• I may change my mind tomorrow but right now, I want Elizabeth Warren to be sworn in as the next president but Joe Biden to run against Trump and I want Kamala Harris to be the nominee who faces Donald in any debates. Any way we can get those three to tag-team the nomination?

So it's June 19, 1969, the day I graduated from University High School. I'd attended Uni for three years but it somehow felt like thirty. Days passed slower when I was that age. Christmases were actually one whole year apart.

This is the second part of a remembrance of that day. If you missed Part One, it's here and it should be read before proceeding. If you have read it, let's proceed right after the following warning…

Now then. I was eager to get outta high school for several reasons, one being that I felt I'd long since stopped learning whatever there was to learn there. I was going to enter U.C.L.A. the following fall but before that happened, I wanted to somehow launch my career as a professional writer…a career I'd decided on more than ten years earlier.

No kidding: I wanted to be a writer from around the age of six. When you're that young, adults seem incapable of asking you much of anything except…

• When's your birthday?
• What's your favorite color?
• And what do you want to be when you grow up?

I had all the answers: March 2nd, orange and a writer. In that order. "A writer?" they'd puzzle. "Don't you want to be a spaceman or a cowboy?"

"Nope," I'd say. "A writer." Right now, I'd feel like a total failure in life if I'd picked being a spaceman or a cowboy. At this very moment, I'm doing what I wanted to do when I was six…something that as of less than a week from now, I'll have been doing for fifty friggin' years. That's five-oh.

Still, though I'd decided on my life's work early on, I hadn't decided what I wanted to be a writer of. There were plenty of enticing options: TV shows, movies, comic books, cartoons, plays, novels…

Since I didn't have to commit at that age, I figured I'd wait 'til I got old enough and see which if any of those became feasible. To my grand surprise, most of them did.

I was 17 on 6/19/69 — younger than most of my classmates because I'd skipped a few grades — but old enough, I thought, to begin figuring out the "of." I wanted to begin actually being a writer and just as much if not more, I wanted something else. I wanted a girl friend. I'd had friends who were girls but there's a big difference between having a girl be your friend and having her be your girl friend. And it's not the same difference as having sex and not having sex.

I hadn't even tried to get a girl friend for about eleven reasons and all of them were Fear. This is going to sound like the most cowardly, gutless thing in the world to anyone who hasn't been in my position but this is what I was afraid of: That I'd ask a girl out, she'd say no and then I'd have to sit next to her in Geometry for an entire semester being reminded of that turndown. Graduation Day was not only the day to make my move, it was Now or Never.

There were a number of girls in my class that I liked but there were three that I really liked. Really, really liked. Since at least one of them reads this blog, I won't say which of the three I preferred but I would have set fire to my comic book collection for any one of them.

Wait. No, I wouldn't have. That's the kind of thing that comes out of you if you're desperate enough. Let's just say I wanted just one of them to say, "Sure, Mark. I'd love to go out with you some evening." The graduation ceremony was going to be followed by a milling period where we graduates could all say farewell to each other. My plan — if you can call it a plan — was that I would locate as many of the three as I could and ask them for the phone numbers and some sort of signal that they wouldn't call the police if I asked them out to dinner.

There were also a few guys — just a few — that I wanted to make sure I stayed in touch with, plus a few more I didn't particularly want to stay in touch with but I felt a pleasant "Goodbye forever" was in order. I managed to talk with all of them and exchange contact info with the few before the ceremony so that was done.

Sitting there, waiting for the boring speeches to end, I kept thinking, "Get on with this! I have phone numbers to get! I didn't imagine that my plan had one major obstacle: My Aunt Dot.

I've written here before of Aunt Dot, a lovely, sweet lady who was incapable of intentionally harming another human being, me especially.  But she sometimes had odd ideas and she could be fairly stubborn about them.  She was at the ceremony along with my father, my mother and my Uncle Nathan.  Nathan was my father's brother.  Dot was their sister.  Aunt Dot had decided that after the festivities, we should all go celebrate at a rather famous Italian restaurant downtown called Little Joe's.

