Here's a brief montage of some of the great Broadway performers who've graced the stage of the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts…

This only runs a minute and most of it is home movies — and not very clear ones — of the Broadway area back in 1957. But it's worth sitting through that because at the end, you see a few seconds of Stubby Kaye performing the "Jubilation T. Cornpone" number in Li'l Abner at the St. James Theater on W. 44th Street. The female dancer you see getting carried away is probably Valerie Harper…

Over on Slate, our man Fred Kaplan takes the media to task for reporting progress in the Iran talks when there is, in fact, no progress.  Trump or JD Vance or several other White House guys say there is and newscasts and articles report that, paying less attention to Iran's denials that that's what's happening.  Here's a paragraph from Fred's piece…

The pattern underscores one of the most prominent, if undersung, media "biases" — the bias in favor of pushing a story forward. Few readers would even skim a story beneath the headline "Nothing New at Arms Talks Today."And so when Donald Trump or Vice President J.D. Vance, who is heading up the talks, announces progress, news editors perk up.

It does strike me that Trump doesn't care about ending the war half as much as he cares about announcing that he's won the war…and hey, where's that Nobel Peace Prize?

Twenty-Eight days from now, I and a lot of folks who read this blog will be descending on San Diego, California for this year's Comic-Con International.  I always go and, as you may be aware, I am one of only four living human beings who have attended every single one of these.  That's if you don't count a couple of smaller bonus or preview cons that have been thrown over the years by the same folks then-responsible for the big one each summer.

I have now firmed-up the schedule, room assignments and personnel for the panels on which I shall be appearing.  Last year, the number was nineteen.  This year, I'm going to take it easy and just appear on and/or moderate eighteen.  Unless, of course, I pick up another one between now and then.  I'll post the list when we get closer to the event but here's my schedule for last year. Nine of those panels are on this year's schedule in the same rooms at the same times, though of course with some changes as to who's on them. And I'm doing five more of them this year in different time slots and in some cases, different rooms. To answer some questions I'll inevitably get…

• Yes, the convention is sold out and no, I can't get badges for you and any dying children you may claim wanted to attend Comic-Con as their last wishes.
• No, I can't help you get a panel on the schedule…and even if I could, that ship has sailed. (I've even had people ask this of me the week before the con.)
• No, I can't help you find a reasonably-priced hotel room or even an unreasonably-priced one. All I can do is to point you to this hard-to-find webpage operated by an outside company that works with the convention. There are rooms available…probably not close to the convention center but there are worse things than staying 5-6 miles away and taking an Uber or Lyft or taxi to the con. There are sometimes even shuttles and San Diego also has a very good trolley line which might be worth investigating. If you're in desperate need of lodging, check out that page and keep checking because new rooms are offered from time to time.
• And no, I can't explain why the convention website doesn't do a better job of directing people to that page.
• Nor do I know anything special about locating a place to park. I do know that some folks have found that their best option is to park some distance away and to Uber/Lyft/Taxi their way in. (If I were in need of a space, I'd probably check out that trolley system and find a spot, wherever it might be, near where the trolley stops.)
• And lastly: No, I have no idea how to get into Hall H. They opened it in 2004 and I have never set foot in the place. I also have never heard of anything that happened in Hall H that could get me to wait in line for more than fifteen minutes, let alone camp out all night. If anything they do in there excites you, great. Good luck to all you Happy Campers.

Right now, I have to begin packing for the convention…which I will do as soon as I finish unpacking from the last WonderCon.

Here's a bit of television history from 5/23/91: Johnny Carson does a "surprise" walk-on on Late Night with David Letterman.  It wasn't a surprise for Dave or his staff.  They knew Johnny was (probably) coming.  He was in New York to appear at a meeting of all the NBC affiliates — an appearance Johnny used to casually announce his retirement, when his current contract was up, from The Tonight Show. That sent a rolling tremor through NBC and the entire television industry. It was an announcement that caught the NBC execs wholly unaware.

