Every casino in Las Vegas — and probably every casino anywhere — has one or more employees who work the phones to try and lure big gamblers to come play. These employees are referred to by various titles but "Casino Host" is a very common one. An uncommon one I've heard is "Captain Ahab" because a big gambler is often referred to as a "whale" and…well, you understand.

In all my trips to Vegas, even when I was playing (and often winning) Blackjack, I never came close to the level of wagering that would classify me as even a medium-sized gambler, let along a Moby Dick-sized one. Also, those gambling days were long ago and the casino hosts of that era are probably long gone. They did not call me then and offer me free rooms, free flights and free meals to come stay at their hotels.

Despite this, I've had three calls in the last week or so from three different "casino hosts" (maybe) at three different hotels who say that they miss me, want me back and will shower me with freebees to make that happen. One of them made it sound like the entire staff at the New York, New York hotel is wandering about, deeply depressed because they don't see Mark Evanier at their slot machines.

That was my first tip-off that this was a total scam and not just a little one. I've never stayed at that hotel, nor put even one coin into any of their one-armed bandits.

I stayed on the line with the guy long enough to realize he was trying to sell me a vacation package disguised as a high-roller's comp. To get my free flight, free room and free meals, I would have to give them my credit card number for any "incidentals" I incurred above and beyond what their package of gifts would include. I think we can all figure out how things would go after that. That last caller was even offering to put a limousine at my disposal and to arrange comps to any show in town I wanted to see. Yeah, right.

The thing is: I wouldn't have taken this guy up on his offer even if it had been legit. I used to love Las Vegas but I have zero interest in going there now. The Pandemic has killed much of my interest in going anywhere, especially by plane, and so have the problems I've been having with my knees. Also, Vegas has become a beastly-expensive, higher-than-ever-hustle place: No more cheap shows, no more cheap buffets.

The room rates aren't bad on some dates even if you factor in the mandatory, quietly-disclosed Resort Fees…but I don't see anyplace there I want to be or dine. Even if I still remembered how to count cards at Blackjack, I wouldn't play with some of the new rules adjustments.

They're now repaving and reconfiguring most of the streets there to get ready for the Formula One racing event that's going to take place there in November. The cars will do fifty laps around a 3.8-mile circuit up and around The Strip. To get a hotel room and a good seat for the event will cost thousands of dollars per night…which is why I was immediately suspicious when that first "casino host" called me. That town doesn't care about tourists like me anymore.

Further proof: It was announced today that the Oakland Athletics will relocate to Vegas, perhaps as soon as 2027. Ground will soon be broken on a 35,000-seat baseball stadium with a retractable roof. Total estimated price: One billion dollars. Everything in that city just got even more expensive. Gee, that was a wonderful place to visit Once Upon a Time.

The folks at Pop Culture Retro interview Sergio Aragonés…

Still on the topic of that performance by the cast of Hair on that 1969 Ed Sullivan Show, Steve Bacher writes to ask…

Was the musical backing for the Hair segment live or prerecorded? If live, the Hair troupe would have had to bring in their own backing band, wouldn't they? Or were there rock musicians on the staff already?

The Sullivan program had a pretty good live orchestra, helmed by a gent named Ray Bloch, which was called upon to play all sorts of music for all sorts of acts. They may have been augmented with pre-recorded music or a few outside musicians for the occasion — it's hard to tell — but I'd guess that a lot of what you were hearing was Ed's usual orchestra.

When I worked on variety shows, I became aware of how many different ways the music can be generated. One time, we had on a singer who was performing a popular number he'd recorded more than twenty years earlier. His voice no longer sounded the way it did on the record and while he still sang it live for live performances, he was reluctant to be heard on network television singing it with his current voice.

The logic went something like this: A live audience at a concert might not expect him to sound exactly like he did on the original record but an at-home audience watching TV would be less forgiving of the change. Many of them would also recognize it if he just lip-synced to the old record and they'd think, "Gee, I guess he can't sing like that any more if they had to use the old record."

