A half-dozen different friends of mine saw The Music Man on Broadway in the last week or three and all raved about it. The most common compliment was that it was worth what they paid to get in.

I'm not sure how much that was but I just checked and at this moment, it's possible to buy two seats near the center of the fifth row for tomorrow night's performance for $614.00 apiece. Of course, that price includes a $2.00 per ticket facility fee. There is one (1) seat available in the last row of the mezzanine for $212.25. And of course, that price also includes the $2.00 per ticket facility fee.

Here's a one-minute-and-fifteen-seconds "sizzle" reel from the show. It looks good but I'm not sure it looks $614 good…

My little essay on working hard as a writer brought me this query from L. Jonas…

I read what you wrote about how writing can be hard work. Do you have any tips for how to cope with how hard that work can be? I'm especially thinking of the alone part of it, of feeling alone and lonely for so many hours. I can't write with someone else in the room but I also can't stand being alone for long stretches of time. Any suggestions?

Yeah: Learn and appreciate the difference between being alone and being lonely. Those don't have to be the same thing. When I spend all day and/or all night writing something with no one else around, I don't feel disconnected from the rest of the world. I'm just not around anyone else. And I often take a break to talk to friends or to go somewhere to be around other people. I doubt I'll do this much in the future but for a while, I'd go to Las Vegas for a few days, hole up in my room and just pound away on the laptop.

The great thing about doing this was, first and foremost, I could set my own hours — write all night, sleep all day if I liked. Eat when I felt like it and what I wanted to eat. Secondly, if someone phoned and I wasn't in the mood for a long chat, all I had to say was "I'm out of town" and they didn't expect one.

If I wanted something to eat and/or to be around people, I just had to get into the elevator and go downstairs. There was always someplace open to get a meal, always someone performing to watch for a while. I find it very easy in that city to strike up a conversation with strangers. And then, when I feel I'm nudging myself to get back to work, I just head back up to my room with the perpetual "Do Not Disturb" sign on the door and I'm as alone as I want to be. It's like turning the outside world on when you want it, turning it off when you don't.

Maybe I'm okay with the "alone" part of my vocation because I was an only child. No brothers, no sisters. I always had my own room filled with plenty of things (like comic books) with which I could entertain myself. I was also a kid who skipped grades in school and that can make you very, very alone at Recess or Lunch. But I came to like it in a way, and I think it had a lot to do with me becoming a writer. I read a lot and spent a lot of time making up my own little stories just for me.

I keep getting back to that movie line I quoted in the earlier piece: "This is the life we have chosen for ourselves." No one is forced to become a writer. There's nothing keeping me in the profession other than (a) I enjoy it and (b) I have no real aptitude for anything else.

I have written with partners and I've also written in "writers' rooms" amidst a whole gang of writers. Both have their benefits, especially when you're collaborating with someone you can learn from. I still felt the need to also write something on my own…at my own pace…and to my own satisfaction. And I never feel lonely. I just feel like the rest of the world is in the next room until I finish my script or come to a natural stopping point for now.

In the last few years, the talented Anna Brisbin (aka "Brizzy") has taken the voiceover business by storm. Part of that is because she's studied the field and knows it well…so well that she's just launched a three-part series that explores the history of voiceovers, going way way back to Thomas Edison and those before him who found ways to record sound. Here's the first chapter and I'll be bringing you the other installments as she releases them…

If you're a writer or want to be one, make sure you read this post by Ken Levine. It's about writers who think everything they do is perfect right out of the typewriter or inkjet printer. They don't rewrite…they don't look at what they've done and consider that just maybe it could be made better.

But I will, of course, quibble with one point. Ken writes…

Kurt Vonnegut…once said something to this effect: When you get a group of writers together usually they'll all squawk about how hard it is to write. And there will be one writer who says it's easy, he loves it, piece of cake. Vonnegut says invariably that will be the worst writer in the group.

I agree kinda with that view but I'm also unimpressed by people who want to be writers, sacrifice everything to become writers, manage to become writers…and then bitch 'n' moan constantly about having to spend long hours writing. There's a line in almost every movie about The Mafia or any organization not unlike The Mafia. At some point, someone says something like, "This is the life we have chosen for ourselves."

There are people in this world who willingly, even eagerly become plumbers and then complain about having to unclog toilets. There are people who dream of becoming lawyers then gripe about having to read all those damned law books. At a party once, I met a guy who said he was "male talent" in porn films and heard him explain what a pain it was to get up every morning and have to go in to be paid to have sex with beautiful women. As if he was only doing it because someone was holding his grandparents hostage or something.

