We often rave on this site about our friend Frank Ferrante, Groucho Impersonator Supreme. I've seen his show An Evening With Groucho so many times, I know everything except the ad-libs by heart. In fact, I could probably perform it except that I'd have to change it to An Evening With Zeppo and then just be stiff, awkward and unfunny on stage.

His upcoming performances in Solana Beach, California are sold out and I'm not sure he'll be Grouchoing again until November when he has an extended engagement in Cincinnati. However! You can monitor his every movement over on this site and you can see a few fine minutes from the show by clicking below. Do this…

The other day, comic Kathy Griffin was photographed holding up a severed head of Donald Trump. Why did she do this? Well, I have a hard time believing she thought everyone would laugh and think how funny it was, or that everyone would take it as a pithy political statement. The most likely motive was that she noticed there wasn't much talk about her in the news feeds and couldn't allow that to continue. So she went out and did something shocking.

There are other people who do this regularly — consciously trying to do something that has no purpose other than to be outrageous and get attention. I'm trying to think of another example…

Oh, right. The guy whose severed head she was holding. He's the master of that.

And of course, what then happens is that what was said is not discussed so much as the mere fact that he or she said it. Some people are outraged that last night on his show, Bill Maher used the "n" word. They aren't discussing the sentence in which he used it or the political thought he was expressing…just that he let it cross his lips.

And further of course, folks on the other side of the political spectrum from Ms. Griffin are ginning up all possible outrage as a weapon to be used for their causes. In Georgia's 6th Congressional District where Democrats hope their candidate Jon Ossoff can pick up a seat, ads supporting his opponent Karen Handel are showing Griffin's photo and saying, "Now a celebrity Jon Ossoff supporter is making jokes about beheading the president of the United States."

Nice going, Kathy. She's apologizing for the photo and at the same time complaining about the backlash against it, thereby keeping herself in the news feeds. I actually think Griffin can be very funny and even witty when she's not trying to position herself as both the creator and victim of publicity-seeking outrages.

It's all such a waste of good bandwidth that might be used for discussing actual issues. We have some, you know.

This was submitted by John Edwards. It's baby ostriches in race cars…

Since my lovely friend Carolyn passed away on April 9, I've had a number of relevant conversations — e-mail, phone and in person — with friends and a few strangers. The topic is usually caring for a loved one in that loved one's final months/weeks/days. I thought I'd somewhat mastered that while taking care of my mother, who died five years ago and spent many years before that teetering on the precipice.

But with Carolyn, it turned out to be different in so many ways because, first of all, she was Carolyn. My mother was 91, unable to walk and by the time she departed, almost unable to see. With absolutely nothing in her future but pain and being tended to by medical personnel, she was ready — even eager — to go.

Carolyn — much younger and with a long list of things she still wanted to do — was not eager; not eager in the least, not even when she was in the most agonizing pain. Long after we both knew an actual recovery was not humanly possible, she fought for one, not so much because she truly believed there was a chance but because she was the kind of person who just had to go down swinging.

For each of them, I had to be The Advocate — the functional person who handles everything for the sick person. I had to watch over their needs, get them whatever they required, intervene with the hospital and caregivers when necessary and run the aspects of their lives they could no longer handle, including personal finances. In simpler terms, I had to just be there for them.

If you ever find yourself in the position of an Advocate, I have a number of tips, the first being this: Make friends with everyone. Meet everyone who does anything that could impact the life and comfort of the patient and jot down who they are, what they do and how to reach them. This includes doctors and nurses but it also includes the food service people, the folks who make appointments, the suppliers of medical equipment, the custodians…everyone. Some of them are surprisingly helpful and in ways you might not imagine. For one thing, most of them understand the arena a lot better than you do.

Not only meet them but make them realize that you're always available. I printed up special business cards and spread them around, including leaving a batch with my mother and later with Carolyn to hand out. The one for my mother had my name, who I was ("her kid," it said), a phone number via which I could always be reached and a message to "Call anytime I can help make things better for her." Whenever my mother didn't understand what a doctor or nurse was telling her — which happened a lot in her last months — she would hand a card to the person and say, "Please call my son and explain it to him."

Also — and this is important — make sure they understand that you understand the limitations of their jobs. Each of these people functions in a bureaucracy with rules and laws about what they can and cannot do. Advocates often get demanding and threatening when a nurse or an orderly says, "I'm sorry. We're not allowed to do that." Don't you be like that. Threaten sparingly…and only after you've tried saying things like, "Look, I know you're not allowed to give her that medicine without the doctor's okay. Can you tell me who I can go to who can authorize it?" I have found that people in and around the medical profession are extremely grateful and helpful when you recognize that they can't just do every single thing you think will help the patient.

One thing that was new with Carolyn was how involved I was with the hospital's palliative care division. Her very wise doctors and nurses there spent almost as much time with me as they did with her.

