparently Amazon and here's the link that will enable you to do that. I'm pretty pleased with it.
Your Internet and this blog will be cluttered the next month or two with interviews and podcasts and publicity about it. For instance, Forbes magazine has this interview with me which is pretty good except that it makes it sound like I picked out all the strips in the book. I did not. A whole committee listed in the book made the selections and I was but one voter.
And here's a podcast with an hour of me talking about the book…and some other things. It's John Siuntre's popular Word Balloon and I've promised to return another time soon so John can ask me about other aspects of what he thinks I've done. There will be a lot more podcasts and links on this blog in the coming weeks as I make the rounds of the Internet talking Peanuts…
Which candy is the most popular handout in your state on Halloween? I'm not sure I trust the methodology of this research but here it is. Make of it as you will.
While we're on the subject of Halloween Candy: I have frequently on this blog expressed my dislike for candy corn…and I still don't like the stuff. Readers send me a lot of jokes about candy corn and they seem unaware that around nine years ago, I gave up all candy as well as cookies, cakes, donuts, pies and anything else in the dessert category. So my feelings about candy corn now aren't that different from my feelings about M&M's, Hershey Bars, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Milky Ways, etc.
The difference — subtle though it may be — is that I can understand how people could love those other candies. I can't understand how anyone could like candy corn. It's like hearing, "Mmm…I love a delicious mouthful of hot gravel!" But until I am granted the power to rid the planet of all food items I can't imagine ever eating, this shouldn't concern you. And if I ever do gain that power, candy corn is not even in the Top 20 on my list. Number one is, of course, cole slaw. And someday, you'll thank me for that.
A nice rendition of one of my — and, I hope, your — favorite TV theme songs…
This is the fourth in a series of I-still-have-no-idea-how-many parts about a gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. To read the first part, click here, to read the second part, click here and to read the third part, click here.
By January of 2006, after months of trying to get on Dr. Perfect's waitlist for Gastric Bypass Surgery, I was starting to seriously think I might not go through with it. That is, if I ever got on the list and if I didn't have to wait until the following decade. One thing that scared me a bit was a remark by one of the many technicians who administered medical tests I had during 2005. I don't remember which test — there were a helluva lot of them — but I remember talking to this one gent about the process and he said — well, let me see if I can re-create the conversation for you. It went something like this…
HIM: I had a buddy who had it done and it did wonders for him. He dropped a ton of weight.
ME: Did it have any downsides for him?
HIM: Well, the obvious ones…buying all new clothes, getting used to ordering tiny meals in restaurants and not being able to finish them. I'd say the biggest problem he had was the carbonation thing.
ME: What carbonation thing?
HIM: After the surgery, you have to give up carbonated drinks. No Coke, no Pepsi, no Mountain Dew…none of that stuff. Didn't anybody tell you?
No, no one had told me. That afternoon, I was on the phone to Dr. Preston who said, "Geez, I could've sworn I told you. It's not an absolute no-no but you kind of need to cut those drinks out. After the surgery, your stomach will be about the size of an egg and it'll be enough of a struggle to get enough protein into it every day without those gas bubbles filling it up. Is that a problem?"
For me, it was. One of the reason I'd gotten so large was that I was addicted to soft drinks. I was putting away around a six-pack a day…usually Pepsi or Coke during daylight hours, something without caffeine (usually 7-Up or Canada Dry Ginger Ale) in the evenings. That was so the caffeine didn't keep me up all night. Sometimes though when deadlines required me to be up all night, I used a cola or two or three to make that happen…and no, I never liked coffee.
Working well into the night was one of the things that caused me to get hooked on the stuff. Another was that there were times I'd find myself dozing off during the day or at inopportune moments like — and I actually did this — when I was driving on the freeway. I downed a lot of colas to keep awake in those situations.
This was before I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea. Once I was, I managed to get the dozing-off under control but I still had the addiction to sodas and, believe me, I tried to quit. Many times. I was honestly afraid that even after Gastric Bypass Surgery and massive weight loss, I'd be suffering whatever G.P.S. patients suffered as a result of chug-a-lugging a Pepsi.
On a scale of one-to-ten with "10" denoting certainty I'd go ahead full speed with the operation and "1" denoting a complete chicken-out, I was at about a "7." The news about having to quit sodas knocked me down to a "5" or "6." Fortunately in February, three things occurred that got me back up to…oh. I'd say a "9."
