It's a holiday dance spectacular with Elliot Dvorin and the Key Tov Orchestra…

I didn't think anything could lower my opinion of the man any more than its current subterranean level…but the list of places he went and people he probably infected after he knew he had COVID has done it.

Here's another Sondheim song I like a lot — "Our Time," sung here by Stephanie J. Block and a bunch of other Broadway performers…

The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to do something to Roe v. Wade. There are a lot of different opinions out there about what this will mean for a woman's right to choose abortion…so many opinions that a couple of them have to be right. But that also means a lot of them won't turn out to be right. I feel I should remind you that lately, every time SCOTUS Watchers predict what the highest court in the land is going to do, some pretty firm opinions turn out to be wrong.

So it may be as bad as some predict but I think I'll wait until the opinion is (a) known and (b) fully understood before I get upset or mad or relieved or whatever the proper response may be.

The same is true of the buzz about the COVID variant, Omicron. There's an awful lot of panic out there and not a whole lot of hard information.

You know, it's nice in a way to be able to get 24/7 news on our TV sets and our computers whenever we want it but it does have its downsides. It's been a while here since I've quoted the late journalist Jack Germond but it helps to remember when he said, "The problem is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know' so we have to say something even when we don't know."

Here are the nice Jewish (I assume) boys from Six13 who did that West Side Story parody I linked to the other day. In this video, they spoof Hamilton with a pretty impressive person introducing their performance…

Warning: The following story is a mystery with no verifiable ending…just speculation. If you're the kind of person who likes your questions to have solid, inarguable answers, you might want to find something else on the Internet to read instead of the following…

Charlton Press was a comic book company that existed roughly from 1945 to 1986. They published a lot of comic books and back when I was a kid, I kind of rooted for them the way you might root for any underdog. They didn't have a lot of memorable characters and their books were cheaply printed and the stories were often kind of sappy. Real good artwork did appear in them but not often. As I later learned, the company had a reputation for paying its writers and artists poorly and…well, it showed.

Sometimes though they got more than they paid for. A guy named Joe Gill wrote an awful lot of them and he'd just bang out story after story after story, whether he had an idea for one or not. Occasionally, he hit a vein of gold. Sometimes, Steve Ditko drew for them as did a couple other good artists like Dick Giordano and Rocke Mastroserio. I started buying Charltons when I was about ten and with few-and-far-between exceptions, I liked them then more than I did when I got older.

Most of those I bought, I bought at second-hand book stores, most of which charged a nickel each or you could get six comics for a quarter. Needless to say, I only bought comics at such stores in multiples of six. That was how I started buying comics from different companies. For a while, I was only buying DCs but one day at some store, I found some quantity of DCs I wanted like 23 or 35…where one more comic would be free. So I'd take some interesting-looking Marvel home as my free comic and I'd like it so much that I'd find myself collecting DCs and Marvels…

…and then one day at some store, the pile of DCs and Marvels I wanted would be, say, 47 and since one more comic was free, I'd try a comic from some other company. I'm pretty sure that's how I started buying Charltons.

Used book shops were a good place to buy Charltons, not just because they were cheaper but because those stores were a good place to find them. Many of the stores I frequented here in Los Angeles to buy new comics simply didn't carry them. The few that had any Charlton comics didn't have many. Even later when I began to learn some things about comic book distribution back then, I couldn't understand why Charlton's product wasn't as available as comics from DC, Marvel, Archie, Harvey, Dell, Gold Key or one or two others.

I still don't know why but that's not the mystery that this post is about. The mystery that this post is about occurred one day at a used bookseller on Santa Monica Boulevard near Sawtelle. I'd picked out some comics to purchase when the guy who ran the place asked me if I collected Charlton Comics. I said I did and he took me into the back room and showed me five boxes of comics he'd recently acquired. Let me describe what was in them…

Each box had about a hundred Charlton Comics. Every single comic was in perfect condition as if they'd just come from the printer and never been read. And what they represented was one copy of every single comic that Charlton had published in about the last two years.