None of us had ever been there before but Aunt Dot had heard it was wonderful and that's where she insisted we dine.  I suggested that instead, we go to Zito's, which was my favorite restaurant of any kind, Italian or otherwise.  Like most folks with major food allergies, I have never liked trying new places to eat.  Aunt Dot, alas, was one of these "you should always try new things" people.  The fact that none of us had been to Little Joe's was, to her, an inarguable reason for going there and not to Zito's.

Zito's was a lot closer…like, a ten minute drive as opposed to 45 minutes in rush-hour traffic.  At Little Joe's, we needed a reservation (which she had made) whereas we could just show up at Zito's and get a table.  I argued all that, plus the notion that since it was my graduation, maybe we should go where I preferred to go?

Nope.  We had to go to Little Joe's.  After all, why drive ten minutes to a place we know we'll love when we can drive forty-five to a place we might not like?  If I sound like I'm dwelling overlong on this, it may be that after one week plus half-a-century later, I'm still having some residual anger about it.

It started ten seconds after I was handed my diploma and I walked over to where my parents, aunt and uncle were sitting.  They all congratulated me, my mother helped me out of the silly cap and gown, and then Aunt Dot said, "Let's go!  We have a 5:00 reservation and it's a long drive."

I gulped and said, "I need some time to say goodbye to some people."  She said, "Well, okay.  But make it quick."

What happened next will have to wait for tomorrow, folks.

Click here to read the last part

I missed writing about this because of my trip outta town but fifty years plus one week ago today, I graduated from University High School in West Los Angeles. It was June 19, 1969, a date I thought would never come. Couldn't wait to get outta there.

To me, school was something you just had to get through. At the time, I thought I'd learned very little there and in terms of Math, Science, Foreign Languages and other subjects like those, I was right. What I did learn in those areas, I retained only long enough to pass the necessary tests, after which a little "You'll Never Need To Know That" filter in my brain released that information into the wild. I learned a few lasting things about English and History but a lot more from my outside reading and the watching of documentaries and such.

But from the awesome vantage point of hindsight, I later realized that I learned much that was of value at Uni. Most of it had to do with interacting with other human beings: How to get along with them, how to minimize contact with those you simply couldn't get along with, how to treat others, etc. One nice thing about high school is that you can make a fool of yourself before everyone and then, once Graduation Day is over, you have a kind of fresh start. You never have to see those people again.

There were however several classmates I very much wanted to see again…a few male friends and three young ladies on whom I had what one might politely call "crushes." The part of this story that involves them will have to wait for the second part of this tale which I will post tomorrow. Right now, lemme tell you about the graduation ceremony…

That grand event was directed/choreographed by Mr. Rudoff, who was the boy's vice-principal. Mr. Rudoff was a nice, long-suffering administrator but he wasn't the swiftest adult on campus. He proved to be a lot more competent at sending students to detention and expelling them than he was at supervising the big show.

Our graduation exercises took place on a big athletic field and thousands of folding chairs were rented and set up for us and our families to sit in. On the north side of this field, there were some raised areas like steps but with dirt and grass in them. Our chairs were placed along them, facing south. Our families and guests were in rows facing us to form the audience. The podium from which various speeches would be made was at the center of the "stage" facing the audience so we mostly saw the speakers' backs.

Mr. Rudoff concerned himself primarily with us making our entrance, which was a long process since there were close to six hundred of us. It had been decided for some reason that we should march in in size-place, shortest kid in the front, tallest kid at the end. Half of a full rehearsal day was taken up just with figuring out who was in what position and we all could have thought of about eighty more efficient and quicker ways to do this than the way we did it.

He more or less had us all line up figuring out for ourselves where we should be — and that alone took half-an-hour. Then he went up and down the line saying, "No, she should be ahead of you…no, you should be back about ten places…no, he should be ahead of you…" The line was so long that at times, he had to use one of those electronic bullhorns to address us all: "Kid in the blue plaid shirt, you should be ahead of the girl in the pink top…"

Once we were all in line, each of us was assigned a number ranging from #1 (the shortest) to #585 (the tallest). Naturally, the front of the line was mostly girls and the end of the line was mostly boys. I felt sorry for one poor girl who was a hair over 6-feet tall and very self-conscious about it. She was pretty darned embarrassed to be #555 when everyone else in the last three-fifths of the line was male.