The first occurred on February 5, 2006. I took my lady friend Carolyn up to Freud Hall at U.C.L.A. to see the musical City of Angels — book by Larry Gelbart, lyrics by David Zippel, music by Cy Coleman. It was an excellent production of an excellent musical and because I was with Carolyn, we were late getting there. Carolyn was a lovely, talented, wonderful lady but whenever we went anywhere, even when I lied to her about when we had to be there, we were late. We got to our seats about one second before the show started and on the way in, I was in too much of a hurry to grab a program book.
Everyone in the cast was terrific but the standout performance was by the guy playing the head of the movie studio, Buddy Fidler. I didn't recognize the actor but he was incredible — funny, energetic, dynamic. I made a mental note to grab one of the ersatz Playbills at intermission and find out who this person was. When I found out, I was amazed. It was Stuart Pankin.
I'd seen Stuart Pankin in many TV shows and movies. He was very talented but he was also very chubby. Somehow, he'd lost a pretty significant amount of weight…enough to look slender and to have tremendous energy on stage. There was even one scene where he had his shirt off and I thought, "Oh, if I ever lose as many pounds as I want to, I hope I look that good with my shirt off." I left the play more determined than I'd been in a long time to undergo the Gastric Bypass Surgery.
That was 2/5/06. On 2/9/06, I was scheduled to fly up to San Francisco to be a guest and conduct panels at that year's WonderCon. I didn't make it because on 2/7/06, my feet started hurting a lot — both of them — and they were uncommonly pinkish in color. The pains kept me up much of the night and the next morning, Carolyn came over and we took a cab (since she didn't drive and I couldn't) to my podiatrist, who I'll call Dr. Bunion. He took one look at my lower extremities and asked me who my physician was. I told him it was Dr. Preston, whose office was conveniently in the same building.
Dr. Bunion phoned Dr. Preston and I heard him say, "I've got Mark Evanier in my office and I think he has Cellulitis. I'm sending him up and you need to take a look at him." We went upstairs and Dr. Preston confirmed the diagnosis. For those of you wondering what Cellulitis is…wonder no more. Here's another cut-'n'-paste from Wikipedia…
Cellulitis is usually a bacterial infection involving the inner layers of the skin. It specifically affects the dermis and subcutaneous fat. Signs and symptoms include an area of redness which increases in size over a few days. The borders of the area of redness are generally not sharp and the skin may be swollen. While the redness often turns white when pressure is applied, this is not always the case. The area of infection is usually painful.
Cellulitis, I learned, can be a very serious condition but as Dr. Preston assured me, we'd caught it so early that it was extremely treatable. "Here's what you're going to do," he said. "We're going to check you into a hospital and you're going to lie there for four or five days while they pump antibiotics into you through intravenous therapy." So they checked me into a hospital and I was in bed there for four or five days while they pumped antibiotics into me. But first, of course, I called the folks at WonderCon and told them I wasn't coming.
It was the first time I'd been in a hospital since my age was in single digits and my appendix needed to flee my large intestine. I remember thinking of it as kind of a rehearsal for if and when I ever got to avail myself of Dr. Perfect's specialty. The nurses brought me three kinda-edible meals a day and then every evening, one would come by at 10 PM and check my blood sugar. If it was below a certain number I don't remember, she'd have the hospital kitchen send up a hamburger for me, then check a half-hour after I'd eaten it to make sure my blood sugar was now in the proper range.
I'm not sure if that was the main reason but it was probably a contributing factor to what was for me, a minor miracle. On my last day there, I suddenly realized I'd gone the entire time without a carbonated beverage. It was not a conscious effort. In those strange surroundings, ordering my meals from a menu that didn't include sodas as an option, it had simply not entered my mind. I vowed then and there I would never consume another one and as I write this, I've kept that vow for over nineteen years and seven months.
So that problem was solved…and the day after I was released from the hospital, I got a call from someone in Dr. Perfect's office telling me I was on the list. That was the good news. The bad news was that I was scheduled for January of 2007 — eleven months away.
Dr. Preston told me to not to take that seriously. A lot of people would drop off the list, either because they chickened or because they grew impatient (or couldn't afford to wait that long) and went to another surgeon. A week or two later, he worked whatever magic he had at his disposal and suddenly, I was scheduled for mid-August of 2006.
I remember thinking that was a fairly good date. That year's Comic-Con International in San Diego was July 20-23 and I didn't want to miss it. Dr. Preston had told me that following the surgery, I should spend at least two weeks — preferably more — staying home, taking it easy. So having G.B.S. after Comic-Con seemed preferable to having it…say, in early July. By now, I had pretty well decided to go through with it.
