Category Archives: To Be Filed

Long day. Amber and I went to lunch at the Magic Castle, then out to Burbank where DC Comics was holding a Len Wein Memorial on the Warner Brothers lot. A nice crop of Len's friends were there, including several who flew into town just to be present, then have to fly back home.

Dan DiDio spoke. Paul Levitz spoke. Gerry Conway spoke. Mike Friedrich spoke. Marty Pasko spoke. Kurt Busiek spoke. Melinda M. Snodgrass spoke. Barbara Randall Kesel. I spoke. Other people spoke. It was funny and poignant and in the after-speeches milling, a couple of those present remarked that they actually learned a thing or three. That was one of the many reasons it was great to be around Len. You always had a good time but now and then, you could actually learn something of real value.

There was a great slide show of Len photos, most of them taken by his lovely spouse Chris Valada, and many of us thanked Chris for taking such good care of him. One of the speakers — I think it was me — remarked on how difficult it was to turn loose of Len. If at any time in your life you were privileged to know him, you know what I mean.

Once I post this item, we will be nine posts from having 25,000 posts on this blog. Admittedly, there have been some reruns — by my count, 136. But I've also deleted at least that many posts in the 6,208 days since I started this blog…and so what? 25,000 posts on a one-person blog has to count for something. Since I average about four a day, we'll probably see Post #25,000 this weekend. It will be, as promised, a pretty long one in response to what I thought was the best "ASK me" question submitted since I solicited questions for the occasion.

Since I saw Something Rotten! last night, I've been listening to the cast album, enjoying the songs again and picking up some of the lyrics I didn't get in the theater.  Here's a video from the recording session for that album…

Very disappointed in Al Franken and the Democrats who demanded he fall on his sword…that is, unless there's something else they all know that we don't know. In situations like this, I often wonder if we have all the facts. Many of the ousters or forced resignations relating to sexual impropriety make more sense if you imagine up some incident that hasn't gone public.

And it makes you wonder what Mr. Franken is going to now turn to as a profession…back into comedy? I can imagine him hosting a show not unlike Bill Maher's or maybe John Oliver's. I can also imagine him staying in government in some capacity. He's too smart and too funny to disappear for long. I figure there will at least be a book.

Meanwhile, a lot of folks quoted or tweeted this line I had here the other day…

In other news, it's starting to look like Republicans will be welcoming an accused pedophile into the Senate around the same time the Democrats are getting rid of a guy who sometimes gives unwanted hugs and kisses to adult women. You ever get the feeling that you're watching a game where the two sides are playing with different rule books?

What I meant by that is they're playing by different rule books. The Trump one, which has been adopted by most of the G.O.P., is that everything's acceptable as long as you win…or can at least claim a win. If you have to lie to win, you lie. If you have to change the rules, you change the rules. If you have to support a pedophile, you support the pedophile. It may not be right but losing is wronger.

I can almost understand a certain kind of voter who thinks like this: They don't like the idea of electing someone with Roy Moore's sexual history and would condemn him mightily for it if he was a Democrat. But they see things like abortion as a far greater evil and/or are terrified that their religion and guns will be taken from them. If voting for Moore can help them in those capacities — and if they can find a way to view the accusations against him as bogus or even arguable — they can view a "win" for their side as the greater good.

We all make those rationalizations to some extent. Those of us who favor Gay Rights backed a guy named Obama who for a long time insisted that a marriage was between one man and one woman. What's varies is how much we're willing to fib to others (and ourselves) and not play fair to get to our wins. In Trumpworld, you don't let anything stop you.

Last night, I went to see Something Rotten!, which is playing in downtown L.A. at the Ahmanson through December 31. A woman sitting behind us kept announcing in a too-loud voice that she'd heard it had been extended into 2018 but I just checked and I see it opens in Sacramento on January 2 so I don't think she knew what she was talking about. The tour continues from there to Salt Lake City, then Ft. Worth, then Hershey, PA followed by many other places. Here's the list. If it wanders your way, go see it because I highly recommend it.

It's the story of two brothers who in the year 1595 are competing with William Shakespeare to make a splash in the theater. This is one of those "the less I tell you about the plot, the more you'll like it" things so I'll just say that their struggle affords ample opportunity for catchy musical numbers, a serviceable romantic sub-plot, very clever costumes, and a lot of funny stuff, much of it references to modern-day theater. At one point, I got a little weary of the anachronisms but then, lo and behold, they came up with some that were so funny, I forgave them.

