This year's Tony Awards got me to thinking of memorable moments from past telecasts…

This is a clip I've featured before on this site but it's been it's been fourteen years so why not? It's from the Tony Awards ceremony in 1990 which they opened with a scene from the musical Grand Hotel, which was running then on Broadway. An actor named Michael Jeter, whose life had once hit rock bottom due to substance abuse, made an amazing personal comeback in that show. In it, he played a bookkeeper who was dying but still managed to perform an amazing, energetic dance number. The role and the win led to much bigger things for Mr. Jeter.

You'll see that number — the other man in it is Brent Barrett — and then you'll see the opening titles for that Tony broadcast. Sit through that (or fast forward) because the first award presented is the category for which Mr. Jeter was nominated. Spoiler alert: He wins…and his acceptance speech will moisten your eyes…

Last July 1st, I bought two tickets to see one of my favorite comedians, Ricky Gervais, perform at the Orpheum Theatre here in Los Angeles next month. At the time, The Pandemic was fading and I figured that by mid-October, it would be safe to be in a big performance space like that, especially if everyone was suitably masked. I also figured that if COVID got worse, Mr. Gervais would cancel his appearance as he'd done twice before. When they first sold seats for this show, it was to be held on June 24, 2020 and then it was moved to February 14, 2021 before being rescheduled for 10/20/21.

I bought the tix from a service which promptly charged my credit card and sent me a receipt for the hefty amount along with a note that I would soon receive an e-mail link to transfer the tickets to my account. That e-mail never came and when I tried phoning up the service, I got a recorded announcement telling me how wonderful their service was, followed by another recorded announcement telling me that they were experiencing wait times of up to three hours.

Well, thought I, we have three and a half months before the show. Perhaps the e-mail will come or perhaps the wait to speak with someone there will come down to something less than the running time of How the West Was Won.

Every few days since then, I've sent an e-mail — the same one, over and over, — to an address that allegedly gets messages to the proper folks at the service. I have had no response.

Also every few days since then, I've dialed them up to see if the recorded announcement has changed and it has…occasionally. For a brief period, the wait time was a mere two hours but it soon went back up to three. I just checked and it's three. They also added an announcement that they were only helping folks attending events within the next 24-48 hours.

If the interminable wait time persisted — as it has since early August — I would have to call on October 18 and remain on hold for however long it took to get to a person there. What if it's four hours by then? Five? Ten?

And even if I did reach a person there and that person there said they'd have the proper e-mail sent to me A.S.A.P., that might not be the end of this. I've been victimized too many times by someone who told me, "You'll have what you need shortly and if it doesn't arrive, just give us a call back!"

Happily, I no longer have this dilemma. It's been solved and I wish I could say it was solved by the service but it wasn't. It was solved by Ricky Gervais canceling that performance. Earlier today, I got a message from the service telling me that and also that 120% of what I paid is now in my account with them, waiting to be used to purchase more tickets from them. This is valid until December 31, 2022. I can also request what they call a "cash refund" — I suspect it's not cash but a chargeback to my credit card — which they will process not immediately but "within 30 days."

And what if those 30 days pass and I don't receive my refund? Well, I guess I could always write them an e-mail or call.

So I signed up for the free trial of Paramount+ in order to watch the Tony Awards special and I couldn't get it to work on my TV. Everything was outta sync — sometimes so wildly that I was watching one winner accepting the trophy while hearing the speech of the next winner. This was only on this one channel. The other streaming channels I checked were fine.

Resets and reboots didn't solve the problem but I did see a lot of menus showing me what else I could watch on Paramount+. I realized I really didn't need that channel so I watched the Tonys on my computer — where it played fine — and then canceled my subscription.

By carving the Tony Awards into two separate shows, they effectively wound up with two hours of The Stuff You Have To Sit Through To Get To The Good Stuff, interrupted by a little of The Good Stuff. This was followed by the two hours on CBS which featured most of The Good Stuff. I enjoyed the CBS segment but wonder if we'll ever get back to one Tony telecast that mixes the awards and the musical presentations. American Television needs to face the mounting reality that the public really doesn't want to watch people get awards…especially people they've never heard of involved with shows and films they haven't seen.

Both shows were marred by occasional slip-ups and technical problems but, hey, that's live TV. I enjoyed the presentation on CBS and, as they intended, I sure felt that Broadway is back.

This is the opening number from last night's The Tony Awards Present: Broadway's Back! The song was written by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman and Amber Ruffin, and performed by host Leslie Odom Jr and some fine Broadway dancers. I didn't catch all the lyrics so I turned on the closed captioning for myself. You can do the same thing.

My favorite part of last night's Tony Awards was when they bowled us over with three duets from past shows: Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel singing "For Good" from Wicked, Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal performing "What You Own" from Rent and (best of all) Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell favoring us with "Wheels of a Dream" from Ragtime.