(This was not the way I thought. I wasn't even thinking about that kind of thing. But the singer and his managers wanted to make him sound more like he used to, and I think our producers did, as well.)

So what they wound up doing was obtaining a master tape of the original recording without the music — just his voice. It still existed in some vault somewhere and he knew where it was. He'd apparently done this before. Then they slowed it down a teensy-tiny bit and put some filters on it to make it sound almost the way it did originally but not exactly. Then they edited in a few micro-seconds of pause between some words…so it was the same vocal performance but not exactly.

Next, they recorded a whole new music track to it with an ever-so-slightly-different arrangement from the original. When it was all mixed together, it definitely didn't sound exactly like the original record. It was like 97% the original record. He did a good lip-sync job when we taped the show and during post-production, the editors did a little of their magic to put his mouth perfectly in sync with the track. I'll bet any viewer who gave it a smidgen of thought thought, "Wow, he still sounds almost exactly like he did 20+ years ago!" Professional audio technicians might have guessed what was done but I doubt most people could have.

The Ed Sullivan Show was broadcast live. Sometimes, an entire number was recorded in advance and the singers just moved their mouths. Sometimes, just the music track was prerecorded. Sometimes, it was an amalgam. When someone came on to perform their new hit record, the record company might be real fussy about how it was presented, fearing that a bad (or different) performance would impact sales. The record company might even pay for extra musicians that night…or pay to pre-record a slightly-different rendition of the song in another studio with their own musicians.

So this is me taking the long route to saying I really don't know about that performance from Hair. Any configuration of the music might have been employed. But I wouldn't be quick to assume that the CBS Orchestra under the baton of Ray Bloch was of no use with the arrangements for the music that was being played over at the theater on Broadway that was housing what they called "The tribal love rock musical."

(By the way: Reader-of-this-site Raymond Zinsius writes that he's pretty sure that's Melba Moore in the still-frame/thumbnail for the video and that you see her in the video beginning at 2:27.)

Sorry for no posting today. It's been busy around here.

Yesterday in this spot, I linked you to a 1969 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show…the cast of the original Broadway production of Hair performing two numbers from that landmark show. My pal Vinnie Favale, who worked on David Letterman's show decades later, suggested I also link you to this clip from Dave's show from 2009. It's the cast of the then-current revival of Hair on Broadway performing the same numbers on the same stage. Dave's audience seems to like it more than Ed's did…

And while I've got your attention: If you're as intrigued as I am by the battle between Florida governor Ron DeSantis and the Disney organization, here's Devin Stone — YouTube's "Legal Eagle" — explaining the matter…

Here's an amazing clash of generations on The Ed Sullivan Show…in some ways, more arresting than any appearance by The Beatles or Elvis. It's March 30, 1969 and Ed has on the cast of Hair to perform "The Age of Aquarius" and "Let the Sunshine In." Hair opened at the Biltmore Theater on April 29, 1968 so they probably arranged to do Ed's program because the weekly grosses were starting to sag a little. Indeed, James Rado, who was one of the creators of the show was quoted as saying of this appearance…

The network wouldn't let us do anything involving nudity, but they did let us have smoke effects and allowed us the run of the theater. I don't think Mr. Sullivan knew what to think of us, but he seemed to truly enjoy the exuberance of the young cast. It was an exciting night and, boy, did it generate a long line at the box office the following morning!

When I came across the clip, I had to go and look up who else was on the show that evening and it was otherwise a pretty typical line-up for Ed — Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, pianist Peter Nero (playing "Mrs. Robinson" from The Graduate), The Lennon Sisters, The Muppets and three comedians: Charlie Callas, Pigmeat Markham and Dickie Henderson. So you can see Ed trying to have it all ways: Something for the older viewers, something for the younger ones, something for the real young, something for the black folks, etc.

Ed also introduced Jackie Mason in the audience. This was after the two of them had patched up their infamous feud/lawsuit. It must have been interesting backstage that evening.

