If you're in Southern California this weekend but not down with all the lovely folks of Comic-Con, I have two experiences to recommend…

One is Hexen, an "ancestral witchplay" that through song, audience interaction and aerial dance — that's right, I said aerial dance — weaves the narratives of three women representing witch archetypes. This story — part historical account, part imaginative fancy — was created by its star, Dreya Weber, a supremely talented friend who never fails to dazzle with her performances. Well, she's dazzled me and I'm not easily dazzled. It's at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood this Saturday and Sunday, and you can find out more about it and buy tix on this page.

Also, Puppet Up! will be puppeting-up at the as-yet-unsold Henson Lot in Hollywood. It's an improvised puppet show for adults and it's different every time and wonderful every time. I've raved about it often on this blog — here, for example — and you can see if they have any tickets left for this weekend or even for next weekend here. And of course, you know where I'll be.

As pleased as I was to see Joe Biden do the right thing, I have a teensy regret that he did it when he did it. He did it on a Sunday morning after John Oliver had recorded his Sunday evening broadcast and the day before a week in which The Daily Show, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon were all on vacation. This could have been a very interesting week on the late night programs.

Thousands and thousands of people are about to fly in to San Diego for Comic-Con International 2024 — all the folks who secured badges and made plans but weren't counting on flying in via Delta. What a mess that is and still seems to be.

I'm getting ready for my panels. I've added Al Milgrom to the panel on 70's comics on Friday, Jim Meskimen to the Walt Kelly's Pogo panel later on Friday and I may (may!) have a very interesting surprise guest for the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel on Sunday. Hope to see many of you on many of my fourteen program items.

My dear friend Beatrix (aka "Ptychka") has a new music video out — an amalgam of live-action and A.I.-generated animation. She not only stars in it but she came up with the story — somewhat inspired by Ghost in the Shell — and she wrote the song…in Japanese, no less.

It was directed by Marc-Andre Gray and Bruno Miotto and on their Vimeo page, Bruno wrote the following…

The story draws a line between reality and a dystopian future — a world where Ptychka, a hyper-realistic robot, escapes from a top-secret lab and ventures into our society. Navigating through the chaos of today's world, she embodies the struggle of all the nonconformists, mavericks, and outcasts. She faces the challenge of adapting to a system determined to suppress individuality and being forced to run away from those who want to silence the magic within her.

I know Ptychka and I know she is quite an individual…

I'm still seeing a lot of worries on the Internet about the Village Theater and the Bruin Theater here in L.A. closing this Thursday. Yes, they're closing but no, they're not likely to never be working theaters again. As I forgot to mention, they've both been designated as Historic Cultural Monuments so there'd be a lot of public hearings and meetings before they could be repurposed as weed dispensaries or anything.

Moreover, the owners of each — separate owners, now — don't seem to want to do anything but some upgrading and remodeling and then to reopen and show films. Whenever one does, you'll probably find me there, reminding myself of the days when I used to do something I don't do much now: Going out to a movie.

And while we're talking about old movie theaters in Los Angeles, let's mention my favorite…which is sadly not the theater it used to be. I spent a lot of my childhood at The Silent Movie Theater over on Fairfax and I developed a bit of a friendship with the couple that operated it, John and Dorothy Hampton. I wrote about it here and elsewhere on this site.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about the place but I recently found this webpage which told me a great many things of which I was never aware. If you're even a tenth as interested in this place as I still am, you'll want to read every bit of it.

Here's a different interpretation of "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat" which says it was performed by the FCHS A Cappella Choir. With a little sleuthing ability and the help of our friend Google, I figured out the "FCHS" was for Fort Collins High School in Fort Collins, Colorado. What I can't figure out is why an A Cappella Choir is singing with piano accompaniment…

Like you, I don't know who Kamala Harris will select to be her running mate. But if I were a betting man, I might put a few bucks on Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania…you know, that state Trump says will cease to exist if the Democrats win.

Several folks have written to suggest I repost at least one of the times on this blog when I said what I said in this post…

I will repeat my frequent advice to friends, which is to remember how long it'll be until we vote and to remember how volatile everything is about our current political scene. Everything can change tomorrow. Everything will change within the month, let alone the 321 days until we go to the polls and vote for whoever's names are on the ballots. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised to find no mention on them of either Trump's or Biden's.

That was said here on December 17, 2019 and it was about the previous Presidential Election but I also said it about this one such as in this post on February 13 of this year…

…I just think Biden would be a too-old president doing his best for America whereas Donald Trump would be a too-old, too-psychotic president doing his best for Donald Trump and no one else. Between the two men, it's an easy choice but wouldn't almost all of us rather have two other real options?

It's not impossible, I tell myself, that one or both of those men won't be on our November ballots…but don't ask me who'd tag in for either or how the substitution(s) could come about.

Well, now we're finding out and it really is a new election. The one that ended yesterday was manipulated, especially the last few months, to be all about if Joe Biden is too old and not up to the mental part of the job. And now the election's going to be about if Donald Trump is too old and not up to the mental part of the job. There could be one or more new elections before November 5.

This will be a busy week for me and you all know why. Posting here will be light but there will be a lot of video links and not all of them will be of "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat." I may also encore a few old posts and I'll try to check in anew when I can.

Not much to say about the new likely/presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party other than that she has impressed me about as much as any Vice-President could…which isn't much. Joe Biden did so a little as Veep but he didn't really impress me until he got the "com," as they used to say on Star Trek. I thought he was an excellent President of the United States though I can understand why someone might not if they were listening to his opponents. Sad that his exit had to happen the way it did.