I was not their patient. My personal medical care comes from a completely different network and insurance company and such. Her medicos however recognized that Carolyn's "quality of life" had much to do with how I held up through it and how I managed things for her and maintained a proper sense of perspective. Where she was unable to think straight, I had to. So this terrific nurse lady named Mary and a caring, all-knowing doctor kept calling me to see how I was doing and to advise me on how to be a proper companion to Carolyn during those agonizing months.

As close as I was to Carolyn, and as much time as I spent with her, I couldn't and still can't pretend to fully understand what she went through. I can speculate how I would have responded in that situation but that would just be speculation and anyway, it would be me and not her. Our relationship was both richer and more contentious because we viewed the world in so many conflicting ways.

Until about the last two weeks, she was fairly lucid and logical and able to communicate. Well into Stage Four, Carolyn remained a very, very smart woman and as long as I'd known her, she was never the least bit reticent to tell me (or anyone) exactly what was on her mind. As I wrote in another piece here, the first time I really thought the end was near was when the palliative care people told me that as far as they were concerned, she was no longer able to make her own medical decisions and those were henceforth up to me. The next big one was soon after as I became aware that she was losing her ability to tell me (or anyone) exactly what was on her mind.

In my own speculations about what I would do in her position, that is the moment when I would somehow get my hands on a pill — I have no idea how — that would end things painlessly, then and there. But maybe I wouldn't think like that if I actually reached that stage. Carolyn endured weeks of pain — the kind morphine cannot mute — to try and stay alive and delay the inevitable. I cannot say she was wrong to do this or that I'm certain I would not do the same.

She lived with breast cancer for quite some time and managed to live a fairly normal life for years. There were times when it seemed like she might just beat it. Increasingly though, it began to stop her from doing the things she wanted or needed to do and to cause her great pain.

Several years in a row, she was literally packing to accompany me to Comic-Con (or some other convention) and she'd admit to herself she just couldn't take care of herself properly in a strange hotel room. "You're going to have to go without me," she'd say. Obviously though, there was a secondary reason: She knew I had responsibilities at the convention, including appointments relevant to my career, and didn't want me neglecting them to take care of her.

I understood this and loved her all the more for it. I come from a family where a key way you showed love for others was to know when you would be creating problems for them…and then to not do that.

Because of the cancer, she couldn't help but dump many of her problems on me and I was glad whenever I could help, which alas was not always. Still, she was wise and compassionate enough to understand how much of my time, energy and cash she was consuming and to feel a certain amount of guilt. As things got worse and worse, she kept apologizing and saying, "I know you didn't want this in your life." What do you say to that? About the best I could muster — and I know these weren't sufficient — were things like, "I wanted you in my life and this was an add-on that neither of us expected."

This may sound like an article about what I did for Carolyn and I guess, in most ways, it is. I think I learned a lot on the job and feel it may help someone reading this to learn what I learned. But as you'll see, it's really an article about a wonderful thing Carolyn did for me…something this sweet, bright, loving woman did for me, not long before she left this world. In fact, it was basically the last thing she ever did.

One of the umpteen wise things the palliative care folks said to me early on was, "It's important to keep reminding her that in spite of how ugly and painful things may get, you still love her. You cannot say that too often." I don't know this for a fact but I suspect that they also told Carolyn to remember to say that to me. With all the distractions of pain and the warring emotions within her, she occasionally forgot for a time but would always, eventually, remember. Only in hindsight am I fully understanding how vital that was to both of us; how it helped us both get through some pretty rough patches.

For at least a few hours each day, I tried to be at the nursing home — but not for too long because I couldn't pretend I didn't have work to do, along with things I had to do for my own well-being. Some days, well aware of this, she'd ask me to leave after an hour or three so she wouldn't feel I was neglecting my own needs.

Once, I foolishly spent so much of a day being with her and running errands that when I finally did go home, I had to stay up all night finishing a script. That probably led to the bad cold I came down with a day or two later and the cold meant I had to miss a few days of visits so I could recover and more importantly so I wouldn't pass germs on to her. She asked me to please, please never stay with her so much that it would happen again. It wasn't good for either of us for me to be out of commission.

Being there was easier when she had her full communicative abilities. As those withered, I would tell her something and halfway through, I'd realize she wasn't following me at all; that she was pretending to be getting it, just to be polite.

Occasionally, she'd ask me to retell one of her favorite jokes. In the twenty years I knew her, she must have asked for and enjoyed the one about the horny parrot a dozen times. It had never failed. Not long before she lost the ability to speak, she requested it and I gave it the greatest performance of my life. Meryl Streep at her Streepiest never wrung so much out of a dramatic scene. Sadly, all I got from Carolyn was a bit of forced laughter in all the wrong places and nothing at all on the punch line.

That was another moment when I knew the end was in sight. The horny parrot story had failed.

Entertaining her and carrying out her wishes were not difficult when she could talk and express what she was thinking. When she couldn't, it was frustrating for both of us. A few months earlier, she began filling notebooks with every thought, every observation, everything that happened. A nurse would come in to give her her morphine and Carolyn would write the time and dosage and sometimes even the nurse's name in the book. When she thought of something she needed — something my assistant John or I could do for her — it would go into the book.