It had been arranged that, time permitting, Johnny would be driven over to Rockefeller Center to do this walk-on — which he did, again mentioning his retirement rather casually. Dave had heard what had just been announced at the affiliates' meeting but was apparently aware that Johnny didn't want to make the entire spot about that or even talk about it. So this appearance is interesting not so much for what was said but for what wasn't…

Jon Stewart at his best…

You may not have known Tom Hensley by name but I guarantee you, you heard him play the keyboards, possibly on some of your favorite recordings. Tom was one of the most in-demand session players. Among the many hits on which he performed were "Rich Girl" by Hall and Oates, "Endless Love" by Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, "Half Breed" by Cher, "Don’t Give Up on Us" by David Soul and a Dr. Demento fave — "Chick-a-Boom" by Daddy Dewdrop. The whole list would be well into the hundreds.

Tom would have been heard on more records but he was frequently unavailable because he was out of town. He spent forty years touring with Neil Diamond and he used to brag he'd played "Sweet Caroline" in every major city on this continent. He was also a lovely man with a great sense of humor, and he was a loyal member of Yarmy's Army. He died yesterday at the age of 85 (we think) following a long illness. Sigh.

Yesterday, I attended a pitch-perfect memorial service for Howard Storm, a comedian, actor, director and, at times, a manager of prize-fighters. I wrote this about him when he passed away last month at the age of 94. It was held in the Directors Guild Theater, a most appropriate place since Howard directed hundreds of hours of fine TV programming, including the Herculean task of handling Robin Williams on Mork and Mindy. Pam Dawber (aka Mindy) was among those who spoke lovingly of this talented, funny man.

There were speeches, film clips, a musical performance and a lovely spread of bagels and pastries. And just looking at the attendees, you could tell the deceased was a beloved and important person.

Hey, here's one of the film clips that was shown.  It's from his friend Woody Allen's film, Broadway Danny Rose.  Howard is the guy at the round table of comedians who's doing all the talking…

Howard was also the head of Yarmy's Army, a group of writers and actors that when it was in full force, was quite a club. Its ranks included Pat Harrington, Tom Poston, Shelley Berman, Howie Morris, Chuck McCann, Gary Owens, Pat McCormick, Harvey Korman, Jack Riley, Jerry Van Dyke, Don Knotts, Peter Marshall, Bob Ridgely, Louis Nye, Rob Carey, many others whose names you'd know, plus — at the other end of the notoriety index — me. Sadly, death has whittled the roster way, way down and the passing of Howard probably means the group is over. If it does ever meet again, it sure won't be the same thing. We also recently lost two more members — Ronnie Schell and, yesterday, Tom Hensley. I will be following this post with some words about Tom Hensley.

We talk a lot on this blog about late night TV shows. Here's an interesting — to me, at least — thing that's changed about them over the years. This is true of all of 'em but we'll just look at the guest lineup for The Tonight Show last week…

Notice that Mr. Fallon's show had reruns on both Thursday and Friday.  That's not that new.  Mr. Carson usually slipped a rerun or two into a week of (otherwise) new shows, though he always placed them on Monday or Tuesday.  What's changed is that while Johnny's reruns were usually around a year old, late night shows now select their reruns from the previous week or two.  One of Fallon's on this list is but 16 days old and the other is from earlier the same week.

Re-airing this particular Monday show on Friday makes sense, I guess, since having the Knicks on is so topical and special. But one of the things that has changed over the years about talk shows is that audiences won't watch reruns that are very old. Both Leno and Letterman tried it and the ratings were disastrous. You'd think that an old show would do better because people had forgotten all or most of it…but the ratings showed just the opposite.

Which is why this week when Jimmy Kimmel is in reruns, they're all from this month. The oldest one airing this week is from June 2. On Friday this week, they're rebroadcasting the episode from June 18th.