Mr. Rudoff reminded us about three times a minute for the rest of the day: "Make sure you remember your number!" I did. I still do. Being 6'2" (I would later grow another inch), I was #572 — and isn't it amazing that half a century later, I still recall that? I don't recall one thing that I learned in Chemistry other than that I hated Chemistry but I remember I was #572 at the graduation ceremony. I guess that filter in my brain decided that fact might prove useful eventually…say, when I wrote this article fifty years later.

We all filled out and handed in cards with our names and numbers. That was so our diplomas could be put in the proper sequence for us to each be handed ours as we filed out in the same order we'd filed in. If they'd just marched us in as per alphabetical order, someone would not have had to spend hours arranging the diploma piles.

The chairs were set up in six rows of 100 each and they were all numbered on little strips of tape someone had affixed to them. As we rehearsed filing in, the first kid in line took Chair #1, the next took Chair #2 and so on. Mr. Rudoff told the kids with #101, #201, #301, #401 and #501 to remember to start a new row, I guess he assumed that they wouldn't know to do that after the kid ahead of them took the last seat in his or her row.

We spent what now seems like many hours practicing our entrance. Things kept getting bollixed-up well ahead of me but finally, there were two runthroughs in a row where my ass wound up on Chair #572. Since everyone else ended up in the proper seat too, Mr. Rudoff pronounced us sufficiently rehearsed on entering. We then practiced exiting, which was a lot easier. On cue, Student #1 would get up and walk to where the Principal would be standing at a table with someone handing him envelopes, each with a student's name and number on the outside and the correct (it was hoped) diploma inside.

Student #2 would be right behind Student #1 and Student #3 would be right behind Student #2 and so on. How could that possibly go wrong? Just you wait. Just you wait.

Each of us would be handed the proper envelope (maybe) and then we were free to march over to our friends 'n' family in the audience and disperse forever from there. An announcement was made that some students would not have diplomas in their envelopes. Instead, there would a letter stating that weren't really being graduated that day. They had one or more make-up classes to pass or some other problem to fix before that could happen.

On Graduation Day, three things went seriously wrong with all this…

Seriously Wrong Thing #1: No one had turned off the automatic sprinkler system so overnight, it had watered the folding chairs. A crew had rushed in with towels to wipe them down but when the ceremony commenced, some of them were still damp and the athletic field was somewhat muddy.

Seriously Wrong Thing #2: At the last minute, it was decided that thirty or so students would not participate in the ceremony. I don't know if those were the aforementioned students who wouldn't be receiving their diplomas or if there was some other criteria. Whatever it was, it created around 30 holes in the lineup. Mr. Rudoff (I guess) decided that they didn't want those empty seats and it was too late to renumber from scratch…so the last thirty of us were reassigned to those places in line.

I was still #572 but now #572 came between #32 and #33. both of whom were girls who were each 5'3". It wasn't as bad as it could be. When we took our seats, my weight and the muddiness of the ground caused my chair to sink about an inch-and-a-half into the mud and bad posture lowered me an inch or two more. I still felt like Gulliver seated among the Lilliputians but I didn't tower over those around me as much as I might have.

Which brings us to Seriously Wrong Thing #3: The overnight sprinklers had not only moistened the chairs but knocked a lot of them over. Whoever set them all back up apparently had heard that we'd lost thirty graduaters (if that wasn't a word before, it is now) and they decided that while they were at it, they might as well rearrange so the last row wouldn't be half-empty. Instead of six rows of 100, we now had five rows of 111, so all that concern about which students would start a new row was out the window —

— and I just remembered a Seriously Wrong Thing #4: At the last minute, someone ruled that twelve or so of those who'd been told they couldn't be in the ceremony had to be in the ceremony. The grounds crew people scurried out to get a dozen chairs off the truck and then they had to figure out where to put them and how to get those twelve last minute additions into them…

That plus Seriously Wrong Thing #2 meant that when you got to the spot where the principal would hand you your diploma, the diplomas were not in quite the right order and…oh, it was a mess.