Thank heavens, by the way, for John. He saved me hundreds of additional trips to the nursing home, to the pharmacy, to restaurants and markets and other stores. If you ever have to be The Advocate, seriously consider hiring The Co-Advocate. I hope for your sake you get one as dedicated and efficient as John Plunkett.

All those journals now sit in a box in my dining room. If I ever for some reason want to get terribly depressed so I begin bawling, I can page through them in chronological order and watch her handwriting deteriorate and her sentence structures slowly collapse. In the early ones, she sometimes did these cute little sketches, mostly of tiny animals, but they got progressively worse as she got progressively worse and about the time speech became difficult, she stopped doing them altogether. The drawings illustrating this article are from the earlier journals.

By this point, she had near-constant nurse attention but there were still certain things only I could do for her. The nurses, as efficient as they all were, weren't me, the guy she'd been with for twenty years, the person she was now counting on to take care of her apartment and her bank account and to make all the decisions she could no longer make for herself.

Early the week of March 27, I began to think I should cancel on WonderCon, where I was supposed to appear and host six panels over the following three-day weekend. The convention was "only" 31.5 miles away but the Anaheim Convention Center is right near Disneyland. At certain times of day, that could mean many hours battling traffic and tourists and Dwarfs who whistle while they cut you off.

I felt I shouldn't be that far from her, just in case. Then again, I also felt that to maintain my equilibrium in this situation, I needed to normalize my life somewhat. Obsessing on something 24/7 is a great way to lose vital objectivity about it and to over- (or even under-) dramatize things. Both can be detrimental.

So I had my obligations at WonderCon but I also didn't want her to think I was abandoning her or that signing Groos was more important than her welfare. I finally told her I was going to skip the con and when I did, she grabbed up the current notebook and wrote in big, bold letters, "NO!!! GO!!!!!"

She could then speak, though not for long and not without effort. She forced out the words to say she could manage without me and didn't want the guilt of denying me something I wanted and in some ways needed to do. Thursday night, I stopped in to see her for an hour, then drove down to Anaheim.

Friday, I did two panels and a few interviews and business meetings. I also spent a great deal of time on the phone to the nursing home and dispatching John to fetch items for her.

My first panel on Saturday morning was at 10:30 — Quick Draw!, which requires me to be as alert as I can possibly be, which is why we really shouldn't do it at 10:30 in the morning. I went to bed Friday night at 1 AM and got maybe fifteen minutes of shuteye before the phone rang and I knew it was the nursing home calling. It had to be. A nurse there told me something was very wrong with Carolyn and she wouldn't tell anyone about it…but they figured she'd tell me.

Within minutes, I was dressed and at the hotel valet stand, waiting for my car. It was then that I had one of the stupider thoughts I've ever had in a life filled to overflowing with stupid thoughts. It was: "At least there won't be much traffic on the 5 at this hour."  It took an hour and forty-five minutes to drive the 31.5 miles on what was allegedly a freeway.

What was wrong with her I still don't know but whatever it was, it seemed to evaporate when she saw me walk into her room. The hospice nurse said this was not at all uncommon and suggested that once she got her 4 AM medication, she would probably go to sleep for many hours. I stayed until that happened and then once again thought one of the stupider things I've ever thought: "At least there won't be much traffic on the 5 at this hour."

If you learn nothing else from reading this piece, learn this: There is always much traffic on the 5 at any hour, especially near Disneyland. Always.

Going back at 4:15 AM, it was even worse than it had been going the other way at 1:30. That was partly due to construction narrowing southbound traffic to one lane, and partly due to a chain of pretty-serious car accidents scattered across that one lane. How they happened, I have no idea but so many collisions in such close proximity could not have been coincidence. Obviously, one caused another which caused another which caused another and so on.

We southbound drivers soon reached the stage of total immobilization. When we hadn't advanced a millimeter in over twenty minutes, some of us turned off our ignitions, got out of our cars and began wandering around, talking to one another. One gent who'd just been to a market was offering bottles of water around. I declined because, I said, it might be another hour or more before I got anywhere near a men's room or even an off-ramp that might lead to a men's room.

So there we were: Milling about on the Santa Ana Freeway at 5:30 in the morning, illuminated by construction work lights and the red flashing glares of emergency vehicles. It was very surreal, though not as bizarre as it might have been had the back-up occurred further to the South. Another 5-10 miles and we might have been able to see the spires and mountains of Disneyland against the night sky. Even without that, it felt damned weird.

A woman about my age started telling me, unasked, that she was coming back from taking her ex-husband into a hospital emergency room. He hadn't long to live and, she said, this would not be a huge tragedy in her life. She said, "I don't know why I even help him. He treated me like crap but he doesn't have anyone else. His next wife left him, too."

