My pal Pete Von Sholly likes monsters and monster magazines a lot more than I do but otherwise, we have many of the same tastes. I also like Pete's sense of humor and artistry and the fact that he writes, draws and publishes work he enjoys doing and which I enjoy reading. So I'm going to suggest you consider backing his Kickstarter for Son of Ugh, his latest collection of weird stories about weird things. I'm sure he ain't gonna get rich doing these but let's see if we can help him make a few bucks or at least break even on fine work done out of passion and the sheer joy of entertaining others. Go take a look and see if he doesn't feel like "one of us" to you.

Disclaimer: This blog receives dozens, if not hundreds of requests to plug crowdfunded projects each month. If I ran them all, I would be posting nothing else and I would also be directing you to a lot of unworthy causes and products. Please do not ask me to plug yours.

Well, maybe I do have something more to post about the Harvey Weinstein matter. The same wishes-to-be-anonymous person who sent me this question just sent me this question…

In your most informative reply, you said you've known a lot of actresses who endured harassment like Weinstein is reported to have committed and that your friends did not want to report it. Could you elaborate on this? I've never been in a situation like that. I think I would report it no matter what the personal cost. I still don't understand why someone wouldn't.

Generally, it's because of some combination of two beliefs. One is that they don't expect it to do much good. The other is that they expect that what they will endure if they do report the incident will be as bad or worse than the incident. And I suppose also some people deal with traumatic situations by just trying to put them in the past and forget about them.

Here's a true tale not about a producer with the power of a Harvey Weinstein but about one who was producing low-budget B-grade movies. (Actually, "B-grade" is too high. His were more like "W" — non-union pics made on a soup kitchen budget with the kinds of sex 'n' violence that earn you an "R" rating.) I could call him all sorts of names but for now, I will just call him The Producer. His victim in this incident was a lady I dated briefly in the mid-eighties when I was around 34 and she was around 25.

She had been in a number of such movies and was called in to audition for a large role in one that was then called "Dark Forces." It seems to never actually have come out and certainly not under that name. She told me once that every film she'd done had a classy title when she'd been cast and maybe even all the time the film was in production. But when they were released, they all seemed to be retitled "Cheerleaders Taking Showers" or something like that. She wasn't wild about such parts and she occasionally managed to get something where she was covered by clothing and/or the production was covered by the Screen Actors Guild…but most of the jobs available to her were on things like what The Producer was producing.

She showed up at an office on Sunset Boulevard near San Vicente. In the casting session were The Producer and several staff members — about five people, two of them female. She read a few scenes with one of the men and took some direction from The Producer. No one seemed to be present who had the title of Director but that was not uncommon and The Producer said that they were still in talks with a couple of directors. If none of those worked out, he said, he might direct the film himself.

After she read some scenes and answered some questions, one of the women there told her that since the role involved nudity, she would have to disrobe for them. This was not unexpected — it was clear in the script she'd been sent — and she'd done such scenes in other films. She had no problem with that. She did have a problem with what happened next.

She was told she could go into the bathroom and strip down to her panties, then come out. The bathroom was around a little corner in the room they were in. She went into it, took off everything but her briefs and came out. She later told me that she thought the room's layout had been designed with what then happened in mind. Because she had to then come around the corner, the bathroom door would swing shut behind her — it closed automatically — before she stepped back into the main room. When she did step back into the main room, she found that everyone had left except The Producer. And — surprise, surprise — he had no pants on.

She ran back to the bathroom. The door had locked behind her with her clothing inside.

She struggled with the door. Behind her, she could hear The Producer saying things like, "Come on. Everyone does this. You've been around. You know how this works." She told me she said, "Not with me it doesn't."

The Producer was stalking about, nude from the waist down. She eluded him, ran out of the room, found an empty office nearby and locked herself in it. There was a phone so she quickly dialed the first phone number she could think of for someone who lived fairly close by and was likely to be home. That was mine. She blurted out where she was, what had happened and who was pursuing her. I said, "I'm going to call the police" but she said, "No, please don't. That would make things worse. Just come and get me." I figured that was her call to make so I grabbed up something she could wear, hopped in my car and was there in ten minutes.