I know why some of us complain about the long, struggling hours of writing. We want to remind others that sitting at the keyboard all day is working. We're not there playing Sudoku.

Okay, you're right:  Some of us are playing Sudoku but that's during our breaks from actually writing. We need to sometimes alert others that we're a bit weary and our minds are still back in our stories so we may not be the freshest, most attentive company.

Also, sometimes when your work is being handed to others to perform, direct or evaluate, you feel you should remind them that it took you, a professional writer, five weeks to write that. They ought to not be approaching it with the assumptions that they can come up with a better line in twenty seconds. Maybe you can on occasion but don't be so quick to dismiss those five weeks.

Complaining about having to work hard at writing doesn't mean you're a good writer or a bad writer. It might mean you're an annoying writer and I try to catch myself when I might be sounding like one. Please don't dismiss what I'm saying here. I was up all night writing this.

Debuting this weekend on your local PBS outlet is a Great Performances special — the recent British production of the recent Broadway revival of Anything Goes starring Sutton Foster. You might want to consult your local listings and set your TiVo or DVR to snag this one. Here's a preview…

Here is tonight's webcast by the folks at The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog with their special guest, me…

I got two more cold calls today from folks who said they were contractors. Just for fun, I asked one what a Floor Joist is and he didn't know. The other one I suspect was a contractor but he tried the old "I spoke to you last year and you were very nice to me and you asked me to call you back in May because you'd be ready to do some work on your house" routine.

I don't need a contractor but if I did, I (first of all) wouldn't select someone I'd never heard of just because that person phoned me. I'd ask people I trust who've either employed contractors recently or are in allied fields and I'd get recommendations. And I (second of all) wouldn't deal with someone who started our relationship by lying to me.

But it looks like the calls are starting up again. I suspect someone somewhere is selling a new list of prospects and I'm on it. Between them and the calls looking for my vote, I'm going to get a lot of spam calls in the coming days.

We're now 70 days from this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego and if you're going to need a hotel room down there, now is the time to book it.

Tonight, my friends who run The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog launch another season of podcasts and incisive news coverage of what's being planned for the con. Their efforts are, you'll note, unofficial. They are also valuable even though they are not connected with the convention or those who run it.

Their first podcast of the year is tonight at 6:30 PM Pacific Time, 9:30 Eastern, and their guest is me. Watch it live on their site or look here later for a link.

So I was sitting here a few minutes ago, trying to figure out what to write about here today. I was going to write about how Mattea Roach, the 23-year-old lady who won 23 times in a row on Jeopardy! was finally defeated last Friday evening. She played the game about as well as it could be played and seemed delightful and humble to most of us…but somehow aroused a lot of anger from anti-social people on social media. People were saying they didn't like her hand gestures, which of course is a perfectly logical reason to hate someone you've never met.

I'm being sarcastic obviously. I think some people were angry because she was young, some because she was female, some because she's openly gay and some because she reminded them of that stuck-up girl back in high school who was smarter than they were. There's a lot of envy and resentment on the Internet, often badly disguised with silly reasons.

But my pal Ken Levine wrote at length about this yesterday so I was trying to think what else I could write about when the phone rang…

As longtime followers of this here blog may recall, I used to get a dozen calls a day from contractors who wanted me to engage them to do work on my house. Actually, some of them were people who said they were contractors but weren't…hired by some sort of agency that makes calls trying to drum up work for contractors. I was on some sort of list and for months and the calls just wouldn't stop — until finally, they stopped. For the most part.

I answered the phone, thinking it would be someone wanting me to cast my ballot for someone in the current election here in California. Instead, it was a man who addressed me by name and told me he was a neighbor of mine. He told me the address…and if he lived at that address, he'd be a neighbor of mine except that there is no such address. He obviously had mine and he subtracted 150 from my house number and said that was his address. Then…

HIM: I met you last year. My son and I came by and introduced ourselves. We're contractors and…

ME: Gee, I don't remember that…

HIM: You were very nice to us and you said that you might have some work you wanted to do around May of this year…

ME: Gee, I have no memory whatsoever of meeting any contractors on my block.

HIM: We had just done some work on the house directly across the street from yours and the man there told us you might be interested.

ME: Across the street from me? What was the man's name?