Just then, a Paramedic truck carrying one of the accident victims rolled past us, deliberately going the wrong way through a section of the freeway that had been cordoned off for construction. Through its rear window, we could kind of see the sad, bandaged patient strapped to a gurney. The woman I was standing with said, "I hope he has a person in his life as nice as I am."

Then she turned to me and referring to her "ex" said, "You know, when that son-of-a-bitch dies, I'm actually going to cry for him. I don't know why but I will. And the worst part of it is that he never once found a way to tell me he loved me, if he even did."

We talked for a while about caring for loved ones…or even unloved ones. Eventually, as the emergency vehicles departed one by one, the jam began to unjam and the cars that were stopped ahead of us began to loosen up and begin inching forward. We all returned to our vehicles, started our engines and began to speed down the 5 at a blistering ten-or-so miles per hour. Seizing on the next off-ramp I came to, I let my GPS lead me through surface streets, getting back to the hotel a little before 7 AM. The time I'd spent parked on the freeway was awful but the conversation I had with that woman was not without its value. After that, I kept thinking, "Well, at least when Carolyn dies, I'll know why I'm crying."

Back in my room, I figured I could doze until 9:30 and still get to Quick Draw! on time if I skipped Breakfast so I set an alarm on my phone. In the bleary haze of No Sleep though, Dumb ol' Mark forgot to unset the earlier alarm he'd set for 8:00…so when that went off, I was up and aware I was going to remain so. If you attended Quick Draw! that morning and I seemed a little "off," now you know why. I made one other commute to the nursing home before the con was over and then went back to L.A. earlier on Sunday than I otherwise would have. Both those visits were uneventful and Carolyn was sound asleep all the time I was there Sunday evening.

The following week, I didn't hear her say one word, though the hospice nurse told me she occasionally said my name when I wasn't there. When I was, she would write notes in the books and show them to me, getting very upset when, as happened more and more, I had to tell her I could not read whatever she had written. It was crystal clear to her but jibberish to me and she'd begin weeping because she knew the problem was not with me. Still, she kept on making her markings in the book.

She liked a certain kind of ballpoint pen — the Pentel R.S.V.P. fine point. We had a little package of them — some with blue-black ink, some with pure black and there were a few with red. On Thursday afternoon of her final week, the black pen she'd been using ran dry and she motioned for me to give her another. Only red was left so I handed her one, promising to get more black. Then I had to excuse myself for a while and I couldn't tell her why. Out in the patio, I had to meet with a man from the company that would provide cremation services when the time came. As I signed the contract and wrote out the check, my hand which is usually rock-steady quivered a bit. It had never occurred to me I might someday have to do this for this woman I loved.

But you do. As The Advocate, you find yourself doing all sorts of things that you never thought you'd have to do.

When I returned to her room, Carolyn was sound asleep and the notebook was open on her chest, like she'd dozed off while writing in it. A male nurse told me he'd given her the medication that always knocked her out for many hours, gently and for her own good. I went home, spent the rest of the day earning my living and didn't get back there until shortly after Midnight. Carolyn was still asleep, just as she was when I'd left her. The late shift hospice nurse had been there since 8 PM and she told me that Carolyn's breathing was normal, her oxygen levels were good…but she had not opened her eyes.

With me there, the nurse took the opportunity to step out for a few minutes. I said Carolyn's name a few times but there was no response. Then I took the book and before I closed it and put it on the bedside table, I looked to see if she'd written anything legible in it after I'd left her. What was on the latest pages was totally illegible and this very, very sad thought came over me like icy fluid flowing through my veins: All communication was over between me and this amazing, radiant woman I loved. She could no longer speak. She could no longer write. If she was going to sleep 24/7 until she died, that was not a bad thing because at least there would be no pain…but then she couldn't even gesture or tell me things with her lovely, expressive eyes. I was holding back tears and I didn't know why because there are moments when sobbing is wildly appropriate and this was certainly one of them.

And then I noticed something. If in reading this article you haven't cried up to this point and you don't want to start now, don't read this next part…

Carolyn had taken that red pen and gone through all the pages in that volume. Every place she had previously and legibly written "Mark," she'd drawn a shaky but unmistakable heart around my name.

The nurse wandered back in and I didn't say anything to her. I walked out of the room, down the hall and out onto the patio where I sat in the same chair I was in when I signed the contract twelve hours earlier for her ashes to be scattered at sea. The nursing home is up on the side of a hill in Silverlake and the patio has a spectacular view of the Hollywood area — the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory and thousands of shimmering specks of light, both across the city and in the sky above. In the dead of night when it's deserted, it's a really fine place to just cry your eyes out.

When they called the following Sunday night to tell me it was all over, I shed only a few tears. That was because I'd shed so many on Thursday night after I found those red hearts in her journal. Those were, in effect, her last words.

I have not cried much since then except what I've been doing here since around when I started typing the paragraph above that began, "With me there, the nurse took the opportunity…"  If you're crying now, please stop and clear your eyeballs because I've dragged you all this way to tell you something I think is important. This is the 24,401st message on this blog and it may be the most important…

There may come a day when you will have to be The Advocate for someone you love. Do not do it under duress because that just creates more problems. Do not do it because you think it will somehow get you in the will because it may not. Do it because you love that person and they just plain need you to be The Advocate. And you must be satisfied with no reward other than that knowing you did the right thing and that you did it reasonably well.

