By now, you've no doubt heard of the passing of actress Arleen Sorkin at the age of 67. She was best known as the first voice — and in a way, model — for the popular character Harley Quinn who debuted in Batman: The Animated Series in 1992, the creation of my pals Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. Arleen was also known for her role on the daytime drama Days of Our Lives and for her work as a writer and comedy improv performer. Her closest friends seem to have all been aware of her recent struggles with the lung cancer that took her life.

"Her closest friends" did not include me. I met and talked with Arleen on several occasions but never for very long and not in recent years. She seemed charming and funny and witty and that, I'm afraid, is the extent of my in-person observations. Those closest friends of hers all loved her dearly and, like all her many fans, are saddened by the loss.

I'll get my one Bob Barker story out of the way first: It was I-don't-know-how-long-ago-it-was…maybe not even in this century. It was after January of 1983. I was at a car wash that is no longer on Highland Avenue in Hollywood, a few blocks south of Sunset. My car had just gone through the gantlet of sudsers and sprayers and it was now out in the area where a bunch of sweaty, underpaid men dried it off with blue cloths.

Bob Barker's car — which was bigger and more expensive than mine, of course — had gone through the same process and was next to mine, being dried off by other sweaty, underpaid men with blue cloths. Bob Barker in casual sportswear was standing next to me, watching them dry his car, waiting for them to be done with it. I recognized him and felt I oughta say something to him. So I said, "You know, they don't like it when you tip them with Plinko chips."

I was hoping for a laugh…or at least a smile. Instead, I got a look that clearly said, "Why are you talking to me?" And without uttering a syllable in my direction, he turned away, waited until they signaled his car was done and then he walked over, handed a sweaty, underpaid man a buck or two and drove off.

That's my Bob Barker story and it had to be after January of '83 because that's when they introduced Plinko to America's longest-running and still-on-the-air game show. I was kind of a fan of The Price is Right for a while, not so much of its host but I sometimes enjoyed watching that well-oiled machine operate. As I wrote here once before, "If that show had never existed and you walked into a network today and pitched it, describing what they are able to accomplish taping two a day, you'd be told it was utterly impossible to mount a show that gives away so many prizes and that it would take three days to tape one hour of what you're describing."

As you may have heard, The Price is Right has left Stage 33 (aka "The Bob Barker Stage") at CBS Television City in Hollywood and is presently relocating to a new facility in Glendale. It was amazing that they could do it at all at CBS but especially in a studio that was not built for that kind of show and where there was little room to house all the cars and living room sets and boats they had on display each tape date. A few times, I got to prowl around backstage and was impressed by how terrific the stage crew was. I also couldn't help but note how terrified they seemed to be of doing even the teensiest thing that might upset Mr. Barker.

My pal Stu Shostak and I have an occasional (but friendly) argument based on my belief that what Bob Barker did hosting that show forever (it felt) was impressive but nowhere near as impressive as what, say, Johnny Carson or even Jay Leno or David Letterman did. Talk show hosts have to do all-new shows with mostly-new material on a daily basis. Game show hosts go out and do essentially the same show over and over and over. Even that's not the easiest thing in the world but being on so long is a matter of endurance, not creativity. In a sense, Barker's job was to not "keep it fresh," just reliable.

And yes, I think Drew Carey is just as good in the job…maybe a little better because he understands that the games and the contestants are the stars of the show, not the guy with the microphone. Barker, especially in his later years, had a little too much self-adoration for me. There was also the fact that my favorite models on the show all went away suing Bob and/or the program.

I respected the endurance. It takes a certain talent to do anything for that long…and I also admired him for his stands on Animal Rights. But I guess I never really liked him that much. Then again, I may be projecting from his previous long-running game show, Truth or Consequences, which I thought was one of the more detestable shows ever on TV. It was all about bringing contestants on stage to be embarrassed and have the audience laugh at (not with) them. I thought Barker, who acted as the ringleader of all that, was a pretty slimy on-screen presence.

Yeah, I think I may be blaming him unfairly for that because to then do a hit show as long as he did is, no matter what you think of the guy, an astounding achievement. Or maybe I'm still pissed that he didn't laugh at my Plinko chip joke.

Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone weighs in on the question of what things D. Trump is saying or might say are protected by the First Amendment and which ones can be restricted by court order. A lot of people in this country seems to think that the First Amendment gives them the right to say absolutely anything they want at any time in any venue. Some even go so far as to think their First Amendment rights include forcing us to listen to them. This is one of the more interesting discussions The Eagle has posted…

I love photos and video of old Los Angeles and here we have a few minutes of uncolorized, silent footage of a drive down Wilshire Boulevard around 1935. According to the description on the post, this starts at Canon Drive in Beverly Hills and goes east. I do slightly recognize a few things but not enough to be sure that that's what we're looking at…and I have no idea what the last minute of this film is all about. But if nothing else, enjoy looking at all those beautiful cars…

I surprised myself — because I believed me when I said on this blog I wouldn't do this — by watching some of the G.O.P. Presidential Debate. I didn't see every minute but I saw enough to have a clear opinion of who won it: Donald Trump.

Trump's consistently high polling among Republicans is, I believe, a result in large part of the members of his party not seeing any viable alternative — a belief that no one else has a chance of winning and putting the presidency back under their party's control. The debate, I think, reaffirmed the idea that there's no alternative. None of those folks on stage looked like they could win a game of hopscotch, let alone the highest office in the land. So by not showing up, Trump won.

Chris Christie looked like he was struggling hard to find a "take charge" moment that never came and they all looked befuddled. And I was befuddled as to what that party stands for these days.

Is it the Pro-Life Party? Apparently not because Mike Pence, who once was for banning every abortion everywhere at any time, is now saying "A 15-week ban is an idea whose time has come." Since about 91% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, I guess a lot of those abortions are now okay with Pence and others.

Is it the Law and Order Party? Apparently it's not that either since most of those candidates would support a candidate who'd been convicted of a felony.

Is it the Straight Talk Party? Apparently not since so many questions were dodged with Ron DeSantis as the leading dodger…and the fact-checkers have been pretty busy. See here and here and here and here and probably many other places tomorrow morning.

In fairness, I really think this debate format is a great way to fill the air with words, most of them pandering to the live audience, without really saying anything…but I don't think anyone who participated "won." If I had to pick the candidate on that stage who was the most impressive, it would probably be Nikki Haley but that's kind of like being the most dignified of The Three Stooges…or in this case, eight.

I hope Donald Trump takes a good mug shot tomorrow…because we're going to be seeing that photo everywhere and forever. He and people who love him will put it on banners, posters, t-shirts and anywhere else they can make money off it. People who dislike him will put it on banners, posters, t-shirts and anywhere else they can make money off it.

Within twelve hours of its release, there will be thousands of doctored versions online making him look like a god, a clown, an angel, a devil, a convict, a saint, a woman, a vampire, a zombie, a movie star, Alfred E. Neuman, Nick Nolte in his famous mug shot…anything you can think of. I'm already sick of that photo and they haven't even taken it yet.

In 1966, there was an off-Broadway show called The MAD Show written by Larry Siegel and Stan Hart — two of the main writers for MAD magazine. It featured material that either had appeared in that publication or could have and its cast consisted initially of Linda Lavin, Jo Anne Worley, Paul Sand, Richard Libertini, and MacIntyre Dixon. In Act One, Ms. Lavin sang a song called "The Boy From…" which was kind of a soundalike/parody of the then-recent hit, "The Girl From Ipanema."

The music for this song was written by Mary Rodgers, daughter of the well-known composer Richard Rodgers. The lyrics were credited to "Esteban Río Nido" which, as everyone came to know, was corrupt Spanish for Stephen Sondheim. A few years ago, Ms. Lavin performed the tune for an online tribute to its lyricist…

I probably won't watch the G.O.P. Debate tonight and I certainly won't watch Tucker Carlson's exclusive interview with You-Know-Who. It will be hard though to avoid endless replays of the juicier moments from either.

I'm assuming Chris Christie will not miss an opportunity to challenge the other candidates for the Republican nomination to be clear on where they stand with Trump. Will they support him through all indictments and convictions? If so, why are the running against him? I would expect a lot of statements from Christie that start with the phrase, "I'm the only person on this stage who…"

You know, Chris Christie would be a great candidate if only he weren't Chris Christie.

Something that I think could improve interpersonal relations in this world is if we all worked a little harder on The Lateness Thing. There are people — you know them, I know them — who never seem to show up anywhere at anything remotely resembling "on time." And I don't mean they're five minutes late or ten minutes late. I mean they're hours late…and with no call to alert you to their tardiness.

Back before we all had cell phones, I could be forgiving about the "no call." If you were racing to get to wherever you were supposed to be by a certain time, it would only make you even later to pull off the road and find a pay phone to call and say, "I'm sorry, I'm running behind." Now that almost all of us can all call or text from wherever we are, I get more bothered about "no call."

