Number two hundred and forty-seven in a series…

Earlier today, I told you about my friend Valerie Perri who I knew before she became an important star of musical comedy. We have here now a fuzzy but watchable clip of her starring in Evita in the original Chicago production of the show.

I saw her in it two and a half times at the Shubert in L.A., the half being a viewing of Act One from the wings. I was over in Century City for a meeting at ABC. When I left, people were going into the Shubert for a matinee and because I had some time to kill, I went over to the stage door and told the man there, "I'm a friend of Valerie Perri's." Usually they call and check but to my surprise, he just let me in. My whole time there, in fact, no one ever asked who I was or questioned my right to be on the backstage premises.

I didn't want to disturb Valerie when she was about to go on so I wandered over to an off-stage post and watched the whole first act standing there, dodging as set pieces and actors went on and off. At one point, the fellow playing Che Guevara (not Mandy Patinkin; his replacement) crashed into me and he apologized more profusely than I did, even though I was the one who wasn't supposed to be there.

I stood there for the entire first act waiting to either be thrown out or for Valerie to have an exit on that side of the stage and notice me. Neither happened. Having killed the time I had to kill, I left at Intermission and on the way out, Che Guevara spotted me and apologized three more times. The real Che wouldn't have apologized once.

I liked that visit better than the previous two times but I thought I liked that show. Then a few years later when I was dragged to a production of Evita that she was not in, I realized I didn't like Evita. What I liked was Valerie. You know how sometimes a favorite star can be in a really, really bad movie but you enjoy watching it anyway because of them?

So I don't like Evita. I know there are some folks who reflexively loathe everything Andrew Lloyd Webber has ever done but I don't feel that way. Matter of fact, just about the only thing I like about Evita if Valerie isn't in it is his music. I think most of the lyrics are silly, written by someone who wasn't sure if he was writing for people who lived in Argentina in 1952 or New York in the seventies. And the book is a story that is of no interest to me about people who are of no interest to me. There are some nice moments of musical dramatics and when the budget is sufficient, some great staging tricks…but they do not add up to a great musical.

Here's a nice moment with Valerie playing Eva Perón. A friend of mine who saw her in it also saw Patti LuPone, who first played the role on Broadway. He said to me, "I thought Valerie was the better singer but I really liked the fact that with Patti, you couldn't understand the words." With some shows, it almost helps…

I don't drink soft drinks or live in New York but I don't like Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to ban large cups of such beverages. For one thing, the plan as stated seems to be filled with loopholes. What about buying two drinks? And lately, every fast food place I go into seems to offer unlimited free refills.

More to the point, there's a limit as to how much The State (even when it's The City) should be controlling what people put into their bodies. I could maybe see the justification for saying, "Look, because people drink this stuff, it creates public health problems that cost the city $X million per year so let's impose a tax that will recoup that money." But that's not what Bloomberg wants and if you did pass that, you'd have to start controlling the portion sizes of french fries and the packaging sizes of M&M's and the tonnage of Whoppers.

Meanwhile in similar news, I voted by-mail the other day on the proposal here in California that would impose a new hefty tax on cigarettes. I don't smoke, will never smoke and couldn't dislike smoking more. It's killed (literally) friends of mine, put other friends in the hospital and I find it repulsive to be around. Still, I have some sympathy for smokers being treated like lepers. It's legal and they have the right to do it to themselves as long as it doesn't affect me. I feel this way about a lot of things including the drinking of alcohol, the eating of cole slaw and the watching of Jimmy Kimmel.

I was conflicted about how to vote on this because after doing a bit of research on the 'net, I came to the conclusion that the "anti" campaign is a matter of tobacco companies spending millions of dollars to spread what are mostly bogus facts. My natural instinct is to want to see a campaign like that fail…but that's not reason enough. It is, after all, possible to make a dishonest case for a good cause.

My problem is that I don't think this is about discouraging smoking and don't think it's the government's place to do anything more than disseminate accurate information about what it does to you. I think this is more a matter of: "The state needs money. I don't want my taxes raised and since I don't smoke, let's stick to it the smokers." That doesn't seem right to me. Hey, I don't go to football games or eat Mexican food. Let's balance the budget by imposing a hefty tax on football tickets and tostadas. That's not how government and taxation are supposed to work.

I went back and forth on this one and finally decided to vote against it. Polls say it'll pass by a good margin so I'm not regretting my decision. But if it passes or fails by one vote, I'm going to worry I did the wrong thing.

Cartoonist Jen Sorensen writes an open letter (comic strip) to the Supreme Court about health insurance.

Funny how a picture on the Internet can jog your memory…and with me, one jog always leads to nine others. When I tell anecdotes, I have been known to stray wildly from topic to topic with no apparent connection…but there's always one somewhere in my mind. It may be underwater but it's in there.

