Actor-musician-comedian (he did just about everything) Greg Lewis passed away this morning — peacefully, I'm told — after a long stay in post-hospital convalescence. If you're old enough to remember some of the great variety acts of the past, you may remember the world-famous Jerry Murads Harmonicats and The Harmonica Rascals starring Little Johnny Puleo. They appeared on every variety program back when there were variety programs including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, The Merv Griffin Show and The Mike Douglas Show. Greg was a part of both groups starting with the former at the age of 15.

Later, he was an actor, mostly of the comic kind, on shows like The Bob Newhart Show, Love Boat, Night Court, Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother and he always seemed to be busy. One of his big accomplishments late in life was an autobiographical one-man show called Some Greeks Are Not in the Restaurant Business which brought him great acclaim.

I have no idea what he died from or precisely how old he was. I just know that he was a fellow member of the group Yarmy's Army, that he was in show biz all his life, that he did a zillion different things in that biz and that he was a very nice, funny man.

P.S. ADDED SOMETIME LATER: Greg's daughter Anastasia informs me Greg was 88 years old, having been born on April 21, 1935 and the cause of death was heart failure.

These little pleas for dough will stop appearing here once I collect what it costs to operate this blog for another year…

Forty years ago, I spent about six days (cumulative) of my life writing the pilot script and small-b bible for a Saturday morning cartoon series called Dungeons & Dragons. In my line of work, you sometimes spend a lot of time working on things that, once they reach an audience, are consumed and quickly forgotten. Even some things that are considered successful for a while can fade from memory with the passage of years.

Ah, but every so often, you get involved in something that people remember and treasure and keep talking about. I feel like I have now spent more than six days (cumulative) being interviewed about this series. It went on CBS on September 17, 1983 and lasted three seasons. Do not believe those who claim it was driven from the airwaves by pressure groups who saw satanic subtext in the series.

It went off for the same reason most shows go off: Because the ratings were declining and — rightly or wrongly — the brass at the network didn't think it would have enough viewers to sustain another season. Yes, there were protests about its content but not many and CBS, at least in those days, was pretty good about ignoring such outcries if — and this is always a Big If — the viewers seem to want whatever is being outcried about.

It was a good show because of good writers, good producers, good artists, good voice talent, good everything…and I was mostly a spectator to all that goodness, having opted not to stick with it. Still, thanks to the gent who was my agent at the time, my name was seen for a micro-second in the credits each week so I get more kudos than I probably earned.

An aside to anyone who doesn't know this: If you're in the creative and collaborative arts and your career has any kind of length or breadth to it, you will often get less credit than you deserve for things. You will occasionally get zero credit. And every rare once-in-a-while, you will get more than you merit. From your point-of-view, it may feel like the universe is doing a big Make Good on you, overcrediting you here to compensate for the undercrediting you got elsewhere.

But you shouldn't expect others to see it that way. Someone else who worked on Dungeons & Dragons once took me out to lunch basically to tell me how much he resented my onscreen credit. Like me, he didn't work on every episode but he felt he deserved most of the recognition for the show's success. He said — and this is verbatim — "I should have had your credit" and didn't laugh when I replied, "You should have had my agent."

Quite recently, I sat for the video podcast below with a fine interviewer and a major fan of the series, Heath Holland. It's almost an hour and we talked about some other things but it's mostly about Dungeons & Dragons…

Hi. I awoke this morning to a flurry of e-mails from folks saying they were getting 404 errors when they tried to access this site. A 404 error, for those of you who don't know, is kind of The Internet's way of saying, "You have reached a dead end." Not all of you were getting that but some.

In the early days of this blog when that happened, all I could do was get on the phone to my hosting company, listen to "hold" music for what seemed like forever and then, if and when I reached a human being, report it. They'd usually have it fixed before the day was out. I got tired of that so I ditched my first hosting company (even though they were giving me space for free) and moved to one that charged money…though not a lot.

You get what you pay for so I finally moved to a somewhat expensive hosting firm and that's why this blog has been up 99.6% (or something like that) of the time. It's also why when I logged into their support site this morning, I found a notice that they're aware of the problem, they've already instituted a fix and it'll just take a little while for it to spread all across the world-wide web so no one gets that 404 error. If you can read this, it's reached you. This kind of service is why I'm now occasionally asking for money here.

You'd be amazed at the spam you get when you operate a blog like this. A lot of companies assume newsfromme is a big company with numerous staffers who must be paid each week and who sometimes take vacations. In the last few weeks, I've had several offers to be my payroll company, one inquiry from a travel agency that wants to help me book my crew for a week in The Bahamas, a sales pitch from a major office supply firm and a whole buncha other things I don't need.

