In an e-mail, Jon Delfin pointed out something I hadn't noticed about last night's Tony Awards telecast: No Obit Montage. Plenty o' theatrical figures have passed away since the last Tonys, including Kitty Carlisle Hart, Alvin Colt, Paul Scofield, Beverly Sills, Deborah Kerr, Robert Goulet, Michael Kidd, Gretchen Wyler, Alice Ghostley, Myoshi Umeki, Tom Poston and the guy in the banana suit, Charles Nelson Reilly. Still, someone made the decision not to bring the proceedings to the usual grim halt by playing sad music and rattling off the list of the departed.

Ratings-wise, it didn't help a lot. The telecast averaged a 4.9 rating and an 8 share, which was down a bit from last year. Still, that's not terrible. CBS has renewed series that get numbers like that…and which sponsors are less eager to buy time in. The audience for the Tonys may be small but it has a nice "buying" profile and demographic so it's probably not in any danger of not being on CBS for years to come.

The folks behind the Tonys are probably satisfied that the audience is sufficiently large…and comprised of folks who are likely to buy tickets to Broadway productions. That is, after all, the main goal of the broadcast — to serve as an infomercial for shows in New York. It will be interesting to see what shows announce their closings in the next few days. There are usually a few marginal ones who hang around long enough to see what, if anything, the Tony show will do for their ticket sales.

Here, for the record, is the speech Mark Rylance gave at the Tony Awards when he won for his performance in the current revival of Boeing-Boeing. This is from the writings of a poet named Lewis Jenkins…

When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc. Driving a tank is very impressive or a car with official lettering on the side. If that isn't to your taste, you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan. At the very least, you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone, or wear a team jacket and a baseball cap and carry a cell phone. If you go into the woods, the back country, someplace past all human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange and carry a gun, or depending on the season, carry a fishing pole, or a camera with a big lens. Otherwise, it might appear that you have no idea what you are doing, that you are merely wandering the earth, no particular reason for being here, no particular place to go.

That was the man's acceptance speech. No mention of the play or his co-stars or director or his family or his agent or anything. He just performed that. And the audience loved it.

Every month, the folks at Turner Classic Movies, slap some old film up on their website which you can watch online if you're of a mind to. This month, it's One Man's Journey, a 1933 melodrama starring Lionel Barrymore, Joel McCrea, May Robson and Dorothy Jordan. Barrymore plays a small town country doctor who is so devoted to his practice and to healing the sick in his town that he neglects his own needs. It's a nice little film with a good score by Max Steiner. You can watch it by clicking…oh, how about clicking right here? It runs about seventy minutes.

And the eleven o'clock news led with the headline that same-sex marriage is only hours from commencing in California. They're going to start issuing licenses tomorrow at 5:01 PM. That's quite a follow-up to the Tony Awards…which, by the way, struck me as the least-gay Tony telecast in many years.

The Tony Awards actually went two or three minutes over this evening. That's interesting because a couple years ago, CBS was telling the producers that overage would not be tolerated; that even if it meant cutting off the final award before the winner was announced, the 11:00 local news would not start even five seconds late.

That was back when the show was crammed into a two-hour time slot, sometimes with an extra hour preceding it on PBS. The telecasts have gotten so much better since someone at CBS had the good sense to say, "Hey, if we're going to broadcast the Tony Awards, let's really broadcast the Tony Awards." So it went to three hours and now, they seem to have also given them a few minutes of a grace period at the end, which this year was necessary. (Wish I'd known that. My TiVo recording ended before the show did.)

I thought it was a pretty good show. I know for some, half the fun is bitching about the clothes and the speeches and the ghastly production numbers, and I suppose some people are now having a wonderful time, complaining about the little segments with Whoopi Goldberg performing in scenes from long-running musicals. But the show kept moving and apart from the necessity of giving out a lot of awards to people America doesn't care about, I thought it was about as good as the Tonys are likely to be. I was actually disappointed that things moved at such a rapid clip that Whoopi didn't get to say much.

Some of the shows looked pretty inviting. I have a feeling Xanadu and Little Mermaid sold a lot of tickets tonight while Young Frankenstein and Grease didn't. The number from Grease looked like the new stage version was adapted from the movie by someone who didn't know there'd ever been an old stage version.

