Debuting this evening on Broadway is one of the touring companies of a show called The Illusionists. It's at the Palace Theater there through January 1 for the tourist crowd. At the moment, there's one other troupe of The Illusionists touring the middle of the country. It's currently in Madison, Wisconsin and heading on to Toronto and then to San Antonio and other towns.

Each show is a presentation by seven or eight great magicians who are identified as certain kinds of specialists. The company opening in New York consists of Dana Daniels (The Charlatan), Charlie Frye (The Eccentric), Mark Kalin (The Showman), Jinger Leigh (The Conjuress), Thommy Ten and Amélie van Tass (The Clairvoyants), Justo Thaus Jin (The Grand Carlini), Rick Thomas (The Immortal) and Jonathan Goodwin (The Daredevil).

The cast in Wisconsin at the moment is made up of Darcy Oake (The Grand Illusionist), Dan Sperry (The Anti-Conjuror), Andrew Basso, (The Escapologist), Kevin James, (The Inventor), Ben Blaque (The Weapon Master), Colin Cloud (The Deductionist) and Jeff Hobson (The Trickster). I gather the lineups in each troupe change from time to time. No matter how they mix and match them, you get a roster of great magicians because those are all really fine performers.

If you go see 'em in Manhattan, pay particular attention to my pal Charlie Frye, who is both a magician and the best comedy juggler I've ever seen. In fact, every time I eat with Charlie, I feel like I oughta buy a ticket because he juggles the dishes, makes the restaurant's silverware disappear, tears the check in pieces and then restores it…

And I see that he also now has apparently mastered the ability to travel back in time and change his race. Since he's on Broadway now, Playbill has added him to their database of performers who've played the Great White Way. In one section of their website, they show the Playbills for each show in which a performer has appeared.

There on the site, they have Charlie Frye appearing in The Illusionists (current) but until yesterday, they also had up the Playbill for Run, Little Chillun, a 1933 Broadway play with an all-black cast. They may have taken it down thinking it was a different Charlie Frye in that show's cast but I know how amazing my friend is. I wouldn't doubt he could somehow pull it off.

Paul R. Pillar is really worried about Donald Trump's appointments in areas like foreign policy and intelligence. He says they show a great tendency to ignore facts which do not fit with ideology. This country has tried that before and…well, you saw how well it worked with the Iraq War. But as Jon Stewart once notably chanted, "Learning curves are for pussies!"

Ben Carson has no experience running a federal agency and especially in the areas covered by the office of Housing and Urban Development. So naturally, he'll be the Secretary of that department.

I've seen a lot of comments that the pick is because Trump figures he has to have a black guy somewhere in his cabinet. But Jonathan Chait thinks the idea is to put someone there who will never let the needs of the poor and disadvantaged get in the way of enriching wealthy developers…like, say, Donald Trump and his friends.

Those who only thought of Florence Henderson as the mom on The Brady Bunch…boy, did you miss a helluva career: Broadway. Movies. Other TV programs and plenty of TV movies. Concerts. She even had a cooking show for a while. She was in some awful productions but I sure never saw her be awful in anything. She was a fine musical comedy performer and that's not easy to be because you have to be able to sing and act and dance and most actors can do one or maybe two of those things. She could do it all.

If you never got to meet her, here's what you should know: She was very smart, utterly aware of her image and quite ready to screw with it and act "against type." She had a good sense of humor about herself and everything and was totally professional.

I can't think of a single anecdote about her being difficult or stuck-up or in any way the cause of trouble. The few times I worked with her, she was an absolute delight. Sometimes, they really are as nice as they seem to be on television.

I've been thinking about this theory that Trump won the election because someone — presumably, someone Russian — hacked the vote counts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. As I said, I doubt there's anything to it.

But this thought keeps popping into my mind: For eight years in this country, we had to put up with accusations that Barack Obama wasn't really president because he wasn't born in the United States. And there was no more actual evidence of that than there is that Trump didn't really win the election because of hackers. Maybe those of us who aren't happy that Trump won should give the hacker story at least as much life as the birth certificate one. I mean, we can make up all sorts of phony evidence just like Trump and others did.

We don't have to believe it. I don't believe that everyone spreading the "Obama was born in Kenya" story really believed it. They just thought it was a good way to weaken a politician they didn't like and to whip up the really stupid people against him. You know…like the Clinton Body Count did.

We could do that. We could…

Oh, wait. I forgot. Someone has to have some integrity. Forget I said anything.