Dozens of performers you've heard of were in Hair during its first Broadway run, including Diane Keaton, Keith Carradine, Melba Moore, Ben Vereen, Heather MacRae, Meat Loaf, Barry McGuire, Ted Lange, Jessica Harper and Lynn Kellogg. I'm not going to try and identify which of them, if any, might have been in this presentation. The number seems to have gone over well enough but the live audience doesn't seem all that comfy with the ending…

Jordan Klepper, who I think it great at what he does, is hosting The Daily Show this week. Here, he talks a little about the show and where it is right now. I always enjoy this program when I watch it but I somehow don't watch it as often as I used to.

Each week, the opening titles of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver include one quick flash of a graphic relating to something current in the news. Since it's only on your screen for a split-second or so, you might miss it. If you watched tonight's episode — which was very good, by the way — you might have seen a friend of ours in the opening…and you might not have. If you did, what you saw was two partial images of Al Jaffee folding over to create the above visual with the caption "Mad Hominem."

I posted a video last night of someone cooking burgers at a Five Guys and I said I could never do that. Even though I said "I am not putting such work down…just saying that it's something I couldn't do," I got one e-mail from someone who thought I was saying such work was beneath me. Not at all. I was just saying I couldn't do it the same way I couldn't fly a plane or play hockey or remove someone's gallbladder. Even if the best teacher in the world trained me, I couldn't fly a plane or play hockey or remove someone's gallbladder.

That correspondent was woefully underestimating my incompetence. When I was in high school, a couple of my friends had paper routes, bicycling around some neighborhood and flinging newspapers into bushes. My total inability to ride a bicycle even precluded me from something like that.

When I say that I became a professional writer because that was the only thing I thought I could do, I'm being about 97% serious. Yes, I have occasionally worked a bit as an editor and a director and a producer and even an artist but those jobs were all extensions of writing jobs I had. I never got hired by anyone for one of those positions without first being engaged as a writer.

And I also received a number of e-mails asking me if I'd ever had a job of any sort before I started working as a writer. The answer is no and here's a story to go with that answer…

I graduated high school in June of 1969. In the months prior, my parents "suggested" I try to find a summer job to fill the time before I started college and, perhaps, help subsidize that higher learning. I put that word in quotes because it was a bit more serious than a mere suggestion.

They were well aware that I was determined to make writing my life's profession but I don't think they had any sense of how possible that might be. Neither did I but we were all pretty certain that it could take quite a while to make it start paying. It might also have turned out to be yet another item on that long, long list of things I just plain couldn't do.

Several weeks before Graduation Day, there was some sort of Job Fair announced for one Saturday out in Santa Monica. It was open to all in my age group and my folks "suggested" I attend. Since I didn't drive, I took a bus out there, arriving about a half-hour before it was scheduled to open…which, as it turned out, made me late. Everyone else seeking a summer job — including at least a dozen of my classmates from University High — had lined-up hours before. I wound up waiting four hours before I could (ever so briefly) see one of the counselors they had there.

Fortunately, I struck up a short-term friendship with a lady my age who was just ahead of me in line. Conversation helped pass the hours and at one point, she held my place while I ran down the block to a McDonald's and brought us back lunch.

While we were dining — if you can call it that — one of my classmates passed by us on his way out. He had a referral to interview for a job at an A&W Root Beer stand. That was the kind of jobs they had available and as the afternoon wore on, I began to think that maybe I could have put those four hours to better use by eliminating the middle men; by just going to fast food places and filling out employment applications. I could have started with that McDonald's down the block.

Eventually, it was my turn to sit with one of the counselors, a harried man who looked like he wanted to get in line and see if he could land a less stressful job than the one he was doing. He asked me what skills I had that might qualify me for something on the lists he had — lists that, he said when I asked, that he wasn't allowed to show me. I told him, "Well, I'm not bad at lettering so I was wondering if you had something in the field of sign painting."

I didn't think that was so outrageous but he reacted like I'd said I wanted to pitch for the Dodgers or replace Sean Connery as James Bond. He gasped and said, "We don't have jobs like that!" He began studying his lists, going over and over them, shaking his head and moaning. Finally, he spotted something and announced, "Ah! This looks like something you might be suited for!" And without telling me what it was, he filled out a little card, thrust it into my hands and then called for the next person in line to come take my seat. I was done.