But we didn't care. At least, I didn't. I was finally getting out of high school!

The speeches were deadly dull…a few of my fellow students and a couple of administrators, all talking about Tomorrow and The World Ahead Of Us and The Future Being Ours and How We Owe It All To University High School and I didn't care because I was finally getting out of high school!

The main oration came from Tom Bradley, who in June of 1969 was the former track star, L.A. police officer and city councilman who had recently been defeated in his first attempt to unseat Sam Yorty as the Mayor of Los Angeles. A few years later, Mr. Bradley defeated Yorty in a rematch to become the only African-American Mayor of Los Angeles and the longest-serving Mayor of the city. But that day, a lot of my fellow students remarked that it said something about our graduating class that we were being addressed by a loser.

What did he say in his speech on my graduation day? I haven't the foggiest. I wasn't paying attention and why should I? All that mattered was that I was finally getting out of high school!

Plus, most of my attention was focused on my immediate, post-ceremony mission. I'll tell you how that turned out in the second part of my Graduation Day Memories, which will be posted on this blog tomorrow.

Click here to read the next part

The Broadway show King Kong will will play its final performance on Sunday, August 18. A tour of Shanghai has been announced for 2021 and there will possibly be others. I'm enormously intrigued by the question, "What do you do with a 2000-lb., twenty-foot-tall ape puppet that takes more than a dozen people to operate?"

Where do you store it? If you take it on tour, how long does it take to set it up in one theater and then move it to another? Can it even work in some theaters? And then what do you do with it when the tour is over? I'm thinking you find some tourist center to set it up as a permanent attraction, not necessarily in the musical for which it was built…but maybe it's too expensive to maintain and operate to do that.

I hope there's an American tour and it makes its way to Los Angeles. I wanted to get back to New York to see this show, just in case it's never performed again. It doesn't look like I'm going to get there in time. I heard mixed things about the musical as a musical but even the folks I know who went to see it and didn't care for it said, "You have got to see this puppet in action."

Another Broadway production — The Cher Show — closes the same night, even though it won two Tony Awards. Its main Cher, Stephanie J. Block, got Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and Bob Mackie won for Best Costume Design of a Musical but those wins apparently failed to boost the box office enough. It wouldn't surprise me if that show toured for a long time…and hey! Maybe the producers of The Cher Show and the producers of King Kong could team up, dress the puppet in huge Bob Mackie gowns and have it sing, "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves." Wouldn't you pay to see that? I know I would.

Saturday, October 7, 2016: The Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump is released with Trump telling the interviewer that he may just walk up and start kissing a woman they are about to meet. He says, "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

What does Senator Lindsey Graham have to say about this? He tweets, "Name one sports team, university, publicly-held company, etc. that would accept a person like this as their standard bearer?"

Friday, June 21, 2019: Journalist E. Jean Carroll publishes an article in which she claims Donald Trump raped her.

What does Senator Lindsey Graham have to say about this? He tells a reporter, "He's denied it. That's all I needed to hear."

We love a cappella singing on this site and Will Hamblet told me about this one. It's the theme from the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon show as rendered by a vocal quartet called Midtown. The snazzy video was, they say, shot entirely on an iPhone using the iMessage comic filter.

The original song was written by Paul Francis Webster and Robert "Bob" Harris. Webster wrote the lyrics for three songs that won the Academy Award for Best Song and for one that won a Grammy, along with hundreds of others that were successful. Harris had less impressive credits but I doubt either man imagined the little tune they created for a low-budget Saturday morning cartoon show would have the kind of life it's had…

I just read Kevin Drum writing about the latest allegation of rape by Donald Trump. I think Kevin's "righter" about this matter than I was a couple of hours ago…

This episode hasn't gotten an awful lot of attention. This is the first I've written about it, for example. Why? I don't think it has anything to do with media outlets not taking rape allegations seriously. The real answer is almost worse: (a) everybody just assumes the story is true and (b) everybody knows that it will have no effect on either Trump's fans or his Republican Party colleagues. Trump will issue a pro forma denial; nobody will take it seriously; and that will be that. Just like the other 15 times.