So let's ask why audiences won't watch older episodes. The only answer I can think of is that the main thing people now want from their late night shows is topicality. They don't want to hear jokes about last year's news, only recent news. Colbert's show — which had the highest ratings of all the late night shows — was arguably the most topical. What's more, Colbert came across as a guy who followed current events and understood them about as well as anyone in his position could. Whenever I see Jimmy Fallon deliver a monologue joke about current events, he seems like a guy who's just reading it off cue cards and who's more interested in getting to the part of the show where they all play Password.

I think The Internet has made us all more aware of what's in the news. I was going to type "more informed," but clearly, a lot of people are not particularly informed though they may think they are.

And this week, Seth Meyers has a week of reruns and they're reaching back farther than they usually do. One episode they're airing is from last December and the rest are from last January. I suspect that's an experiment. And I also suspect it will fail and they'll go back to rerunning more recent shows.

It's Father's Day so here's one of the many pieces I've written here about my father. This one first ran on 6/18/17…

My father died when I was 39. In those 39 years, we had very few arguments, very few fights of any sort. He was not the kind of person to yell and in those thirty-nine years, he probably yelled at me less than a dozen times…and not at all in the last fifteen or so.

I've probably said this before here about him but there were times when he almost seemed to wish I gave him more reasons to raise his voice or discipline me. I was just one of those kids who never got into trouble, never did anything really wrong, at least on purpose. He'd go to work and hear other men talking about how they had to smack their kids or ground them or otherwise punish a son in dire need of learning to behave. There was so little of that with me that he sometimes felt he wasn't being a proper father.

This is not to say he never got mad. He hated his job and worked in a bureaucracy that was sometimes very harsh or disrespectful of its employees so there was plenty there to holler about. He just couldn't find many reasons to get mad at me. Also, he had Joe Pyne.

Joe Pyne was a commentator-host on radio and TV at the time, and in some ways a role model for most folks who now do political-type radio shows. More than a decade ago on this site, I wrote…

Joe Pyne inspired a couple of generations of TV and especially radio personalities who learned that getting people pissed off was good for the ratings. I never met Mr. Pyne but the guy who used to cut my hair used to cut his, and you tend to trust your barber. He said that Pyne was, indeed, an angry, one-legged man who was always yelling about everything, but that the guy clearly laid it on thick and deliberately for his broadcasts. Like a lot of folks in radio, he found an act that worked for him and he worked that act for all it was worth.

Pyne was big on TV and radio in Los Angeles in the sixties, and I could never understand why some people went on his show or called in. He was generally Conservative but his overwhelming concern seemed to be contempt for his guests, no matter what they said. To the extent he had a political philosophy, it seemed to be mostly anti-freeloader. He was pro-police, pro-military, pro-gun ownership, etc., but he was also pro-union, at least when the union was actually representing the interests of working men and women. I don't think anything enraged him more than the concept of welfare…and not just for the poor or minorities. Unlike a lot of people who loathe welfare, he was also against various government subsidy programs that he thought functioned as welfare for the wealthy, and quite willing to rip even Republican leaders who were responsible for that kind of thing.

For a time when my father was dropping me off at school on his way to work, we used to listen to Pyne on the car radio. Even though I was pretty Conservative in those days, I thought Pyne was a jerk on many fronts, seeing Commies where they weren't any and presuming that if you were under the age of 21, you were almost certainly a worthless, dope-smoking hippie. It amused me that he was always railing against people (especially young people) who allegedly shunned honest work…this, while he was making a small fortune via what struck me as very easy, dishonest work. Pyne then did his A.M. radio show from a little studio in his bedroom at home. Often, he was lying in bed in his jammies, yammering insults and telling people to go out and get a real job. My father did not see the irony or amusement. Pyne simply enraged him…but he listened, and I guess that was the point.

