This is the opening number from last night's The Tony Awards Present: Broadway's Back! The song was written by Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman and Amber Ruffin, and performed by host Leslie Odom Jr and some fine Broadway dancers. I didn't catch all the lyrics so I turned on the closed captioning for myself. You can do the same thing.
My favorite part of last night's Tony Awards was when they bowled us over with three duets from past shows: Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel singing "For Good" from Wicked, Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal performing "What You Own" from Rent and (best of all) Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell favoring us with "Wheels of a Dream" from Ragtime.
I saw someone online say that this segment only served to remind them that this year's offerings didn't have the same power and timelessness. Well, maybe. This year's Broadway shows certainly have plenty of excuses for not filling their stages with history but I did think some of them sold a lot of tickets with the numbers they presented — especially Moulin Rouge and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.
I'll write more about the ceremonies when I get through with some work that stubbornly insists it's more important than blogging. Here are those three duets I so enjoyed…
Folks have been sending me links to websites that track public figures who (a) came out against vaccinations and/or masks, (b) came down with COVID and, in too many cases, (c) died from it. The sites I've seen in this category all seem to have a jubilant "got what they deserved" celebratory air about them which makes me real uncomfy. Cheering on the pain and death of others is not something I enjoy and I sure hope I never do.
But yeah, once in a while, someone I think has done terrible things dies and I can smile at the notion that they won't be doing those terrible things anymore. Schadenfreude does bring out the worst in us.
Yesterday when I dropped by a nearby eatery to pick up a "to go" order, there was some sort of mask-related psychodrama winding down. One loud guy was screaming and cussing and threatening because they wouldn't serve people like him with an exposed face. I didn't catch enough of it to fully understand but the cussing guy sure reminded me of folks I sometimes encounter who just love to scream and spread hatred and if masks hadn't been his reason, it would have been something else. Maybe.
But there are people opposed to vaxxing and masking who aren't fanatics or screamers or even operatives who feel empowered by leading a crusade against what Liberals or "woke people" or political opponents are advocating. They're just people who are wrong, possibly because they don't have good doctors or don't trust the ones they have. Or they've been grossly misinformed.
Or maybe they're like a guy I knew back in school who took a bizarre pride in never changing his mind about anything. He thought that was a trait indicating dedication and forcefulness and character. I thought it was a way to stay on the wrong side of an issue forever. I wish there was a way these people could back off on the positions they've taken…a way they could cover their faces and save face at the same time.
Badges went on sale this morning for the Comic-Con Special Edition which is being held November 26-28 at the San Diego Convention Center. Online chatter says it has not sold out and it might not sell out today.
I suspect the nature of this convention is that it will have a total turnout around that of WonderCon (run by the same folks), which would mean around 50,000 attendees over three days. I further suspect a low percentage of those folks will come some great distance and stay in a nearby hotel. There will be such people but a large percentage of the guests will be ones who drove to the con for a day. I may be wrong about this. I don't think even the fine staff running the convention is too sure at this point.
Unless there is some alarming uptick in COVID or a new strain that strikes mainly people who don't eat cole slaw, I plan on being there and I'll be hosting a few panels. It does not look like any of them will be Quick Draw! or the Cartoon Voices panels I so often helm but I'm not sure yet what they will be. If you'd like to be there, find out more or get into an online queue to purchase badges at this site.
Here's another video where Sergio and I answer questions from Groo fans. Got one you'd like us to address? There's a comments section on the page over at www.groo.com where you can read all the videos we've done so far…
The Tony Awards will be handed out on Sunday, unnoticed by most. In the best of times (i.e., pre-COVID), very few Americans cared who won what and it's worse this time because so few shows were seen by so few audiences.
Here's an indicator: The nominee for Leading Actor in a Musical is Aaron Tveit in Moulin Rouge. That's nominee, singular. He's the only one. Instead of picking from a list, the Tony voters were asked something like, "Should Aaron Tweit win in this category?" If he received 60% "yes," he gets the trophy.
The telecast this year has been bisected. At 7 PM Eastern, Audra MacDonald hosts the Tony Awards on Paramount+. That will run two hours. At 9 PM, everyone theoretically switches over to CBS for a two-hour show hosted by Leslie Odom Jr. This one is called The Tony Awards Present Broadway's Back!, which sounds like it'll be a two-hour infomercial for all the shows that have just opened or reopened, or are about to open or reopen. I hope it is.