I recently came across this image of the now-eradicated Shubert Theater in Century City which I used before on my site. I found it back then on the web and looked to see whose it was so I could write for permission to use it on my site. To my surprise, it turned out to be someone I knew: Alan Light, founder of the The Buyer's Guide to Comic Fandom…a publication for which I'd written and one that is still being published by others as the Comic Buyer's Guide. Alan graciously okayed my borrowing and I ran it…but didn't look that closely at it.

If I had, I would have seen — as you will if you enlarge it — that the show then playing at the Shubert was Beatlemania, which would place it around early 1978. At least, that's when I saw Beatlemania there. You may recall the show which starred four men who looked and sounded a lot like John, Paul, George and Ringo if you half-closed your eyes and had forgiving ears.  They performed an hour or two of Beatles' hits, morphing in style and dress through the era when them guys was fab. For most attendees, it was kind of like, "What would it be like to attend the ultimate Beatles concert?" and I could certainly understand and even savor a bit of that fantasy. I wasn't a maniacal Beatles fan (like some people I know, Shelly) but I certainly liked most of their music.

What I couldn't understand was why the show's cast recording sold a single copy.  It reportedly sold quite a few.  At the time, there were many record albums — yes, record albums — which collected actual Beatles hits (meaning: performed by the Beatles)  in various aggregations.  There were even a couple that contained all the same songs that were replicated in Beatlemania. So you could buy the real Beatles performing those tunes for $6.98 or you could buy the recording of four actors and a bunch of musicians trying to sound just like the real Beatles for $9.98.

Okay, explain to me why anyone would opt for the latter. I'll wait.

I went to see Beatlemania because a friend of mine named Valerie Klemow wanted to see it…and she wanted us to pretend we were seeing the real Beatles. The premise of our evening was that from the moment I picked her up, all through dinner and the show and going home, we would pretend those were the real Beatles up there. I was to say nothing to destroy the illusion..and I did a good job of it except for the moment when I muttered something about "Paul's" accent sounding more like liverwurst than Liverpool. But I'll tell you what else I remember…

Earlier that day, my agent had sent me out to meet a nice lady named Bonny Dore, who was in charge of development or production or something (I suspect, everything) at Krofft Entertainment. That's "Krofft" as in "Sid and Marty Krofft." I didn't meet Sid and Marty that day but I met Bonny and she interviewed me for a staff writing position on an upcoming series.  I always go to such meetings with an attitude of, at the outside, "Gee, it would be nice if I got this but it won't bother me much if I don't."  That's the most I ever feel in terms of hopeful expectation.  Sometimes on the way out, it's "Gee, I hope they don't offer me that" or "If they do offer, I'm saying no."  But I never think that life as I know it will end or even be much worse if they opt to hire someone else.

…though I admit I did want to work for the Kroffts.  I didn't like all their shows but I liked enough of them.  And even the ones I didn't like looked like they'd be fun and educational to work on. Also, I'd recently separated amicably from my writing partner and this, if I got it, would be my first-ever TV writing job being hired as a solo. So on both fronts, it was kind of a big deal or at least as big as I ever allow these things to get.

At intermission at Beatlemania, I went to a pay phone in the lobby (remember pay phones?) and used a beeper to access my Phone-Mate answering machine at home.  Remember Phone-Mate answering machines — the kind you couldn't access over the phone without using a little beeper? I used mine and heard a message from my then-agent, Bernie Weintraub, telling me, "Congratulations! You start Monday working for the Kroffts!" Come to think of it, remember when all agents were named Bernie?

I've had hundreds of jobs and professional associations over the years, some lasting a few days; others, a few months.  I've had four or five that have lasted a few decades and working with Sid and Marty is/was one.  I say "is/was" because though it's been a few years, Marty always has a dozen projects soon to blossom and I expect to be involved in one or the other…maybe. Anyway, it all started that evening.

I also have this memory of that night: Valerie was a talented but then-largely-unknown actress-singer. At one point, she pointed towards the Shubert proscenium and said, "Someday, I'll be performing on that stage."

Usually, you hear that kind of talk and you think, "Uh-huh, yeah, well good luck to you with that one." That's probably what I thought that night. But not all that long after, I found myself sitting in the Shubert Theater watching the first L.A. production of the Andrew Lloyd Webster musical Evita and the woman on that stage playing Evita was, yes, Valerie.  This would have been a good enough story if she'd been in the chorus but no, she had the lead role and I wasn't the only person who thought she was incredible in it. Critics concurred.

