Hadley Freeman talks with Mel Brooks, whose autobiography has just come out. I decided to buy this as an audiobook because hearing Mel say it for real will be better than imagining his voice in my head.

The first Broadway show with music and lyrics by S. Sondheim was almost a musical called Saturday Night. It never made it to The Great White Way because its producer died. Here's one of the songs written for it as sung by Benjamin Love…

The Carpenters had a pretty big hit in 1970 with a song officially called, I believe, "[They Long To Be] Close To You." You need to include the part in brackets. It came from the same album as another huge it of theirs, "We've Only Just Begun," which made it to the top of the charts but not — and I'm sure they were crushed about this — to my mixtape.

I liked The Carpenters a lot. It was pretty sad in 1983 when Karen Carpenter died from heart failure brought on by complications of anorexia. Two years earlier or so, a producer I was later glad I never worked for took me to lunch and said he was closing a deal with ABC for a weekly Carpenters TV series and he wanted to lock me in as head writer. I was not sure that either ABC or The Carpenters knew about this and many years later when I met Richard Carpenter, I found out they didn't.

I decided at the time that even if the series was a real offer, I was going to pass on it. Before I did — or maybe after I did but before this producer gave up on the project and/or involving me — he sent me over a package of all the Carpenters records to date. I played them. I enjoyed them. Gee, that lady had a pretty voice.

The records were messengered to me in a package that contained the receipt from Tower Records, which was where the producer had purchased them. That heightened my suspicions that he wasn't in tight with the Carpenters. If he couldn't get a few free records out of them, he probably couldn't get a contract out of them. But I was grateful for the records.

I finally got around to watching the video of Alec Baldwin being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos about the tragedy on the set of the movie Rust. There is, of course, a mystery as to how that awful thing happened but I'm not going to speculate from afar. There's an ongoing investigation and if the folks conducting it can't figure it out with access to all the evidence and witnesses, I'm sure not about to crack the case sitting here.

There are two other mysteries here, one being why Baldwin consented to the interview and if he did so against the advice of his attorneys. He must have known that if he broke down crying — as he did — people would just say, "He's an experienced actor. He knows how to cry on cue."

That may or may not be so but he's not going to win any sympathies with it, nor will saying — as he did in several forms — "I would go to any lengths to undo what happened." That's kind of a hollow, easy thing to say when we all know that there's no way to undo what happened.

There will presumably be a report that will spread blame around to many but to one person in particular — whoever was responsible for the live charge in the gun. That person will pay a high price and there will be civil suits where someone or someones will pay a high price. Some people will never believe the "official" conclusion because some people never believe the "official" explanation of anything. And there will be some new rules or policies about guns on movie sets which may do the teensiest smidgen of good.

And the other mystery is why I watched that interview…and that one, I can answer. I think I was just dumb and I would go to any lengths to undo…

What we have here is the opening number from The Book of Mormon as performed Zoom-style by actors who would never be cast to play these roles in a conventional production. This is from a group called Limelight Performers who do what they call "Miscast Musicals" that are consciously cast that way…

• Ever since the invention of cell phones with hands-free earphones, I can't tell which people I see on the street who are alone and talking are engaged in an actual phone conversation and which ones are just talking to themselves.

George Perez is a very fine comic book artist best known for "team" comics like Teen Titans and The Avengers and any other popular comic that would cause another artist to say, "No, no! I won't draw that book with that many characters in it!" He is also an extremely nice man about whom I have never heard a bad word.

He has not been well for some time. His vision is failing and he is no longer drawing. Worse, it has just been announced that he is suffering from Stage 3 Pancreatic Cancer. More details are available on his new Facebook page. Great guy. Great talent. Very sad news.

Here from The Ed Sullivan Show for October 8 of 1967, we have The Muppets — and an early prototype of Cookie Monster…

Back here, I mentioned how reprehensible it was that after Donald Trump tested positive for COVID, he and his aides hid that fact and he continued to meet with unsuspecting people and to appear at a debate with Joe Biden. This was, we are told, revealed in the forthcoming book by Trump aide Mark Meadows.