The three most important Tony Awards — Best Play, Best Revival of a Play, and Best Musical — will be presented on this show. All the other awards that are going to be televised at all will be given out on the earlier show.
They tried something like this years ago and it didn't work then…but it might be a good idea now.
Not all that long ago, the Tony Awards were thought of as a loser telecast, always finishing low in the ratings. CBS was willing to air it providing the show did not run a second over two hours…and they were very rigid about that. It presented a lot of problems because it meant a lot of awards had to be presented not on the air but before the telecast or during commercial breaks. Obviously, a lot of nominees and recipients were unhappy about that.
But the time problem had another downside. Giving out the trophies is Job Two on a Tony telecast. Job One is showing scenes from what's currently playing on Broadway to perhaps lure buyers to order tickets. Some shows have been saved from having to close by a surge of ticket-buyers following the Tonys.
One year, a nominee for Best Musical was a show called Ain't Nothin' But The Blues, which starred a friend of mine named Ron Taylor. That's Ron on the right in the above photo. He's no longer with us but he had a great voice and if you ever listen to the original off-Broadway cast album of the musical of Little Shop of Horrors, that's Ron singing as The Plant.
Ain't Nothin' But The Blues was not doing great business and might have closed except that the Tonys were coming up and there was the thought that doing a rousing number from it on the telecast might boost sales and keep the show alive. We'll never know if it would have because that year, portions of the telecast ran long and the number from Ain't Nothin' But The Blues never got on. The show closed soon after.
The Tony people tried one year to work around the two-hour limit by doing two hours of the show on PBS and then the two hours on CBS — kinda like what they're doing this year. That time, it was awkward and the PBS section went largely unwatched, plus of course there were huge arguments over what would be on the CBS section. The two-hour restriction ended about the time Les Moonves took over as the Head Honcho at CBS.
We can all think of bad things to say about Mr. Moonves but he did a lot of good things and one was this: It was he (reportedly) who decreed that not only could the Tony Awards run three hours but they could even run a little past 11 PM it they had to. On most Tony telecasts thereafter, you could usually see a shot of Moonves in the audience, enjoying the hell out of the show, as a little "thank you."
I am guessing that the decision to let the Tonys go as long as necessary was not because the show had become any more popular with viewers. It probably had something to do with the fact that most awards shows were down in ratings so the the Tony Awards' tune-in no longer looked as bad as it once had. Anyway, most of the televised ceremonies have been delightful since then — and probably somewhat responsible for Broadway doing as well as it was doing the last decade…up until the point when The Pandemic opened.
So this year, it's probably right 'n' proper that they turn the CBS telecast into a selling tool to lure audiences back. If you don't subscribe to Paramount+, this might be a good time to get a free seven-day trial of it, which is what I intend to do. I may or may not cancel before we get to the part where I have to start paying.
I do not expect to be back there soon. I'm still uncomfy with the idea of being on an airplane or even leaving my house for very long. I also don't see a lot playing or opening back there that lures me. The Hugh Jackman/Sutton Foster revival of The Music Man was very tempting until I saw what they're charging for good seats — and I don't mean what the scalpers are charging. I mean the price printed on the tickets. Harold Hill will not be the only con-artist in that theater.
But I'll watch all four hours of Sunday's festivities and see if anything else lures me…and I hope Broadway comes back, bigger than ever. Even when I'm on this coast, I like the idea that it's thriving on the east coast.
Here's another one of those fake text messages not from AT&T trying to get me to click on a link that will do fiendish things to my phone and/or credit rating. This one, as any fool can plainly see, is intended for Dorothea. That was the name of my mother who died in October of 2012 but who is apparently still paying monthly bills for the cell phone she never had. Mom was always good about such things.
I'm curious how my cell number got connected to her. When she was in and out of the hospital and nursing home the last year or two of her life, I often put her landline phone on call forwarding to my landline phone…and I do still get spam calls for her. About twice a year, a live person claiming to be from a charity calls my landline and asks for her. I ask, "What is this in reference to?" and the caller says something like, "Well, we've always been able to depend on her for a donation and when she gave us one six months ago, she asked that I call back around now to remind her to donate again."
Sometimes I say, "Really? Six months ago, you spoke to my mother who died in 2012?" If they didn't immediately hang up, I'd say, "Don't you feel guilty conning money out of the Deceased?" But they always hang up before I can get to that part.
I dunno if she ever donated to the caller's "cause" but she did donate to some legit charities and I guess that got her on a pigeon list somewhere. Her old number is not on call forwarding to mine and hasn't been in years but I guess somehow when it was, my number got linked to her.
