Monthly Archives: February 2014

Three more…

I have been to a Del Taco once in my life. One night at 3 AM, I was working here and I suddenly realized I oughta (a) eat something because I hadn't eaten in too many hours and (b) get to bed. Before I could do either of these things, I got a phone call that my mother had pushed what I called her "I've fallen and I can't get up" button. She hadn't fallen. She was just so ill that she was summoning an ambulance. I sprinted for my car and — long story short — by 5 AM, we were in the Emergency Room at the hospital. A nice doctor told me, "I've given her a sedative so she can get some sleep while we wait for test results. We should have them in an hour or two."

So I had an hour or two to kill. The hospital cafeteria didn't open until 7 AM so I went down to a vending machine room where I'd often grabbed a bite of something on similar long nights. The machines were picked clean of things I might find edible…and what I should have done was get in my car and drive to some 24 hour restaurant for an actual meal. But I was afraid to stray too far so I walked to a 24 hour Del Taco that was near the hospital.

I'd never been in one before because my food allergies pretty much rule out anything that's standard in a Mexican restaurant…even a Mexican fast food joint. But they had hamburgers so I ordered one. The teenager at the counter told me I might be happier with a taco or a burrito. I told her, "No thanks…I can't eat a taco or a burrito. I'd like a hamburger." She told me I might be happier with a quesadilla or a tostada. I told her, "No thanks…I can't eat a quesadilla or a tostada. I'd like a hamburger." She gave up and told the cook — the only other employee in the place — "One hamburger."

The cook said, "Tell him he'll be happier with a taco or a burrito."

I finally got them to make me a hamburger. I could see what they meant. I don't eat at Del Taco anymore.

I was introduced to Krispy Kreme by a friend of mine named Christine Pedi, a talented actress and Broadway performer. She said they had the best donuts in the world. This was back when I ate things like that. I'm not sure if they were the best I'd ever had but if they weren't, they were close enough. My favorite was the Chocolate Iced Custard Filled…but when I went to a Krispy Kreme store, my real favorite was whatever was the most-recently made.

One year a long time ago, I had to spend a week in Las Vegas and I worked day and night in my room but especially night. I was writing a script, often until 7 AM or 8 AM. Then I'd sleep most of the day, just to annoy the housekeepers.

Around 3 AM, I would take a break and walk from my room at the Luxor to the Krispy Kreme stand over in the Excalibur. The two hotels are owned by the same company and there's a walkway that connects them. It was a long walk so I felt better about eating a Krispy Kreme donut than if I hadn't burned so many calories to get to it.

There was a very cute lady who worked there and as she didn't have much to do at 3 AM, we always got to talking. I think I went over for the conversation as much as for the donut. This was not a romantic thing — she was married and in an early stage of pregnancy — but I liked talking with her and making her laugh. One night as I walked up, I said, "What's the latest donut?" She said they'd just made Cinnamon Buns so I said, "I'll have a Cinnamon Bun." As she was fetching it, a well-dressed man rushed up, shoved his way past me and demanded a dozen assorted donuts, IMMEDIATELY!

She said, "I'll help you as soon as I finish helping this gentleman." That didn't satisfy the well-dressed man and he screamed like it was an emergency, "YOU WILL GIVE ME THE DONUTS NOW!!!" I nodded to her to help him first and she began putting donuts in a box for the man. As she did, I turned to him and said, "You sound like someone's holding your loved ones at gunpoint for a donut ransom."

He said, "It's worse than that! We have a whale who's demanding them or he's going to go to another casino!" ("Whale" is the Vegas term for a gambler who bets — and preferably loses — in the $100,000 and up category.) I realized the fellow was a casino host, probably not from the Excalibur.

A casino host jumps at the whims of such gamblers. The bigger the whale, the higher the jump. From the way he acted, he had a Blackjack player back at this hotel who'd just swallowed Gepetto.

She gave him the box of donuts, he threw twenty dollars at her and, not waiting for change, sprinted out with the box.

The lady had just made about a twelve dollar tip so she insisted on treating me to my Cinnamon Bun. I asked her if anything like that had ever happened to her before. She said, "About two weeks ago, a woman came in, shoved her way past about ten people in line and demanded a dozen Glazed Raspberry Filled donuts immediately. Just like that guy, she screamed, 'IMMEDIATELY!'"

"Another casino host?" I asked.

She said, "No…just a fat lady who couldn't wait two minutes for her donuts. She ate the whole dozen standing up in about four minutes, then came back for more. The second time, she waited in line."

As I've mentioned here, my sweet tooth has gone away on me so I no longer eat donuts or anything of the sort. But when I did, I liked Krispy Kreme. And after that, I couldn't eat one without thinking of that story.

I don't like anything at El Pollo Loco except the chicken. Don't like their fries, don't like their mashed potatoes, can't eat any of their Mexican dishes. I don't even like their little half-ears of corn-on-the-cob. How the hell can you ruin corn-on-the-cob? But I like their chicken so much that I am often found at an El Pollo Loco picking up one of their eight-piece chicken-only packs.