But there are also people — you know them, I'm one of them — who I think are too impatient with lateness. We're usually very prompt and we have trouble understanding why everyone isn't. We attribute all sorts of character flaws and unseemly motives to lateness. I did once have a lady friend who intentionally kept everyone waiting as a kind of power game: "I don't wait for you, you wait for me."

She believed, via a thought process I didn't really understand — that arriving well after everyone else established her status as the most important person in the room. It also enabled her to "make an entrance."

I also knew one guy who was always late and felt it was your fault for expecting him, when he said he'd be there by 6, to expect him to be there by 6. It was like, "Oh, you know me. I'm always late. Why in the world would you expect me to arrive when I said I was going to arrive?" It was, to him, kind of a charming habit, almost a trademark. He also had a few Sovereign Citizen tendencies like believing speed limits didn't apply to him and he could travel between any two countries without a passport.

In past essays on this topic on this site, I've ranted about how annoying it is to miss airline flights or the first 10-15 minutes of a show. And that will never stop being annoying but my attitude on this has evolved. It's skewing more towards, "Well, that's just how some people are." I wish they weren't that way. Most of them wish they weren't that way. But some people just have a strange relationship with this thing called "time."

And some people just go through life with an anxiety about all the next steps in life we take each day. I'm thinking now about a lady I dated years ago who with one exception was just about as perfect as anyone whose standards in men were low enough for me to qualify as a boy friend. The exception was that she was late for every single date, every single appointment, every single moment when she had to do something at an appointed time.  It wasn't just when she was with me or supposed to be with me.  It was airline flights, doctor visits, jury duty…once, she showed up at a Surprise Party for her best friend forty minutes after everyone else had yelled "Surprise!" for her best friend.

I tried (sweetly, I thought) explaining what she was doing to me and others around her with her constant lateness.  Didn't help.  I tried explaining (also sweetly) what she was doing to herself by missing flights, not being able to use tickets she'd purchased for events that required timely arrival…even job auditions.  She lost one job she really, really wanted by showing up three hours late for an interview.

It didn't even work to tell her we had to be someplace at 7:00 when the real time was 8:00. We'd somehow still get there at 8:20…or later. She would get herself ready to go and at the time we agreed I'd pick her up, she probably could have been out the door. Still, there was always this underlying trepidation, trying to delay the inevitable moment when she would appear in public.   She had to spend another forty minutes making microscopic improvements on her makeup.

And in the last few years when I've thought about current friends who do this kind of thing, I've started equating it with the most impossible, hard-to-believe example of performance anxiety I've ever witnessed…

I've written here before about a short period of my life — late teenage years — when I was sometimes trespassing around the NBC Studios in Burbank. I'd often find my way into Tonight Show tapings when Johnny Carson, then based in New York, brought his show out here. That man making his entrance to deliver his monologue was one of the most thrilling Show Biz moments I ever got to witness in person. It had to do with his history and how important he'd become to so many of our lives, and it had a lot to do with that incredible-when-you-were-there-to-hear-them-live band.

One minute before tape rolled, I'd be where I usually stood, which was among all the production people off to the side of the set.  If I acted like I belonged there, people just assumed I belonged there…or more often, didn't pay the slightest bit of attention to me. Today, you have be patted-down, strip-searched, cross-checked on computer and in possession of three forms of I.D. to get where I got in 1970 by just walking by the guards with a friendly wave.

Ed McMahon would be doing the audience warm-up, warming-up an audience that needed no warming-up whatsoever. They came in, ready and eager to clap themselves silly and to laugh at every single thing Mr. Carson said and did. You could feel how excited everyone was to be there. Ed would make a joke where it sounded like he was about to announce that there was a guest host that night and a chill of tension swept through that stage…quickly replaced by a huge laugh and exhale when Ed revealed that Johnny was there.

I already knew Johnny was there. From where I stood, I could catch a glimpse of him making his walk from the make-up room to the position backstage from which he'd make his entrance.  He looked handsome and well-dressed…and petrified.

That's right: Johnny Carson, who'd done this eight jillion times before, always to a huge welcome, looked terrified at stepping out on that stage in front of them. Like there was a good chance they wouldn't love him the way they always had and always would.

He did not make that walk alone. His director, Bobby Quinn, was with him, telling him everything would be fine, it would all work. Someone told me Quinn often told Johnny dirty jokes to distract him and get him laughing and "up." Usually, the director of a show would be in the booth, running things from there but at that moment, the Assistant Director was in his chair, calling the shots.  Quinn was needed to hold the star's hands and shove that star out onto the stage at the proper moment. Then and only then, Bobby Quinn could run up to the booth and take over the command.