Wandering out, I looked at the card and the first thing I saw was the address. It was out in Downey — a good 26 miles from where I was and a pretty difficult place to get to by bus. Continuing down the card, I saw that it was an upholstery company and I was to go in and interview for the position of Apprentice Cutter, which paid $1.30 an hour.

My mind flashed, as it usually did and still does, on old jokes. It instantly called up the one where an Agent calls a Performer and says, "I got you a great booking. It's in Philadelphia and it pays $100 but you have to pay your own transportation both ways and also secure your own lodging." The Performer replies, "But it'll cost me more than $100 to get there and back and to rent a hotel room!" To which The Agent says, "Hey, there are some jobs in this world you have to save up for."

I lingered outside the Job Fair to wait for my new friend — the one I met standing in line. She too had a referral card. Hers too was to take a network of buses to Downey and try to land a gig as an Apprentice Cutter for $1.30 an hour. I asked her if she was going to actually go there and she said, "Hell, no. I've been thinking of printing up flyers and putting them in every mailbox in my neighborhood, asking if someone needs cleaning work or baby-sitting or something like that."

We exchanged phone numbers and pledged to keep in touch. Since neither of us made good on that pledge, I can't tell you how she made out. I can tell you that I tossed my referral card in a trash can. Instead, I went home, redoubled (or maybe retripled) my efforts to sell my writing services and, two weeks after graduation, sold three articles to a local magazine. I've been doing variations on that now for around 53 years and nine months.

It has not all been fun. It has not all been lucrative. For the most part though, I've been pretty lucky and pretty happy…which is not to say there haven't been times when I get to wondering if that place in Downey is still hiring. As I've learned in the past 53 years and nine months, there are some jobs in this world you have to save up for.

This video is 4 minutes and 39 seconds of what it's like to work at a Five Guys flipping burgers. 4:39 is roughly the length of time I could do a job like this without going out of whatever mind I have. I am not putting such work down…just saying that it's something I couldn't do. There's a very long list of jobs I could never do. It's pretty much anything other than writing or a few jobs that are peripheral to writing.

Sometimes, I kinda wish I could do something like this. And if you don't believe I couldn't, drop by some time and I'll make you a hamburger on my indoor grill. You'll have to specify whether you want it frozen, burned to a crisp or "Evanier style," which is burned on the outside, frozen in the middle or vice-versa…

Last week for Last Week Tonight, John Oliver and his staff prepared two shows. The one that aired on HBO-type channels had as its main story, a rather scary look into Home Owners Associations. But — aware that most people under a certain age will never be able to afford a house, Oliver and Company prepared a second "main story" for them. This story was about Chuck E. Cheese and similar places to eat and play and have your kid's birthday party, and they posted it online.

It was a very entertaining story and when I ask my friends who love Last Week Tonight as I do how they liked the Chuck E. Cheese story, they all said, "Oh, I forgot to watch it" and one even said, "Is that a real thing? Did they really post a whole other segment about that?" Yes, they did and this is your reminder to go and watch it at Last Squeak Tonight dot com.

This is one of my favorite episodes of The Phil Silvers Show aka You'll Never Get Rich aka Sgt. Bilko. Writer-Producer Nat Hiken had worked for some unstable comedians in radio and early TV. He'd also dealt with a lot of sponsors and ad agencies who didn't let knowing nothing about comedy stop them from critiquing everything. So this installment about an unstable comedian and his know-nothing producers and sponsors was probably a lot of fun for Hiken and his co-writer Billy Friedberg to write.

And it works to a large extent because of the man in the above photo, Danny Dayton, who I consider one of the great unsung comic actors of stage and screen. You may not know his name but he was all over TV and occasionally in movies for many years, always great but never quite becoming as famous as I think he deserved. Here — before we get to the Bilko episode, here's Danny Dayton in the movie version of Guys and Dolls, performing with Stubby Kaye and Johnny Silver. Mr. Dayton played Rusty Charlie, the horseplayer in the tan suit…

Recognize him now? I didn't think so. But he had showy parts on lots of programs you watched including a recurring part on All in the Family and Archie Bunker's Place as Archie's pal, Hank Pivnik.