There were copies of Army Attack, Army War Heroes, Battlefield Action, Billy the Kid, Black Fury, Blue Beetle, Brides in Love, Cheyenne Kid, Fightin' Army, Fightin' Five, Fightin' Marines, Fightin' Navy, First Kiss, Freddy, Frontier Scout Daniel Boone, Gorgo, Gunmaster, Hot Rod Racers, I Love You, Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Just Married, Konga, Li'l Genius, Love Diary, Marine War Heroes, Marines Attack, Montana Kid, My Little Margie, Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds, Navy War Heroes, Outlaws of the West, Romantic Story, Sarge Steel, Secrets of Young Brides, Six Gun Heroes, Strange Suspense Stories, Submarine Attack, Sweethearts, Teen Confessions, Teenage Hotrodders, Teenage Love, Texas Rangers in Action, U.S. Air Force, Unusual Tales, War Heroes, Wyatt Earp and maybe a dozen others.

The storekeeper told me someone had brought them in and swapped them for two cents per comic in store credit, not cash, and had picked out ten bucks worth of old books (not comics). He would let me have the lot of them for twenty dollars. I offered fifteen. He said, "It's a deal if you get them out of here today."

I was about thirteen years old when this happened. I didn't have a lot of money but I had enough for this transaction. During all this, my father had been patiently waiting in his car outside, reading the newspaper. When I think about how good comic books have been to my life, I am grateful for my father's willingness in those years to drive me to second-hand bookstores and sit outside in his car reading the newspaper while I went in.

He was a little startled when I came out carrying crates of comics but by that age, he was used to his son surprising him…and he figured I knew what I was doing even though I didn't always figure that. I had to make five trips to his car.

The comics were not in order and it wasn't until I got them home and did some sorting that I realized what I'd acquired. It was, as I said, one of every comic book Charlton had issued for two years. That wasn't readily apparent to me until I realized that Six Gun Heroes had changed its title to Gunmaster and continued the numbering. Or that Charlton published five issues of Blue Beetle numbered #1-5, then they stopped Unusual Tales after #49 and followed it with Blue Beetle #50. So the numbering of Blue Beetle went #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #50, #51 and so on…

Charlton did things like that all the time and back then, there were no reference books in which I could look this stuff up. I had to figure it out for myself.

But that also is not the Charlton Mystery that this post is about. The mystery is: "Where the heck did this collection come from?"

How or why could or would anyone collect one copy of every Charlton comic for two years straight? They didn't miss one issue, even with Charlton's rotten distribution and its comics changing names as effortlessly as some people change socks. I could understand (maybe) being a lover of Charlton's romance comics or their war comics or every comic they put out with the words "Fightin' or "Attack" in its title…but every Charlton comic? And in perfect condition? How? Why?

Here's the best theory I came up with and if you have a better one, I'd love to hear it…

Someone in Los Angeles had a relative who worked for Charlton…or some business connection. Maybe some artist or writer who worked for the firm lived out here. Charlton for some reason sent them, individually or collectively, one copy of every comic that came off their presses and the recipient just tossed them all in boxes. That would explain the perfect condition. One day, they looked at the accumulation and said, "I'm sick of having this stuff piling up like this. I'm going to take them to a used book shop and I'll take anything they'll give me for them."

That's all I've got. I don't even have all those comics. I traded or sold 'em off long ago but I still sometimes wonder where they came from.

And of course, we have to include Tom Lehrer's memorable ditty…

Quite a few folks wrote me about what I said yesterday about Chris Christie. Our pal Doug McEwan wrote to say, "I think one reason Chris Christie's book is flopping is that the people who would most want to read Christie's book are mostly illiterate." I think the point is that nobody wants to read it.

No one cares about Chris Christie. He is well past the stage where he's likely to matter in any way in politics. Once upon a time, he had some appeal as a Republican who was (briefly) able to work the middle of the road and win the governorship of a usually-Democratic state. But he left office with an approval rating two points below that of cold sores. He was never going to win an election again but he might have wrangled an appointment in the Trump Administration — and indeed, he claims he turned down Chief of Staff.

But now even Trump doesn't want him around. And voters don't want a middle-of-the-road guy these days. Not being loathed by the opposition party is proof you're a traitor to your party. Christie's trying to sell himself as a sensible Republican who admits Trump lost…but who also wants and needs Trump supporters. Can't be done. You not only can't sell a candidate from that stance, you can't even sell a book.