This was not the way it was with everyone who hosted that show. I was there once when Bob Newhart guest-hosted and saw no visible anxiety at all. No need to have the director play nursemaid. Years later, I saw Jay Leno do it and again, not a jitter, not a shiver, not a twitch. He joked with people on his way to the stage…the exact same person he'd be twenty seconds later when he was out in front of the cameras and America.

But Johnny Carson, walking that same walk, looked like he was on his way to appear before a firing squad because…well, that's just how some people are.

Once Johnny got out there and received that huge, inevitable ovation, he was fine…just as when we got to the show or the party of whatever it was, this lady friend of mine was fine. I saw her untense the same way, if you were there on Stage 1 at NBC, you could see Johnny untense. It's not a perfect analogy because Johnny, of course, was never late making that entrance. But I think my date just had a problem looking in the mirror and declaring herself ready to be seen by others.  The lateness was just her way of stalling.

Johnny couldn't stall. He knew that no matter how frightened he was, he had to walk through those parti-colored curtains two seconds after Ed said, "Herrrre's….Johnny!"

I talked to that lady recently — our first contact in more than twenty years. She wrote me on Facebook to say hello and ask me how Comic-Con had gone. Our "relationship" since we broke up has consisted wholly of her reading this blog and at one point, she came across one of my older posts about people in my life being late. She figured I was talking about her…and I was but not only her.  What I'm telling you about her was true of others I've known and folks I know today.

Her message led to a phone conversation in which she let me know that since she got married and had kids, she's gotten a lot better at being on time for things.  She apologized for all the problems she'd caused me through what she called "avoidable lateness."  She defined that as "the times I could have been on time and I wasn't."  I apologized to her for not being more understanding and for sometimes confusing "unavoidable lateness" with the avoidable kind. I really did think at times she was doing it on purpose.

She told me on that call, "I have a daughter now. In three more years, she'll be the same age I was when we dated." The daughter is starting to take after Mom back in her never-on-time-for-anything days. Mom doesn't like what she's seeing but having been there/done that, she at least understands where it comes from. I'm going to try real hard to always look at it that way.

It's Randy Rainbow time!  It's Randy Rainbow time!

This is for those of you are sitting home wishing you could experience the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland. WARNING: Viewing this video will cause that song to reverberate in your head for a very long time. I'm still hearing it from the one and only time I rode through that attraction, which was in 1969 and every time I see Richard Sherman, I  pay him royalties.

Earlier this evening, I got a slightly disturbing call.  "Annoying" might be a better choice of words.  It was from a pharmacist at the CVS Pharmacy near my home…and I should explain the following.  I take a number of prescriptions and I have approximately a third of them filled by a mail order firm, another approximate third filled at a nearby supermarket pharmacy and the rest by the CVS Pharmacy near where I live.  Why do I divide my business up like this?  Here's why…

• The mail order firm is connected to my health insurance and they fill what I have them fill at very reasonable prices and in most cases, they'll give me a 90-day supply which is much handier than dealing with monthly renewals.  Of course, it sometimes takes a while for my medicines to arrive.
• The supermarket pharmacy doesn't take my health insurance but on several — not all but several — medications I take, their price is way cheaper than the mail order pharmacy.
• The CVS Pharmacy is, as I mentioned, near my house.

A year or so ago, I found it was valuable to me to take the time to go online with the mail order pharmacy and the supermarket pharmacy and look up what each drug I take costs through them.  It took about a half hour but sending certain prescriptions to one pharmacy and certain ones to the other is now saving me a couple thousand dollars a year.  I am not exaggerating.

And when a doctor of mine prescribes something they want me to begin taking immediately, I have them phone it in to the CVS, where because I use my health insurance there, it's the same price as the mail order firm only I get it right away.  If it turned out to be one of those prescriptions that's way cheaper at the supermarket pharmacy, I could switch it from CVS over to there but so far, that hasn't happened.

If this sounds confusing, just forget about it. All you need to know is that CVS only fills about a third of my prescriptions.

So I get this call from a pharmacist there who says he and the CVS computer system have looked at my medical record and determined that there's a certain medicine I'm not taking that may help me. He wants permission to call my physician and discuss it and, I guess, talk my physician into prescribing it for me. Apparently, they do this a lot but it's the first time I've gotten one of these calls. I probably don't have to explain why this bothered me but I will anyway…

A pharmacy is supposed to dispense what doctors order. The folks at the pharmacy know how to do that but they know very little about me, my body, my medical hisory…pretty much everything about me. Oh, yeah — they also know my birthdate. Every time I get pills or ointment from them, they ask me over and over for my birthdate, which is a tremendously secure way to make sure I am who I say I am. After all, my date of birth is only known to me and anybody who looks at my Wikipedia page.