Of course, to get that last part, you have to actually do it reasonably well. That may mean accepting that it may not be easy or fun or painless. In fact, it may be none of those three things. You may have to change diapers, clean up vomit, wait up all night in emergency rooms, hide your tears, spend money and see things that are upsetting at the moment and hard to erase forever after.

You need to keep your perspective and your judgment and your command of logic, no matter how bad things get. You need to recover from the mistakes you make because this is not an easy job, being The Advocate, and you will make mistakes. I certainly did. It may also at times be a full-time job, even if you thought it was part-time when you took it on.

You may even have to write out a check for someone to handle the remains of someone you love. That kinda got to me and the man who brought the contracts over said, "That's when a lot of people suddenly accept that the person is actually going to die." I'd accepted that by then but my signing hand apparently hadn't. You need to take care of all the forms, all the legalities, whether it's a Durable Power of Attorney or an Advanced Medical Directive or even a Last Will and Testament, and there are a thousand other duties you need to do because someone has to do them and they won't get done unless you do them.

But the most important thing is that you need to tell the person that you love them. It is not enough to show them that by being there for them. You need to say it — clearly, often and sincerely — and you need to really mean it because you can't possibly be any good at being The Advocate if you don't.

That person may well recover, at least for a while. If so, great. Maybe they'll put all the illness or injury behind them and return to a normal life. Maybe they'll even someday be The Advocate for you. Carolyn was never going to make it out alive but even people who do usually need an Advocate. Those situations are generally simpler and less dramatic but they still follow the same basic rules, including that main one: Tell the patient that you love them. Say it over and over and over and mean it every damned time.

And if you ever are the patient who requires an Advocate, tell that person the same thing and mean it just as much. This may not easy because at some point, you may not be able to speak, you may not be able to write, you may not be able to express yourself in any of the usual ways. But for God's sake, find a way to tell them, even if all you can do is scrawl little ballpoint hearts around their name.

What a smart, wonderful woman she was. My parents aside, that may be the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.

And right then, I really needed someone to do something nice for me.

I've gone way too long on this blog without an unusual rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here's Storm Front, a popular barbershop quartet doing some barbering of Queen's masterpiece…

I've been kinda busy today and much of my blogging time has been spent finishing a very long post which will appear here in the next day or three. It's about…well, you'll see what it's about once it's up on this page. It's one of those serious ones.

The other day here, we were looking at the Carnation Rabbits and I said that the voice of Pete the Rabbit only sounded to me like Lennie Weinrib in the last of the linked cartoons. I thought two other guys did Pete's voice, one being Pat Harrington. Well, animator and historian Mike Kazaleh tell me that's correct. Harrington's the first voice, Lennie is the last and the one in the middle is Gene Moss, who kids of my age who grew up in Los Angeles will always remember fondly as Dr. Von Shtick on the short-lived but brilliant local kids' show, Shrimpenstein. Moss also had a prolific voiceover career including Roger Ramjet and many years of supplying the voice of Smokey the Bear.

No Trump Dump today but I recommend you read Fred Kaplan about how our prez is screwing up relations with Germany, and Daniel Larison about how in his foreign policy has abandoned the premise of "America First." He's now pursuing "Trump and His Friends First," which is really the only thing that man has ever cared about anywhere at any time.

You know, I really like Kathy Griffin when she isn't trading Being Funny for Being Outrageous. Funny is sometimes outrageous. Outrageous is sometimes funny. Neither is always the other. Trump, for example, is outrageous without ever being funny…or right.

This year's Comic-Con International kicks off in San Diego with a Preview Night on July 19 and then the con runs July 20-23. As always, the convention will be about many things but a key one this year is Jack Kirby.

Of course, in a way the convention is always to a great extent about Jack. His influence, his style and characters he birthed or co-birthed are all over the place. But this year, they're going to make an extra-special fuss, starting with the striking cover on the souvenir book, executed by Bruce Timm with the lettering magic of Todd Klein. If you aren't familiar with what this is based on — even though we discussed the Don Rickles issues of Jimmy Olsen recently on this blog — this will tell you more about it.

This may change but I'm currently set to host twelve panels at the convention. Four of them are specifically about Jack and I'm sure his name will creep into a few others. (The full schedule will be posted two weeks before the con and we're not supposed to announce things yet…but I don't think they'll mind if I tell you that most of mine will be the same panels as last year and most will be in the same rooms on the same days at the same times. Hopefully, the content will be different.)

I'll be at the con the whole time…and for those who were wondering: We'll be announcing the recipients of this year's Bill Finger Award in a day or so. Can't believe it all starts in less than fifty days from today. I'd better do some of last year's laundry.