That's a disadvantage of being a one-person operation like this. The biggest advantage is that over the 273 months since I started this blog, I've been named Employee of the Month two-hundred and seventy-three times. I think I'm way overdue for a raise and if you agree…

Here once again are on the melodic men of Voiceplay, this time giving the a cappella treatment to a collection of TV theme songs…

I just came across a bunch of polls in which Americans were asked if they think Donald Trump [or Hunter Biden and/or his father] is guilty of…and then the pollster named some sort of crime. As you might imagine, the results varied wildly depending on the party affiliation of the person being asked…and nothing else.

Seems to me they could get the exact same results by asking "Would it make you wildly happy if Donald Trump [or Hunter Biden and/or his father] was convicted of a crime…any crime?" It reminds me of all those people at Trump rallies chanting "Lock her up! Lock her up!" about Hillary Clinton. They didn't know what crime she'd allegedly committed. They didn't care. They just wanted her locked up.

Thanks to all of you who have donated so far to our little telethon here. It keeps the blog running and it makes me feel it's worth doing; not that I didn't feel that before but more is always nice.

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Back in this post, I linked you to a video that purported to be of Los Angeles in 1953. Then in this post, I cited a reader of this site who pointed out that the copyright on the video said it was 1945. My buddy Stu Shostak thinks that despite the copyright date, 1953 is more likely correct. Here — I'll let him tell you why he thinks that…

If you look closely at all the cars, there are more from the late 40s/early 50s than there are from prior. Also, the film mentions NBC and CBS Television, neither of which existed in 1945. Neither started with any great presence until at least 1947 or 1948.

Stu may be right…I dunno. Can anyone who knows cars tell me if there are any automobiles from the fifties in the video? That would settle it, sort of.

I used to be real good at identifying the makes, models and years of cars. One could speed by me doing sixty and I could instantly tell you all that but the skill, which came from nowhere went back there just as mysteriously as it had arrived. And when I say "used to be," I mean around when I was twelve. Most of my permanent teeth came in and my ability to recognizing cars went away. I'm sure you see the connection.

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Lastly: I keep reading articles in which learned men and women theorize as what Donald Trump's plan is for dealing with all his indictments and lawsuits. It seems to not have dawned on any of these learned folks that he may not have one.

From Jeff Alexander…

Let me be among the 1,492 who are correcting you on an understandable error you made in your Bye Bye Birdie column. The 1963 movie was not Miss Ann-Margret's debut. She'd already scored major appearances in Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and State Fair (1962).

As much as Birdie was re-tooled to emphasize her, it does seem like it was her debut. Keep up the great work. I do enjoy your columns!!

You're right about everything, Jeff, except that it wasn't 1,492. More like 1,480. But thanks for the correction and you also reminded me that I've never told my Ann-Margret story on this blog. Three in the morning isn't a good time for me to be trying to write it out so I'll get to it in the next week or so, "or so" meaning (of course) before Christmas of this or some other year. Thanks to all of you.

…of our annual telethon and if I'd thought to do this over the Labor Day Weekend, I could do this imitating Jerry Lewis and bring out Max Alexander and Norm Crosby and I could have started the whole thing off with this musical number…

But I didn't think of that then so all I can do is tell you that if you like this blog and wish to help fund its very existence on the web…

Here's something kinda interesting. As you may know, when the 1960 Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie was turned into the 1963 movie Bye Bye Birdie, an awful lot of it was changed including about 75% of the book. The character of Albert Peterson — the role played in both by Dick Van Dyke — went from being Conrad Birdie's agent (who is at heart an English teacher) to being a songwriter (who is at heart a biochemist)…and did you know that the screenwriter who did the conversion, Irving Brecher, was also the person who wrote the Marx Brothers movies At the Circus and Go West, was an uncredited writer on The Wizard of Oz and the creator of the TV series, The Life of Riley?

But forget about him. One of the big changes for the movie was the addition of the title song performed at the beginning and end by Ann-Margret. An awful lot of the bizarre changes from stage to screen seem to have been done to boost the impact of that lady who was making her screen debut…but the title song was probably a good addition. Ever since, whenever Bye Bye Birdie has been remounted for the stage, the remounters almost always find a way to insert that title song, usually as a finale.

This is a video in which the song has been turned into an opening number. It's from a 2015 production done at The Stratford Playhouse in Houston, TX by Stratford High School…and I want to emphasize that this is a high school production. I don't think you'll be able to tell that from the video which looks pretty professional to me. Some amazing musical comedy voices in there.

Anyway, they did this very clever staging of the title song to open the show. I don't know if the folks behind this production invented this. I thought at first they might have picked it up from the unsuccessful 2009 Broadway revival but I looked it up and that version did the song at the end. And where the heck did those new lyrics come from? Take a look…

And while we're at it, here are two more scenes. First is a little of "An English Teacher," a song which never made it to the movie. Then comes their staging of "The Telephone Hour," one of the few numbers from the show that seems to have made it relatively unscathed from stage to screen and back again to stage.  Some of the audience members look askance at what's going on around them but it's a well-staged number.