(It's like when you buy something at a store with a credit card and they ask you for your zip code. That's a good way to make certain that anyone who has stolen my credit cards has also stolen my driver's license.)

The folks at CVS have never taken my blood pressure, checked my sugar, done an EKG on me, listened to my lungs, peered into my ears with a flashlight, had me say "Ahh," had me turn my head and cough…anything. My physician has done all that…and they want to tell him what they think I need? If that's useful then I have the wrong physician.

I doubt they can arrive at any informed medical conclusions by looking at a list of what my doctors have prescribed but even if they can, they only have a partial list. And that partial list doesn't tell them if I'm already taking that particular drug they think I should be taking.  I'm not because it's a drug to which I happen to have a very severe allergy. It is most definitely not a drug I should be taking.

My physician is a great guy and I trust him. He's also one of the busiest people on this planet. He doesn't need someone who studied a lot less medicine that he did wasting his time phoning to say, "We see your patient occasionally experiences headaches. May we suggest you prescribe a remedy called aspirin?"

After I got off the phone call an hour or so ago, I thought for a few minutes, started writing this and then decided to call back on the phone number that my Caller I.D. said the call was from. I wanted to make sure he really was with the CVS Pharmacy and this wasn't a scam spoofing their name.  Since I qualified for Medicare, I get a lot of calls from organizations trying to sound like an official arm of Medicare, getting me to let them send me something they've decided I need…oh, and they need to confirm my Medicare number so they can bill Medicare.

The call allegedly from CVS was indeed from CVS.  I reached the man who'd called and we had a nice conversation that calmed me down to the point that I could finish writing this. Why did he call me? Because the computer there told him to call me. He didn't say this but I got the feeling he thinks he should be filling prescriptions instead of making these calls.

Tomorrow when the CVS Customer Bitching Line is open, I'm going to call up and add my voice to the list of folks who think a drug store should not be doing this. If there isn't already a long list, something's wrong. That will probably keep me up all night fretting and that in turn will cause CVS to call up and ask if they can phone my doctor to suggest sleeping pills.

This is from The Ed Sullivan Show for May 4, 1969. Because The Beatles had been such a ratings-booster for Ed, he often tried to feature Beatles songs performed by others. Some of these pairings of performer(s) and song were ghastly match-ups but once in a while, like this one, they were kind of charming. This is Joel Grey who, as Ed notes, was the star of the Broadway show, George M. Ed does not mention that George M closed a week before this broadcast…

Twitter has been doing so badly since it was acquired by Elon Musk that it's now gone into hiding, reportedly working under the name "X."  If I were doing that poorly, I'd start signing my work that way too.  I still check in on it now and then.  Enough people who post interesting things are still posting interesting things on it but I haven't put a message on there since 1/6/23.

I recently opened an account on Bluesky, which strives to be a quieter, less inflammatory place for social messaging.  So far it seems to be that but I must admit to having some trouble with the way it works.  When someone reposts a message by someone else, it doesn't identify who the original author was.  And I frequently am shown replies to messages but cannot locate the message to which that reply is replying.

I'll give it another few weeks to see if they improve the software or I get the hang of it.  If you're a member there, you can follow me there.  I'm @evanier.bsky.social but I haven't decided yet if I'm going to stick around.  If you're not a member there, you need an invite code to join but I don't have any to give out yet.

Comedian John Regis died last night at the age of 94. He'd been living for some time at the L.A. Veterans Home and he recently took a bad fall there. I'm told John had a very distinguished military career — he was in the Air Force for nine years — but I never heard him talk about it. He did however have an endless stash of anecdotes about performing in dives, dumps and Playboy Clubs. I never saw him work but he had a rep as a guy who could sing, dance, tell jokes, play an array of musical instruments and so on. Whatever it took to please a crowd.

John was one of those performers who for a long time just worked wherever he could — clubs, cruises, Vegas, industrial gigs, wherever. I don't think he got on TV very often but a lot of folks can make a decent living without that. He did sometimes talk about how his income plunged as those Playboy Clubs closed. I think that's where I first saw his name: In ads for a Playboy Club. He said that for a long time, he just went from one to another, working eventually at every one of them.

I knew him mainly from Yarmy's Army, the social group for comedians, comedy writers and other funny people. The last few times I saw him at meetings, maybe five or six years ago, he had some sort of medical shuttle service bring him over from the Veterans Home and then take him back there after he shared food and jokes with a lot of his friends. Nice man.