Several folks wrote to "inform" me that the story is Fake News and as near as I can tell, they were basing that wholly on denials by Trump and Meadows…as if those two men had no reason to lie and never have. I still await the release of the Meadows book so we can all see if the reporters who quoted him were quoting him inaccurately or if the book does indeed say what they said it says. I suspect that if the quote was inaccurate, Meadows would have released the relevant passages along with his denial.

But we can wait and see that. In the meantime, William Saletan catalogues the way in which Meadows' account is "evolving," which in this case is another way of saying he can't seem to get his story straight.

In the past 637 days, I've learned to be very comfy — and to even enjoy in some ways — not leaving my house much. Or maybe I should say "my neighborhood" because I do go out and walk around my block and surrounding blocks and sometimes over to local merchants for supplies and eats. And I have been out for a few lunches — mostly eaten outta doors or in a restaurant with no one else in it but my dining companion(s) and masked servers. And I go to the occasional doctor appointment…

…but I've been here a lot and I recognize that that's not the healthiest lifestyle in the world. Avoiding viruses is healthy. Never getting out is not. I've known people who in non-COVID times were terrified to leave their homes and it damaged their careers, made them socially distant from others, impacted their health and generally made their world smaller and smaller and smaller. I need to enlarge mine judiciously.

I'm still adhering to my belief that the true answer to the questions "When will this all be over and when will life be normal again?" is "Nobody knows." When I say I'm expecting to be at WonderCon next April, there's a little implied asterisk (*) on that statement and a footnote that says "Coronavirus permitting." And it's based on the assumption that there will be an in-person WonderCon next April.

This dispatch is being written, like many things that appear on this blog, more for me than for you. I expect to look back on this and other posts here and kind of chart my Pandemic Experience. This is to remind me of when it was I became a little more assertive in slowly and safely getting out of my house.

But it is kinda nice here…

Now that we've gotten past the Hanukkah Channuka Chanukah Hannukah video links, I've decided to post a lot of Sondheim video links. Some will be him being interviewed and I'll try to minimize the number in which he tells the story about Oscar Hammerstein telling him his first play was terrible, which he got trapped into telling almost every time he was interviewed. Some will be folks singing his praises or, better still, his songs.

Here's fifteen minutes of him being interviewed on The Mike Douglas Show in 1977. In those minutes, he mentions that when he and his collaborators were working on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, their "dream cast" — not that they had any delusions they could get all these people — was as follows: Phil Silvers as Pseudolus, Danny Kaye as Hysterium, Bert Lahr as Senex, Buster Keaton as Erronius and Zero Mostel as Marcus Lycus.

They wound up with Zero as Pseudolus. Mr. Mostel repeated that role in the movie where he was joined by Silvers as Marcus Lycus and Keaton as Erronius. As Sondheim notes, Mostel was playing Silvers' part and vice-versa.

He also gives a neat little explanation of the song, "Send in the Clowns" and (of course) he tells the story about how Oscar Hammerstein told him his first play was terrible…

• Back when I was doing all-night group rewrites on sitcoms and variety shows, I learned that anything we thought of between Midnight and 2 AM was funny and anything anyone thought of after 2 AM was not funny.

Hello. This first ran here on December 14, 2010. Everything in it is unchanged except for the line in the first paragraph where I said, "I don't need to spend money now for mustard I won't use until 2022." I am now spending money for mustard I won't use until 2022, which commences a little less than four weeks from today…

Costco has loads of stuff that I need and plenty of items I don't need. It also has many items I need but not in those quantities. Every time I'm in there, I see the multi-pack of French's Mustard they offer and I think, "Oh, I use French's Mustard" and make a move to put one package in my cart. Then sanity (or my reasonable facsimile) prevails and I think, "Wait a minute. I don't need that much French's Mustard! That's enough to douse ham sandwiches until the decade after next." Yes, I know the stuff keeps. Food these days does not deteriorate. Food these days is so well-packaged and filled with preservatives that it can sit on your shelf for eons. That doesn't mean it should. At the very least, I don't need to spend money now for mustard I won't use until 2022 and I could use the storage space.