What a shame that, in politics, something like this is only thought of as a crime when it can be used against your opponent and you look the other way when it's your guy. I don't think the Democrats quite did that with Clinton — I also thought Paula Jones was lying more and more, each time she changed her story — but there was some of that then.

Georgi Mihailov — who seems to come up with more questions in a day than all the Jeopardy! contestants in a month — wrote to ask this simple one…

What is your opinion on Donald Trump attempting to rape E. Jean Carroll?

My opinion is that we don't know that he did. I'm obviously no fan of Trump's and any guy who brags about forcing himself on women and grabbing them by the you-know-what has sacrificed a certain amount of trust in his denials of this kind of accusation. Still, Donald Trump could not possibly be guilty of every evil, scummy thing he's accused of doing. And it is possible to make a bogus charge against even someone who's very, very guilty of other misdeeds.

I was going to write that Ms. Carroll should be heard…but I guess she is being heard in the press. She should also have her charges examined by the proper investigative bodies. I have no idea how much evidence there is but those investigative bodies should investigate and the matter should not be driven by those who hope Trump is never cleared and that it hurts him politically, if not legally.

You probably remember Juanita Broaddrick, who claimed she was raped by Bill Clinton. If you didn't remember her from then, Trump enlisted her in attacks against Hillary. George Conway, who must have a wonderful fun life at home, says that Carroll's story is "at least as compelling as Broaddrick's — if not more so." Conway was a lawyer who aided Paula Jones in her claims against Bill Clinton so he has some credibility on this topic.

A number of women have accused Trump of inappropriate sexual conduct, if not outright rape. Some of their stories sound a bit hinky but many do not. They should all be given some official scrutiny by law enforcement. I'm not saying Trump is guilty in all or any of these matters but I agree with Conway that it would be hypocritical for anyone who believed Broaddrick deserved to be taken seriously to not take the same stance with Carroll.

And just as there are Trump supporters who wouldn't become non-supporters if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, there are Trump supporters who won't care if he did rape someone.

We recently had Gay Pride Weekend or Gay Pride Week or something of the sort. Whatever they called it, that seemed like a good time to watch this interview Barbara Walters did with playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein back in 1983. I meant to post it then and plumb forgot.

1983 wasn't that long ago but it feels like ages since this was the way mainstream television talked about human beings who are drawn to other humans of the same gender. Ms. Walters' obsolete questions remind us how much some people didn't know about the topic just as some recent events remind us how much some still don't.

Fierstein was and is a pretty good spokesperson for his cause and his play, Torch Song Trilogy, did a lot to promote understanding. I remember seeing him do it at the old Huntington Hartford here in L.A. a few years after this interview. It was a very moving work, especially the third act. And I couldn't help but notice that the audience was full of older people who reacted exactly as they would have reacted to an equally-emotional piece of theater about heterosexuals.

That made me think I might indeed live to see a time of full acceptance of gays and gay rights. I must admit I did not think we'd get as far in that campaign as we have so far. There's still a long way to go and I suspect Trump will be responsible, directly or indirectly, for some setbacks but what has happened has happened sooner than I ever imagined. I think Mr. Fierstein's play and interviews like this one may have had a little to do with that, though not as much as old people dying off, young ones being tolerant of all kinds of differences, and some folks of all ages just plain coming to their senses…

This is another not-paying-much-attention-to-Trump weekend for me. At almost the last minute, he called off a plan to begin bombing Iran. Is it a good thing that he listened to someone (probably many someones) who told him that was an awful idea or is it a bad thing that he even planned to do it? Third and fourth possibilities: He always planned to call it off but thought it would scare Iran into some sort of desirable (for us) position and/or just thought it would thrill his supporters. It's very important to this man to be perceived as "tough." I just wish it was important to him to be viewed as "smart."