I never understood why my father, who had stress enough at work, insisted each morning on turning on the Pyne program. Back then, there were plenty of channels on the radio that played music…lovely, non-controversial, non-inflammatory music. I think the appeal was that every so often, some caller would sneak in and give Pyne a real argument and point out the asininity of one of his positions — but that didn't happen often. In any debate, the host has a secret weapon which I suspect all hosts of such shows use at times. Many clearly use it a lot.

You can win any argument if you have a magic button that mutes your opponent, especially if you know how to use it so it doesn't sound like you cut him off. It's not hard to make him appear speechless because he couldn't find the words to reply to you. Pyne would sometimes delight in insulting a caller and hanging up on him but he'd also sometimes do the trick where he'd quietly cut the guy off, ask him to offer some proof of what he said or name an example…and then after a bit of silence, he'd say, "See? You can't come up with any, you jerk!"

My father really hated Joe Pyne. He didn't hate a lot. He hated Richard Nixon and most of the Republican leaders of that day, and he hated Joe Pyne. That was about it.

Oh — and Art Linkletter. Mr. Linkletter was a TV host who once on some show said something my father interpreted as "Really, all that matters in life is making as much money as you can, and there's nothing immoral about anything you do that makes you money, and if other people get hurt, that's too damn bad for them, and you shouldn't care about them because if they're not rich themselves, they aren't really human beings. They're more like dogs and, gosh, who wouldn't kill a dog if you could make money doing it?"

I am exaggerating…and my father didn't think Linkletter actually said those words or anything close but my father heard him say something — perhaps many somethings — that suggested that was the Linkletter credo in life. My father's awful job was that he dealt with tax evaders for the Internal Revenue Service so he encountered people who actually felt like that. He didn't make many jokes but one time, we were watching an adaptation of Mr. Dickens' A Christmas Carol and near the beginning when Scrooge was saying that the poor should just all die and decrease the surplus population, my father pointed at the screen and said, "I think I had a case on that guy."

What he hated about his job was that no one was ever glad to see him. If my father called on you, you were in trouble. You owed the government money, you had to pay and you had to work out a payment schedule. He was more-or-less Good Cop, warning you that if you didn't settle with him, he would have to turn the matter over to Bad Cop — another division which would seize your property and/or threaten jail time. Once in a while, he had to do the seizing himself.

Some people would cry and sob and tell him — and he often knew this to be absolutely true — that they were destitute, unable to even feed themselves or their families. And now, here was this man telling them that they had to come up with a couple thousand dollars for Uncle Sam. If you are a person of decency and compassion, as my father was, how would you like to be in his position a couple times a week?

In other instances, he dealt with people of fabulous wealth who could easily have bought one less Picasso that week and more than paid off their delinquent taxes, but who were like Leona Helmsley, the hotel heiress who supposedly told one of her many housekeepers, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." As often as not, those people would wind up paying very little or even zero. They all seemed to have a friend high in the government — sometimes, it was Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan themselves. They'd call the friend, the friend would call someone also high up in government and the tax bill would disappear or be settled for nickels. Once, my father was forced to write a written apology to say he'd made a mistake to think the person who actually owed millions owed anything.

Like I said: How would you like to be in that position a couple times a week? But having grown up in the Great Depression and having no particular marketable skills, he was afraid to look for anything else.

Some of our best father/son time came when he drove me to school in the morning, dropping me off and then heading off to work.

In his last years, and especially when he was hospitalized, we talked with absolute honesty…and it was father and son but it was also two adults. He was amazed and proud that his son had built a career doing something he loved…and in my particular profession. My father would have loved to have been a writer but probably didn't have the skill and he definitely didn't have the temperament to deal with two downsides. One is that a writer faces occasional (sometimes, frequent) rejection. As a young man, he'd tried out for one writing job and the turndown left him devastated and unwilling to try again.

The other downside is that for most writers, income can be highly unpredictable — how much you'll make and when they'll actually pay it to you. The upside of working for the Internal Revenue Service was that there was a guaranteed check every Friday for X dollars.