I found her outside, fully-dressed and crying. One of the ladies who'd been in the casting session — the one who'd told her to go take her clothes off — had knocked on the door and told her her clothes were outside and she could take them and get out. She did, in a hurry. I took her someplace where we could talk and she calmed down and told me that while this was the worst such experience she'd had, it was not the first such experience she'd had.

She absolutely resisted the idea of going to the cops. She knew women who in similar situations had done that and it made things worse. "You get treated like a whore because you've done nudity. They'll say, 'You went to his office. You took your clothes off. Why the hell didn't you think that might happen?' If it's going to go to court, they'll investigate me and my sex life and twist it all to make me look like a whore, plus I'll have to see that bastard again and he'll have some bullshit story about how I offered to have sex with him. The best thing for me to do is just forget about it. I got past the last few times and I can get past this."

And she did…which does not mean it was not a shitty thing to do to another human being. (And I don't just mean what The Producer did. How about that lady who worked for him? How about everyone else in that room who cleared out on cue? How proud would you be if your job description included being an enabler of rape?)

Sadly, I've heard a lot of these stories from women I've known, sometimes involving predators with fame, fortune and sterling reputations. Most of the details were different but they all had this in common: Someone who had power thought they could use it to force someone to do something they didn't want to do, usually of a sexual nature. I do not understand how a putative human being could do that to someone.

Hell, I don't even understand how anyone could enjoy physical contact on that basis. To me, the best part of consensual sex is the consensual part. Out of sheer curiosity, I would love to hear Bill Cosby explain why sex is better when the woman is unconscious and has no say in what you do to her.

Getting back to the lady who had that ugly encounter with The Producer: We've stayed friends. She's no longer acting. She's happily married with a family. I called her last night to tell her I wanted to post this story — minus her name, of course — and she was not only fine with it, she encouraged me. "My daughter's taking up acting," she said. "The more Harvey Weinsteins who learn that they can't get away with this kind of crap, the better it will be for my daughter and everyone!"

Here we have Penn & Teller taking a magic trick that I could do when I was seven, putting their own spin on it and turning it into a pretty entertaining presentation…

I started to write this a few hours ago but there was a big car crash outside my house and I went out to see if I could help. Nobody was hurt but a couple of cars are probably past the stage where insurance can make them right again.

We have a fair number of traffic accidents in this area. I'm waiting for one of them to involve James Corden as he drives around our neighborhood doing one of his Carpool Karaoke segments. About half of them seem to take him down streets I walk or live on and I can't help but notice how the backgrounds jump on those things. They must record some of those songs three or four times then cut them together.

I keep thinking I should write more about the Harvey Weinstein matter…but then I keep realizing I don't have anything interesting to say about it that I didn't say here already, except maybe this: Weinstein has been booted out of the Motion Picture Academy, prompting many to ask why they haven't kicked out Mel Gibson, Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby. I'm not sure all three of those men are even in the Academy and I'm not sure anyone ever suggested that the organization judge its members like that. I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't; just that the Academy has rarely if ever considered if someone is a decent human being. They only seem to care if the person is in the industry.

Getting bounced out is not really much of a spanking, anyway. All it means is that Harvey may miss out on some of the screeners. He deserves some actual punishment.

Trump today said that most presidents, including Obama, do not place phone calls to the families of soldiers who die in the line of duty. When it was pointed out that this was just plain wrong, Donald's excuse was that someone told him that. I wonder why that kind of thing doesn't worry his supporters. Isn't a president supposed to (a) take responsibility for his own words and (b) fire aides who give him faulty information? Imagine if he decided to bomb some country, found out his reason wasn't true and said, "Well, someone told me they were about to attack us!"

Lin-Manuel Miranda interviews Stephen Sondheim. I suspect what you have there is two men who are each very jealous of the other for different reasons.