A baby penguin being tickled…

There's a brouhaha raging about this year's Tony Awards.  Naturally, the producers want Bette Midler on the telecast to do a number from her sold-out, just-try-and-get-a-ticket revival of Hello, Dolly!  They especially want her and the male ensemble to do the title tune.  When asked, Bette and her producers said yes but on the condition that they not do it at Radio City Music Hall, which is where the Tony Awards are being presented.  They said the stage was too different from the one they have over at the Shubert Theatre where the show is running.  They said the number would not be effective at R.C.M.H. and because the number has a lot of acrobatics in it, the alien stage might pose a threat to the dancers.

The Tony Award producers said no, they don't want to create that precedent. There have been remote numbers before on the show but they want to stop that. Arguing ensued and at the moment, the plan is that Ms. Midler will not sing at all on the broadcast.  She will show up to present an award and possibly receive one but the number that will be performed to represent her show will be her co-star David Hyde-Pierce singing "Penny in My Pocket."

You may not know that tune because most likely whenever you saw Hello, Dolly!, that number wasn't in it.  It was cut from the original production but has been put back for this staging.  Frankly, I don't think it's a very good song and I wonder why nothing else from the show is being considered.  There are plenty of good numbers in that show, with and without Bette Midler, and most of them work just fine out of context.

Obviously, this is not a big issue and the way tickets are going for Dolly, it won't hurt them one bit.  But Midler doing the title tune would probably up the tune-in and do a little good for Broadway in general.  If I were in charge of the telecast, I'd let them do it on top of the Empire State if they wanted to.

In fact, here's what I'd do.  The Shubert is about half-a-mile from Radio City Music Hall.  A person could walk it in about 12-15 minutes.  The Tony Awards show is three hours, commencing at 8 PM.  I'd have Bette present an award around 9:00 PM and after it, host Kevin Spacey would come out and tell her that the world is watching and the world would love to see her and her dancers perform the signature moment of her show.  Bette would explain that she'd love to but she would have to do it from the Shubert because they're used to that stage and this one's too big and so on and so on and so on…

Spacey would say that will be fine— "And we have you scheduled to do it at 10:45 as the last musical number in the telecast tonight — if you get there on time. If not, we have someone standing by…"

We then cut to a live remote from the Shubert where Nathan Lane, dressed in the Dolly dress with the wig, is waiting to go on in her place. "Take your time, Bette," he calls to her. (Obviously, it could be someone other than Nathan Lane.)

"Oh, no!" the Divine Miss Dolly proclaims. "Nobody's doing that number on this show but me!" She bolts from the stage and a live Steadicam follows her out the door where she is mobbed by fans and unable to work her way through the mob and hail a cab. For the next 90 minutes or so, every time the Tony Awards broadcast goes into or out of a commercial, we cut to Bette in a cab, Bette running up W. 50th, Bette calling an Uber, Bette running into construction work, etc. At some point in her journey, she is joined by her dresser who saw her struggling to get there and brought the dress out so she could arrive ready to go on.  We see her changing into it on the subway.

But she misses her stop and winds up way out in Central Park. Desperate, she appeals to a policeman on horseback and she (i.e., a stunt-person) hops on and the horse gallops down 7th Avenue with "Dolly" clinging to the cop for dear life. At 10:45, we cut to the Shubert where Nathan is cackling and getting ready to go on. Bette arrives just in time to shove him aside, make her entrance and perform the number to, of course, perfection. (Most of this — except maybe her leaving Radio City Music Hall and "her" arriving at the Shubert — would be recorded a few days earlier.)

Then back at Radio City Music Hall, they present the last two Tonys of the night: Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical (Bette is nominated) and Best Revival of a Musical (Hello, Dolly! is nominated). If she wins hers, she accepts from the stage of the Shubert. If she loses, they cut to her mouthing "Fuck!" or something like that. The producers of the revival are at the Shubert so they can also accept from there with Bette and the cast if their show wins.

That's roughly the idea. It would get a lot of attention for the telecast…and keep people tuned in until the end, which doesn't always happen. They would have the big money number but it would not really create a precedent because they could tell other shows that wanted to do remotes, "Sorry, we only did it for this special routine." It could be very funny, especially if Miss Saigon and Eva Noblezada (who stars in it) win.

Will they do it? Probably not. But I had to throw it out there…

Hey, do you remember Pete and Harry, the two rabbits who used to appear in commercials for Carnation Milk? Yeah, me neither. Did they even air in the Los Angeles area?

Well, here's a bunch of them. These are from the mid-sixties and they were animated by Playhouse Pictures, which was founded by Ade Woolery in 1952. Until it closed down in 2002, it produced a stream of mostly-wonderful cartoons, animated commercials, industrial films and movie titles in a wide array of styles. They did the titles for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, for example…and the first animated spots of Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

You can find out more about these Carnation commercials over at this website. There's a newspaper article there that says the voices were done by Al Hammer and Lennie Weinrib. I assume we're talking about Alvin Hammer, a character and bit player who was in a lot of movies and TV shows back then, though I don't know of him doing any other voicing for animation. I'm not familiar with his voice but I'm going to assume he's playing Harry in all of these.