HIM: I don't recall it at the moment.

ME: Well, there's no house with the address you gave me and said was yours. Are you even a real contractor?

I didn't get the answer to my question because that's when he hung up on me. I just sat here wondering, "Does that ever work? Do people really hire a contractor based on a pitch like that?" And lately every time I wonder about something like that, I look at the news and some of the ridiculous things that some people believe and I have my answer.

Heading for Las Vegas? Well, if you're ready to spend $30,000 per night for accommodations, here's where you can stay. Or you can stay for free here if you're gambling so much and so poorly that they figure you'll lose that amount every night…

Many folks are writing to remind me that Ross Bagdasarian (aka David Seville) had an Alfred Hitchcock connection, having played the songwriter in the Hitchcock film, Rear Window.  Whether this had anything to do with Ross/David recording his version of the theme from The Trouble With Harry is unknown to me…but a lot of musicians who never worked with "Hitch" did their versions of that song also.

The Tony Award nominations are out and it'll be interesting to see if the June 12 telecast gets more viewers than usual. Two people that most Americans have actually heard of are competing for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical — Hugh Jackman for The Music Man and Billy Crystal for Mr. Saturday Night.

Having not been within 2,820 miles of Times Square in the last few years, I of course have seen none of the nominated shows — or even the non-nominated shows — so I have no rooting interest here or predictions. It'll be nice though to see the scenes from all those productions and maybe it'll even entice me to get on a plane in the next year or three. The award ceremony will apparently be available live to anyone, no matter where they reside, if they have some upper-tier subscription to Paramount+…which I don't.

Paramount+ will also offer an exclusive hour of I-don't-know-what before the three-hour ceremony on CBS…so that will make for a four-hour broadcast. Or five if Billy Crystal gets to give an acceptance speech.

In 1956, when Paramount Pictures was releasing the Alfred Hitchcock film The Trouble With Harry, someone got the idea of getting different recording artists to record different versions of the title song. It was some sort of promotional idea that I really don't understand. One of those versions came out on Liberty Records and it was performed by, as you can see on the label, "Alfi and Harry." This recording appears nowhere in the film but it was "inspired" by it.

Does Alfi's voice sound familiar to you? It might if you're old enough to remember Ross Bagdasarian who also made records under the name "David Seville." He did a lot of novelty records like this before he hit big with "Witch Doctor" and later with his sped-up friends, Alvin and the Chipmunks. This may be my favorite of all that he put on vinyl. CAUTION: It may also be an earworm that will move into your head and live there for days/months/years…

Remember: I warned you.

This originally appeared here on May 10, 2015…

I've officially been an orphan since October of 2012 when my mother passed away. As I've detailed here, her death was not a tragedy. The tragedy — if you can call it that with a woman who lived far longer than any doctor would have expected — was how her health deteriorated the last ten years or so. Inability to walk much or see much or eat anything she liked or go three months without being carted off to an emergency room had left her wishing it would end. She just wanted it to end. If there had been a legal, painless way to make that happen, she would have eaten three chili dogs, then pushed the button.

(Actually, in her condition, if she'd eaten the three chili dogs, she might not have lived long enough to push the button.)

On March 3 of that year, one day after I turned 60, I held a big birthday party for my little ol' self and invited 120 of my friends. If you felt you should have been among them, I apologize…but I have way more than 120 friends and that's about all the restaurant could hold. I chose that particular one because of her — because she liked it and it was close to her home. As if all the other problems I mentioned in the first paragraph didn't restrict her ability to enjoy life, there was this: She sometimes and without much warning got incredibly tired and had an urgent need to go to bed and stay there for 8-10 hours. One day, I took her on a day trip to a place she'd always wanted to go that was about a two-hour drive from her bedroom. The fatigue hit her there and it was quite an ordeal to get her home and safely under the covers.

After that, she was unwilling to ever be in a situation where she was more than about twenty minutes from that bed. She wouldn't let me take her to the theater or to a show because, as she put it, "What if we get there and the show is just starting and I suddenly need to be home?" She agreed to come to the party because I assured her that (a) if she suddenly needed to go to sleep, someone would immediately take her home and (b) it would not be me. I convinced her to let me take her to the party since we would be getting there before it started but she made me swear I wouldn't leave my own birthday party in progress to chauffeur her back to her abode.