Here's another link to my schedule. Several of my panels will have additional "surprise" participants…

Westwood Village is a small community of (mostly) retail outlets and offices adjacent to U.C.L.A. and I spent a lot of my youth there. My parents were always taking me to stores and restaurants there. It's where they took me for tap dancing lessons in one of the few major errors they made in parenting. You could have taught a pelican to tap dance before you or anyone could have taught me. Later, when I went to U.C.L.A., I hung out in "The Village" between classes and when I was dating, it was a terrific place to take dates.

The core of Westwood Village — if there was one — was an intersection with movie studios on two of its corners. Where Broxton Avenue and Weyburn Avenue cross, there stand The Village Theater (opened in 1931) and The Bruin Theater (opened six years later). I was in both a lot and while I remember the movies I saw at that intersection, I'm not always sure which movie I saw where. I'm pretty sure my mother took me to see Bambi at the Bruin and I'm pretty sure I saw Goldfinger and Fritz the Cat at the Village.

These viewings spanned several decades, of course. I think most folks my age who grew up near Westwood have a lot of such memories. And a lot of those people are very sad that, as this article notes, both theaters are closing this Thursday. The sadness seems to me overdone given that both will probably soon be back in biz, somewhat or fully remodeled.

The Village was recently purchased by a consortium of Hollywood filmmakers. I don't think they bought it to tear it down and open a Sephora in its place. The Bruin remains unpurchased but no one seems to be talking about razing it either. I haven't set foot in either for a long time but once one or both are back, I intend to rectify that neglect on my part. If I weren't so busy this week, I'd share some of my happy memories of those theaters now but that will have to wait.

Here's that number you're getting sick of seeing here. This is how it was performed in a production in Waterford, Ireland and I wish I had a suit like the one the guy playing Nicely-Nicely is wearing…

Fred Kaplan runs down the history of U.S. Presidents who decided against running for another term.

The situation with Biden is quite unprecedented. Just about everything in politics these days is quite unprecedented. A friend just asked me if America was ready to elect a female president. It was not so long ago that folks were asking if America was ready to elect a black guy. Everything is unprecedented until it actually happens. (And let's remember that Hillary won the popular vote. It's not like no one voted for her.)

This is Episode #4 of the 1977 Laugh-In revival with no host but a troupe that included Robin Williams, Lennie Shultz, Sergio Aragonés and a lot of folks who, though very talented, never got enough attention later.

This was the Christmas episode and you may not recognize two of the cameo guests. The older lady with the hat is Bella Abzug, a prominent Congresslady who was front and center in the growing women's movement. The gent who acts like an evangelist preacher is Marjoe Gortner, a former evangelist preacher who had a brief acting career and who hosted another series produced by George Schlatter. It was called Speak Up, America and it also starred Jayne Kennedy and Sergio.

There are other interesting folks in this episode and a couple of nice songs written by Billy Barnes…

If we learn nothing else from this turn of events, it's that this is the kind of election that will have many more turns of events. Polls ask, "If the election was held today, for whom would you vote?" That's all well and good but the election is not being held tomorrow. This time last week, we didn't know who'd be on the bottom half of the Republican ticket. Now, we don't know who'll be on either half of the Democratic ticket and how the world will react to the changes.

I keep remembering the voice of Vin Scully when he'd be covering a baseball game where one team was way ahead and then the other team would suddenly tie the score. Vin would say, "…and it's a brand-new ball game!"

Joe Landau wrote to ask me — well, I'll cut-and-paste his e-mail so you can read it for yourself…

Forgive the age reference here but I often read stories by fans of your generation about how their parents disapproved of them reading comic books and threw them all away. Did you ever have any experience of this sort? Your articles about your parents make them out to be very nice people but did they ever, out of concern for your welfare, throw away your comics and forbid you to buy more?

Au contraire. They not only never disapproved, they bought me all the comic books I wanted — an action which I think had an awful lot to do with my eventual career, not just as a writer for comic books but a writer of other things. Almost no restrictions were put on what I could watch or read or see. Once in a while, they would tell me that I was too young for a certain book or comedy record but that was rare.

I'm a little skeptical of some (not all) of the claims I've heard over the years about parents throwing out or tearing up their kids' comic books. In the sixties, there began a flood of news stories about how a copy of Superman #1 had sold for a then-staggering $300 or a Batman #1 for even more. Imagine someone paying that much money for a book that sold originally for ten cents! It does not seem to shock many these days when one of those comics goes for six figures or more.

But with those initial news reports came all these stories that went, "I had all the first issues — Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, all of them — but my mother threw them away!" I heard that so often on TV and from people I met that I couldn't believe it had happened to many of them…maybe even to any of them. I'm sure some parents threw some comics away but not all those rare issues that now sell for the price of a mid-sized mansion.

As a kid though, I was never really disciplined. I never gave my folks much reason to and neither of them was the yelling type. I started to read at a very early age, way younger than was expected. My Kindergarten teacher noted this and forwarded my name to some special division of the Los Angeles City School Board and I wound up skipping grades and my parents were told their kid was exceptionally gifted, at least in that area.

(One of the problems I had was that I was not gifted at all in other areas. So I wound up in classes where I was the youngest, smallest kid — ahead of my classmates in English language skills, behind them in things like arithmetic and history. And this was more traumatic than you might imagine, I was way, way behind them in learning the games we played at Recess.)

I think my early reading abilities had more to do with book books, as opposed to comic books, but comics deserved some of the credit. My parents figured they were doing something right and let me read whatever I wanted. As I got more into collecting back issues of comics, my father would even drive me to second-hand bookstores to search for ones I needed. So no, Joe. I never had the situation you're describing. In fact, a few times I benefited from a friend whose parents made him get rid of his comic book collection. I bought my friends' collections.

Another "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat." This one is from the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida…