Disney has changed a long-standing policy at its theme parks. They no longer allow special privileged access to a party of guests that contains one or more disabled folks. The reason given — and it makes sense that they'd want to stop this — is that a little cottage industry has sprung up. Disabled folks are hiring themselves out — sometimes as guides, sometimes just joining your party for a fee — to enable you and your friends and/or family to bypass the long lines, use the special entrances, etc.

I wonder if anyone considered just limiting the frequency with which a disabled person could qualify for one of those Special Assistance Passes. In any event, them's the new rules…

Disney Parks is modifying the current Guest Assistance Card program, which provides access to attractions for guests with disabilities, so it can continue to serve the guests who truly need it. The new program is designed to provide the special experience guests have come to expect from Disney. It will also help control abuse that was, unfortunately, widespread and growing at an alarming rate.

The new Disability Access Service (DAS) Card will replace the Guest Assistance Card on Oct. 9. Guests at Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort can request a Disability Access Service Card at Guest Relations. DAS Cardholders will receive a return time for attractions based on the current wait time.

Disney Parks has long recognized and accommodated guests with varying needs. Guests can visit Guest Relations to discuss their individual situation, and Disney Parks will continue to provide assistance that is responsive to their unique circumstances.

I can understand why folks would want to abuse the system. The last two times I went to Disneyland, I was fully able-bodied yet I was able to cut lines, go in the special entrances, by-pass the mobs, etc. In '97, my friend Wendy Pini asked me to take her there for a day and as she'd just had a hip replacement, she qualified for a Special Assistance Pass. We waited in no lines except, sometimes, behind others with the same privileges. We got into everything we wanted to get into…including one or two rides I didn't want to go on but Wendy insisted. My stomach only finally settled down last Tuesday from the Indiana Jones experience.

A few years later, the Disney Channel was toying with the idea of doing a live (live!) variety show on Saturday nights from Disneyland and I was asked about maybe producing it. I immediately said — and I was right — that it was a terrible, utterly impossible idea.  The person I was meeting with then said, "Well, before we decide that, let's go down to Disneyland some Saturday and take a look." I decided to go along with that, especially after she told me she had some sort of Disney Executive Pass that sounded even more magical than what Wendy had. In fact, she knew I was right that day in her office and we made the trip just so she could take a free trip to Disneyland and use the pass.  She said we could even have dinner in Club 33, which was something Wendy and I couldn't have done, not being members or having access.

Our expedition more or less replicated the access I'd had with Wendy except that we had a private tour guide and we got into everything we wanted to get into except Club 33, which was seriously overbooked.  A voice over the intercom that admits you basically told us that if Walt himself came back from the dead and wanted a table that night, they'd have to turn him away.  But that one glitch aside, I had a great time on both occasions and I suspect the reason I haven't been back to the Magic Kingdom since is that those two trips spoiled me.

Anyway, I agree that's a great way to experience the Happiest Place on Earth and make yourself even happier. And I agree that it's unfair to others the way things have evolved. Next time I go, I'll wait in the lines just like everyone else. Or I'll get some Disney exec to take me so I don't have to.

Actor Jay Robinson died last Friday at the age of 83. Jay was a fascinating man whose personal story was probably as interesting as any movie or TV show in which he appeared.

Jay was a major star on Broadway and was "discovered," as they say, in 1953 and cast in the motion picture, The Robe. It's hard to get noticed in a film that stars Richard Burton, Victor Mature and Jean Simmons…but Jay, in the key role of Caligula, earned some of the film's best notices. It led to many important roles (including a reprise as Caligula in Demetrius and the Gladiators) and he was just becoming a major star when it happened.

"It" was an arrest in December of '59 for possession and sale of heroin. He served jail time but when he got out, he discovered his career was over. Studios wouldn't touch him. He drifted into other work in mostly menial jobs, got into all kinds of trouble and wound up behind bars again. Finally, in 1968 when he got out, he cleaned up his thoughts and mind — and finding Jesus, he said, was the big thing — and made an all-out attempt to rebuild his acting career. While he never attained his pre-arrest stature, he did manage to find steady work, mostly in small roles. Once typed as Caligula, he found himself now typed for over-the-top roles of a fantastic nature. He did a lot of horror and science-fiction films and finally got himself cast in a Saturday morning series, the Krofft SuperShow, in which he played the villainous Dr. Shrinker.

I worked with him on a subsequent Krofft series in which he played a similar, scenery-chewing mad scientist. He was awfully good…a very nice man who worked very hard at his craft.

I have two main memories of Jay, both from that series. Jay wrote his autobiography…a soul-cleansing book he called The Comeback. It was a little preachy but then so was Jay. One day shortly before it came out, he came up to me on the set and asked me if I'd like to have lunch with him and some of his friends that day. He said, "You're interested in Watergate, aren't you?" I told him I was, yes, very much. "I remember you said that," he continued. "Well then, you have to come to lunch with us."

An hour or so later, his friends came on the set — all of them way too well-dressed to be in our crummy studio. The leader of the group was Charles Colson, once hailed as "Nixon's hatchet man," who'd served time for his Watergate-related crimes and then run a religious organization since his release from prison. I don't recall if he was publishing Jay's book but he was involved in its marketing and that's what the lunch was about.

Before long, I was sitting among his entourage at a big table where not a word was said about Nixon or Watergate but there was constant mention of Jesus, God, Our Heavenly Father, etc. Me aside, everyone alternated: One sentence about how to boost the gross of Jay's book by strong-arming it into religious stores and book clubs, then one non sequitur paying lip service to Jesus. It was like they were all convinced that when you reach those Pearly Gates, you are judged not on anything you've done but wholly on how many times in your life you mentioned God. One of the few things I said to Mr. Colson — and I actually said this — was, "Praise the Lord and pass the ketchup."

He didn't get it. He passed the ketchup, said "Praise God," then turned to Jay and explained how he was going to (nicely) threaten some distributor of religious books and get them to drop a certain other book and push The Comeback. Jay was pretty serious about not caring about the money. He just wanted people to read his story so that they might benefit from his experiences. For everyone else there though, it was just product to be hustled hard for profits.

That was one memory I have of Jay. The other one was a few weeks later, I believe. The show we did together featured the Bay City Rollers, a once-kinda popular rock group that was about fifteen months into its Year at the Top. I believe they'd actually retired but upon being offered this series, had reassembled to make a few more bucks Rollering before they went their separate ways.

The Rollers were great guys but one of them had what seemed like a bit of a drug problem. One day, he was woefully late for a taping and when he came in, he didn't know his lines but he did know an array of excuses no one believed. One of the other band members, in front of everyone, accused him of being too stoned to get up that morning. The tardy Roller shot back that he could handle it. It wasn't going to get in the way of whatever career they had left. Then Jay stepped in and began lecturing the young man about the evils of narcotics.

That Roller's first response was along the lines of "What do you know about it, old man?" Then Jay said, "I knew plenty about drugs before I went to prison for heroin, and what I didn't know, I learned behind bars." Everyone around got instantly silent and he launched into his story — the ruined stardom, the lost years, the hard climb back…all of it. And I'll give this to that Bay City Roller: He listened. I don't know if he took any of it to heart but he listened. The 15-minute version that Jay delivered was a riveting, emotional story that I'm sure would have helped some drug abusers if they heard it.

And that's mainly how I remember him…telling his story of how he'd destroyed his life…hoping that by sharing it, he'd do somebody some good. He was a kind, compassionate man. And just last week, I saw him on a rerun of an old Banacek and I was reminded he was a darn good actor, too.

Many of you have informed me that Entertainment Weekly has a different excerpt from Henry Bushkin's about-to-be-released book on Johnny Carson. This one is about how, according to Mr. Bushkin, Carson dealt with the belief that his wife Joanne (aka Wife #2) was cheating on him with football's own Frank Gifford. Here's the link.

It should be noted that Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank's third wife, has quoted her husband as saying (at first) that he didn't remember if he had an affair with Joanne and then saying he was sure he hadn't. An odd denial to be sure.

The former Joanne Carson has denied it and is now in a public squabble with her own former assistant who says there was such an affair and that Joanne tried to get her to cover it up. As they're quoted as calling each other liars, yet another Bushkin sample is making the rounds. It claims "The Mob" once ordered a hit on Johnny because he'd been flirtatious with the lady friend of a well-connected boss.

And that's about as much of this stuff as I'm following since my interest in Mr. Carson does not extend to who he slept with. However, I will say this: It's fascinating to me that this is all coming out now.

Johnny's — shall we say? — "approaches" to women were never much of a secret in show business. They were not all that secret but no one ever dared mention them in a public forum before. There are certain performers who somehow earn a bubble of respectability that no one dares pierce. It's fine to write about Frank Sinatra's affairs or connections with shady figures. No one ever wrote about Johnny's before — or at least, never did so in a venue that anyone noticed.

After Carson died — and after Bob Hope and a few others passed on, too — I expected someone would cash in with tell-all books about affairs and dirty dealings. But there's no such book about Hope or the others and it's taken this long for anyone to write anything about Johnny that went against his public image. I really don't know why that is. I don't think it's because there's no market for it.

Ezra Klein on Obama's dilemma in the current shutdown/debt ceiling duel. The more it looks like he's winning, the more he unites Republicans in trying to not give him a win. This sure looks like the biggest obstacle to settling this whole mess.

Yesterday, we had Groucho Marx in a TV version of his play, Time for Elizabeth. Talking with a few fellow Marx Brothers enthusiasts last night, I got to wondering: Did Groucho do that, at least in part, with an eye towards maybe angling into a situation comedy?

By 1964 when Time for Elizabeth aired, You Bet Your Life had run its course and Groucho has followed it with a short-lived series called Tell it to Groucho which, I'm sure, its makers hoped would replicate the success of the previous show. It didn't…so it was unlikely Mr. Marx would be seen in that format again. At about the same time that the latter went off, Jack Paar was announcing his abdication from The Tonight Show and Groucho reportedly let it be known that he might be interested in the position. When Johnny Carson got the nod, there was a six-month interval between Paar's leaving and Johnny's arrival, filled by guest hosts. Groucho was one and in letters to friends, he said he wished he'd gotten the job. (One of the nights he hosted, his guest was a young actress, then shining on Broadway, named Barbra Streisand. Some of the audio still exists of that episode.)

Anyway, he wanted to work. At the time, the most likely way a former star of movie comedy got work in television was to star in a situation comedy. So did anyone propose this for Groucho? He was still a pretty big star, appearing in specials and making guest appearances, so it's hard to believe no one raised the possibility. But if they did, there's no known evidence of it.

There is, however, evidence that Chico Marx tried to get his own situation comedy. In fact, we have here an imperfect but watchable copy of that unsold pilot. It was called Papa Romani and it was produced in 1949 and aired, like they used to do with unsold pilots, as part of an anthology series — in this case, on 1/9/50. It's not all that funny despite the presence of Chico and, among other actors, Margaret Hamilton and William Frawley. In '51, of course, Mr. Frawley would get into a rather successful situation comedy called I Love Lucy. Here's Chico's unsuccessful attempt…

Robert Holmen read that excerpt of the Henry Bushkin book I linked to and he notes two errors that I'm embarrassed I didn't catch…

• Bushkin mentions Jack Benny among the guests at a 1979 Friars Club dinner for Johnny Carson. Not likely since Benny died in 1974.
• Then he writes of a meeting in April of 1980 between Carson and ABC executives at the home of Joan Rivers, and he quotes Rivers as saying, "No one else is in the place, so feel free to talk about your secrets — how much Barbara Walters makes, how much you have to pay plastic surgeons to keep Joan Collins' boobs off the floor." Joan Collins was not an ABC star then; not until she joined the cast of Dynasty the following year.