With all that agreed-upon, she agreed she'd attend my 60th birthday party. She said, "I guess I should since I was there for your last one, fifty years ago." Actually, she was there for all of them but the previous one was, indeed, fifty years before.

I don't recall my first few. My earliest memory would be of one that was around age five or six. I remember a lot of neighborhood children and their mothers, we kids dressed up nicer than we wanted to be. I remember sandwiches and cake and presents and paper hats. That's really all that stayed with me about the next few and about all I recall about going to the birthday parties of friends of mine unless they were cruel enough, as some were, to hire a clown.

Clowns do not belong at kids' birthday parties. They belong at circuses and in cartoons and Red Skelton paintings and nowhere else.

Mostly, I had tiny, family-only parties at ages seven, eight and nine…and then when I turned ten, my mother insisted on throwing a big gala birthday celebration for me. I had not asked for one. She just felt it was something a parent was supposed to do for a child and she seemed way more excited about it than I was. It was only in ostensible adulthood that I began to not hate being the center of attention of anything. Still, I somehow felt obligated to go along with this party thing so at her request, I specified twelve friends I would like to have attend.  She contacted their parents and arranged the kids' presence and the assistance of a few moms.

It was all planned as an afternoon of events. The first was that with the aid of some other parents and their autos, we all caravaned to a miniature golf course on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica and played a round of miniature golf. Then we drove to our house and there was food — hamburgers, hot dogs, lemonade and (of course) cake — and then a Badminton tournament in the backyard. Somewhere in there, I unwrapped a lot of presents.

Fun? Not one bit. I hated the entire day. Could not wait for it to be over.

The miniature golf course part of it just seemed so awkward — getting thirteen kids there and dividing that prime number into smaller groups since thirteen kids cannot all play golf at the same time. The golf course was a ramshackle slum that was torn down a few years later. It might have imploded on its own on my tenth birthday if I'd had a better backswing on my niblick.

There were all these parents around taking pictures of us and…well, there were a lot of things I didn't like about being a kid and one of them was being thought of as "cute" in the same tone of voice you'd use to describe a "cute" trained dog act. It also didn't help my disposition that I finished dead last in the tournament. None of my friends were classy enough to throw a few putts and let the Birthday Boy win.

Then it was back to the house for chow with all these adults taking photos and also now 8mm movies of how cute we all looked wearing our party hats and eating cake. I made a wish and blew out all the candles with one breath but I didn't get my wish: The party continued. Some of my friends embarrassed me with spillage and mess-making and there was my poor mother running around, trying to wait on all these kids and making a special lunch for one girl who didn't want to eat a hot dog or a hamburger.

Not one of the presents was something I wanted or could use. I've rarely enjoyed getting gifts because I'm terribly hard to shop for. I'm larger than people think, I have all those food allergies and I don't drink…so probably a good 70% of all the presents I've received in my lifetime, unless I told the person what to give me, have been items of clothing that didn't fit me, food I couldn't eat or wine I wouldn't drink. I also buy or receive review copies of every DVD or book I want so there's not much chance of giving me one of those I don't have. It's always made me feel bad when someone goes to the trouble and expense to buy (or worse, make) something I can't wear, eat, drink or use. Friends have succeeded in giving me wanted gifts but not often.

That day at my tenth birthday party, I did my best to smile and thank the givers but I was as bad an actor then as I am now and I'm pretty lousy now. Then the Badminton game was chaotic with the net falling down and no one knowing how to keep score or even play…and again, I lost. The whole afternoon just felt so wrong to me in every way.

When all my friends had finally left, my mother came up to me and asked if I had another wish for my birthday. I yelled, "Yes! I would like to never have another birthday party as long as I live!" Then I ran to my room, slammed the door and stayed in there for about five minutes, crying and sulking.

It took the full five minutes for my ten-year-old brain to realize that my parents — my mother, mainly — had gone to a lot of trouble to give me a wonderful day and it wasn't their fault that it hadn't turned out that way. I went out into the living room. My father had gone out somewhere but my mother was sitting in her chair, crying.

It was the worst moment of the day, maybe the worst moment of my admittedly-brief life until then. I had taken a bad situation and made it worse and I had hurt my mother.

"I'm sorry," I said to her. "I'm very, very sorry."

She said she was sorry I hadn't liked my day. I told her I was sorry that she was sorry and that I really liked what she tried to do. She looked at me hard and said, "I should have known. You don't like Halloween either!"