Pete is pretty obviously Lennie Weinrib in the last of these commercials but not the others. I think there's at least two other guys doing that rabbit's voice in them and one of them sounds a lot like Pat Harrington to me. Others may disagree…

Back when Jackie Mason was funny — yes, some of us can remember that long ago — he used to have a great line about when Richard Nixon was president. He said, "Every morning when I get up, I check and make sure my furniture is still there." In the Trump Administration, a lot of us get up each morning and check to see if the country is still there. I mean, you just know that the man would sell the whole United States and even toss in Puerto Rico if Putin offered the right price.  And then would come the bragging about what a great deal he made.

It's also amazing that each morning, we can check and see the latest story that someone in the White House felt compelled to leak about some Trump quirk that makes him look like an inattentive, self-obsessed dictator; someone incapable of reading even one paragraph of a briefing if he doesn't spot his name somewhere in it.

At a Memorial Day BBQ yesterday, a couple of friends were making the point that anyone who works around Trump has to be terrified that they'll have to spend their life's savings lawyering up — as did so many who worked for Nixon, Clinton or others — as investigations proceed. There's something to keep in mind as we watch the steady trickle of leaks from those in or around the Oval Office. They're not leaking that kind of stuff because they think Trump will be good for the country…or them.

Here come the links…

• What's less popular these days than Donald J. Trump? Well, as Jonathan Chait reminds us, everything Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are trying to accomplish is less popular than Donald J. Trump. Not many other things are.
• Matt Yglesias offers up an interesting theory as to why Trump says so many things that aren't true…and which don't even advance any political goals. The idea, sez Matt, is to test the loyalty of those around him. Are they loyal enough to blindly repeat and defend bullshit?
• Trump is still waffling on whether or not to pay the cost-sharing subsidies of Obamacare. What is his dithering accomplishing? Well, it's getting at least one insurance company to raise its rates substantially. Which may be why he's doing it.
• Daniel Larison summarizes what Trump accomplished on his first foreign trip: Nothing particularly good.

Another thing someone said at the barbecue yesterday: "Every time Trump attacks someone as 'failing,' their popularity soars. I wish I could get him to describe me as 'failing.'"

Had he been as immortal as his work, Jack Kirby would have been 100 years old on August 28 of this year. Conventions and comic book companies are doing all sorts of things to celebrate the life of this man I had the honor of knowing and working for.

Yes, I am still finishing that humongous biography of him that his widow Roz asked me to write decades ago. It was delayed a lot as various Kirby-related legal matters caused her, or after she passed, the family or their lawyers to ask me to stand down for a time. Other matters, some of which you know if you read this blog, slowed things further. But I'm now back completing a book that's too important for me to be rushed for any arbitrary on-sale date. Sometime next year looks very possible.

In the meantime, it should not be confused with this year's reissue/upgrade of my 2008 book on Jack, Kirby: King of Comics. The new edition is smaller (page-wise), slightly-longer (one new chapter/update) and has a number of new illustrations. It can be ordered here and despite whatever it may say there about a release date, I'm assured there will be copies aplenty at Comic-Con International which commences in — shudder, shudder — 52 days. Most of it is the old book, though I took the opportunity to clean up some confusing language here and there throughout.

Right now, I want to say a few things about this fine article by a writer named Mark Peters, one being that, yes, Jack really was that amazing.

Secondly, this is not a correction but a clarification. Peters writes, "Marvel settled a 2014 lawsuit with the Kirby heirs that was headed to the Supreme Court." True…but I have to keep reminding people that that was a lawsuit Marvel filed against the Kirby heirs. Neither Jack nor his family ever sued Marvel. He threatened it a few times but then Marvel reps threatened a few times to sue him. He did not sue Marvel. His heirs did not sue Marvel. They filed, as per the law, to reclaim some copyrights but they did not sue Marvel. I keep hearing from folks who should know better, including some who worked in high positions at Marvel, that there was this lawsuit from Jack that was filed and won, filed and lost or filed and settled. Never happened and like I said, his kids didn't sue Marvel, either.

Then I want to quote one paragraph and say one other thing. Here, first, is the paragraph…

At Marvel, Kirby worked with Stan Lee to create just about every significant Marvel hero, villain and concept, from Cosmic Cubes to the planet-eating Galactus. Lee has received disproportionate credit for their work, partly due to a misunderstanding of what the two creators actually did. As Marvel Comics was exploding in the 1960s, Lee had too many comics on his plate to crank out full scripts. So he would come up with short plot summaries and let his two visionary artists — Kirby and Steve Ditko — plot out the issues they illustrated. Lee would then return to fill in the dialogue. Known as "Marvel method" or "Marvel style," this process created many classic comics. It was also partly responsible for Kirby and Ditko not getting due credit or compensation for their work. Few understood that the illustrators were writing as much, if not more than, the writer.