So…is the whole book like this? Hope not.

A little profile of our pal Floyd Norman, correctly noted as the first black animator to ever work for Disney. I met Floyd at Hanna-Barbera where he was a valuable talent…and the undisputed master at drawing funny cartoons about the office staff and bosses. I wrote about that here.

Henry Bushkin was Johnny Carson's attorney for eighteen years. You may recall Johnny's occasional on-air references to "Bombastic Bushkin," the guy who got him into great business deals like that tanning salon for Albinos. Anyway, Mr. Bushkin has now written a book about his famous client and all the personal and contractual squabbling that engulfed the Tonight Show host. It comes out next week and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. Here's a link to pre-order.

And here's a little preview. One of the many interesting facets of Mr. Carson's long run as host of The Tonight Show is that he never intended or expected it to be like that. When he first took on the gig, it was like, "I hope this will last a few years and then I can go do a prime-time series like The Red Skelton Show." At that point, that seemed like it would have been a step up. Moreover, Johnny had once had a show like that, it had failed, and he had a nagging drive to go back and do it right.

As his Tonight Show got more popular, it less and less seemed like a stepping stone to anything else. Shows like Skelton's became passé and Carson realized that to leave his late night slot for one would be a big gamble, a lot more work and — as his Tonight Show money improved — not even a more lucrative job. So he stayed where he was on what was pretty much a year-to-year basis, always thinking he'd pack it in soon. Twenty years before he quit, he said there was no way he'd be doing that show in ten more years. But he was.

I'm eager to read Bushkin's account of all the battles and negotiations and decisions. I'll report back when I do.

This runs 47 minutes so you might not want to watch all of it…but you might want to watch a little.

In the 1940's, Groucho Marx and his friend Norman Krasna wrote a play called Time for Elizabeth. Apparently when they started on it, Groucho had in mind to star in it himself. That was when he was worried about having or not having future employment. By the time they finished it, Groucho was starring weekly on radio in You Bet Your Life, which paid a lot better to do one show a week than the play would have earned him to do eight. He also was tethered to Los Angeles where his game show was produced…so he had a good excuse not to star in the play he co-authored.

It was staged without him…with Otto Kruger in the lead. It opened at the Fulton Theater in New York on September 27, 1948, where it lasted for a whopping eight performances, probably due to its tepid reviews. Some suggested Mr. Kruger had committed the unpardonable sin of not being Groucho Marx; that the character's lines would have sounded right for Groucho but were wrong for Otto. Still, there was a movie sale — reported as $500,000, which sounds awfully high to me for a show that closed so rapidly. There was talk of Groucho starring in the movie but no such film was ever made.

He did tour in it a few times during vacations from You Bet Your Life. Reportedly, he took liberties with his own script, broke character often to chat with the audience, and at the end of each performance delivered a long curtain speech that most audiences preferred to the preceding play. But he only did it once on camera — in an abridged version that ran on April 24, 1964 with his then-wife, Eden Hartford, in a small role. It was an episode of the anthology series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, and that's the video we have for you today. It's not wonderful but it is Groucho and he's pretty funny at times…

Folks keep asking me about Dick Van Dyke and his still-newlywedded, much-younger spouse Arlene. Here's a good interview with Arlene Van Dyke. They seem like a pretty happy couple to me.

Democrats say the votes are there in the House to pass a clean bill to reopen the government. John Boehner say they aren't. So why doesn't Boehner, who has the power to do so, just hold a vote and prove it? William Saletan says he's trying to protect his members from having to commit to a position that can be used against them in the next election.

My mother died a year ago last Friday. Today, the doctor who took such wonderful care of her for more than the last third of her life phoned to see how I was doing. He was never my doctor. He was my mother's. But that's how strongly he felt a connection to her…and thus, to me.

