Carl Reiner is 98 years old today. Let me see if I can put that in a context we can all understand: Yesterday, Carl Reiner was 97 years old and that was amazing. Today, he's a year older than that.
During around 80 of those years, he was either a working actor, a working director, a working producer, a working writer or retired. Actually, he's been writing books while retired so maybe he's not retired at all. What's more, most of what he's done as a working actor, a working director (etc.) has been very well respected and often loved. I can't think of anyone else ever in show business with a track record like that. Did he ever have one day since he turned 21 when he was worried about his next job?
I probably said this about him somewhere else on this blog but I'm too lazy to do a search…but what amazes me about the man is that he's spent almost all of those professional years making other people look good. On Your Show of Shows and other programs he did with Sid Caesar, he made Sid Caesar look good. On The Dick Van Dyke Show, he made Dick Van Dyke look good. On many great record albums, he made Mel Brooks look good. Directing movies, he made Steve Martin, John Denver and many others look good.
Now, you might say, "Hold on, Charlie! How difficult is it to make someone like Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks look good?" and the answer is "Very difficult." To share a stage with someone like that, you have to be as good as someone like that or you disappear. When one guy's being the straight man and one guy's being the funny guy, the straight man has to be adept enough to "spot" (in a gymnastic sense) the funny guy…to see where he's going and to help him get there and to pull him back when he goes too far.
So he's always been good at that and he has a reputation for being one of the nicest people on this planet. The few times I've been around him make me think it's richly deserved. A joyous 98 to him and I hope I can rerun this column every year for many years to come.
Darn near every day of my life the last thirty years, something happens that causes me think, "I couldn't have done that X years ago." When I think that, I'm thinking of something involving technology that did not exist a decade or three before, usually something involving my cell phone and/or my cellphone and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the Internet. I look something up. I order something. I communicate with someone. I create something. Just writing on this blog and having you read it, possibly moments after I post it, is something that was impossible in an earlier part of my adulthood.
Less than an hour ago, I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to do today. Since I ain't venturing out of the house, it pretty much came down to (a) what I'm going to write, (b) what I'm going to eat and (c) what computer-based chore I'm going to do. I have megabytes and megabytes of files on my computer that I need to sort through, deleting unnecessary ones and dupes and putting "savers" into their proper folders. I'm trying to devote an hour or so of each day of imprisonment to culling that stuff down.
So as I was lying there, I received a text message on my iPhone from a market that's supposed to deliver supplies to me today between Noon and 2 PM. It contained the happy words, "All items available," meaning that they didn't give my Thomas' English Muffins and my organic baby carrots to someone else. And I thought, "Gee, if you absolutely have to have a global pandemic, it's handy to have the Internet around." When they had the 1918 influenza plague, they had to get through it without online ordering.
I'm not being silly about this…I think. You have plenty of time right now to ponder things so maybe ponder all the ways this horrible infestation is a bit more endurable because you have certain inventions at your disposal, including whatever you're using to read this. Yesterday, I did a two-hour online video conference call about a project I'm working on. Couldn't have done that years ago. All week, I've been ordering items I need for my house. Couldn't have done that years ago. I've been learning things I need to know about the COVID-19 virus on the web and I don't feel as alone as I might have felt if I'd been in self-isolation in the eighties. And think of all the videos I can stream and watch and the books I can download to my iPad and read…
As I've been writing this, I received an alert from my alarm system that someone was on my front porch and the camera showed me it was a guy from Amazon delivering a package. I watched him enter some info into a wireless device and seconds later, I had a text message that a delivery had been made to me of something I ordered to reorganize part of my closet. That's something else I can do today.
We take a lot of this stuff for granted and that's okay but it's nice to pause for a mo and be a little amazed by things you can do now but couldn't do even late in the previous century. I also got an e-mail this morning from an actress I met briefly at a party some time back. She flirted with me for a few seconds while Amber was off to the bathroom or somewhere.
Now, this actress is saying that if I PayPal her any amount over $25, she will schedule an all-nude Facetime chat with me. I assume that means she'd be nude — not me — but you never know. I'm going to e-mail her back that I appreciate the offer but I have to go rearrange my closet, plus there are all those mystery files on my computer. I don't know what the hell some of them are…
From August of 1987: Buddy Hackett, guesting on Johnny Carson's show, tells three jokes. The third of these — the duck story — is a great example of how a master tells stories…
I know you don't come to this site for information on the pandemic. If anything, most of you probably come here in search of some corner of the Internet where it isn't being discussed and I'm trying to limit the percentage of my day I spend reading or talking about it. But during the small amount of time I do spend reading about it, I come across a few articles that might be worth passing along. I'll understand if you skip them. We've gone from hearing too little about the virus to too much…
I always thought my lifetime subscription to Playboy magazine meant my lifetime, not the magazine's. The current management has announced that there will be no more issues this year and many folks are assuming that's the end of it. If so, it would mean the publication outlived its founder by three years and its relevance by about forty.