This paragraph is basically true though I think it actually understates the artists' contributions. I have met and talked with just about everyone who was around then and who was available to talk about it — Ditko, Heck, Brodsky, Goldberg, Ayers, Stan's brother Larry, and even Stan himself. All of them (repeat: all) said it was like that and that when Stan came up with "short plot summaries," even Stan said that often, they were practically nothing — just a sentence or two and sometimes verbal — and that often they were the results of brainstorming sessions with the artists, meaning that the artists had the basic ideas.

Stan has said otherwise on some occasions but I choose to believe the more generous things he told me because (a) they match what everyone else said and (b) why on any plane of existence would someone overcredit his collaborators, especially to someone like me who he knew was writing about that history? I discuss all this in much greater detail in the next book.

• Remember that guy who told us his reps in Hawaii had found proof Obama was not born in the U.S.? He's now complaining about fake news.

A baby polar bear trying to get up…

Increasingly, stars who have the clout to do so without creating empty seats at their live performances are banning cameras, cellphones and other recording devices. If you buy tickets for Chris Rock's current tour, you will be confronted with this alert…

No cellphones, cameras or recording devices will be allowed at Chris Rock's Total Blackout Tour. Upon arrival, all phones and smart watches will be secured in Yondr pouches that will be unlocked at the end of the show. Guests maintain possession of their phones throughout the night, and if needed, may access their phones at designated Yondr unlocking stations in the lobby. All guests are encouraged to print their tickets in advance to ensure a smooth entry process. Anyone caught with a cellphone in the venue will be immediately ejected. We appreciate your cooperation in creating a phone-free viewing experience.

I've been trying to figure out how I feel about this. In recent years, there have been times when I felt I had to be reachable — by my mother or her doctors when she was failing or because my friend Carolyn might need me, again for medical reasons. Cell phones made that possible.

Thinking out loud now…

When I've been in a show the last ten or so years, there have been many times when my phone vibrated to announce a call. I'd sneak a quick peek at the screen, shielding it so its light wouldn't distract anyone around me. 95% of the time, it was not a call that paramedics were en route to my mother's house or that Carolyn needed me urgently at the nursing facility…so I could ignore the call and direct my attention back to the stage. Quick, easy, unobtrusive.

But if my phone had been in a Yondr bag, I couldn't have taken the chance that it wasn't an emergency call. Not only would I have been derelict in my duty as a friend and loved one, but I wouldn't have been able to focus on the show. I would have been sitting there worrying the call was important. So I would have had to get up and unless I'd scored an aisle seat, crawl across people — "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me" — greatly inconveniencing them twice (once going out, once coming back) to go out and check.

That doesn't sound very good for me, my loved ones or the audience members around me. I guess I would have not gone to the show.

I'm not, by the way, questioning that the performing venue or the performers have the right to require this, unless maybe I'm not warned before I buy my ticket. I'm just trying to figure out what it means to me.

I'm also thinking about when my friend Amber and I went to see Idina Menzel at the Greek Theater a few weeks ago. From the time we got to our seats to the time the show started was more than 49 minutes and we were far from the first people to take our seats. Many people were there more than an hour. We passed some of our wait time on our phones, including practical things like figuring out where we were going to go to dinner after the show and getting the answers to a few questions that arose from conversation. Yondr doesn't just take your phone away from you during a show. It takes it away from you before the show and during intermission.

So I'm wondering if at a show that requires Yondr pouches, ticketholders delay going to their seats and then there's a mad crush, just before the entertainment commences.

Even so, I guess I'm okay with it but a few other things bother me, mostly in the realm of justifications for it. I read a lot of articles and watched several videos in which artists and promoters using Yondr defended it by saying it was for our own good. They're helping us break our unhealthy addiction to our cellphones or "You'll enjoy the show much more if you don't watch it through your phone." It's kind of insulting that you're presuming to decide that for me…

…and it's not even the real reason. The real reason is you don't want me putting pieces of your show up on YouTube.

And I'm fine with that, too. I think the Internet is a tidal wave of copyright infringement and I'm all for controlling that when the proprietors want it controlled. Some are fine with it. Some regard it as good promotion or a part of what we're paying for. (Then again: If the star engages in some copyright infringement of his own — say, it's a comedian and he does a big hunk of someone else's act — they don't want that to be recorded and used in a lawsuit. Or if the star pulls a Michael Richards and starts spouting racist crap or otherwise does something career-damaging. They're trying to prevent that from going viral.)

This isn't a big issue and it's only a temporary one at that because any day now, someone will come up with other technology to deal with this. Performance venues may have "jamming" beams that will prevent video or audio recording on the premises. Or there may be some app which you can install and it will prove to a guy at the door as you enter than you've disabled recording on your phone for the next X hours. Or something else.

But it's a little issue for now and I hope that if I go to a show where they require this, they don't keep us waiting an hour before they start. And I wish they'd be more honest about why they're doing it. It's not for our own good as audience members. It's for their own good as entrepreneurs protecting their product.