I saw someone online say that this segment only served to remind them that this year's offerings didn't have the same power and timelessness. Well, maybe. This year's Broadway shows certainly have plenty of excuses for not filling their stages with history but I did think some of them sold a lot of tickets with the numbers they presented — especially Moulin Rouge and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.

I'll write more about the ceremonies when I get through with some work that stubbornly insists it's more important than blogging. Here are those three duets I so enjoyed…

• Apparently, if your TV can't play Paramount+ properly, Tech Support from Roku or Paramount+ consists of telling you to buy a newer set and see if that solves the problem.

• So I keep turning both Roku and Paramount+ on and off and every time, the audio and video are outta-sync by a different (but still unwatchable) interval…not just on the Tony Awards but on other Paramount+ shows. Everything looks like a poorly-dubbed foreign movie.

• Watching the Tony Awards on Paramount+ totally out of sync. The audio is at least fifteen seconds ahead of the corresponding video.

Folks have been sending me links to websites that track public figures who (a) came out against vaccinations and/or masks, (b) came down with COVID and, in too many cases, (c) died from it. The sites I've seen in this category all seem to have a jubilant "got what they deserved" celebratory air about them which makes me real uncomfy. Cheering on the pain and death of others is not something I enjoy and I sure hope I never do.

But yeah, once in a while, someone I think has done terrible things dies and I can smile at the notion that they won't be doing those terrible things anymore. Schadenfreude does bring out the worst in us.

Yesterday when I dropped by a nearby eatery to pick up a "to go" order, there was some sort of mask-related psychodrama winding down. One loud guy was screaming and cussing and threatening because they wouldn't serve people like him with an exposed face. I didn't catch enough of it to fully understand but the cussing guy sure reminded me of folks I sometimes encounter who just love to scream and spread hatred and if masks hadn't been his reason, it would have been something else. Maybe.

But there are people opposed to vaxxing and masking who aren't fanatics or screamers or even operatives who feel empowered by leading a crusade against what Liberals or "woke people" or political opponents are advocating. They're just people who are wrong, possibly because they don't have good doctors or don't trust the ones they have. Or they've been grossly misinformed.

Or maybe they're like a guy I knew back in school who took a bizarre pride in never changing his mind about anything. He thought that was a trait indicating dedication and forcefulness and character. I thought it was a way to stay on the wrong side of an issue forever. I wish there was a way these people could back off on the positions they've taken…a way they could cover their faces and save face at the same time.

Badges went on sale this morning for the Comic-Con Special Edition which is being held November 26-28 at the San Diego Convention Center. Online chatter says it has not sold out and it might not sell out today.

I suspect the nature of this convention is that it will have a total turnout around that of WonderCon (run by the same folks), which would mean around 50,000 attendees over three days. I further suspect a low percentage of those folks will come some great distance and stay in a nearby hotel. There will be such people but a large percentage of the guests will be ones who drove to the con for a day. I may be wrong about this. I don't think even the fine staff running the convention is too sure at this point.

Unless there is some alarming uptick in COVID or a new strain that strikes mainly people who don't eat cole slaw, I plan on being there and I'll be hosting a few panels. It does not look like any of them will be Quick Draw! or the Cartoon Voices panels I so often helm but I'm not sure yet what they will be. If you'd like to be there, find out more or get into an online queue to purchase badges at this site.

Here's another video where Sergio and I answer questions from Groo fans. Got one you'd like us to address? There's a comments section on the page over at www.groo.com where you can read all the videos we've done so far…

The Tony Awards will be handed out on Sunday, unnoticed by most.  In the best of times (i.e., pre-COVID), very few Americans cared who won what and it's worse this time because so few shows were seen by so few audiences.

Here's an indicator: The nominee for Leading Actor in a Musical is Aaron Tveit in Moulin Rouge.  That's nominee, singular.  He's the only one.  Instead of picking from a list, the Tony voters were asked something like, "Should Aaron Tweit win in this category?"  If he received 60% "yes," he gets the trophy.

The telecast this year has been bisected.  At 7 PM Eastern, Audra MacDonald hosts the Tony Awards on Paramount+.  That will run two hours.  At 9 PM, everyone theoretically switches over to CBS for a two-hour show hosted by Leslie Odom Jr. This one is called The Tony Awards Present Broadway's Back!, which sounds like it'll be a two-hour infomercial for all the shows that have just opened or reopened, or are about to open or reopen. I hope it is.

The three most important Tony Awards — Best Play, Best Revival of a Play, and Best Musical — will be presented on this show. All the other awards that are going to be televised at all will be given out on the earlier show.

They tried something like this years ago and it didn't work then…but it might be a good idea now.

Not all that long ago, the Tony Awards were thought of as a loser telecast, always finishing low in the ratings. CBS was willing to air it providing the show did not run a second over two hours…and they were very rigid about that. It presented a lot of problems because it meant a lot of awards had to be presented not on the air but before the telecast or during commercial breaks. Obviously, a lot of nominees and recipients were unhappy about that.