The cast is quite wonderful, especially Rob McClure and Josh Grisetti as the two brothers and Adam Pascal as Shakespeare. And there's a number in the first act called "A Musical" which some of you may have caught in a truncated version on the Tony Awards show a few years back. In fact, they made it the opening. It's as hilarious and fine as any song I've ever seen on a stage and the biggest problem with the show is that Act Two can't quite keep up the batting average of Act One. You will enjoy the evening or matinee the most if you know a little about musical comedy history and a lot about Shakespeare, though neither is required.

Some of you may remember that I originally had tickets for 11/28 and then I got an invite to the Len Wein Memorial at the Writers Guild and it was that night. So I sold those tickets and bought a pair for last night. When we got to our seats, there was a little gift-wrapped packet on mine and I assumed it was a mistake. No mistake. Inside was a tiny Something Rotten! notebook and a note that said, in part…

Mr. Evanier,
We can't help but notice that you're coming to multiple performances of Something Rotten! We hope you're enjoying the show, and wanted to thank you for your ongoing support of our work at the Ahmanson Theater.

That's a nice gesture and it will be even nicer if it isn't followed by endless phone calls trying to get me to subscribe…which I might do if all their productions were as good as this one. In any case, I noticed a lot of these little gift packets on other seats so that's a good indicator that other people are liking this show as much as I did.

The fires all over Southern California have me quite depressed. They're nowhere near me but I wish (a) we spent more money in this country on disaster preparedness and (b) news people thought that covering something like this was not so much about showing destroyed homes and interviewing the poor people whose homes have been destroyed. I also think someone has told them that viewers are more interested in hearing about how animals have been rescued than in how people have been rescued.

I wouldn't make a good TV news reporter. I wouldn't want to bother people in what might well be the worst moments of their lives and I'd feel compelled to put down the microphone and try to help the victims or something.

In other news, it's starting to look like Republicans will be welcoming an accused pedophile into the Senate around the same time the Democrats are getting rid of a guy who sometimes gives unwanted hugs and kisses to adult women. You ever get the feeling that you're watching a game where the two sides are playing with different rule books?

I have to clear my mind of all this and finish what is at least supposed to be a funny script, then I have tickets to a play which I wish I could postpone. So don't expect much here the rest of today. As I say each Christmas when people give me gifts I don't want, I shall return.

This just in from Douglass Abramson…

I did a little poking around, out of curiosity, and I'm pretty sure that the video comes from the 1979 Society of West End Theatre Awards. (I've also seen it called the London Theatre Awards and officially changed to the Laurence Olivier Awards in 1984) Channing was nominated in the Best Actress in a Musical category.

Thank you, Douglass!

I'm not certain what this is from but it's Carol Channing doing the "Hello, Dolly" number at some function in London in 1979. What more do we need to know?

The Trump Administration is opposing laws that say that a business — like a baker of wedding cakes who won't bake them for gay weddings — shouldn't be free to discriminate. Its stance is probably because Trump believes this is what his base wants but I suspect it's also because Trump believes that the owner of a business should be able to do any damned thing he wants. Jeffrey Toobin reports on the arguments before the Supreme Court.

The Trump/G.O.P. tax bill may not be quite as much a "done deal" as most folks assume. John Cassidy explains why.

So now we're hearing that Robert Mueller is looking into at least some of the financials of Donald Trump and his associates. There are lots of folks out there arguing that Donald Trump is a great president, a man of God, a pillar of integrity. I suspect there darn near zero of the folks saying such things are confident that a probe into his finances will not reveal a string of dirty deeds — the kind that are done dirt cheap.

Matt Yglesias says that Democrats are decrying the wrong things about the tax bill. What's bad is the way it hurts poor folks and others who need the social safety net. What's not bad (necessarily) is how it grows the deficit…or so Yglesias says.

And finally: We're down now to the point where Roy Moore's defenders are saying, in effect, "Yeah, but let's give him some credit for all the teen-age girls he didn't molest!"

I can't think of the last item I got in the mail that made me as happy as what I received yesterday: A printed copy of Volume 4 of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips.