I'd like to see the Democratic Debates run a little like Survivor. After every question, someone gets voted off the list of candidates.

If and when I have the patience to deal with an airline again — and I'm not saying that will happen — I think I'll take Amber to New York again, this time with a stopover to visit Mt. Airy and see Betty Lynn again. And maybe I'll teach Amber (she's a quick learner) how to be the cameraperson for an interview I'll do with Betty and get her to tell some of the great stories she's told me over the years. This is all a big "Maybe."

Comic-Con starts in 24 days. This means that the schedule of events (panels, presentations, etc.) will be posted on the Comic-Con website going day by day, starting in ten days. I'll also post a list of my panels then. I urge attendees to study both lists and make up a list of things they want to see there…and their second choices in case they can't get into their first choices. I also urge non-attendees to not nag me to get them into the con somehow so they can become attendees.

I especially urge everyone not to call or write me to ask if I can help them get a panel on the convention schedule. The convention schedule is full. I will be doing most of my usual ones in approximately the same rooms and time slots as always, plus there will be a number that are unique to this year and the celebration of the 50th Comic-Con in San Diego.

Later this week, I will be celebrating a special 50th anniversary on this blog. Don't try to guess what it is. You won't.

Last Monday, as I explained here, I drove a rental car to Mt. Airy, North Carolina to see my friend (more like my unofficial aunt) Betty Lynn. When I was a year and a half old, my parents bought and moved into a house next door to the home where Betty and her folks lived. My mother lived in that home the rest of her life. Betty lived in her home until a few years before my mother passed. That was when she moved to Mt. Airy where she is the biggest celebrity in the city.

Mr. Griffith spent his childhood in Mr. Airy and so they worship The Andy Griffith Show there. Other worshipers come from all across the U.S. — and other countries, I imagine — to get a little closer to their favorite program. Years ago, someone told me that fans of the original Star Trek not only loved the series but often applied the morals of its episodes to their own lives. I dunno how true that is of Star Trek but it's certainly true of fans of The Andy Griffith Show. To many of them, it's a lot more than a situation comedy.

Betty, as you know, played Thelma Lou (girl friend of Barney Fife) on the series. I said in my earlier post that apart from occasional visits from Ron Howard, she's the only cast member you'll ever see there. I was wrong. Several Mt. Airy residents, including folks involved in their tourism department, informed me Ron has never been there. A few others visited before they passed away and a few living actors who were in one or two episodes — like Jackie Joseph and Ronnie Schell — have visited and may again. But Betty is the only actual cast member around and as I witnessed, meeting her is a big thrill for many people.

While I was there, she took me over to The Andy Griffith Museum for a private tour. I'll tell you about it but first, let's all watch this video about Mt. Airy and the museum. You'll see Betty in it along with a charming lady named Abigail Linville who works at the museum and showed me around the place last Monday…

As you can see, a nice place to visit. Intermittent rain in the "deluge" category prevented me from seeing as much of Mayberry Mt. Airy as I might have liked…but then, I was really there to see Betty more than the town. We spent some time at the museum, which is very pleasant and very well arranged and maintained. It's not as large as I was expecting but I doubt any fan of the TV show wouldn't love seeing the memorabilia they have there. You just saw some of this in the video but here are some photos I took, starting with one of Sheriff Andy Taylor's shirts…

At right in the picture, you also see a mock-up of the doors to the Mayberry Courthouse where Sheriff Taylor and Deputy Fife worked.  There's one other replica of that sacred place in Mt. Airy but I didn't get to it.  Here are two of Barney's famous "salt-and-pepper" suits…

And as you can see, they're surrounded by still photos.  One of the other folks touring the museum at the moment overheard Betty say, "You worked with Don, didn't you, Mark?" and they reacted like she'd said, "You used to hang out with the Easter Bunny, didn't you?"  Or some other mythological creature.  This man really seemed amazed…and then I think he and his family recognized the redheaded lady I was pushing around in the wheelchair and couldn't believe they were in the same room with Thelma Lou.