But the time problem had another downside. Giving out the trophies is Job Two on a Tony telecast. Job One is showing scenes from what's currently playing on Broadway to perhaps lure buyers to order tickets. Some shows have been saved from having to close by a surge of ticket-buyers following the Tonys.

One year, a nominee for Best Musical was a show called Ain't Nothin' But The Blues, which starred a friend of mine named Ron Taylor. That's Ron on the right in the above photo. He's no longer with us but he had a great voice and if you ever listen to the original off-Broadway cast album of the musical of Little Shop of Horrors, that's Ron singing as The Plant.

Ain't Nothin' But The Blues was not doing great business and might have closed except that the Tonys were coming up and there was the thought that doing a rousing number from it on the telecast might boost sales and keep the show alive. We'll never know if it would have because that year, portions of the telecast ran long and the number from Ain't Nothin' But The Blues never got on. The show closed soon after.

The Tony people tried one year to work around the two-hour limit by doing two hours of the show on PBS and then the two hours on CBS — kinda like what they're doing this year. That time, it was awkward and the PBS section went largely unwatched, plus of course there were huge arguments over what would be on the CBS section. The two-hour restriction ended about the time Les Moonves took over as the Head Honcho at CBS.

We can all think of bad things to say about Mr. Moonves but he did a lot of good things and one was this: It was he (reportedly) who decreed that not only could the Tony Awards run three hours but they could even run a little past 11 PM it they had to. On most Tony telecasts thereafter, you could usually see a shot of Moonves in the audience, enjoying the hell out of the show, as a little "thank you."

I am guessing that the decision to let the Tonys go as long as necessary was not because the show had become any more popular with viewers. It probably had something to do with the fact that most awards shows were down in ratings so the the Tony Awards' tune-in no longer looked as bad as it once had. Anyway, most of the televised ceremonies have been delightful since then — and probably somewhat responsible for Broadway doing as well as it was doing the last decade…up until the point when The Pandemic opened.

So this year, it's probably right 'n' proper that they turn the CBS telecast into a selling tool to lure audiences back. If you don't subscribe to Paramount+, this might be a good time to get a free seven-day trial of it, which is what I intend to do. I may or may not cancel before we get to the part where I have to start paying.

I do not expect to be back there soon. I'm still uncomfy with the idea of being on an airplane or even leaving my house for very long. I also don't see a lot playing or opening back there that lures me. The Hugh Jackman/Sutton Foster revival of The Music Man was very tempting until I saw what they're charging for good seats — and I don't mean what the scalpers are charging. I mean the price printed on the tickets. Harold Hill will not be the only con-artist in that theater.

But I'll watch all four hours of Sunday's festivities and see if anything else lures me…and I hope Broadway comes back, bigger than ever. Even when I'm on this coast, I like the idea that it's thriving on the east coast.

Here's another one of those fake text messages not from AT&T trying to get me to click on a link that will do fiendish things to my phone and/or credit rating.  This one, as any fool can plainly see, is intended for Dorothea.  That was the name of my mother who died in October of 2012 but who is apparently still paying monthly bills for the cell phone she never had.  Mom was always good about such things.

I'm curious how my cell number got connected to her.  When she was in and out of the hospital and nursing home the last year or two of her life, I often put her landline phone on call forwarding to my landline phone…and I do still get spam calls for her.  About twice a year, a live person claiming to be from a charity calls my landline and asks for her.  I ask, "What is this in reference to?" and the caller says something like, "Well, we've always been able to depend on her for a donation and when she gave us one six months ago, she asked that I call back around now to remind her to donate again."

Sometimes I say, "Really?  Six months ago, you spoke to my mother who died in 2012?"  If they didn't immediately hang up, I'd say, "Don't you feel guilty conning money out of the Deceased?"  But they always hang up before I can get to that part.

I dunno if she ever donated to the caller's "cause" but she did donate to some legit charities and I guess that got her on a pigeon list somewhere.  Her old number is not on call forwarding to mine and hasn't been in years but I guess somehow when it was, my number got linked to her.

More bizarre is how, though she never signed up anywhere to receive text messages, she does now…and they show up on my cell.  If you know how this happens, please don't tell me.  I like to keep a little mystery in my life about some things.

Several of you have sent me info on how to go about reporting spam text messages and I am now about to try some of them.  I'll report back here once I understand a little more about how this works.

Hey, remember that nakedly-partisan review of Maricopa County's 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election? The one that was supposed to prove Trump really got more votes? Well, the rumor at the moment is that when its report is released — apparently, later today — it will show that Biden got slightly more than the previous counts determined and that Trump got a little less.

And some people will go to their graves not only believing that Trump won but that there was clear evidence that proved it…even though Trump's lawyers never presented any to anyone in an official position to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, here's an article by Adam Serwer detailing the five main ways Trump has tried to seize victory in an election that he lost badly. I wonder if he's looked into changing his name to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and making Pence change his to Kamala Harris.

It's Jordan Klepper talking to parents at an anti-mandate rally…