If Rodney Dangerfield hadn't died on us, he'd be a hundred years old. That's as good a reason as any to watch 100 Rodney Dangerfield jokes. (Actually, it's more like 98. There are a couple of repeats in here but just go with it…)

The last few weeks, it's been hard to turn on the TV without seeing Chris Christie plugging his new book. I kept hearing in my head that little earworm that was once placed there by a Hanna-Barbera cartoon: "He's here / He's there / He's everywhere / So beware!" And speaking of cartoons, I was afraid to turn on a rerun of my old Garfield & Friends show for fear he'd had himself edited into an episode.

But he was all over, doing his little act where he denounces Donald Trump, then says he might vote for him next time because Trump's definitely gonna run, then he walks that back and says Trump might not…then Christie says he hasn't decided about entering the race but argues against the notion that he won't. The guy's on all sides of every issue and, as Eric Boehlert notes, his book and comeback tour are flopping big-time.

Rob Salkowitz has a positive report on the Comic-Con Special Edition last weekend and I also heard (mostly) positive things from others who were in attendance. It was smaller, it had wider aisles, it had very little "celebrity" presence, it was a lot more about comics than about Hollywood, etc.

I'm glad to hear it was a success and I'm glad I made the decision I made not to attend. I wasn't ready for it.

The same fine folks who run Comic-Con will be running WonderCon in Anaheim from April 1 to April 3 next year. And the (presumably full-size) 2022 Comic-Con International in San Diego is set for July 21 to 24 with, I assume, Preview Night on July 20. During Covid Times, I have made it a point not to guesstimate that it will all be over by any particular date. We've all been wrong when we've done that. But I'm going to try to transition out of Stay-At-Home mode and work towards being ready for both.

Speaking of Stephen Sondheim…

There are a lot of articles appearing about Stephen Sondheim and it feels like every interview he ever gave is resurfacing. A lot of the interviews are the same interview, repeating the tale of how he gave a musical he wrote in his teen years to Oscar Hammerstein, thinking Hammerstein would produce it on Broadway and instead, Hammerstein said, "It's the worst thing I've ever seen" and proceeded to teach the young Sondheim how to do it right. But there are interviews that cover other ground and I'll try to point you to some of them in the coming weeks.

Here's a link to an article that Frank Rich wrote in 2013 that somehow escaped my notice then and since. It will tell you a lot about that extraordinary composer.

I wrote here about a trip my mother and I took to New York in 1959 when I was a mere seven years of age. I have a surprising number of memories from that trip and one was a lunch we had at The Automat. At one point, there were many Automats in New York and by '59, they were disappearing one by one.

Don't know what an Automat was? This video, promoting an upcoming documentary, will explain it better than I ever could…

I don't recall which Automat my mother took me to but we were staying at the Hotel Taft which was on Seventh Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets so it probably wasn't the one advertised above at 57th and Sixth…which may not even have been there by '59.  I gather they all looked pretty much the same, at least on the inside.

I do remember what a fun place it was, especially for a kid and I somehow remember what I had to eat: A turkey sandwich on white bread, a side dish of cooked carrots, a lemonade and a piece of very rich cake with strawberries and whipped cream.  And I even remember wishing we had a place like it back home in Los Angeles. If it had been next door and I had enough change, I never would have eaten anywhere else.

It's odd that we don't see places like this opening left and right these days. When you call a business, you're usually aware how much they don't want to hire human beings to talk to you. When you go to the market, they'd really prefer you use the self-service check-out. Even paying to park your car is often automated to the point where there's not one flesh 'n' blood human being in sight. So, someone's got to be thinking, why not a chain of restaurants that totally eliminates people waiting on diners?

I'm not advocating for this. I don't like the depersonalization of businesses or the job losses. I just like the idea of seeing my food before I commit to paying for it. It's the same reason I like cafeterias…or places like Subway where you can actually see the person assembling your lunch and stop them before they reflexively smear Russian Dressing all over what I ordered. And that Automat was just so much fun.