Here's an outfit worn by Hal Smith in his role as Otis Campbell, the town drunk.  It's funny that Hal is probably best remembered for that role because he did so many in his long, busy career.  He worked all the time, both on-camera and as a voiceover artist.  For a time, he was the voice of Elmer Fudd for Warner Brothers and re-created many other actors' voices for Disney.

Lastly, here's a photo that should be of interest to comic book fans.  Andy's whole career is covered in the museum and there's a section on No Time for Sergeants, which was a vital part of his life.  The novel by Mac Hyman was adapted into a television play in 1955, a hit Broadway play later that year, and a movie in 1958.  Griffith starred in all three and it was in the movie that he first worked with Don Knotts.  An adaptation of the movie as a one-shot Dell comic book also put him into a fourth medium and they have a copy on display in the museum…

In case you can't read the card, it says "This comic book, issued by Dell, features artwork by the legendary comic book artist, Alex Toth."  A few display cases away, there's a copy of the Dell comic book of The Andy Griffith Show and the accompanying card acknowledges the artwork by Henry Scarpelli.  I doubt either artist ever imagined that work (or anything they did) would get them into a museum.

There's also a very nice section of the museum devoted to Betty with posters and stills from her many movies, including Sitting Pretty (with Robert Young, Maureen O'Hara and Clifton Webb), June Bride (with Bette Davis and Robert Montgomery), Father Was a Fullback (Fred MacMurray, Maureen O'Hara and Natalie Wood), the 1950 film of Cheaper by the Dozen (Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy) and Meet Me in Las Vegas (Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse and Jim Backus).  Betty appears at the museum to meet her fans and sign autographs every third Friday…and occasionally when someone she's known all his life comes to town to see her.

The museum is lovely…heck, the whole town is lovely. It rained a lot while I was there but it was a courteous rain. It poured while Betty and I were inside the museum. Then it stopped when we left and I drove her to a restaurant for dinner. Then it started up again while we ate and stopped just as we were ready to leave. I got Betty back to her home, hugged her a lot, then headed for the hotel where I was staying for the night. About two minutes after I got back to my room, it poured and the hotel parking lot and street outside looked like The Mighty Mississippi. And it accommodated me by ending before I had to head for the airport the next morning, resuming only again after my flight home took off. Thank you, rain.

By the way: If you ever visit Mt. Airy, this is a very nice place to stay. Betty recommended it to me and I now recommend it to you. It's about a five-minute drive from the museum.

This whole trip was a mess with the airlines screwing up and it was hot with ghastly humidity and I hated the idea of (but fortunately avoided) driving a strange rental car through a monsoon…but Heroes Con, which I attended as part of the trip, turned out to be a well-run convention. It was worth all the humidity and hassle to see my lovely ex-neighbor again. Certain people are important to our lives and we shouldn't let a little thing like being 2,461 miles apart stop us from hugging them and telling them how much they matter to us. I should have made this expedition years ago and I shouldn't let that much time pass before I do it again.

And the museum was a lot of fun, too…though now that I think of it, I don't think they had Barney's bullet on display. Maybe it was there and I missed it.

Actress Racquel Bailey spent a few thousand dollars to take out billboards where she thought director Tyler Perry might see them and hire her. In reply, Perry posted this on the 'net. The punctuation is his…

Auhhh…. soooooo…… here's the deal. This is not the way to get my attention if you're looking for a role in one of my shows. Please DON'T DO THIS, SAVE YOUR MONEY!! This is the third time that someone has done this. PLEASE STOP! To audition is FREE!! I'm sure you can use that money for a better purpose.

I love that you want to work with me, and I love that you invest in yourself. But when you do things like this it puts my team on high alert and makes me look at you sideways. I know the message that you want to send is a positive one, but this comes across as the opposite.

Again, the best way to work for me is to AUDITION and it;s FREE! We post breakdowns all the time for actors. JUST COME AND AUDITION. And by the way, you were great in THE NIGHT OF! It was my favorite show a couple years ago. I ALREADY SAW YOU!! So just audition and keep your money!!