He was on the Bilko show in other roles but his best appearance was in this one. He played the neurotic comedian Buddy Bickford, who combined the worst traits of Red Buttons, Milton Berle and a few others. In so doing, he did the impossible. He actually stole an episode from Phil Silvers. I'm not sure anyone else ever managed that…

In addition to being a great comic actor, Danny Dayton was also a director for the stage and television. He was a cast replacement and stand-by for many of the roles in the original Broadway production of my favorite musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Zero Mostel was the original Pseudolus and then when he left the show, he was replaced by Dick Shawn. After Shawn left, he was replaced by Danny Dayton.

After the show closed on Broadway, Dayton played Pseudolus in some national tours and regional productions, often doubling as director. More people probably saw him in the role than saw Mostel and Shawn combined. In the mid-eighties when he was mainly directing for TV, I got to see him do what may have been the last time he did Forum on stage. He was as fine in the lead as anyone else I ever saw…and I've seen a lot of Pseudoluses. So I wanted to call attention to him.

Also in the Bilko episode, you may have noticed a cameo by Virginia Ruth "Jennie" Lewis, a popular TV personality of the fifties known professionally as Dagmar. She turned up on a great many programs as a dumb blonde type and there were a great many jokes made about her voluptuous figure. At the time this episode of Phil Silvers' show was done (it first aired on 2/12/57), she was also Mrs. Danny Dayton.

A person who asked to remain anonymous sent me this…

You recently mentioned how thrilled you were to see your name in print for the first time in a comic book letter column. I'm fairly certain that you're referencing the attached that appeared in Aquaman #28 in 1966.

Having to spoken to a lot of fans of "Silver Age" books, many have said that in trying to get a letter printed, they deliberately chose titles that they deemed less popular, hence figuring they had a better chance of being selected. Do you recall if that was your strategy back then, in targeting Aquaman? And was that your first letter, or had you sent in some previously that didn't get printed? And did you share this accomplishment with friends and family at the time, or did you keep it to yourself?

I sent a lot of letters in to comic book letter pages and I'm going to guess that the one you mention — indeed my first to make it into print — was my eighth or ninth attempt. Eventually, most of the letters I sent were getting into print but at first, the ratio wasn't that impressive.

I never had any strategy about which titles to write to. What I did though was to submit the kind of letters they seemed to be printing. If the editor of the comic in question published mostly short letters, I sent short letters. If he selected longer letters, I sent longer letters. If he seemed to like critiques, I sent critiques…and so on.

As I may have mentioned here someplace, I stopped because of a couple of incidents where someone (the editor or an assistant) edited or just plain rewrote my letter and changed its meaning, in one case turning a negative review into a positive one. In a couple of other instances, I wrote something sarcastic and/or silly and it got rewritten in a manner that suggested I was serious. It seemed to me that since I wasn't getting paid for my writing, they shouldn't be doing that to it.

Later when I got into the industry — and was actually assembling letter pages myself — I became somewhat less proud of having had so many of my letters chosen for publication. I learned how few letters most comics got and how unpublishable 75% of them were, especially if you wanted to promote the notion that your comic was read by older, erudite consumers. That explained (though in my mind, did not excuse) the rewriting of letters and the publication of bogus letters, which most comics did at times. It further explained the elimination of most letter columns in comics over the years.

At almost every convention I attend, someone compliments me on the letter pages we run in the Groo the Wanderer comics. I always thank them and then ask if they can name another current comic book that even has a letter column. And they usually can't.

Donald Trump's operation is sending me messages again insisting that everything we care about in this world will be gone soon unless Donald Trump is reinstated as POTUS and, of course, he won't be reinstated as POTUS unless all the phony arrests and lawsuits against him are immediately terminated and of course they won't be immediately terminated unless I send him vast amounts of money and take to the streets demanding blah blah blah. I blocked the messages of this sort coming from one address but now they're coming from another…and they're about as credible as the ones I get from the Nigerian royalty who'll put billions in my accounts just as soon as I send them all my banking information.