First rule of Costco Shopping: Never buy anything without first answering the question, "Where am I going to put this?"

Once in a while, I see a group of friends who've gone to a Costco together as a kind of collective. They've decided to buy things they all need, split the low prices for buying in quantity, then divide up the items later. This makes a lot of sense if you can make it work for you. My last visit, I saw a kibbutz of three out in the parking lot trying to divide their purchases and it looked contentious and friendship-ending to me. One was upset that in their communal purchase of blister-packs o' batteries, they'd gotten plenty of AA and AAA but no 9-Volt, which is what he required. You know how ugly it can sometimes get when pals try to split up a restaurant check? This was worse. I actually overheard the strident phrase, "My needs are not being met."

One of the things that occasionally annoys me about Costco is something I call The Kellogg's Variety Pack Frustration. It harkens back to the day when my parents would let me pick out the cereal I wanted at the supermarket. Naturally, getting a sufficient quantity of one I liked was less important than getting those neat little boxes of them that you could stack up and play with. Why get a decent-sized box of Rice Krispies when I could get the Kellogg's Variety Pack and get a little Rice Krispies and a little Sugar Smacks and a little Sugar Frosted Flakes, etc.? It looked so great but there was that drawback…

Shredded Wheat. The cole slaw of breakfast foods.

A Kellogg's Variety Pack contained ten boxes, five to a side. On each view, I found three cereals I loved…one I could tolerate (Special K, for instance) and one I just plain didn't want. Shredded Wheat was always one. On the other side, there'd be one, as well…usually something with "bran" in the title like Raisin Bran or All-Bran. Whatever it was, it was Shredded Wheat to me. The contents changed from time to time or Kellogg's would issue other samplers. There was a variation called the Request Pack which wasn't bad but the ones I saw in our market only had six boxes and if you did the math, you paid more per little box. I really wanted the ten-pack but I didn't want the Shredded Wheat. It spoiled everything.

I remember standing in the cereal section of a Safeway once — I must have been six or seven — examining every Kellogg's Variety Pack on the shelf. Surely there would be one where someone in the plant in Battle Creek, Michigan erred…one V.P. with no Shredded Wheat and maybe an extra Sugar Corn Pops. That Shredded Wheat spoiled everything for me but I never found a package without it.

I feel that way often in a Costco. They have this nice-three pack of picnic condiments: A bottle of mustard, a bottle of ketchup and a bottle of relish. In this case, the relish is the Shredded Wheat. I never use relish. They have cases of Progresso Soups, every one of which contains two of this one I like, two of that one I like, and so on…but also has two that might as well be Cream of Shredded Wheat. There's a box of little bags of various kinds of Baked Lays chips that I'd buy except it includes Doritos…which are, after all, made out of Shredded Wheat. Or maybe All-Bran, which is just Shredded Wheat in a clever plastic disguise.

Having told you how much I love Costco, I am now attempting to be fair and balanced by telling you I don't like these assortment deals. I don't know why the case of little cans of Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs can't be all Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs…why it has to contain Beefaroni. Or in a non-food aisle, why the 20-pack of Gel Pens has to have 14 black, three blue and three red. It is far more likely I will need just black pens than that I will need black, blue and red in precisely that ratio. Come on, folks. Why does everything have to have Shredded Wheat in it?

If there's anyone in the L.A. area who loves to go to Costco, needs roughly the same kind of things I need but loves Shredded Wheat, let me know. I think we can work a deal and I promise you won't hear me crying, "My needs are not being met."

John Oliver is off until February 14th. Here's something his show just released to hold you over until then…