Oh, excuse me. I made a mistake in the above paragraph. The show is not called Young Frankenstein. It's actually The New Mel Brooks Musical, Young Frankenstein. If you want to know one of the reasons it didn't get much in the way of Tony nominations (it won none of the few it got), there's a big hint in that official title. True, reviews weren't wonderful but the show was also known within the Broadway community for a certain air of arrogance in its advance publicity, ticket prices, refusal to report grosses and other little ways. I suspect someone will also be peeved at that commercial they ran during the East Coast feed and which I caught via my satellite dish. It touted the show as "Winner! Best Musical 2008!" — which would make many think it had won the Tony in that category. Actually, in type that could not possibly be read on any TV screen, it presumably admitted that this was the Outer Critics Circle Award.

Best acceptance speech? Mark Rylance, winner of Best Actor in a Play for Boeing-Boeing. He did a rambling monologue that had nothing to do with the event or the show or the award. From press coverage, I gather that it was an excerpt from The Back Country, an essay by the poet, Lewis Jenkins. It sure got the crowd's attention and in a good way.

Nice tribute to Rent. I'm sorry Mr. Sondheim was a no-show but his acceptance note, read by Mandy Patinkin, was classy. The medley from South Pacific looked especially good…almost enough to make me want to see this production of a show I've never much liked.

That's all I have. Good job, whoever did the show this year. I'm sorry my TiVo cut off the credits so I don't know who you are.

Oh, wait. I just realized the West Coast telecast is concluding as I'm typing this so I just turned the set on. Executive Producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss…Weiss directed…Dave Boone was the writer. Fine job. And the late news started at 11:01:30 so they only went a minute and a half over.

I haven't done one of these in a while. This poll has nothing to do with who you'd like to see win the White House. We're merely asking for your prediction…and I'll ask again a few times before Election Day. You have one week to vote this time.

If you aren't oversaturated with hearing about Tim Russert, this might interest you. My pal Paul Harris, who chats with interesting people on the radio all the time, chatted many a time with Mr. Russert. On his website, Paul has put up this audio file of one such conversation. It's a good little discussion about Russert's book, his face-offs with controversial public figures and even his appearance as a contestant on Jeopardy!

Paul was on radio in St. Louis for many years, then lost his gig when the broadcasting company did a big economy move. He's lately been bouncing around the country doing a week here, a week there. I'm sure he'll land somewhere soon with a permanent slot — or at least, as permanent as anything can be in radio. I just hope it's on a station I can listen to over the Internet.

We are way too happy to report that the Popeye DVD series is going the distance…at least through the black-and-white cartoons produced by the Max Fleischer studio, plus a few color specials by the same outfit. A couple years ago, if you'd gathered cartoon buffs in a room and asked them to fantasize the ideal DVD release of some vintage animation series, the consensus would have been very much like what we're now getting. The early Fleischer Popeyes were the most-desired cartoons that (then) seemed to not be anywhere on the horizon…and the buffs would have yearned for them to be reissued with sharp restoration, everything in sequence, nothing censored, etc., with just the right bonus material.

Volume 1 came out last July and all I could say was, "Well, blow me down." Sharp restoration, everything in sequence, etc. Apart from the fact that I was in the bonus material, it was perfect.

You can order that first volume from this link and you can pre-order the second, which comes out this week, from this link. The third volume will follow closely. It's currently scheduled for the end of September.

Do not, by the way, get confused. Time Warner Home Video is also bringing out a single-disc this week called Popeye and Friends. This is a batch of the 1978 Popeye cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera. I'm not including a link for that one because you don't want to order it…but make sure you get the other sets.

Jerry Lewis is famous for saying — in an annoying, high-pitched voice — "Hey, lay-dee!" Right? Of course. You've all heard him say it. So how come some friends of mine who need a clip of him saying this can't find one?

They're watching old Jerry Lewis movies and screening old Jerry Lewis TV shows and they haven't yet been able to find him saying, "Hey, lay-dee!" or even just "lay-dee!"

Do you know where they can find such a thing? Drop me a note if you do. This is for a rather important project.