Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Sweet Charity

How do we help the folks in East Africa and Southern Asia who are suffering? Should one give money? Blankets? Food? This is a question that has mattered to me since many years ago when I heard a popular performer tell me he'd semi-regretted hosting a telethon to aid people who'd lost their homes in a flood in the mid-west. Everyone's intentions (including his) were only the best...but this particular telethon had been encumbered with red tape and way too many paid staffers. And as a result, though the telethon had raised a decent sum of cash, way less than half of it had actually been put to good purpose, and even that distribution took months. The performer said that after hosting that seemingly-successful telethon, he'd been deluged with requests to helm others, and that he'd declined most...not because the causes were not worthy but because, he said, he'd decided to confine his fund-raising and personal donations to only the most efficient efforts. Makes sense to me.

So yesterday, I called a friend of mine who works for a disaster-relief charity and asked, in effect, how one gets the most bang for one's donated dollars at the moment. Her answer was that really, while donations of food and goods always feel like "doing something," unless the final recipients are local, you're just saddling the charity with problems. So what should you give? Her reply:

There are really only two things that matter — money and, when they're short, blood. If you call us up and say, "I've got ten cases of canned food here for starving people overseas," I have to start looking in the budget for a way to get it from you and then get it to them, and that can be expensive and take time. If you give us money, I can have that money feeding hungry people in twenty-four hours.

The charity she works for is only peripherally involved in the current Africa/Asia efforts but I'll bet it works that way with most causes. She said that if one donates to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, very little of the money goes to administrative concerns. "You can't put the money to much better use than to give to them," she said. "And the Red Cross can also tell you if they have a special need for blood at the moment."

So here's a link to a page where you can donate to the Red Cross. And those of you who were thinking of donating to this site...please double or triple the amount you were going to send me and send it there, instead.

• Posted at 12:29 PM · LINK

Jerry Orbach

Here's an old article that gives a great overview of Mr. Orbach's performing career.

• Posted at 11:33 AM · LINK

New Hoedowns!

I never thought it was "real" improv, as proven by the large number of experienced comedy writers listed as producers and consultants on its end credits...but I still enjoyed the American edition of Whose Line Is It Anyway? hosted by Drew Carey. I watched 'em when ABC ran them in prime time and I watched reruns on the ABC Family Channel until I got sick of seeing the same episodes repeated over and over. So it's nice to hear that starting January 17, ABC Family will be running what they're calling "new" episodes. I suspect they'll be filtering them in with the reruns I don't want to watch again but perhaps my TiVo can figure out the difference.

There seems to be some confusion as to just what these "new" episodes are. When Whose Line? went off ABC, there were reportedly a number of shows that had not aired, and some sources are saying that these are the ones that will start next month. Other sources claim that any leftover episodes from the end of the network run have already aired on ABC Family and that what they're doing now is to go back to the old tapes and build new episodes out of leftover material. One of the quiet secrets of both versions of Whose Line? (British and American) is that at each taping, they played many more games than necessary to fill out a half-hour, then chose the best ones to air. This is why, at the end of each game, the performers always return to their chairs, even if they're in the next bit. It makes it easier to chop out or rearrange segments if they all start with all four players seated.

If that's what they're doing — using material that failed to make the cut the first time around — this would probably mean a lot of bits taped during the show's first year. That season, they usually taped for 2 hours and whittled it down to one half-hour show. In later years, they generally taped a little longer but would cut the proceedings into four or even five shows. Does anyone have any firm details on whether this is what's being done?

One hopes they'll also run the one "lost" episode from the program's first season on ABC. One night in 1999, the show was pre-empted at the last minute by a Barbara Walters interview of Monica Lewinsky, and the scheduled episode never ran. Fans assume that this was because it was one of the few without Wayne Brady, who by then was becoming one of the most popular folks on the series. (His slot in that episode was filled by Patrick Bristow, who had appeared on the British version of Whose Line?) It would be nice to see it for the first time instead of the episode with Richard Simmons for the eightieth...and the points still won't mean a thing.

• Posted at 11:12 AM · LINK

Jerry Orbach, R.I.P.

It's hardly the worst news in the papers today but I was still sad to read of the death of Jerry Orbach. Most folks probably know him for his appearances on Law & Order and other dramatic roles...but a lot of us think of him as a genuine star of Broadway musicals. Matter of fact, Orbach was in the first Broadway musical I ever actually saw in a Broadway theater, 42nd Street. He played the role of the callous, all-business Julian Marsh, who produced musicals but didn't seem to have any music in his soul. That was until about midway through the second act when suddenly, thrillingly, he burst into song with "Lullaby of Broadway." It was one of those "tingle" moments and it worked because Jerry Orbach was just so darn good.

• Posted at 9:14 AM · LINK

Offensive Cartoonists

Over on his fine comics news weblog, my friend Tom Spurgeon says that he fears we're about to see a lot of political/editorial cartoonists operating in a climate of fear. Here...I'll quote Tom's key sentence...

...with the newspaper business being what it is and more and more eyes at all levels of journalism on the bottom line, I don't see where any real resistance is going to come from if a set of complaints against a single work or editorialist were to build critical momentum.

I think Tom's right and wrong but mostly right. Once upon a time, the press in this country believed that the news was the news, and you report it as per established rules, regardless of whether it's what your readers want to hear. Now, more and more, people seem to want their news to reinforce what they already believe and to be free of facts or opinions to the contrary. More and more in this Rupert Murdoch world of ours, some news organizations are happy to pander to that need, while others increasingly fear offending anyone...even tiny groups if they're vocal enough. Which is bad news for this generation's Herblocks. You can't be much of a political cartoonist if you offend no one. It's not difficult to imagine editors or publishers folding if a small band of The Offended all make enough noise at the same time about some artist. With the F.C.C. doling out "indecency" fines based on a handful (as in, "less than five") complaints and advertisers sidestepping controversies every which way, it doesn't take a lot of bodies to form an angry mob.

The one area where I might part company with Tom — and I'm not sure if we agree or disagree on this — is that I think the free market should operate in this area. I don't think editors should be quick to drop cartoonists, and they especially should not do so in response to these little ginned-up, phony enraged protests. But it's also possible for a cartoonist to offend to no good purpose and/or spread disinformation, and those folks shouldn't be able to claim the First Amendment as immunity from getting replaced by someone better. It's not as bad with editorial cartoonists but lately, we've seen some incredibly shoddy "journalism" practiced by non-cartooning political commentators (Example: The thankfully-retiring William Safire). A few have even meekly advanced the argument that if something is clearly an opinion column, normal standards of factual accuracy do not apply.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that I think there are some lousy editorial cartoonists out there. I'm not sure the folks who control today's news media know how to differentiate between dropping one because he's ticking off readers who can't cope with alternate viewpoints...and one who's just plain uninformed or unfunny. Tom's right that there's a clear and present danger that the good ones will get dumped or pressured to tone it down. But there's also a danger that the standards for political cartooning will continue to descend, right along with the rest of most editorial pages.

• Posted at 9:06 AM · LINK