I nodded yes. To me, Halloween was and still is a day when you disfigure yourself, go around and extort candy you probably won't eat and — again — do things adults think are "cute." Never liked it. I've just never been big on holidays. I figure if you can live life so you're reasonably happy on non-holidays, you don't need the holidays. They become less important. A friend of mine later would tell me, "I lived all year for Christmas because it was the only time there was no screaming in our house." There was almost never screaming in the house where I grew up.

That afternoon, my mother and I continued to apologize to each other for about the next ten minutes. I was sorry I hadn't enjoyed my party. She was sorry she hadn't realized I wouldn't enjoy a party…and indeed, I didn't have another one for an entire half a century.

In those fifty years, I don't think I ever had another harsh word or moment of unpleasantness with my mother. She was smart and understanding and she just accepted that her kid was not like other kids. Actually, I'm not sure there are any kids who are like other kids but if there are, I'm not one of them. So after the debacle of my tenth birthday, we had an unspoken pact…

She never did anything just because it was something other parents did. And I, because I knew just how exceptional she was and how everything she did was at least intended to be for my own good, never faulted her for anything. There was really nothing to fault but I had a good imagination. I could have made up something if I'd wanted to. Years later, I stood by as my then-girlfriend — one who was not out of my life rapidly enough — screamed at her mother. What the mother had done was immaterial. It was wrong but not destructive and certainly not malicious. Still, my lady friend yelled, over and over, "Mom, you ruin everything!"

And I just stood there, cringing at the scene and thinking, "Gee…my mother never ruined anything!"

She certainly didn't ruin my 60th birthday party. Quite the opposite. She was the star attraction, getting way more attention than I did — which was fine because I intended it to be less about me and more about her getting to meet a whole lot of my friends she had not met and vice-versa. I knew she wouldn't be in any condition to do that by #61 so I had the party and I planted her at the first table by the door. It didn't matter if guests congratulated me on entering my seventh decade but they all had to talk with my mother. As it turned out, I had a good time because she had a great time.

Biggest thrill of that evening for her? Talking with so many of my friends and especially Stan Freberg. Stan was not only there but though I'd admonished all there were to be no gifts and no performing, he wrote and insisted on reciting a poem about me. And then since he'd broken the rules, someone else insisted they all sing guess-which-song.

She didn't get exhausted. She wound up staying for the entire evening and then Carolyn and I drove her home. After she passed, I realized it was the last time she'd left her house for non-medical reasons.

The morning after the party, she called me up to thank me for, as she put it, "wheeling me there." I made like I was annoyed she'd upstaged me at my own party and she laughed, then said, "Well, I'm more important than you are!"

She said, "People kept saying to me, 'Oh, I can see where Mark got his sense of humor.' I told them, 'No, I got my sense of humor from him.'" That's something we both believed. She explained to them, "Mark started picking up all these funny things from comic books and books he read and TV shows he watched. I had to start talking like him so we could communicate. It was like if your child suddenly began speaking Swedish, you'd have to learn Swedish." At one point, Freberg asked her where I got my sense of humor and she said, "I think he stole some of it from you."

Today, as you're probably well aware, is Mother's Day. My mother never wanted to do anything on Mother's Day. The restaurants were always too crowded, she said, and she preferred to get flowers and gifts from me when she didn't expect them and they didn't seem like an obligation. It was pretty much the same attitude I have about all holidays. If you always treat your mother like it's Mother's Day, there's really nothing out of the ordinary you can do for her on the second Sunday in May except wish her a happy Mother's Day. So I'd do that and then I'd take her out to dinner the next time she felt like leaving the house.

The last Mother's Day she was around, she didn't want to go out. She didn't want to go out the next day or the next day or any day for weeks after…and then she was in the hospital for a week. Finally in late June, I gave her an ultimatum: Redeem your Mother's Day "coupon" now or forfeit it. She said, "Okay, if you insist, you can bring over some El Pollo Loco this evening and we'll eat together here."

I said, "That's not a Mother's Day dinner. I brought you El Pollo Loco last week…and I think, the week before."

She said, "Yeah, but it wasn't Mother's Day then."

I said, "It's not Mother's Day today."

She said, "Hey, I'm your mother and if I say it's Mother's Day today, it's Mother's Day today. I want four drumsticks and a couple of thighs — enough to have some for tomorrow. I have a feeling it's going to be Mother's Day tomorrow, too."

How could you ever find a reason to get mad at someone like that?  How?