As I said back here, I think Jimmy Fallon's rating decline is not exactly, as some theorize, because he doesn't bash Donald Trump. It's in that ballpark but I think the problem is that Trump and his antics have made us all hyper-aware of politics and as I said, "Fallon's a nice enough guy but he doesn't seem as interested in what's happening right now as the other fellows."

And now, here's an interview with him in which he says, "I don't really even care that much about politics. I gotta be honest. I love pop culture more than I love politics. I'm just not that brain."

I decided to test Amber's willingness to accompany me to plays. After dragging her in New York to four of them in five days, I took her last night to one in Redondo Beach — a production of Young Frankenstein. I expected it to be good for two reasons…

First, it was at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, which is a beautiful theater in Redondo Beach, which is not as far from Los Angeles as it sounds. Basically it's fifteen minutes south of LAX by surface streets, twelve by freeway. It's a well-run, comfortable place with the tech facilities to do anything that can be done on Broadway. It's also located a mere 1.7 miles south of an area on Rosecrans Boulevard that has a wide array of the kind of restaurants you'd want to eat in on your way to see a play. I can't think of a building in Southern California where I'd rather see a show.

I've seen a lot of 'em there. For many years, a company called the Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities staged revivals of hit musicals there, many of them most impressive in their ability to approximate Broadway quality. That group eventually ran into legal problems, fled to other venues and now seems to have disappeared. Eventually, a company called 3-D Theatricals began presenting the same kind of musicals in the structure in Redondo Beach and the ones I've seen have been sensational.  So the theater itself was one reason to go and the track record of 3-D Theatricals was the other.

The way 3-D Theatricals operates is to mount a revival and run it for a few weekends at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center and then to move it for a few more weekends to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which is another half-hour south of LAX. It's also not a bad place to see a show but I prefer the R.B.P.A.C. not only because it's closer to me but because I think it's just plain a better theater. Alas, 3-D Theatricals has announced that they've signed to be the exclusive presenter of musicals at the C.C.P.A. so when the current season is over, they will abandon Redondo Beach and do all their presenting wholly in Cerritos. I hope some equally-skilled operation makes use of the place they're abandoning. It's too good a theater not to have good plays in it.

The previous show we saw there was Spamalot, which they did quite well. Part of that was because they had secured the sets and costumes from either the Broadway original or one of the touring companies sent out by the Broadway original. All they had to do was — and I'm not suggesting this was easy —  put real good actors into those costumes and into those sets. That, they did. It was probably darn near as good as what you would have seen in New York after the original actors were replaced.

I assumed they wouldn't be doing Young Frankenstein at all if they couldn't get the sets and costumes from Broadway and indeed they did. At least, one of the folks who runs 3-D said in a pre-curtain speech they had the original sets and costumes from Broadway. I suspect they were actually from a touring company but that's close enough. The cast they assembled was excellent. The direction was excellent — and amazing, given that the budgets on a show like this couldn't have allowed for a very long rehearsal period. What we saw last night in Redondo Beach was every bit as good as what I saw on Broadway in November of 2007. Here's a commercial made during that rehearsal period…

This is not to say it was a perfect show because Young Frankenstein — at least, as per this version of its script — is far from a perfect show. It did not do that well on Broadway. Exactly how it fared there is unknown because in a break with tradition, its producers declined to release its weekly gross figures…but clearly, they opened it expecting a much, much longer run. My reaction was that it was a fun show and that if you'd seen it in an outta-town pre-Broadway tryout, you would have said, "Hey, if they replace some of the weaker numbers and come up with a better ending, they might have a great musical here."

Interestingly, ten years later, Mel Brooks is finally trying to do that. A new production just opened in London that cuts some numbers, adds two new ones and rewrites large swatches of the book. The reviews have been pretty rosy so I'm guessing it'll get another shot at Broadway. Maybe it'll finally be the smash it wasn't ten years ago.

But getting back to what we saw last night: I don't think this was quite the same book I saw in New York. In the interim, someone — presumably Mr. Brooks and his late co-librettist Thomas Meehan — fiddled with some lines. Still, what I saw in Redondo Beach was as good as what I saw in Manhattan.