More bizarre is how, though she never signed up anywhere to receive text messages, she does now…and they show up on my cell. If you know how this happens, please don't tell me. I like to keep a little mystery in my life about some things.
Several of you have sent me info on how to go about reporting spam text messages and I am now about to try some of them. I'll report back here once I understand a little more about how this works.
Hey, remember that nakedly-partisan review of Maricopa County's 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2020 election? The one that was supposed to prove Trump really got more votes? Well, the rumor at the moment is that when its report is released — apparently, later today — it will show that Biden got slightly more than the previous counts determined and that Trump got a little less.
And some people will go to their graves not only believing that Trump won but that there was clear evidence that proved it…even though Trump's lawyers never presented any to anyone in an official position to do anything about it.
Meanwhile, here's an article by Adam Serwer detailing the five main ways Trump has tried to seize victory in an election that he lost badly. I wonder if he's looked into changing his name to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and making Pence change his to Kamala Harris.
It's Jordan Klepper talking to parents at an anti-mandate rally…
Let's say you're in a roomful of people who are not wearing masks during The Pandemic. Are you any safer if you wear one? According to this article, yes, you are. You're better off not to be in such a room but if you are, Masked is better than Not Masked.
And someone asked me what kind of mask I'm wearing when I go out. My doctor recommended this one and I'm pretty happy with it. I have no idea how it'll do on your face but it's comfy on mine and I like that it goes around my whole head, doesn't hook on my ears and it easily covers my chin. Some of the masks I tried earlier were not so efficient in the chin area.
Minor drawbacks: They aren't the cheapest masks you can get. Then again, maybe this is not the time to be wearing the cheapest mask you can get. Also, you'll feel like the 3M company bought advertising space on your face.
This is the 3M Aura N95 Model 9205. I also wear their Model 9210 which is just about identical but harder to purchase in small quantities. They say it's "disposable" but I'll bet you could wear one for many days and many nights.
Maybe you've been getting these for a while on your cell phone but it's only been the last month or two that mine has received them. They're fake messages, mostly pretending to be from AT&T, trying to get me to click on a link that will take me…
…well, since I've been wise enough not to click, I don't know where any of them would take me but I think "to the cleaners" is a likely possibility. Or maybe Computer Virus Hell. Or maybe to a festival of data-mining and/or an avalanche of additional spam. Whatever it, is, I'll bet it's not good for me.
This one wants me to click and claim some sort of money they're holding for me. The one before told me there were serious problems with my bill and I needed to click on the provided cyberlink to sort things out. The one before that said, "As requested, your cellphone account will be disconnected and deleted in one hour" and then it gave me a link to click if this was not what I wanted. And so on. How did I realize it was a fraud?
And also, I keep getting these. They have me on High Alert.
I'm not sure if there's anything I can do except to block their numbers. I have an app that lets me report voice calls I shouldn't be getting and while I'm not sure that does any good, at least I feel like I've done something to fight back. That's why these are more annoying.
Shortly after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who'd voted for him but viewed it less as a vote for Donald and more as a vote against Hillary. This guy really had a hate on for Hillary Clinton for reasons that struck me as having little to do with anything she'd done or might do in government. He kept comparing her to "that girl in high school who kept acting like she knew more than anyone else." At one point we had (approximately) the following exchange…
ME: Wouldn't you like to have a President who knows more than anyone else?
HIM: Not if they keep acting like they do.
It didn't make a lot of sense to me back then. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me now, especially since the guy he voted for was the guy who went around saying things like "Only I can fix it" and "nobody knows more about technology than me." Here's a list of some of the times Trump said he knew more than anyone else about something.
I think this particular friend had a problem with the concept of a woman acting like she was smarter than he was but not with a man claiming it. But a lot of people don't like anyone saying that. They're kind of "in denial" that a doctor might know more about medicine, a lawyer might know more about law, etc. They like The Internet because no matter what stupid thing you believe, you can always find an alleged expert who will agree with you.
99.99% of doctors might agree that hitting yourself repeatedly on the head with a ball peen hammer will not make you live longer but somewhere on the World Wide Web, there's gotta be someone who claims to be an expert and who advocates his "Ball Peen Hammer Longevity Treatment" — and if there isn't, there will be. Even if you don't completely buy into it, it gives you the power to say, "All the science isn't in yet" or "Experts disagree on this." Today, more than ever, we have people who believe they are indeed entitled to their own facts.