There was just one possible snag: I hadn't met Dr. Perfect yet. I had a date in early April to go in and meet him and be examined by him, after which he would do a thorough review of the medium-sized mountain of test results and scans his office had accumulated about me. I asked Dr. Preston, "Is it possible he'll look all that and me over and find some reason not to do the surgery on me?"
"Highly unlikely," Dr. Preston said. "I wouldn't worry about it." And he didn't…but I did. To be, as they say, continued.
If you grew up in Southern California, you probably got sick of TV commercials from a gent named Earl Scheib who boasted he'd paint any car any color for only $29.95. That was cheaper than any mechanic or service department but we had my mother's car painted by them once and…well, you know the old saying, "You get what you pay for?"
As I recall, there was also a lot of upselling going on — offers to do body work and other services they'd try to convince you your car desperately needed…suggestions you might be happier with the $39.95 paint job or the $49.95 paint job…various hidden charges, etc. But Mr. Scheib's $29.95 offer got you and your car onto his lot. That was the point. Here's a flashback to the commercial which back then, interrupted every old movie I tried to watch on television at least once, sometimes more than once in a single airing…
As you may know, I get an awful lot of unsolicited phone calls from solicitors who want to sell me stuff I would never in a trillion years buy or just have me give them money. They come in waves and the latest wave — because my info has gotten onto another list somewhere it shouldn't be on — is for Student Loan Settlers. These are companies that propose to somehow refinance my Student Loan so that instead of owing tens of thousands of dollars, I can make a few payments of seventy bucks and be done with it all.
At least, that's my limited understanding…limited because the callers never get through the entire sales pitch. I inform them that (a) I was last a student around 1974 and (b) I never had a Student Loan. It says something that they're placing these calls to a 73-year-old man. Are there still people who are 73 who are struggling to pay off their Student Loans? Possibly.
I've also had a recent flurry of calls asking to speak to my mother who, they are unaware, died in 2012. These calls are either about selling of fixing the home she owned but which I sold…or they're asking for donations because she sent their charity money fifteen years ago. The ones calling about the house go instantly away when I tell them the house is no longer owned by her or her heir (me). Most of the charities hang up when I tell them she's deceased and some apologize greatly for calling…
…but some of them suggest I have a duty to donate in her memory to a cause she supported a decade and a half ago. If my mother was still alive, she'd be 103 years old. I'm going to start telling the charities that call how she can't afford to donate to them because she's still paying off her Student Loan.
Who invented the Top Ten lists on David Letterman's talk shows? Well, if we're to believe this oral history, just about everyone on the premises at the time.
Donald Trump seems to have this idea that if he merely claims he's settled a war, he has, end of story. He and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met and proclaimed "one of the great days ever in civilization…a historic day of peace…let's call it eternal peace" and you could kind of hear Trump thinking, "My Nobel Peace Prize should be arriving any minute now." As Fred Kaplan points out, there is one thing wrong with this new peace plan: Only one side has agreed to it and the other will regard it as Near-Total Surrender.
I like to feature great magicians on this site and a lot of folks in that profession would tell you of their admiration for Lennart Green. Mr. Green, who doesn't seem to be performing much these days, had a unique style, acting very clumsy and disorganized while being one of the most skillful card handlers of all time. He invented an awful lot of moves which other sleight-of-hand specialists looked at and said, "I have got to learn how to do that" and did. Here from a 1997 magic special is a short segment of Lennert Green which other magicians studied over and over and over…
This is the third in a series of I-still-have-no-idea-how-many parts about a gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. To read the first part, click here and to read the second part, click here.
Monday morning before I could call Dr. Preston's office for what I hoped would be a same-day appointment, he called me. He said, "Dr. Bush tells me you're ready to discuss Gastric Bypass Surgery. I'm booked solid with patients all day. The only time I'm not is an hour for lunch…so let's have lunch." We had lunch and I asked him about the "odds" I'd been hearing about G.B.S. leading to complications and even death.
He said, "Forget about those numbers. First off, with a lot of the people who are having the surgery, it's like a last, desperate roll of the dice. They're 68, they're three hundred pounds or more, they have bad hearts and a dozen other things wrong with them."
And he had a story. That was one of the great things about Dr. Preston. Hw always had a story. This one about a patient whose case he was familiar with, a man who had died following the surgery. "He had like a 5% chance of survival if he didn't have the surgery. You can't compare the stats on people like that to you. You're ten years younger than he was, your heart is in great shape and so is your liver and just about everything else. You're in excellent health except for the fact that you need to lose a hundred or more pounds."