This book would make anyone happy since it's packed with two years worth of what a lot of us think is the best newspaper strip ever done — Walt Kelly's Pogo. Not only that but the two years are 1955 and 1956 when Mr. Kelly had truly hit his stride and was doing the kind of work that made it and him famous. But I have a special reason to be delighted…

As most of you know, I got involved in this series because I was involved with Walt Kelly's wonderful daughter Carolyn and she was involved in this series. Matter of fact, she was its co-editor and designer and over-all Quality Control Martinet…and I mean that in only a good way. No one else supervising a series of books reprinting a newspaper strip could possibly care about its excellence more than she cared about preserving and presenting her father's magnum opus.

It was not easy to meet the goals she set for the series. Good quality source material was not available for some of the early strips so Carolyn painstakingly restored some medium-quality source material into good source material, retouching and cleaning up the strips by hand and/or Photoshop. You would not believe how many hours she spent doing that. That delayed the books. Then her co-editor Kim Thompson began battling the cancer that took his life in 2013. That delayed the books. Then Carolyn herself began battling the cancer that took her life earlier this year. That really delayed the books.

One of the many ways I knew we were going to lose her was that she began asking me, "If I don't make it, will you make sure the Pogo series is completed, just the way we planned it?" I assured her several times it would be and I have stepped into her role as co-editor to make sure that happens. The long-delayed Volume Four is now printed and Volume Five is on schedule. In fact, Volume Five is about 80% complete — with a foreword by Jake Tapper.

Volume Four contains two years of strips — dailies and Sundays with the Sundays in color — as well as historical material, a little tribute to Carolyn and a foreword by Neil Gaiman. At the moment, Amazon is giving January 9, 2018 as its release date but since I have an actual, real printed-and-bounded copy to my left, it should be out through them before that. It takes a few weeks for all the copies to arrive in this country from the overseas printer and then the crates have to clear Customs…but before Christmas seems highly possible.

"How do I get a copy?" I hear you ask. This link will allow you to pre-order one from Amazon — and since I have my copy, it shouldn't be that long before you have yours.

But, as they say in infomercials, wait! There's more! If you didn't get Volume 3 or maybe even if you did, you can get Volume 3 and Volume 4 in a lovely boxed-set with a slipcase that holds both of them. Amazon says they'll be delivered at the end of March but I don't believe that. Why? Because I didn't just receive my copy of 4 yesterday as a standalone. It came as part of my lovely boxed-set of Volume 3 and 4. I've got one! The boxes were made at the same time as Volume 4 and an additional pressing of Volume 3. Here's a link to order the boxed set — and I should mention that the box looks different from the illustration there.

And I should also tell you that at this moment — and, knowing Amazon, maybe not for long — you can get the boxed set of Volumes 1 and 2 at this link for about the price of one volume. If you're thinking of collecting this series, this would be a great way to start.

I was a fan of Pogo long before I ever met Carolyn, even before I could "get" two-thirds of the jokes in it. Fortunately, there were enough that even a third was more than enough. I loved it and I wished someone would do the series I now find myself co-editing with Eric Reynolds. If you want to say Peanuts was the greatest strip ever or that Krazy Kat was or Li'l Abner or the Elzie Segar Thimble Theater (aka Popeye), I'll admit they're all wonderful too and we won't have much of an argument. But I'll still be right.

I was just discussing the previous post with a friend and I reminded myself of something. Back in the eighties, I was working for a company when one of the top men was fired…and rather unceremoniously, I felt. They put out one of those stories nobody ever believes about how he'd resigned to spend more time with his family — which is certain code for "we canned his sorry ass" — but the announcement seemed even phonier than usual. I wondered why since his job performance, while not grand, didn't seem that inept.

A year or two later, someone in a position to know told me that the guy had been fired because of a couple of "inappropriate" situations with females in the workplace. In this case, as a euphemism, the word "inappropriate" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. It was standing in for something close to rape.

The company had fired the guy. It had also paid significant money to the women to settle a lawsuit or the threat of one. Everyone involved — victims, included — wanted it kept hush-hush so it was kept hush-hush. End of story.

One of the questions I keep hearing about the recent epidemic of sexual impropriety scandals is "Why is this happening so much now?" An obvious reason and probably the main one is that when some women come forward and are believed, that gives confidence to others to come forward. We may have Mr. Cosby to thank for that.