The answer is that I am fine with it. Do I miss her? Sure…but I miss the woman she was when she could walk and see and do things without me or a caregiver assisting her. But by the time her heart stopped beating on 10/4/12, that person was long ago and far away. So for me the mourning period hasn't been one year; more like ten.

I felt so sorry for her the last decade of her life. It was all about surviving — taking pills, going to doctors' appointments, etc. — and not much else. She couldn't eat the foods she wanted to eat. Couldn't read a book. Couldn't walk without a walker…and then, not very far. She couldn't even get down the front steps of her home without someone to help and couldn't get down the rear steps to go out in her backyard even with assistance.

She hated it. She hated being so reliant on others. And when I had to run over there or haul her into the hospital at 4 AM, she hated what she felt she was doing to my life. Over and over, she talked about how there should be some simple, painless way she could choose to just be done with it. (My mother is not the best example in my life of the sheer humanity that would be involved in allowing the elderly and ill to make that decision. Before long here, I'll post the tale of some neighbors we had whose story makes the case even better.)

So yeah, I miss her. But the elation at seeing her out of pain drowns a lot of that out and so does this: Had she lived another few months, she would have been totally blind, as opposed to legally blind, and she would have lost the last crumbs of the independence she so dearly loved. And to be honest, I would have had to make some hard decisions about where and how it was best for her to live. Nothing I would have decided would have been to her liking…and I'm glad for me I didn't have to pick the least painful alternative.

Every so often, it hits me that she's gone. Most days around 5:30 or 6 in the afternoon, I get the odd sensation that I've forgotten to do something I was supposed to do. And then I remember: Any day I didn't see her earlier, I'd phone her around then to check in, say hello (and usually, something very silly) and just connect. That's what I'm remembering I haven't done yet.

The other day, I was talking about her with my dermatologist. I had an "atypical mole" removed and I was there so he could yank out a few stitches. He said, "It looks like you've been doing a good job cleaning the sutures." I said yes, "I've been washing the area off with Bactine."

He looked surprised. He said, "Bactine? Do they still make Bactine?"

Yes, they do. It's not always easy to find in the First Aid section but it's usually there, just to the left of the Neosporin. Bactine is what my mother used to spray or daub on any cut, scrape, abrasion or place on my body that hurt. It usually stopped hurting within moments and I'm not sure if it was the magic healing/cleansing powers of Bactine Pain Relieving Cleaning Spray or just the fact that my mother was fixing the boo-boo. It may well have been a combination.

My mother could heal anything with a bottle of Bactine. Anything! If I'd needed a heart transplant, she would have just sprayed on about a tenth of a bottle and — poof! — new heart! I'm sure of it.

I always keep a bottle of it in my medicine cabinet. It doesn't work quite as well when I spray it on. I just don't quite have her touch. But it does help, maybe because it reminds me of her. I hope something always does.

It's actually been thirty years since Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Not long ago, the five surviving members of the troupe sat down — one via Skype or a similar hookup — and discussed the film for a special feature that appears on the new Blu-ray edition. This is one of those bonus features that's intended to get you to buy another copy of a movie you already have and most of us, of course, will fall for it. Here's a brief excerpt from that discussion…

I think every cable news channel should have a little clock in one corner of the screen showing us how long the Shutdown has been going on. Then they should have another clock in another part of the screen showing us how long it will be until America defaults on its debts. Then they should have another clock that shows long we have until the time after that when we have to raise the debt ceiling. Then they should add in a clock to the next time we'll need to pass a new funding bill. Then five more clocks counting down the times to the five subsequent needs to raise the debt ceiling, plus a clock telling us how long we have until the 2014 and 2016 elections.

If they can get all these clocks and timers on the screen, there'll be no room to show Senators and Representatives in Washington arguing over whose fault it is that all this has taken the place of actual governing. And that, of course, is the whole point of the clocks.

Ezra Klein has The 13 Reasons Washington is Failing. Sounds like a pretty accurate list to me.