We're taking the day off here at newsfromme — the afternoon, at least. Don't eat too much. Since I had my gastric bypass, I can't…but that doesn't mean I'm not going to try.

Here in America, we're the world champions at throwing away food. In a world where so many people are starving, you won't believe how much turkey meat winds up in the garbage.

I've linked you to a lot of real goofy songs on this blog, including a few that were not "Up the Ladder to the Roof." I just decided it was time I linked you to a real good one…in fact, this may be my favorite short piece of music in the world. This is "Rondo Alla Turca," aka "Turkish Rondo" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart…

Currently making the rounds is a theory that Donald Trump won the White House via hacking and fraud, especially in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  I tend to be very skeptical of conspiracy theories, especially those whose proponents seem to believe the conspiracy is obvious and no evidence anywhere will ever convince them otherwise.  This, so far, is not one of those conspiracies but I still kinda doubt it.  I could give some of my reasons but Josh Marshall has a better summary of why it ain't necessarily so.

There are some reports out today that Donald Trump — who said he wants to bring back waterboarding "and worse" — has changed his mind about this. Fred Kaplan says no, Trump hasn't changed his mind.

What Trump did was to acknowledge that a respected (by Trump and others) retired Marine Corps general said that torture is not a great way to extract information from enemy combatants. And that sure seems to be a consensus of military leaders who are actually charged with interrogation. But that doesn't seem to matter to a certain kind of person we have around today who just plain likes the idea of America torturing anyone who may qualify as "the enemy," whether it's going to get us useful information or not.

In Arnie Kogen's fine piece on the legendary comedy writer Pat McCormick, much was made of the time Pat "streaked" The Tonight Show during one of Johnny Carson's monologue. A video clip was also included. This led to this question from Andy Rose…

Do you have any idea if that was planned? Johnny seemed genuinely surprised, and you can see a cop hovering behind Ed afterward. On the other hand, both the cameraman and the spotlight operator seemed prepared for it.

Utterly, absolutely planned. First off, earlier in that monologue, Johnny said something like, "There's a rumor that we're going to be streaked this evening." Now, how would such a rumor have been floating around unless it was planned? Real streakers don't announce their intentions in advance and put Security on alert. And why would Johnny mention it if it wasn't sure to happen?

Secondly, to get in and into a position where you could do that on that stage was just about impossible unless the staff arranged it. And getting outta there was even more difficult.

Thirdly, if an unwelcome stranger had done that, NBC Security would have tackled the guy, had him arrested and cut the whole thing from the tape. They would have done that even if he hadn't been naked because they wouldn't want to give anyone else the idea of disrupting a taping. (Carson, who didn't like surprises, would probably have had the entire Security Squad there fired.)

And finally, Johnny didn't like surprises.

The interesting thing about this, of course, is that it was Pat. Streaking was big at the time, mostly because it was something titillating that the news broadcasts found they could get away with airing. They could claim it was news. So it was kind of natural that someone at the Tonight Show said, "Hey, we should have someone streak during Johnny's monologue" and of course, Johnny okayed it. He was doing streaking jokes every night so it seemed a natural.

Then they had to decide who to have streak, and I'll bet someone's first idea was to get some lovely college-age kids — both male and female. Then, I'm guessing, someone got worried that that would seem exploitative and more like porn than humor…and maybe Standards and Practices got into it and said, "If you block the naughty parts out on the screen, okay but only one streaker." That meant a guy since that was less sexy than a woman…and also, the most publicized streakers were male.

So someone says, "Okay, we need a male streaker who's not too sexy. Who can we get?" And Pat happens to be walking by at that moment.

That was one of the things Pat's friends loved about the guy: He would do anything. Around this time, I was writing a variety show for Dick Clark that taped at NBC, so we often saw Pat in the halls. He was appearing on a lot of sleazy cable shows and for some reason, our writing staff had a little contest amongst ourselves. It was to "invent a mythical cable show that Pat McCormick would refuse to be on for reasons of questionable taste."

We thought of dozens of entries and I wish I could remember the names of any of them…but I recall that we never had a winner. Every time we saw Pat, someone would run to him with the current list and read it to him and Pat would say, "I'd do that show…Sure, I'd do that one…yes, I'd be on that…yes, of course…Oh, I taped that one last week…" He was one of a kind.

My favorite barbershop quartet, Main Street, takes us through the history of dance…

• Why does the press bother quoting Trump? What he says today has no connection to what he'll say tomorrow or what he'll actually do.

I'm back. My new motto in life is: "When all else fails, try reseating your graphics card."

That's all it took but I'm still blaming Trump.