X wasn't a lot but it paid all the bills with a few bucks left over. He told me many times how he never understood how I could sleep at night, not knowing how much money — if any — I'd receive next week.

Not long before he had that last heart attack, he began telling me over and over how much he loved dropping me off at school — at high school and especially at U.C.L.A. He loved our conversations which often were about why Joe Pyne was full of shit this particular morning, as opposed to why he was full of shit on previous mornings. Then he loved watching me get out of the car with my notebook and scurry off to theoretically get a little bit smarter and more likely to make something of myself.

One time, he said, "I always loved that moment and I'd enjoy it as long as I could before my ulcer kicked in." Because once I was out of the car, he was no longer driving me to school. He was heading in to work…so his stomach would constrict and there'd be that little hurt in it, not knowing how he'd be kicked right there that day but feeling fairly certain there would be at least one kick.

I had not made the connection before. Seeing me going off to class, believing I'd do better than he had…that was one of his rewards for doing that terrible, terrible job each day.

We talked about that a couple times and one day when he was in the hospital, he surprised me by saying, "It always bothered me when you seemed ashamed to have people see your father dropping you off at school." My brain and voice responded in unison with a loud "Huh?" That thought never occurred to me. Not once…and I told him so. "When did I ever do that?"

He said, "When I dropped you off at U.C.L.A. I always offered to drive onto the campus and take you right up to your first class but you always insisted I let you off outside the campus."

Did you ever find yourself in a misunderstanding that could have been and should have been cleared up decades before? Let me explain this one…

The turf has changed a bit since 1970 when I went there but U.C.L.A. was and is a huge place with many entrances onto its grounds. There was one at the corner of Westholme and Hilgard and I always asked my father to let me off at that corner. From there, I could walk about ten steps onto the campus and turn right to go down a pedestrian walkway (i.e., a passageway on which cars could not drive) that took me straight to the building where my first class of the day was held. It was very easy and I liked the short walk, which also took me past some vending machines where I'd sometimes buy a bag of chips or pretzels to eat later in the day.

Had he driven onto the campus, the roadway immediately veered to the left — away from the walkway and the vending machines and the building I was trying to reach — and it went nowhere near my destination. Anywhere he'd let me off would have meant a much longer walk for me (and no pretzels) and then it would have been very confusing for him to find his way off the campus.

I thought I'd explained that to him several times back in '70…but now there we were in his hospital room nearly a quarter-century later and he was telling me, "I thought you were just saying that. I thought you were ashamed that your father was driving you to school."

I went over it with him one more time and he said he understood now…but some ideas, you just have to blast out of some minds. I went home and found an old map I had of the U.C.L.A. campus and a bit of the surrounding area. I drew up an enlargement a yard-wide of the relevant area and took it in to him the next day.

"Look," I said. "This big blue line shows how if you let me off outside the campus, I could walk down this little pathway, stop at the vending machines here and then go right to English 101. This red line shows you where we'd have wound up if I let you drive me onto the campus."

He stared at it and it was probably my tenacity more than my cartography that convinced him it was just as I said. "I guess I had it all wrong," he muttered.

I moved his I.V. stand over so I could get up real close to him and look him straight in the face. I said, "Is there anything else I ever did that still bothers you? Something we never discussed? I've apologized for a number of things and we buried those as issues between us. Think hard. Did I spit up on you when I was two? Did I forget to take the trash out once when I was fourteen? Is there anything else like this — anything! — that we need to talk about?"

He thought for a long minute or so then said, "You told me once you were up for a writing job on that TV show…that Maude thing. That was a good, successful show. Why didn't you take that job?" That was twenty years earlier.

I said, "They hired some other writer instead of me."

He smiled and said, "Oh. In that case, there's nothing else." Then he added, "Except you did spit up on me a lot when you were two. And three. And four. And five…"

Gee, I had a great father.