But I'm wondering if maybe the uptick in such cases isn't quite as large as it seems. Maybe there have been a few more of these in the past than we thought and they're just not being kept hush-hush any longer.

I meant to mention this earlier in the item about Sexual Harassment. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else but it sure strikes me that a few of these firings — people losing their jobs over something they said or did that was deemed "inappropriate" — are cases where the company was looking for an excuse to terminate or break a contract.

I'm not talking about the ones where someone committed rape or anything approaching it. But there are some involving physical contact that doesn't seem to be so wrong as to warrant ouster and some that are merely imprudent (as opposed to threatening) speech. In those cases, I wonder if the employer isn't seizing on an opportunity to get rid of someone they were already thinking of getting rid of. You could probably get some people to settle out their contracts for a lot less money if you did it that way. Just a thought.

My favorite impressionist Jim Meskimen has a real "hard-to-get" guest on his latest celebrity podcast…

First, from Jim Kosmicki…

It would seem to me that sexual harassment in comics would be much more prevalent at conventions and other such public gatherings. Haven't most of the major cons adopted specific guidelines on appropriate behavior, especially as cosplay has gotten more prevalent?

Yes…and here's the thing that I think about whenever I read such guidelines. The rules they give to follow at their con are all good rules…but they're also rules that you should follow everywhere, not just at a con. Here's part of one convention's statement…

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Shouldn't everyone be refraining from that behavior when they go to Arby's? When they play softball at the park? When they walk down any public street? What the convention is saying — and I'm not faulting them for this — is "If you're going to do these kinds of things, don't do them where people are going to complain to us about them or where we might be sued." Maybe we need one of those policies for the whole planet.

This next one is from one of those "don't use my name" people…

How do you feel about the people who knew about Louis C.K. or Cosby or any of those people and did nothing? I saw people dumping on Jon Stewart saying "He must have known his friend was doing this."

I don't know what Jon Stewart knew. The trouble is that in a lot of cases, you'd be trying to police unsourced, vague gossip. If you heard about Louis C.K.'s "Hey, Look Me Over!" activities before they became headline news, you probably heard that he did this in some unspecified place at some unspecified time with some unidentified woman. And whoever the woman was, you probably don't know if she was fine with it or if she was so horrified or if she just wants to forget about it and not have anyone mention it ever again.

Moreover, if you asked the person who told you, "How do you know this?," the answer might have been something like, "Oh, this guy I know heard it from his roommate's boy friend. He did something on the crew of some show Louis C.K. did." It's tough to do much with that kind of info, especially when it doesn't involve you directly.

Now maybe if you knew Louis C.K., you could go to him and say, "Hey, I hear these rumors…anything to them?" He'd almost certainly deny them — apparently, he did deny them to a few people — and then what are you going to do? You might have heard it happened but you probably don't know for absolutely sure that it did.

And I keep coming back to this: You don't know if the victim(s) want to make an issue of what happened or if they just want it to go away. I've known a number of women who were subjected to what we now call with great tact, "sexual impropriety." These were mostly actresses pursued by Wanna-Be Weinsteins, though one lady I knew was pursued once by a studio head and on other occasions, by two people everyone would call Comedy Legends. She wanted to make like those incidents never happened. She was horrified when I suggested that the actions of the studio head warranted a call to the police. She was dead certain that just dropping these matters would be less painful and harmful to her and she had a right to have it that way.

The good thing that is happening now is that more women are speaking up about these abuses…but not all women are. Anyone think for a moment that there aren't ladies who've kept quiet about what Cosby did to them? Or Weinstein? Or most of those folks? Most of the women who did come forward did not do so at the time. Some waited years until some scars had healed and/or they thought they might be believed. (I absolutely do not buy "Why didn't she say something at the time?" as a reason to disbelieve any of these accusations.)

So I don't know what Jon Stewart knew. Or what he could have done about it if he had known.

So now we have one of Trump's lawyers claiming, in essence, that the President of the United States can do any damned thing he wants and he won't be breaking the law. We are but days from the assertion that he can indeed grab women by the pussy and shoot someone on 5th Avenue.

Wish we had Republicans in this country who would react to that the same way they'd have reacted if a lawyer for Barack Obama had said that. Remember when Signing Statements were proof that the Chief Exec was power mad and outta control?