It will continue as a somewhat valuable brand name and it doesn't seem unlikely that some day in the future, in the midst of exploiting that name and bunny logo for wearing apparel, games, home video and general nostalgia, someone will say, "Hey, how about trying it as a magazine again?" And I'll have to call them up, as I have at least three times in the last twenty years, and remind them what the term "lifetime subscription" means.
The primal philosophy and world of Playboy now seem deeply antiquated and silly and in many ways, sexist and shallow but a few things could be said in its defense. One was that, nekkid photos aside, it was an excellent magazine because Hugh Hefner spared no expense to make it so. Almost every major American author turned up in its pages as did many important artists and cartoonists. Its pages were often filled with very fine journalism and crusades for civil rights and, of course, advocacy for the premise that adults should be able to buy and read whatever they like.
Playboy was important to me in two ways. It wasn't the first place I ever saw a beautiful naked woman but for many of my teen years, it was the best and most reliable source of them. Later, in ways I don't feel right discussing on this blog, outgrowing Playboy and understanding the puerile parts of it got me to a much better place vis-a-vis associating with the opposite gender. We sometimes learn plenty by seeing examples of where we don't want to go.
I have a complete collection and every year or so, I get in the mood to browse older issues — rarely anything much after 1980. It's a great personal WABAC Machine and not just because it momentarily reprises old crushes on a couple of Miss Augusts. The interviews…the cartoons…the sense of what was "cool" when I was fourteen…it's all fun to revisit and to remind me who I was back then.
Apart from keeping a complete set complete, I haven't cared much about the magazine for 30+ years and, given its circulation problems, it's obvious that no one else has, either. Still, it's sad to see an old friend go.
The lovely and charming Shelly Goldstein favors us with a new video that she made this morning. Shelly writes wonderful song parodies like this one based on Ann-Margret's big song in Bye Bye Birdie…
While you're cooped up in your home with only a TV that has seventy-eight thousand things on it you can stream and watch, to say nothing of all those books you haven't read, DVDs you haven't played and all the websites online you haven't visited, you might need something to keep you entertained. Two friends of mine are offering you just that at no charge…
TwoMorrows Publishing, which puts out wonderful books and magazines about comic books and the related arts will give you a free digital edition of one of their magazines when you shop on their website. Just enter the code "stayhome" when you checkout and they'll deduct $4.95 from what you're paying. There's no minimum order but the code can only be used once per customer and it's valid through March 31, 2020. TwoMorrows reserves the right to end this offer at any time if they detect misuse.
If you're not heavy into comic books but you like old TV shows, get the latest issue (#8) of RetroFan with a big illustrated history of The Flintstones by our pal Scott Shaw! and an in-depth interview of the lovely Judy Strangis, star of Room 222, ElectraWoman and DynaGirl and many other shows. That's Judy and me posing with a copy below.
If reading is too tough for you and you just want to watch and listen, Stu Shostak has made a number of episodes of Stu's Show available for free viewing — and I'll warn you: Some of these shows run longer than it would take you to get across country…on foot. (I'll also warn you: A couple have me in them.) But if a topic interests you, no one gets into more depth on the subject of classic television than Stu and his guests. Go here and see if you can't find a few that entice you.
There's loads of advice out there about self-isolation, when to wear masks and when not to, washing your hands for 20 seconds (or if you want to live dangerously, 19) and other ways to deal with the Global Pandemic. It's all useful and me, I'm just staying in my house, writing and sleeping and eating whatever's in my kitchen or occasionally ordering in. I've often gone for several days at a time like that so this isn't a total disruption of my life…yet.
Everyone's talking about how to maintain your health and that's fine, but I think we need some pointers on how to maintain one's sanity. We have this problem and I always think that the first step towards dealing with a problem is getting a good read on exactly what the problem is and — very important — just how big it is. Coping with small problems is a very different thing from coping with the big ones. When I look back with some perspective on problems of the past that I've handled well or not handled well, I generally think the "not handled well" ones went that way because I misjudged their size.
Small problems are problems you can often make go away entirely, sometimes with one clever or perceptive solution. I've even made a lot of small problems go away by realizing I didn't have to do anything; that they'd just burn themselves out and go away on their own. Or sometimes that they weren't really problems in the first place. My problem was that I thought they were.
Steer Manure. You'll understand why this photo in a moment.
Big problems often require multiple solutions along with the realization that you may not be able to make them totally go away for a long time, if at all. Sometimes, you must accept that you can't make them completely disappear because that's just not possible. You have to learn to live with them for as long as they endure (occasionally, forever) and minimize the damage. And one way they do damage is to occupy our minds; to make us spend so much time itemizing all the negatives and possible dire chapters ahead that we forget the positive things we can do now.