A gent named Dino Nicandros was well up to the task of playing Frederick Frankenstein. Danny Blaylock got every bit of humor and pathos it's possible to get as The Monster. And as on Broadway, the show was stolen by the lady playing Frau Blücher (horse whinny) and the fellow playing the Marty Feldman role of Igor (or Eyegore). In this case, they were Tracy Rowe Mutz and Erik Scott Romney.  If I were the producer, I'd award Mr. Romney some kind of Most Valuable Player award because he not only played Igor (or Eyegore) so well but also doubled as the lead singer in "Join the Family Business," which I think is the best number in the score.

Which brings us to the question: "Hey, I live in Southern California.  Can I see this show?"  Well, yes but if you want to see it in Redondo Beach, you'll have to hurry.   Their last performance there is a matinee that starts at 2 PM today.  Then there are nine performances at the Cerritos Center commencing this Friday.  Tickets and info can be found on this page. If you don't like it, blame Mel…because these people did this show about as well as it can be done, at least with that script.

Here's a video of the MAD panel at the New York Comic-Con, hosted by my pal John Ficarra. If you're at all a fan of this magazine, you'll want to watch this…

One of those folks who wishes to remain unnamed asks…

You live and work in Hollywood. For those of us who don't, can you give us an explanation of why so many people knew about Harvey Weinstein's disgraceful acts and no one did anything about them? And how common do you think the Harvey Weinsteins are in show business?

Well, first of all, I live and work in Hollywood but I don't exactly travel in the same circles as Harvey Weinstein. I've barely traveled in the circles of Harvey Korman.

Secondly, when folks say they heard about Weinstein's misdeeds, they sometimes mean (a) they heard directly from someone who was victimized by him. And they sometimes mean (b) they heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone about an unnamed actress who was groped in an unspecified locale at an unknown time. When it's said that "everyone knew," some of those everyones were in category (b) and they don't act, in part because so many of those rumors turn out to be bogus and in part because the law can't do anything without proper names and some specifics.

So why didn't those in category (a) do something? I don't think a lot of them knew what to do, especially if/when the victims prefer to just forget the whole thing and not open themselves up to the public spotlight, attacks from the perpetrator's lawyer and sometime from the police, the number of hours it would consume to testify against their assailants, etc.

This is key to understanding the problem here. The biggest reason slimeballs with power get away with grabbing, pressuring and raping is that many of their victims are terrified of reporting or corroborating what's been done to them…and there's not a lot that can be done to their assailants if the victims decide they're better off that way. I've known a lot of actresses who were mistreated but came to that decision.

One in particular would tell me horrible — and I'm sure, true — stories about what some very powerful men tried to do to her. At least two of the assailants were Big Stars with Big Lawyers — and reputations as decent family men with wholesome images. My friend did not think she could win a She Said/He Said argument with them and their $700-an-hour attorneys; that she'd be smeared as a slut and a lying opportunist and even if she did get some sort of justice, it would consume her life for months if not years and destroy her career.

A large part of the reason Weinstein finally got exposed was that certain of the women he mistreated were or have become Angelina Jolie, Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino — ladies who have become successful enough that they're not afraid they'll lose everything if they go on the record. Unknowns could and would be accused of lying to get attention and/or money. Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't need either. If he was only abusing unknowns, I bet he'd get away with it forever. I am reminded of how there were a lot of stories around about cartoonist Al Capp exposing himself to women and trying to blackmail them into sex. Many dismissed those accounts as lies until Goldie Hawn went public with the story of her unsavory encounter with Mr. Capp.

The Harvey Weinstein situation is not a problem unique to Show Biz. Most rapes in this country go unreported. Some estimates place that number as high as 80%.

