I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I usually plug what's coming up on Stu's Show, my pal Stu Shostak's program on my pal Stu Shostak's radio station. I got busy and wasn't able to tell you about yesterday's show, which featured two of my favorite folks, Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall.

Charlie and Mitzi are famously remembered as the comedy team that had to hold the stage before an audience full of screaming Beatles fans on the night the singing moptops made their historic debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. But more than that, they've been popular entertainers for close to fifty years, working not just as a comedy team but individually and collectively as actors, writers, voiceover artists, game show panelists and radio personalities.

They met around '59 in a comedy workshop class that Jerry Lewis was running. They went on to work with everyone in their field. You think I've got a lot of show biz anecdotes? Hang around Charlie and Mitzi for an evening. Whenever I have, I always laugh myself sick and learn even more about all they've done.

It was a great show today. They were joined by their pal, actor Jack Riley, and they told wonderful tales…so I'm sorry I didn't promote it here. Fortunately for you though, the show reruns all week — at 7 PM Eastern, 4 PM Pacific time…and you can figure out the time for your part of the world from that. Tune in and listen, which you can do by going to the website of Shokus Internet Radio and clicking on the player there. You have six more chances to do this.

I have once again accepted an invite to show my face (and perhaps throw caution to the wind and host some panels) at the Mid-Ohio-Con in Columbus, Ohio. This year, it's October 3 and 4 and the guest list already includes Mike Grell, P. Craig Russell, Bernie Wrightson, Gary Friedrich, Tony Isabella, Fred Hembeck, Herb Trimpe, Marv Wolfman and a whole mess o' other fine folks. There's a reason why I go back to this convention year after year and it isn't just because (a) they ask me, (b) there's a great Mongolian Barbecue a few blocks away or even (c) that Tony Isabella is just so darned irresistible.

No, I like it because it's a great, friendly convention. Those of you who moan that the Comic-Con International should be smaller and more about comics should seek out gatherings like Mid-Ohio-Con. I always have a good time there.

I kinda feel sorry for sane, intelligent Republicans these days. There are such people…lots of 'em. And they must be cringing and writhing to see their party represented by tea-baggers, birthers, deathers, Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, and folks whose idea of democracy is that you mass at town hall meetings and just try to shout everyone else down, screaming that Obama was born in Kenya. My Conservative pal Roger visibly winces at the suggestions that Rush Limbaugh is "the" face of the G.O.P. because Roger thinks that Limbaugh cares only about getting people to listen to him, not about winning elections.

But these folks are only part of the problem. Another part is Republican politicians who are deathly afraid of them. I think most Senators and Congressfolks on that side of the aisle know well that the idiots are idiots. Trouble is, they're useful idiots. They vote. They donate money. They work for candidates. And as much as they hate Democrats, they're even more rabid against Republicans they think are weak on their pet issues…or worse, turncoats. So if you're a G.O.P. guy in office and you want to stay in office, you have to kind of wink at them and say non-confrontational things about how they have some valid points and are raising questions that must be addressed.

There was a period in my life (a brief one, thankfully) when I found myself around a lot of folks who were convinced of all sorts of major conspiracies in the Kennedy assassination, including a few that were but one notch closer to reality than a scenario in which JFK was offed by a band of Venusians. I went in, thinking that what these people craved was an answer they could believe in, but soon discovered that that was the last thing they wanted. There were such researchers and skeptics around but they were pretty much trampled into oblivion by a mob that could and would never be satisfied by any solution.

Most of them didn't even have one theory about who killed Kennedy. Some had a dozen mutually-exclusive theories (i.e., if #1 was true, numbers 2 through 12 could not have happened) and they got hysterical if you tried to take any one of those theories away from them. Every conceivable explanation was possible except, of course, that maybe the 35th President of the United States was killed by one lone nut with a rifle. One did not dare consider that possibility in their midst. That didn't get them anywhere.

In the same sense, the birthers really don't want definitive proof that Obama was born in Hawaii. That's of no use to their purpose, which is to pretend the nation didn't really elect a black Democrat who's kinda Liberal. In this article, Joe Conason reminds us how a lot of the same folks tried much the same thing with Bill Clinton, trying to de-legitimize his presidency by ginning up scandals that later evaporated for lack of any evidence. As long as Obama is in office, we're going to be hearing this nonsense. Get used to it.