He went on: "This surgery is relatively new and there might be some surgeons doing it who maybe don't have enough experience. I'm not going to let you go to one of them. There are several in town who are terrific at it." He mentioned a few names — one was the doctor who did Alice Maltin's surgery — and he singled out one in particular. Again, I am changing names here. The surgeon he thought was the absolute best is a man I'm calling Dr. Perfect. That's what his track record to date was: Perfect.
But Dr. Perfect was not totally perfect for my needs. His services were in such demand that he had a wait list of at least two years. "I don't want to wait two years," I told Dr. Preston, to which he replied, "You won't. Dr. Perfect owes me a couple of favors and I bet I can get you moved way up on his list. Besides, this is not something you just go in and do next week. There's a whole process you have to go through and qualify before he'll operate on you and it could take months." I made the decision to start the process and it did indeed take months — and more than a few of them.
I had to have all sorts of check-ups and heart scans and meetings and my bravado occasionally faltered. I told a few people I was "contemplating" the surgery before I learned that telling just about anyone was a mistake. It yielded lot of under-informed, rumor-based "facts" and theories I really didn't need in my brain, co-mingling with what I was hearing from Dr. Preston and others who really knew what the were talking about.
Most of the folks I told knew (or more often, knew of) someone who'd had some form of Gastric Bypass and regretted it dearly. One or two friends felt an obligation to save my life by talking me out of such a reckless, self-destructive, sure-to-end-in-disaster decision. In some cases, the conversation went like this…
ME: Where did you hear about this person who had Gastric Bypass Surgery and died three days later?
OTHER PERSON: Oh, somewhere. I think it was on the Internet somewhere.
As we all know, you can believe each and every word someone remembers reading somewhere on the Internet.
One person who was very worried about what I was considering was my dear lady friend/companion Carolyn — but then she'd always had a deep distrust of hospitals and conventional medicine. Partly because of her, partly because of other friends and partly because I still had some natural apprehensions, I found my commitment to the procedure softening a bit. Over the months of qualifying for it, I kinda inched from "I'm going to have the surgery!" to "I'm going to do everything I can to qualify for the surgery! If and when the day finally comes when I get a date for Dr. Perfect to perform it, I'll decide whether of not to go through with it!"
One of Dr. Perfect's associates later told me that of all the people who came to that moment — who were offered firm dates for the operation — about 10% (in his words, not mine) "chickened out." As you shall see in a later chapter of this series, others chickening out turned out to be a benefit to me.
As I recall, the first thing I had to do was to attend a kind of "orientation" meeting. Once a week, the hospital would welcome folks who were considering the procedure or at least curious about it. Such folks would fill a classroom-like hall and view a video about Gastric Bypass Surgery. Then a doctor who worked on such cases, though not at Dr. Perfect's level, would deliver a Powerpoint lecture about the procedure. He'd be followed by someone who'd undergone it and then the doctor and the patient would answer any and all questions.
The day I attended, I found myself in a room full of very, very large human beings, many of them way larger than I would ever be. The start of the presentation was delayed because when I got there a tad late, there was only one seat open and I had a lot of trouble just getting to it. The aisles were clogged with fat people. Some of them moved aside as much as they could, some of them couldn't move enough and I just about climbed over one very large lady like I was conquering Kilimanjaro. She actually seemed to enjoy it.
At the moment when it looked like I'd never make it to that open chair, the doctor who was waiting to begin the festivities asked, "Can't you get to your seat?" and I replied, "If I could get to my seat, I wouldn't be here!"
That evoked a very big laugh from the very big people in the not-big-enough room with the not-big-enough chairs and aisles. As I would learn, there was a very healthy amount of camaraderie to be found among overweight individuals. We all had a lot of the same problems.
The presentation though didn't really tell me anything Dr. Preston hadn't told me. The best thing about it was that huge laugh I got and the fact that the seminar was one of the few things in the qualifying process that didn't cost me anything. Some of the other stops on my journey were mostly-covered by my insurance and only cost me a modest co-pay but some were not covered and not cheap. The actual procedure would cost me almost nothing but. uh, there was one kinda important thing missing: It did not include the services of Dr. Perfect.
As Dr. Preston explained to me, the hospital had very good surgeons who could do it without me paying an extra cent but Dr. Perfect was, as he kept saying, the best in the business. As in most businesses, the best costs extra. In this case, I think it was $10,000 which, Dr. Preston assured me, was well worth the money.