Here's the latest from my favorite newsreader, Jonathan Pie…

Very busy today.  More content will be here after I cross some more pressing "to-do"s off my "to-do" list.

But boy, are things going bad for Trump and his most loyal supporters and the people of all those places that are being killed while a "ceasefire" is technically in effect. Even the folks defending that Memorandum of Understanding don't seem to have their hearts in it. And Trump looks very unhealthy…

Linda Eder — she of the extraordinary voice — sings a song from A Chorus Line about as well as it could ever be sung…

Here's what I can tell you about Tom Dreesen, a very hard-working comedian who died yesterday at the age of 86: He was a very good guy. The obits all seem to think the most important thing he did was to open for Frank Sinatra for many, many years. That's not nothing but he would have had a pretty good career even without Ol' Blue Eyes.

Dreesen's act was solid and, like I said: He was hard-working. And ethical. And smart. When the infamous Comedy Store Strike happened in 1979, Tom sacrificed an awful lot of time and money as one of the leaders of the movement, even though he was — career-wise — past the stage where what they were fighting for would have benefited him personally. He made a lot of speeches and a lot of enemies and held a lot of hands and was ultimately a key player in ending what had turned into a very ugly battle.

I saw him perform a number of times and he always made the audience laugh. He also helped a lot of other comedians for no other reason than that he thought it was the right thing to do. I didn't know him well but, as I posted here some time ago…

Many moons ago, I wrote a sitcom pilot that was to star Tom. It was a deal he got as a kind of consolation prize when he was fired from the pilot of Hello, Larry. (Ron Liebman was fired before him. Tom replaced Ron and then McLean Stevenson replaced Tom.) Of all the projects I've done that never went the distance, I think the Tom Dreesen pilot is the one that disappointed me the most. It was a great idea for a show — mostly Tom's idea, by the way — and he would have been terrific in it.

(To give you an idea of what a great, smart guy Tom is: We had a recurring role in it that called for a crotchety old man. Tom suggested a fellow some of you may remember named Leonard Barr. Leonard is, like Irv Benson, kind of forgotten, even on the Internet. But he was very funny and when a network guy said to Tom, "You know, he'll steal the show from you," Tom replied, "Fine. I don't care who gets the laughs so long as it's a good show." I've worked with comedians who would slit a major artery before they'd say something like that.) Anyway, that show never made it to tape day due to a contract snag that had nothing to do with Tom or me.

I don't have much more to add except to note that being an Opening Act can be a thankless gig. No matter how good you are, almost no one's there to see you…and you're liable to be blamed if the headliner comes out and doesn't get the reception he thinks he deserves. Tom was really good at it and a fun guy to talk to. The Letterman people quickly assembled this collection of times Tom guested with Dave. It's pretty entertaining and I think you'll see how much affection and respect Dave had for Tom. Letterman was utterly incapable of acting like he liked a guest if he didn't. It's a half-hour but well worth your time…

Here's a link to Fred Kaplan's inevitable article analyzing the U.S.–Iran ceasefire agreement. Even Republicans you'd expect to fall in line with praising it are saying it's pretty bad. For those of you who can't vault the paywall at Slate, here's one paragraph from Fred's piece…

Trump and his aides have heralded as a major accomplishment the eighth of the framework's 14 paragraphs, which states: "The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons." Notice the word reaffirms. The Obama-era nuclear deal, which Iran and six other countries signed in 2015 (and Trump scuttled three years later), stated, in its prologue, in almost identical language: "Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons." Even there, Iran "reaffirmed" the pledge because it had made the same promise when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. (See Articles II and III of the NPT in particular.) Maybe the Iranians were lying then, maybe they're lying now. The point is, in this respect, Trump's big tout is nothing new.

This morning, I don't see Trump and his loyalists defending the agreement so much as they're trying to say that if it's lousy. that's all JD Vance's fault.