I'm still not following all the news but what I see makes me think someone could start a 24/7 "Trump's Legal Woes" channel and not lack content for the next few years. The trial over E. Jean Carroll's accusations looks like it'll keep the news channels and the late night monologues full to the point of overflowing for a few weeks. Some reports are saying he's going to have to take the stand…and given his recent inability to sound coherent in interviews, that looks to be some interrogation.

This has been This Week's Post About Trump. See? I'm holding it down to one a week.

Among the many earworms that have wormed their way into my ears in the past few years is a song by the group Walk the Moon called "Shut up and Dance With Me." If you've never heard it — and it was hard not to for a while — it went like this.

I recently mentioned it to a friend and she said, "Did you see what they did with it at The Gypsy of the Year Awards? That's an annual show put on each year for fund-raising purposes by the worthy cause, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Each year for two performances, members of the Broadway community — mostly folks performing in current shows — put on sketches and skits and song parodies and…well, the shows I've seen have been a lot of fun.

I hadn't seen what they did one year with the Walk the Moon number but I found it. It was the opening to the 2015 Gypsy of the Year Awards show and it went something like this…

Yesterday, I ran a message here from Jeff Thayer and part of it said…

You said on your blog that the first time you got a writer credit on a comic book you wrote was Welcome Back, Kotter #4 from DC which came out in February of 1977. But one online database says you wrote a story in House of Mystery #214 which came out in 1973. I happen to have that issue and your name is on that story.

Yeah, it is but I'm credited only for "Story Idea." Here's what happened: DC had made a deal with a group of very able comic book artists in The Philippines to draw stories for them. Later, many of those artists (like Alfredo Alcala and Nestor Redondo) would relocate in the United States and be paid U.S. page rates but at the time, they were living over there and were satisfied with much, much less per page than DC was paying American artists.

The styles of the Filipino artists seemed to lend itself best to ghost/mystery stories and DC's books in that genre were selling well. There were some plans to add several more comics of the sort per month and to also get as much of that kind of material drawn while they had access to all that cheap labor. That meant a sudden rush to buy scripts that those artists could draw.

I was invited — as I'm sure were many others — to submit as many premises (short outlines) for ghost-type stories as I liked. If Joe went for any of them, I could submit a finished script and, assuming he liked that finished script, I'd be paid $10 per page for it. We're talking here about stories of 6-8 pages mostly. At the time, Gold Key Comics was paying me $12 a page and I didn't have to submit premises first but I thought it might be good to write different kinds of comics for different publishers. I dashed off a half-dozen premises and sent them off to DC.

One of the problems you often encounter as a freelancer is that you're outta the loop as to what they want as their needs change. On Monday, they tell you "We want stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses" and you start writing premises and pitches for stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses, unaware that on Wednesday, they decide they have too many stories about fifty-foot monsters with big noses.

And then on Friday, your submissions arrive in their office…and of course, they're D.O.A. and they probably go unread. Back when I was submitting work on that basis, that happened to me a number of times.

In this case, I sent my premises in right away and heard nothing for several weeks. Then Joe wrote me back that he liked a couple but he was suddenly committed to giving script assignments to certain of DC's "regular" writers so what he wanted to do was to buy some of my premises for $10 each — that would be the entire pay — and then have his regulars turn them into scripts…if that was okay with me. I wrote him back politely it wasn't OK with me; that I didn't think the compensation was sufficient.

I didn't hear anything more from Joe but a week later, I got a check from DC for $10 for one of my plots…and it was turned into that House of Mystery story scripted by Robert Kanigher. I decided not to make a fuss about it. I just forgot all about it until you reminded me. I'm only telling it here because it's a situation that happens in some form to most freelance writers. When you try to sell scripts to people far away, you're sometimes quite unaware when their plans change.

I have a couple of other stories about this kind of thing happening. Maybe I'll post one in the coming weeks. Thanks, Jeff.