The wonderful Heidi MacDonald of Publishers Weekly has posted her long report on this year's Comic-Con. I agree with darn near everything Heidi ever says about anything but I have to address something about one thing she said in this piece…

It's quite disheartening and demoralizing to look at all the major media coverage of the con and not see a single comics-only project or personality (unless you count Stan Lee) getting coverage.

Yeah, it is. And equally disheartening is to see Heidi MacDonald, whom I adore, write her major overview report on the con without mentioning Jerry Robinson or Russ Heath or Nick Cuti or Doug Moench or most of the comics-only guests or events. In earlier coverage, she mentioned a couple because they were onstage at the Eisner Awards but I think that was about it.

The place was crawling with comic book folks, past and present, and there was plenty of interest in them. They just get ignored in the fan press because, I guess, it's more interesting to cover Robert Downey Jr than it is to cover anyone who ever drew Iron Man. I got Stan Freberg, who is kind of a legend in animation, down to the convention and he was mobbed and we turned away hundreds of folks at the Freberg panel…but that's received nary a sentence in the convention coverage. We had a Golden Age Panel that has gone largely uncovered. I did a panel with comic creators from the seventies that has been noted on one website so far, and a particularly historic panel — the first-ever reunion of the three main "Bob Kane" ghost artists on Batman — that I've yet to see mentioned anywhere online…

…but I sure see a lot of people complaining there's not enough emphasis on comics.

There's plenty of comics content at that event. It's there and if you decided to only attend programming that was wholly about funnybooks, you could do that and easily fill four days…and I don't just mean with my panels. One of the many things I love about Comic-Con International is that they don't just schedule and support the programs and guests who are likely to pack Hall H. They spend money to bring Lew Sayre Schwartz and Jack Katz to the convention.

That's not going to change so I have no complaints in that area. Those folks are getting plenty of attention from the convention. They're just not getting much from reporters, even those who lament that Comic-Con puts too much emphasis on movies and "hot" non-comic concerns.

One actually came up to me on Sunday and started bitching about all the focus on the movies and the Hollywood celebs and such. Now, my attitude about the Comic-Con (oft-stated) is that the con is really a dozen or more cons rolled into one. There's an anime con in that building, an animation art con, a small press con, a Golden Age comics con, a gaming con, etc. Some of them don't interest me in the slightest so I sidestep those aisles and find the con I want to attend. I always seem to be able to find it. Unless you're dying to attend a sparsely-attended gathering, the one you seek is in there somewhere. Don't let all those other conventions annoy you or distract you.

But this guy was upset that so much of the Comic-Con wasn't about comics and he felt, I guess, that I'd concur and would rush off to do something about it…maybe throw Robert Downey Jr out of the hall or something. Instead, I told him about that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that. I then said to this fellow who was complaining about the con not being about that kind of thing, "I didn't see you there."

And so help me, he replied, "I couldn't be there. I had to get in line to see the 24 panel with Kiefer Sutherland."

Every year at the Hollywood Bowl, they do a "concert" version of a famous Broadway musical. In this case, "concert" means no sets and some rather odd staging so that the actors can cover the vast Bowl stage. I've seen good and bad there but the best I've seen to date was this year's presentation, which was Guys & Dolls. They did it for three nights — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — and some friends and I were there last night for Sunday's.

Brian Stokes Mitchell played Sky Masterson. He was terrific, capturing well the smooth macho imperative of the character. Scott Bakula was Nathan Detroit and he was pretty good in what is generally a thankless task, musically. Sam Levene, who originated the role on Broadway, wasn't much of a singer so his songs kept getting assigned to other characters, and he was left with "Sue Me" and an order to mouth the words but not sing aloud in the group numbers. This has left every Nathan Detroit since wondering why everyone gets to sing in the show but him.

For the movie, they cast the role with that well-known non-singer, Frank Sinatra. To give Ol' Blue Eyes something to warble, they added him to the title song (where, of course, his character is singing absolutely against his established motivation) and composer Frank Loesser wrote him a new, forgettable song called "Adelaide." For the Hollywood Bowl production, they added in the "Adelaide" number and it actually sounded rather nice…better than when Frank did it in the movie.