By then, she'd married someone else, taken his surname and become Valerie Perri. She's married to another someone else now but she's still indecently talented. Carolyn and I ran into her and her spouse last week when we went to see that great new production of Follies and I immediately asked her, "Why aren't you in this?" And then I answered my own question by saying, "Oh, I know. It's because you're not old enough!" Which she isn't but someday she will be and she'll be great in that show. Here's her website. If you ever see her playing in anything near you, order tickets immediately.

I have other special memories of the Shubert.  I'll post a few more of them in the days to come.

Number two hundred and forty-six in a series…

I think we've fixed the problem that was causing some browsers to skip over messages on this site…and by "we," I mean that I fixed 5% of it and Glenn Hauman fixed the other 95% of it. Thanks, Glenn!

If you still have the problem, try reloading the page or flushing the temp files on your browser. Which is something you should do every day or so anyway.

The L.A. Times has a good obit up on Dick Beals, who died the other day. It mentions something I totally forgot about Dick: He was a pilot. He liked to get away from Los Angeles for long periods and would sometimes fly his own plane back for recording sessions.

Our pal James H. Burns sends in this remembrance of Dick…

Back in 1999, at the Old Time Radio Convention in Newark (now, no more), I was chatting with Ed Hulse (he, the master of pulp history and a major film buff) outside the hotel's entrance, when Dick Beals showed up from the airport, exiting the hotel courtesy shuttle. We nodded Hello, and Dick went to enter the hotel. He stood in front of the "automatic" glass door —

And nothing happened.

I was about to see if the door was broken or something when Beals simply walked to a side panel that he knew must be there, pressed it, and the door slid open.

I still don't understand how the door's weight sensor, or electric eye, wasn't adjusted to account for what would be the equivalent of a child's size. Maybe it was just out of whack.

But there was this kind of look of sadness in Beals' eyes, this impression of something that had happened many times before, but it was an annoyance — out of no other choice — he knew how to deal with. That look has stayed with me all these years.

(It's far more important, of course, as you point out, to remember all the joy that Beals' talents helped create!)

And maybe I just read too much into the moment. Beals might simply have been annoyed that he was in Newark…!

I've worked with a number of folks who were very short (Billy Barty, Herve Villechaize, Dick) and also very tall (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hulk Hogan). One can usually sense a certain amount of mixed feeling about how nature made them "different." There are the obvious pains of trying to fit into a world built too small or too large for you. I'm not that tall and there are plenty of times when I feel like Gulliver…and wonder how Kareem at 7'2" deals with situations that cramp me at 6'3". On the other hand, if Kareem were 5'8", a lot of the best things that have happened to him in his lifetime would probably never have happened.

Would Billy, Herve and Dick even have been in show business — a field they all loved — but for their physical conditions? I can't speak for how they viewed the trade-off but there had to have been moments when they considered the "up" sides. Billy at least used to joke and say to people who took unwanted pity on his size, "Hey, if I were your height, I'd be working at the Safeway Market."

By the way, James…I'm sad to hear that Newark is no more.

From an old Muppet Show: Dr. Teeth sings a song written by Stan Freberg…

Hey, where did ketchup come from, anyway?

Like Billy Pilgrim, this blog has suddenly become unstuck in time. At the bottom of the first page, there's a link that says "Older Posts" which should take you back to the post from immediately before the last post on Page 1 here. In most cases, it will. Sometimes, it leaps back a day or two.

On my main computer at the moment, it works fine in Firefox but leaps back a few days when I browse the same material in Internet Explorer. One or two other people have reported the problem no matter what browser they use. On my secondary computer, it works fine in any browser.

I have no way of repairing this but am reporting it to folks who might. In the meantime, here's the workaround. When you get to the bottom of Page 1 and want to read the item before it, click on the subject line of the last message at the bottom of Page 1. That will take you to an individual page for that item. Use the links at the bottom of that page to move back to the item before it and then the item before that one and the item before that one, etc.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I expect it will be fixed one of these days.

Number two hundred and forty-five in a series…

Our friend Frank Ferrante — oft-mentioned on this site for his uncanny portrayal of the brother of Harpo, Chico, Zeppo and Gummo — dropped by my recording session the other day to show his lovely daughter Lucy how cartoon voices are done. Frank makes his debut doing that kind of job in a third season episode of The Garfield Show…and no, I don't know when it will air in this country. But he has the title role in an hour-long special called Long Lost Lyman. (Note to longtime fans of the Garfield comic strip: Yes, it's that Lyman. You'll find out where he's been all this time and no, he wasn't locked in Jon's basement.)

Frank won't be doing his Groucho show anywhere for the next few months. But folks in Southern California may be excited to know they can spend An Afternoon with Groucho — it's a 2 PM matinee — at the Richard & Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach on Sunday, October 14. I know it's a ways off but you can order tickets now. I'm going.