Somewhere in the insurance business, there are guys who have Weinstein-sized money and similar appetites and they get away with such assaults. Every time one does, he feels more invulnerable and goes farther with the next lady who looks to them like easy, attractive prey. And time and again, their victims think, "If I report this, I'll be ruthlessly interrogated, my motives will be questioned, my life — and maybe even the lives of my friends and family will be invaded." It is also, to some, just plain humiliating to be looked upon as a victim. We need to change that.

There are other Harvey Weinsteins in Hollywood — men who do that kind of thing because they're pretty certain they'll never be caught, never be punished. It would be nice to think that the exposure of Mr. Weinstein's abominable behavior will cause many of them to think, "Gee, maybe I'd better stop doing that kind of thing."

A cat carrying toilet paper upstairs…

Fred Kaplan on why Trump's Iran speech was full of lies and fraught with danger. I have yet to see anyone, even the loyalest Trump defender, explain in any real detail why his position is wise. Those who try at all — and most don't — say things like it's bold or decisive. But bold and decisive are not always right. I could make boneheaded decisions in bold and decisive ways.

As Jonathan Chait notes, Trump's newest Obamacare move is pure sabotage. But as Jeremy Stahl reports, polls indicate that voters are hip to this strategy and will hold Trump — not the institution of Obamacare and not the Democrats who gave it to us — responsible.

Sarah Kliff goes into greater detail as to why Trump's actions will make health care worse and more expensive in this country. You get the feeling this kind of mad-man destruction worked to Trump's advantage once in a real estate deal and he's sure it will work in this situation?

Andrew Sullivan makes a key point; that Trump is not trying to enact policies that realistic conservative leaders would ever offer. Here's one paragraph…

These are not conservative reforms, thought-through, possible to implement, strategically planned. They are the unhinged fantasies of a 71-year-old Fox News viewer imagining he can reconstruct the late 1950s. They cannot actually be implemented, without huge damage. And so he resorts to executive sabotage — creating loopholes in the enforcement of Obamacare to undermine the entire system. Or he throws a temper tantrum because Obama's Iran Deal is actually working as promised, and attempting to undermine that as well. At this point, the agenda is so deranged and destructive almost every sane senior member of his cabinet is trying to rein it in.

Susan B. Glasser notes that Bob Corker isn't the only Republican who has problems with Donald Trump. The list is growing.

And as Paul Krugman notes, Puerto Rico doesn't have the only Americans who are suffering these days.

Our sympathies to Jean Schulz, widow of Charles Schulz, and her family over the news that the home where she and "Sparky" lived in Santa Rosa was destroyed in the California wildfires. Fortunately, most of his artwork and memorabilia are safely housed in the the nearby Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center. The museum was unharmed, although it's closed for a while due to a lack of electricity and other necessities in the area.

Back here, I raved about a new documentary on the longest-working person in show business, Rose Marie. That documentary is about to get a national release — in New York City on Nov. 3, in San Francisco on Nov. 10 and in Los Angeles on Nov. 17.

I am delighted to see that my friend Laraine Newman is being inducted, along with other cast members of the original Saturday Night Live, into the Television Hall of Fame.

I have raved here about the production of Sweeney Todd that we saw in New York.  It began life, as so much that's innovative in New York Theater often does, in Great Britain.  Here's a video about that production and its transfer to the U.S.  We saw a different but still superb company of players…

Monday morning, Amber and I roamed about a rainy New York City, visiting a few places and folks for whom I've occasionally worked. The only one that might interest you was the offices of MAD Magazine, where I talked with its outgoing editor, John Ficarra. He and his most capable staff (i.e., "Gang of Idiots") have only a few more issues to get off to press before that office closes. Then, control of America's greatest humor publication shifts to offices in Burbank where a mostly-new team is already staffing-up. Before that day arrives, I will write a long post here about what it all may mean.

I will also remind you that MAD may have no greater fan than me and that I think the issues edited by John and his staff (including Charlie Kadua, Joe Raiola, Dave Croatto, Jacob Lambert, Sam Viviano, Ryan Flanders and Patricia Dwyer) have done the publication proud. If you haven't been reading it, lo this last decade or two, you've missed some really sharp satire.