If you've never had it: El Pollo Loco serves citrus-marinated chicken that's grilled over an open flame. It's very good, especially when you haven't refrigerated and then reheated it. I always assumed it was among the healthier things I could eat at a Fast Food place but until I looked it up, I hadn't realized how much healthier. A 4.3 oz. chicken breast with skin at El Pollo Loco contains 220 calories and has 620 mg of Sodium. A fried breast of approximately the same size at KFC contains 360 calories and 1080 mg of Sodium. Even if those numbers were even, I'd still prefer the one from El Pollo Loco.

Years ago, we had a similar chain in Southern California that never caught on…because of the name, I suspect. They served pretty much the same grub but they called themselves Chicken on Fire. I liked their food but I always felt a bit uneasy walking into a place called Chicken on Fire. I'll bet I wasn't the only one.

Next time: We finish the Top 27 with Boston Market, In-N-Out Burger and Baskin-Robbins…but I'll be doing a few more of these after that.

Three common grammar errors.

Fred Kaplan believes that the reason so many Republicans fault Obama's foreign policy is because he isn't eager to go to war. Given the way our wars have gone lately, I don't see that as a fault.

Dave Morris is a teacher of improv comedy. Here in eleven minutes, he lays down some basics that may be of use to you in real life — which is, after all, a form of improvisation…

I thought Mr. Leno's last Tonight Show was pretty good and I don't see the online reviewers today noting what I couldn't help but notice; that Jay, who would easily have done an hour-long tribute to himself, allowed it to lapse into The Billy Crystal-Garth Brooks Hour. Granted, a lot of what both did was hurling love at him but he gave them both plenty of time to soar as performers. Brooks even got to close the show.

That's always something that I always liked about Leno's Tonight Show: It wasn't all about him. He made his guests look very good and rarely felt the need to make it all about himself. And that was one of the reasons I thought Conan's Tonight Show didn't work nearly as well and why I sometimes turn off Letterman. (My other problem with Dave is that there are times when he's interviewing someone and his manner suggests that he doesn't really care about his guest. So why should I?) Jay just always seemed to me to like the people he had on and be pleased when they scored.

Dave, I hear, said something sportsmanlike about Jay last night and so, though he probably didn't mean it, did Jimmy Kimmel, as well. Conan said something graceless and bitter. I get the feeling that if Conan spills his soup at dinner, that's Jay Leno's fault.

A friend of mine who works for Jay is quite shocked that Jay isn't out there letting people know he'll be back soon in something else…and he says this is a sudden change; that only a month or two ago, everyone in the office expected Leno to have something lined-up and ready to announce soon. My friend quotes things Jay said to the staff that made them all think that that last thing he wanted was for his final show to feel like a retiring-from-show-biz party. But in some ways, it did.

I don't think the guy's going away. I think he has a great future as an Elder Statesman of Comedy — one in which he'll be more revered than he seems to be these days.

Jack Kirby died twenty years ago today. And since then — and I know I speak for a lot of people in this capacity — there hasn't been a day when I haven't thought about him, talked about him, answered questions about him and done something that would not have been possible had I not been exposed to him and his work. He was a lovely man and a brilliant man and the older I get, the more I realize how lovely and brilliant he was.

I don't know where it all came from but from this little man with the tough New York accent had idea after idea, concept after concept, insight after insight…and not just about comic books. If you mentioned yogurt strainers to Jack, there was a good chance he'd have something interesting to say about yogurt strainers. And if he didn't, there was a good chance that the next time he saw you, he'd lead off the conversation with an amazing idea concerning yogurt strainers.

Those who never met him sometimes, I think, have a hard time understanding why those of us who did feel as we do about him. After all, to them he was just another good comic book artist, right? Well, not really. Not to take anything away from other great comic book artists but I never met one who could think as large as Kirby or who tried to think as large as Kirby. Every drawing he did, every story he wrote was a part of something much, much bigger.

He was a very kind man and very trusting…too trusting, we all felt at times. He always treated you as an equal even though you never were.

When people hear that I was for a time his assistant, a lot of them think I was there to learn to draw like him. I wasn't, in part because I couldn't; not in a million billion years of practice. But there were things to learn from this man about almost everything else and I was fortunate to maybe grab a small handful of them. I wish he was still around so he could reap some of the financial benefits that his former collaborator has achieved by surviving. I wish he was still around so that every one of you could maybe have the chance to meet him for yourself. And — getting selfish now — I wish he was still around so I could learn even more from him.

We miss you, Jack. And by "we," I mean just about everyone you ever touched, in person or on the page.

Dahlia Lithwick has written the smartest thing I've read about the Woody/Mia/Dylan battle.

Like most of you, I'm going to read Mr. Allen's rebuttal/reply to Dylan's accusations whenever it appears. And then I think I'm going to stop paying attention to this matter until such time that there's an actual resolution. Which will never happen.

This is the Mnozil Brass with their version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Andy Warhol once said that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. I believe that in the future, everyone will have their own interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Thanks to Phillip Pollard for telling me about this one.