Remember: It's real easy to imagine horrible, catastrophic outcomes that could happen…but won't. You can spend a lot of time worrying and getting your stomach tied up in a knot the even Houdini couldn't undo, imagining horrible, catastrophic outcomes that could happen…but won't.
I'm trying to find the right balance for the current crisis. I can't not follow the news and I can't not talk about it with friends who call. I can also do way too much of that and I think in the last few days, maybe I have, spending too much time thinking and talking about what I can't do instead of what I can. I can't invent the perfect vaccine but I can finish my part of an issue of Groo.
I am not suggesting those two are in any way comparable in importance or in service to mankind. One of them — I'll leave it to you to decide which — is a wee bit more beneficial to all, or at least me.
What's going on in the world now is all so unprecedented in our lives and we aren't seeing nearly enough calm, informed leadership at the top. I absolutely understand that this thing caught a lot of people unprepared and they don't have a manual full of rules that will tell them what to do in this situation that has never happened before. But us living with this 24/7 in our heads and ulcers ain't helping.
There's a bit of advice that most of my close friends have heard from me, in some cases many times. I deliver it so often that I'm amazed that in the 7030 days I've been writing this blog — that's the actual number — I've never delivered it here. But I haven't. I just searched this site for "steer manure" and I didn't find a trace of this advice so here it is…
Imagine one day your doorbell rings. You open the door and there's a masked stranger holding a huge bucket of steer manure. Before you can stop him, he hurls the contents of that bucket into the middle of your living room, then runs off cackling with glee…
…leaving you with a living room full of steer manure. At this point, there are two things you can do about it…
You can cry and moan and curse and spend days telling everyone you know about the horrible thing that was done to you and how it's so unfair that that asshole masked stranger did to you and what you're going to do to him when you get your hands around his throat and you can feel very sorry for yourself and mad at a world in which any old masked stranger can come by and just dump a heap of steer manure in someone's living room and why doesn't someone stop this kind of thing? And then, finally, you can clean up the steer manure.
Or you can just clean up the steer manure.
You have to do it, now or later. Why not do it now before it really starts smelling up the place? You might even find a constructive use for all that steer manure. Spread it on your lawn. Or get a mask and dump it in the living room of someone you don't like.
Some people love to play the victim card and talk endlessly of how unfairly they've been treated and how awful they have it and how you should forget about your life and feel real sorry for them. I guess that can be fun at times but it doesn't get the steer manure out of your living room. Only getting the steer manure out of your living room gets the steer manure out of your living room.
That's my advice. Find that sweet spot between being alert and managing your life in the current pandemic emergency…and letting it define your life and upset your entire being and pre-empt things you could be doing. A certain amount of thinking ahead is essential and if you'd done enough of it before, you wouldn't be panicked about running out of toilet paper right about now and trying to use only one square of it at a time. ("How could I have known I'd need to wipe my butt in March?")
I'm struggling to find that middle-ground myself. I'm not sure exactly where it is but I know there is one and I need to be there. It's someplace between living like Howie Mandel and waiting for the government to come around and start passing out Soylent Green.
Just to show you how different things were in 1973, here's a joke from a Johnny Carson monologue back then. For those of you who don't remember, "Mrs. Olson" was a character who appeared then in commercials for Folger's Coffee…
Last July in reporting on that year's Comic-Con International in San Diego, I wrote…
The start of one of the panels I appeared on at Comic-Con was delayed so that a Congressional Aide — I'm sorry I didn't get her name — could present a citation to the con…The proclamation noting the fiftieth Comic-Con was signed by four of San Diego's five members of Congress. Only one of them is currently under criminal indictment and likely to be in prison by the fifty-first Comic-Con.
That (now former) member of Congress, Duncan Hunter, was just sentenced to eleven months in prison for breaking campaign finance laws. Mr. Hunter gained notoriety for using all the same excuses that Donald Trump uses when he gets caught doing something wrong: The news media is lying. I didn't know anything about it. It's not illegal. Democrats did worse. Etc.
Also, Hunter was one of the first two Congresspersons to endorse Trump for president, the other being Chris Collins, who was sentenced to 26 months in prison and who used all the same excuses.
So it looks like Hunter will indeed be behind bars by the fifty-first Comic-Con. I wish I could accurately predict just when the fifty-first Comic-Con will be.
There are no human beings visiting the Chicago Aquarium at the moment…so why not let the penguins waddle around and see the place? One of these is Wellington, who is said to be the oldest penguin alive, having inherited the title from Burgess Meredith…
Well, it seems that as of this moment, there are only three men who have a real shot at being the next President of the United States and Bernie Sanders' shot is not from the free-throw line but from way out in the parking lot. The other two, of course, are Joe Biden and the guy who just told us the virus is "something we have tremendous control of" when clearly we don't and he'd say that no matter what the true situation was.