Lest you think for a nano-second that he was suckering me into some bait-and-switch scam or maybe getting a cut of Dr. Perfect's action, no, no, no. That was absolutely not the case and it turned out to be the smartest ten grand I ever spent. Among the least beneficial (but still required) amounts I spent was that for the one and only time in my life as of this moment, I had to pay for and have a session with a psychiatrist. The entire session went roughly like this…
HIM: How do you expect your life to change if you have this operation and it results in you losing a hundred or more pounds?"
ME: I expect I'll be smaller and healthier and I'll fit into airline seats and feel like I fit into the world better.
HIM: Okay, we don't need to go through the other stuff…
I could have left then but since I was paying for a 45-minute session, I insisted on chatting for at least a little while longer, mainly about why the hell I had to see a psychiatrist at all. He didn't really give me a good answer but later, Dr. Preston did: "There are many people who have the surgery, lose a lot of weight and then experience severe emotional problems because it doesn't change every single thing in their lives that they were hoping it would change."
As always, he had a real-life example — a true tale about a patient one of his colleagues had counseled: "This guy couldn't hold a job, he couldn't attract a mate and he didn't have any friends, not because he was grossly overweight but because he was just an obnoxious, angry person. He had the procedure, he lost the weight…he probably saved his life. But then he was furious that he didn't suddenly get a great job, a great girl friend, a circle of friends and so on. That was because he was still obnoxious and angry. In fact, the failure of the surgery to make all his dreams come true made him even more obnoxious and angrier."
Doc Preston went on: "Seeing a shrink really shouldn't be necessary in your case but one of the reasons Dr. Perfect has had such good results is because he insists on knowing every single thing about his patients, inside and out. He requires more tests and x-rays and ultrasounds and scans than anyone else." Indeed, over the next few months, I found myself driving all over the city for test after test after test…and this was just to get on Dr. Perfect's long, long waitlist which I was not yet on.
If and when I did get on it, two things would have to happen. One was that Dr. Preston would have to use his clout to get me leapfrogged over many others and moved up on the list. He was confident he could. I wasn't. And the other thing was that if I did, I would probably have to have most of the same tests performed again before Surgery Day since they'd be months old by then. At the end of 2005, I'd been on that journey for over a year and my determination to go under the knife — even a knife wielded by Dr. Perfect — was waning.
Then in February of '06, three things happened in rapid succession that got me thinking that it could happen, it should happen and it would happen. I'll tell you about them in the next chapter. We still have quite a ways to go. This will not be over in another chapter or two or three, I'm afraid…
I have this wonderful longtime friend named Tracy. She used to be Tracy Abbott and now she's Tracy Cook. By any name, she's a sweet, smart lady I love dearly for everything she does, which includes political activism.
She was once my secretary — and if in the mid-to-late eighties, you had a letter published in Groo or any other comic wherein I ran a letters page, there's a good chance Tracy retyped your letter for publication. She went from that to writing for television including Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In the latter gig, she became the first female writer in the history of The Tonight Show. Steve Allen never hired a woman. Jack Paar never hired a woman. Johnny Carson never hired a woman.
For a while, she turned her activism on the various schools her son was attending, even to the point of getting me to come in and talk to students about cartooning and teaching them to draw. Lately, she's directed her efforts to progressive causes including, very recently, the Jimmy Kimmel situation.
Tracy has a Substack account and she's posted two essays about the Kimmel matter. You can read the first one here and the second one here. Even if you're not interested in the politics and Freedom of Speech, you may find them of interest.
Really, really sad to hear about the passing of a real good friend, Rick Hoppe. People knew him best as an animation designer and animator, especially for Disney where he worked on Mickey's Christmas Carol, Black Cauldron, Aladdin, Little Mermaid and so many more, occasionally also contributing to other studios' projects. I knew him before all that. In the seventies, he was dabbling in comic books, doing a little (just a little) work for Gold Key Comics and for the Tarzan and Korak comics I edited for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate.
We lost touch for a while, reconnected, lost touch again, etc. I always thought if he'd followed his muse to draw comic books, he would have been one of the greats but he was slow and he fit in better at Disney where they paid him by the hour, not by the drawing, and didn't mind if he took a week to produce one. Because it was always worth the wait. Real nice, talented guy. He was 75.
Here's a little peek at what the new Stan Lee Hologram looks and sounds like. Would Stan have approved? Yeah, probably, if the money was right…