We'll be through with all these Leno posts in a day or so…but here's Bill Carter's piece for the New York Times.

I think it's a little silly to try and compare Jay's last show to Johnny's. Johnny was leaving and while he said he wanted to find something else to do in show business — and from all reports, did look and didn't find anything he wanted to do — Jay is not retiring from the entertainment industry or maybe going away forever, no matter how much Howard Stern might like that. He's just not going to do that particular show anymore.

Entertainment Weekly, which has kind of always had an air of nastiness about Jay Leno, is getting in some final shots in at him. You'd think this article called "Jay Leno deserves a dignified 'Tonight' exit" would be a lot nicer to him than it is. And just to achieve the opposite of what that article's headline says, they just ran this one, which is basically a compilation of every nasty thing they could find that anyone famous has said about the guy, carefully edited to leave out any trace of compliment.

The article's more than a little dishonest with stuff like saying people in Hollywood hate him "…because his primetime Jay Leno Show tanked, sinking Conan's Tonight Show before it had even really begun." Yeah, you could believe that if you ignored the simple fact that O'Brien started at 11:35 on June 1, 2009 and his ratings were poor and dropping well before Leno's 10 PM show started on September 14. (And come on! If there was any evidence at all that Jay's show was really sinking Conan, don't you think NBC would have gotten rid of Jay and kept Conan? There was a reason most of the affiliates demanded Jay back in that slot.)

But where the piece is really slimy is by listing things like feuds with and angry words from guys like Arsenio Hall and Dennis Miller without mentioning that those guys patched up with Jay, apologized for a lot of that and became frequent guests on his show. The Letterman quotes have also been sliced and diced. I would also question the claim that he is "…widely reviled by the majority of his peers." To prove this, they cite a couple of impressions not unlike ones done of anyone who's that big, a few competitors who Jay was beating, a few jokes that show no real animosity, Howard Stern and only a couple of other guys.

Yeah, there are people who don't like Leno. There were those, like Stern, who hated Carson. But if the author of that piece thinks there's a wide consensus among other comedians against Jay, maybe she oughta ask Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Bill Maher, Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, Howie Mandel, Billy Crystal and a few other names I'll think of later. Because those are Jay's peers.

CVS Pharmacies to stop selling cigarettes. Good for them…but what they should really do is take a look at some of those homeopathic "drugs" they sell in the aisle with the odder diet aids. Most people at least know that Marlboros are not good for them.

Also: CEO Larry Merlo said, "We've come to the conclusion that cigarettes have no place in a setting where health care is being delivered," he said. That's true but I'd be curious to hear the explanation of why those three aisles of liquor do.

They all are, lately…and boy, that guy's turning out to be a disappointment to a lot of us. His main defense against what his former buddy David Wildstein is and might still say is that Wildstein is a treacherous, unreliable guy…take, for example, an incident that he was involved with in high school back in 1979.

Now, that's a pretty lame attack on someone because, first of all, it was high school. Secondly, it was so long ago. And thirdly, this was a guy Christie picked and used to think was honest and reliable. But as it turns out, it's lamer than that. Even the story from high school wasn't what Christie's reps said it was.

This is the best he's got?

Here's a good overview of the ratings situation in late night TV. Of special note is the age of the audience that each host is attracting. They probably all skew older than you'd expect.

These numbers bode well for Mr. Fallon and I believe he's doing much better than Conan O'Brien was when he moved into the 11:35 time slot. The question is whether Jay's viewers will stick with him or if they'll go away as rapidly as they did last time. If I had to guess — and that's all this is: a guess — I'd venture that an awful lot won't stay with Fallon. A few will go to Dave and fewer will go to the other Jimmy…and we'll look back and say that when Jay left, he took a large chunk of the late night audience with him.

Also surprising to me is how so many folks who watch Jon Stewart don't stick around for Mr. Colbert…but then what we're looking at here are the averages for an entire episode of each show. When you see that Letterman has 2.95M viewers and Ferguson has 1.48M, your first thought is that Craig is losing half of Dave's audience. But Dave doesn't have 2.95M people watching the last minutes of his show. He has more than that when he starts and less when he ends as more and more people go to bed or change channels. To really assess Fallon's strength, you'd have to have the numbers for Leno's last 15 minutes and lay them alongside the numbers for Fallon's first fifteen. Maybe NBC's decision would make more sense if we saw those stats.  And maybe I'd change my guess if we did.

If Hillary Clinton becomes President — and I'll write a post one of these days why that doesn't feel likely to me — a lot of people think she should appoint her hubby as Secretary of State or to the Supreme Court or put him in charge of White House Interns or something. Amazingly, she cannot. Not unless they get one of those divorces that the tabloids have been telling us for twenty years now were only days away.

Today (Wednesday), the topic on Stu's Show is The Jack Benny Program, which ran on TV from 1950 to 1965.  Your genial host Stu Shostak will be discussing it with Laura Leff and Martin Gostanian, two experts on this series starring one of our most beloved entertainers.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond.

Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three.