I went to a high school full of kids from show business families — we had Bonnie Raitt and David Cassidy, both of whom went on to stardom, both of whom had fathers with serious Broadway credentials — and we couldn't have pulled off something like this. I'm also impressed by the directing and editing on the video itself…

September is when I pay a large chunk o' cash to the company that hosts this website and I also have expenses relating to software and maintenance.  If you enjoy this blog and would like to contribute to maintaining its free-for-everyone, no-paid-ads presence…

The guys of VoicePlay favor us with a medley of theme songs from 80's cartoons…

I will soon be resuming a series of articles here under the title "Borders Crossing." Back in Part 5, I briefly told you about a market that was located near the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. That market was on the southeast corner of those cross streets. This one is about what was on or about the southwest corner. That intersection was within walking distance of where I grew up. In fact, when I went to University High School and later to U.C.L.A., I would sometimes wind up at bus stops at that intersection.

Located a door or three west of it was the Picwood Theater, a place that showed second-run (sometimes, first-run) movies. Here are the names of four movies that I'm quite sure I saw at the Picwood along with the years of their release, which is when I would have seen them there: Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! (1964), They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), Willard (1971) and Fame (1980). There were many, many others.

The Picwood opened in 1948 and was demolished in 1985 to make way for a huge shopping center. An awful lot of my childhood and adolescence was demolished to make way for huge shopping centers. I fully expect that someday, I will be demolished to make way for a huge shopping center.

There are many photos around of the Picwood but for years, I was never able to find a photo of a little hamburger stand that sat on what was otherwise a huge parking lot at the corner of Pico and Westwood. It was called Scot's and it was one of three or four Scot's locations in Southern California.

Scot's was about as blatant an imitation of McDonald's as you could have opened without having Ray Kroc personally come by to swat you in the face with a subpoena. It had no clown. Its "mascot," who I believe existed only as a big painted sign on the roof of each Scot's, was a lovely lady wearing Scottish attire including a kilt. That and the name were the only things even vaguely Scottish about the place.

They did not serve haggis or porridge or stovies. They served the exact same things McDonald's served for lunch and dinner — very close imitations — plus pizza. As I recall, the pizza wasn't bad considering its price and point of origin. The burgers and fries were as good or bad as at McDonald's and the prices were the same. There was then no McDonald's anywhere nearby — there is now — so my family and friends went to Scot's often.

It did not last as long as the Picwood. I would say it was gone by 1970, replaced on that plot of land by one of the short-lived Lone Ranger restaurants. That chain — which you can read about here — appeared and disappeared in two or three years. I recall not particularly liking the food there but the design of the place was very cool and on the weekends, the Lone Ranger himself would appear in person at one of the four-or-five Lone Ranger restaurants in Southern California.

And when I say "the Lone Ranger himself," I don't mean some guy they hired to put on the mask and the outfit. It was the man, Clayton Moore, in all his glory. I wonder how many people who shook hands with him and got photos understood that it wasn't some guy they hired to put on the mask and the outfit.

Or how many didn't go because they didn't believe it would be Clayton Moore. I told my friend Mike Royer, who was a huge fan of the character and the man who played him on TV, and Mike was skeptical. But he went to one, met The Genuine Article, and ran home to phone me, as excited as if he'd met the actual Santa Claus and sat on his lap.

Getting back to Scot's: I still have never found a good photo of the place and several friends of mine who grew up in West L.A. say they've been searching for one forever. But I recently came across this aerial snapshot of the corner which won't show you much. If you click on it, you can zoom in a little on the only image of Scot's I've ever seen…

The area between Scot's and the Picwood housed a number of different businesses my family patronized. One — and I'm not sure if that's it in this photo — was a redemption center for Blue Chip Stamps, which were these stamps you got when you went to the market. You pasted them in books and when you had enough books filled, you could take them to the redemption center and trade them in for some semi-valuable item. That was how and where my mother got me my first typewriter (an Olivetti-Underwood) and a copy of The Random House Unabridged Dictionary.

So you could kind of say my writing career started there. I still have both the typewriter and the dictionary. I haven't used the typewriter since I got my first electric one and I haven't looked a word up in that dictionary since I first got access to The Internet.

The businesses on the other corners of Pico and Westwood weren't near as interesting. I won't be writing about them.

If you're trying to reach me today, I hope you have a carrier pigeon. My internet connection is deader than Rudy Giuliani's law practice and my phone ain't working except for text messages and very slow web access…so I can post this and that's about it. This will all change but I haven't a clue as to when. As is normal for me.

[UPDATE, HOURS LATER:] It's fixed.