Again, I appreciate your effort, but that's not the way to work for me. God bless you dreamer. I have no doubt you will make it one day!!

Actors occasionally try stunts like this and while I'm sure there's some example somewhere of them working, I think they do more harm than good to careers. The folks in hiring positions are more often going to think, "Gee, if you have to resort to tricks like this, you must not be very good."

I knew an actress once who looked an awful lot like Goldie Hawn. When they were casting the Private Benjamin TV series, based on the movie which starred Ms. Hawn, my friend went to enormous (for her) expense to try and get an audition. She paid a photographer to snap a great photo of her wearing an army helmet, looking very much like a key poster art of Goldie in the film. Then she paid even more money to Variety and Hollywood Reporter to run it as a full page ad. Under the pic, it said, "Casting Private Benjamin?  Why not me?"

She got zero response from the show. Nothing. Not a call. Not an inquiry. A few weeks later, it was announced that Lorna Patterson would play the lead.

A few years later, my friend was up for a part in a movie. The casting director looked at her and asked, "You weren't the girl who took that ad out trying to get seen for Private Benjamin?" My friend admitted she was.

The casting director said, "Well, you blew it. We had you on the list to come in and read for the part and then the producers or someone saw that ad and said, 'Let's skip her.'" It just seemed like something a real amateur would do."

My friend probably would not have gotten the part if they had had her in. She had experience but probably not enough to star in a network sitcom. But the point is that that ad turned a long shot into a longer shot. A friend told her, "To get a job, you need talent and a good agent. What you did was pay a lot of money to make show business think you had neither."

I thought this was a valuable lesson…for writers and a lot of other professions, as well. Let your work speak for you. It was Racquel Bailey's talent that impressed Tyler Perry, not her billboard. Because anyone who can scrape up the money can buy a billboard.

James Corden did an amazing stunt the other night with David Blaine. What Blaine did was, of course, amazing…but Corden pulled off his end of it with equal skill. Steve Allen aside, I'm trying to think of a late night host who would even have gone along with the routine and so far, I'm blank. (At one point, he said, "Jimmy Fallon literally just stands there when you do this." They all would have just stood there. Actually, none of them would have let themselves get into that situation.)

Corden also managed to pretend very well that he didn't know exactly how things were going to go and what he was supposed to do. Obviously, he was briefed on what to do, what not to say, where to run, etc. That was no ordinary bottle of wine he brought back. (What if he'd brought one that didn't have an easy twist-off cap?) But he did it well…and so did the audio guys who apparently had waterproof microphones of some sort…and hand-held booms nearby.)

As you may know, I am one of the editors of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, a series from Fantagraphics reprinting my favorite of all newspaper strips. We are close to sending Volume 6 off to press for release later this year but we have a problem. We are missing good copies of four of Walt Kelly's Sunday Pogo comics, all from 1959. We need to find someone who has either the original artwork to them or printed images from the newspapers.

The dates are August 2, August 23, October 4 and November 1. From '59. And we need either the tall 4-tiered versions or the complete 3-tiered versions. If you have them, please get in touch with me. You will be rewarded in some way.

Most of us are aware of first-year Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems to upset a lot of Republicans partly because of things she says and partly — it seems to me — because they're being said by someone who is female and Puerto Rican. She certainly enraged a lot of them when she recently referred to the detention facilities for immigrants as "concentration camps" — and maybe, since we associate that term with Nazis, it's too inflammatory. Okay. I might agree with that.

But then, as Jonathan Chait points out, the folks criticizing Ocasio-Cortez seem able to ignore or dismiss any inflammatory thing Donald Trump says. Doesn't matter how nasty or inaccurate it is, that's just Donald. That's the way he is. Don't take that stuff he says seriously. As Chait writes…

What is interesting is the way conservatives have used the largely rhetorical nature of Trump's fascistic politics as a defense. Trump can call the media "enemies of the people" all day long, and we should shrug because it's just words. Fascist rhetoric is meaningless, but anti-fascist rhetoric is an outrageous slander. What reasonable case is there to hold the president of the United States to the lowest standard of any public official?