We made it over to a party at the home of my friends Jim Brochu and and Steve Schalchlin. Jim is an actor-author-director-whatever I've known for a long time…an amazing guy who knows everyone in the theatrical community. We could only stay so long at their bash but in the time we were there, I got to talk to Anita Gillette, Charlotte Rae, Joyce Van Patten and Jerry Stiller. Talked about What's My Line? (and seeing her on Broadway) with Anita. Talked about the Li'l Abner Broadway show (she was the first Mammy Yokum) with Charlotte. Talked about The Good Guys (a favored 1968 sitcom she was in) with Joyce. And just talked with Jerry about him being a magnificent comic actor — a fact he denied but he was wrong and I was right.

Other folks of that theatrical caliber were drifting in as we had to head out. Amber's way younger than I am so she didn't know who a lot of those people were but she found them all fascinating and somewhat regretted, as I did, that we had theater tickets for that evening and had to go. What we had to go to was…

I'm not a huge fan of the Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or the film version with Gene Wilder (didn't see the other one) but Amber is so I got tickets to the new musical version. I was hopeful because so many folks said Christian Borle was superb in the role of Willy Wonka…and they were right. He is. I also am a huge fan of Marc Shaiman's music, though I think I like everything else I've heard by him more than I like the new songs in this version.

Along with Mr. Borle's performance, I liked the sets and the art direction and the special effects and John Rubinstein as Grandpa Joe. One of my favorite comic actresses, Jackie Hoffman, was delightfully sour as Mrs. Teavee and the whole cast was genuinely energetic and fine. But it's still a story that doesn't have a whole lot of resonance or internal logic to me. In no version I've read or seen do I get why the cryptic Mr. Wonka acts as he does or why anyone seems only moderately annoyed when children are maimed or killed. But then even back when I ate candy, I didn't orgasm over the whole idea of it so maybe this is just not the story for me.

I will say this for the show: Most of the audience loved it. The overwhelming majority of those in the Lunt-Fontanne Theater were kids or had brought one or more kids and it's probably the perfect show via which to introduce a lad or lass to musical theater. But it just didn't come together for me and Amber was also somewhat disappointed in this, the last show we caught in New York. We both thought Sweeney Todd was by far the theatrical high-point of our theatergoing.

Which brings us to Tuesday. Not much to report about Tuesday. We checked out of our hotel, checked our bags, roamed New York, ate lunch, went back to the hotel, got our bags, took a limo to the airport and flew home. Did I mention how much I love JetBlue? Yeah, I guess I did. Some Notes To Self for this trip…

Staying in a hotel in the heart of Times Square these days means wading through swarms of touristy-type enterprises. We couldn't get from our room to anywhere without a dozen people thrusting offers at us.

Then again, I'd forgotten one advantage of that location: You can get darn near anywhere from Times Square if you know the subway system since so many trains converge on Times Square.

Then again, I have to remember to brush up on the subway system before the next time I go. It had been nine years since I'd been in New York and I don't think I went on the subway the last few visits before that gap. I did discover though that the Yelp! app on my iPhone was real handy for telling me which train to take and when to hop off.

New York drinking water isn't as tasty as I recalled and I switched over to the bottled stuff.

And I'd forgotten how it's impossible to go anywhere without going up and down stairs — an issue of some consequence since my knee replacement.

And why is it that every single corner has a Walgreens Drug Store or a Duane Reade and it's three stories and what I need is on the third floor and both the escalators and elevators are out of order?

And lastly: For the first time in New York since I was a tot, I got in and out without setting foot in a delicatessen. The Carnegie is an empty storefront. The Stage is now another, non-deli restaurant with "Stage" in its name. I didn't get to my favorite restaurant (Peter Luger's out in Brooklyn) and I didn't get to my favorite restaurant in the Seafood division (The Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station)…and I can live with those omissions. But minus the Stage or the Carnegie, it almost doesn't feel like we went to New York. I should've found a way to get us to Katz's. Next time for sure.

Seth Meyers nails the Harvey Weinstein issue…