We should remember that all three of these men are in the age bracket that's supposed to now stay home and self-isolate but instead, they're traveling about, appearing in public places, not staying six feet from people. The incumbent still seems to be shaking hands and he sure doesn't look or sound well. I'm not saying he has the CO-VID19 virus; just that he doesn't look or sound healthy. That could mean something for our future.
So could the health of Mr. Biden but barring some unforeseen factor other than racking up delegates, the Democratic ticket will be Joe plus a woman to be named later. It'll probably be one who'll bring some youth to the ticket (meaning she will be under seventy), possibly a non-white presence and certainly some solid liberal credentials.
Bernie Sanders has already succeeded in pushing Biden and their party to the left in many ways, particularly on health care…and health care may well be more important in this election than anything has ever been in any other election. A lot of folks who never particularly cared if other people got sick are now barricaded in their homes or waiting in three-hour Costco lines or just plain fearing for their lives because other people got sick.
Kevin Drum summarizes some of Biden's leftward drift here and this should appease most of the Sanders/Warren supporters and get them on board, especially if they consider the alternative. Our goal (I voted for Sanders, remember) should be to keep the House and flip the Senate.
Forget about some of the stupid-ass, wrong things Biden's done in the past. You've already forgotten about some of Bernie's. President Biden with a Democratic Congress will enact more of The Bernie Agenda than President Sanders could with a G.O.P. House or Senate. And a second-term Trump would dismantle health care, Social Security, the Bill of Rights, U.S. sovereignty. the election system, the Justice League of America, the infield fly rule, all businesses without his name on them…
The other day here, I linked to a video of a number from the 1997 Broadway revival of one of my favorite musicals, 1776. My buddy of half-a-century Joe Brancatelli suggested I mention that two of the three men in that video were not in those roles when that revival opened. When it opened (and when I first saw it), Brent Spiner was playing John Adams and Pat Hingle was playing Ben Franklin. The late Merwin Foard, whose passing we were noting, played Richard Henry Lee.
When I went back to see it many months later, Spiner and Hingle had departed. Michael McCormick was playing Adams, David Huddleston was Franklin and Merwin Foard was still playing Richard Henry Lee. The TV appearance I embedded was of that cast. But there was another cast replacement that intrigued me and I wanted to mention it. It involved the fine character actor, William Duell.
Mr. Duell, who passed away without enough notice in 2011, was one of those actors who worked all the time, alternating between screen and stage. The Internet Broadway Database has his first appearance on The Great White Way as 1954 with a revival of Threepenny Opera — but remember that's just Broadway. Almost no one starts a stage career on Broadway. He was born in 1923 so I'll bet you he was performing on stage for more than ten years before that.
"1776"
There are many places you might have known him from. When 1776 first opened on Broadway in March of 1969, William Duell played the role of Andrew McNair, the Congressional Custodian who fetched rum for some of the delegates and who near the end of the play was sent up to ring the bell to proclaim American Independence. He repeated that role in the movie version which came out in 1972.
Two other places from which you might know William Duell: He had a real prominent role as one of Jack Nicholson's fellow inmates in the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And he played Johnny, the shoeshine man who gave Leslie Nielsen tips on how to solve every case on the short-lived, much-admired TV show, Police Squad. That's a photo of him as Johnny at right in the image at the top of this post.
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
As I mentioned above, in 1997 when the Roundabout Theatre Group opened their wonderful revival of 1776 at the Gershwin Theatre, Brent Spiner was Adams, Pat Hingle was Franklin and I should have mentioned that Michael McCormick was playing Caesar Rodney, the delegate from Delaware who was dying of cancer. If they thought to ask William Duell to reprise his role as McNair, they'd have been out of luck. He was not available because he was working six blocks away at the St. James.
He was playing Erroneous — a befuddled old man, abroad now in search of his children, stolen in infancy by pirates — in a revival of another of my favorite musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This was the production that starred Nathan Lane and I saw that one twice, too. He was great both times.
Okay now, follow this. When Spiner and Hingle left 1776, they brought Huddleston in to play Franklin and McCormick moved up to play Adams. So they needed someone else to take over as Caesar Rodney and they got…William Duell. Because that production of Forum had just closed.
His last Broadway job seems to have been in the revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner in 2000, also with Nathan Lane and still available as a DVD and for streaming here and there. His last credit seems to have been a part on the movie, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in 2003. So he worked pretty steadily from 1952 to 2003. Going straight from one show on Broadway to another is not something a lot of actors can manage so I thought it was worth noting. It looks like his whole career was like that: One part after another.