Okay, so much for the male leads. Adelaide was played by Ellen Greene, who was so wonderful in the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, and who basically played the same role here. So you got Ellen playing Audrey playing Adelaide…but it worked. Every now and then when Adelaide was talking about how she wanted to settle down in a little house with Nathan, you expected her to start singing "Somewhere That's Green," but basically it was a great characterization, which I guess was to be expected. The real surprise of the night though was Jessica Biels as Miss Sarah. She struggled a mite with the more operatic portions of the score but when she sang in her natural range, she was delightful…and when they took the bows at the end, she got the biggest ovation.

Two close runners-up for that distinction would be Ken Page, who played Nicely-Nicely Johnson, and our pal Jason Graae, who portrayed Benny Southstreet. Page played the same role in the seventies' (all black) revival of the show and he stopped the show then with "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat," a feat he repeated at the Bowl. Stubby Kaye, wherever he is today, may own that song but Ken Page got himself a lease with an option to buy.

A great night. Kudos to director Richard Jay-Alexander and choreographer Donna McKechnie and to everyone involved. I wish you could see it. Heck, I wish I could see it again. When that show's done right, there's not a whole lot that's better.

Do you get the Reelz Channel on your teevee? I get it on DirecTV but it also seems to be on a lot of cable lineups. It's a channel that promotes (mostly) upcoming movies and until this week, the only thing I watched on it was Secret's Out, a fine program hosted by my buddy Leonard Maltin. On it, Leonard spotlights obscure films and video releases, and he often has wonderful guests — the kind of person who doesn't get interviewed often but should.

Anyway, for some reason, Reelz is running episodes this week only of Carson's Comedy Classics, a half-hour syndicated series that was made up of sketches and bits from Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. They have ten episodes that each run three times a day, and you've probably already missed Monday's. Check your listings and set your TiVo or VCR if that kind of thing interests you. I dunno why they're putting these on or why it's only for one week…but hey, there's lots of stuff out there I don't understand. Like, why would anyone with an I.Q. over 50 listen to or even interview Orly Taitz?

In case you've been wondering, the perky lady in those incessant TV ads for Progressive Auto Insurance is named Stephanie Courtney. I like her but I wish there was some rule that said that if your company is going to run ninety commercials an hour, you have more than two different ones in the rotation.

Voice actor and historian Craig Crumpton has written an open letter to the Hollywood trade papers (Variety and Hollywood Reporter) to complain about their coverage of the salary dispute in the Futurama negotiations. His point, and it's a good one, is that the articles put the actors in a negative light by making it seem like their demands were vastly more outrageous than they actually were. Both papers later quietly, and without the customary announcements of corrections, amended the online versions of the articles to tone down those assertions.

Obviously, we don't know exactly what happened here. But it's certainly not unprecedented for either paper to publish something that's planted by one side in a financial dispute to try and put pressure on the other side…and for the trade paper to pretend that the info came from some uninterested third party, rather than from the side doing the planting.

People are writing me to ask how to learn more about the 1963 Jerry Lewis Show. Well, one good way would be to seek out a long out-o'-print paperback by Richard Gehman called That Kid: The Story of Jerry Lewis. At least, I think it was only a paperback. I've never seen a hardcover and I gather that even the paperback didn't get a lot of attention when it came out. But it's a pretty good bio of Jerry, including contemporaneous coverage of his TV debacle.

Richard Gehman was a prominent author of his day, specializing in celebrity profiles. He often got access to follow stars around for a few weeks so he could interview them extensively and report on what he observed…and then they wouldn't like the resulting book or article because he'd (gasp, choke) quoted what they said and reported on what he observed. I have the feeling Jerry regretted letting Gehman hang around when they were assembling that Jerry Lewis Show.

Gehman's book on Sinatra — Sinatra and His Rat Pack — is also hard-to-find but worth the effort. Many who've written since about Frank, Dino, Sammy and the rest have obviously secured copies and borrowed liberally. In any case, though Mr. Gehman is long gone, the family tradition lives on. One his daughters, Pleasant Gehman, is an actress-dancer-musician but also an important writer covering the current music scene.