Mark Evanier's Blog, page 48

FACT CHECK: R.F.K. Wrong Again

The folks at The Associated Press review a lot of recent statements by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about medical data in the United States.  Needless to say, he gets almost none of it right.  Was ever the health of a nation placed in the hands of someone who knows so little?

Today's Video Link

I intermittently follow a number of folks on YouTube who teach about cooking and/or how our food is made. The main ones I find interesting for occasional viewing are Adam Ragusea, Brian Lagerstrom, Laura Vitale, Chef John, Sam the Cooking Guy, Martha Stewart and Joshua Weissman.

Mr. Weissman recently journeyed to where they make Parmigiano Reggiano and filed this report that I found rather educational…

ASK ME: More on the Abrego García Matter

There's a lot of conflicting information around about the status, guilt, innocence or history of Kilmar Abrego García…and a lot of people who, despite knowing very little about the man or his background, are very, very certain that know enough about who or what he is. Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post lays out a timeline with some facts in it.

Tales of My Childhood #27

As you may know from past essays here, my father's side of the family was Jewish and my mother's was Catholic. Neither parent was particularly proprietary about their religion. To a great extent, it was a matter of being what they were so as to not disrespect their parents' faiths. Judaism was my official heritage/faith but we were never militant about it, The one time it was pursued — when they tried sending me to Hebrew School on Sundays — it was a colossal disaster. In later years, I would tell people I'm Jewish in the same sense that Olive Garden is Italian but one day, I heard a stand-up comic use that same line so I gave it up.

As a kid, I was exposed to both Judaism and Catholicism in sufficient dosage to know a lot about them but, somehow, Easter escaped my learning experience. I was probably ten or eleven before I learned it was about anything more than an imaginary rabbit hiding inedible eggs. Here is my earliest Easter memory and I'm guessing I was five or six at the time.

The eggs involved were, as I said, inedible — actually, literally, inedible. They might have been cast out of Plaster of Paris..certainly never anything it was wise to put in one's mouth. I don't know who made them at the time but in later years, I saw eggs that looked like the ones in this story under the Brach brand name. They were billed as being marshmallow but if they were, it was probably marshmallow left over from the Plasticene Era. They were colorful on the outside, rock-hard on the inside.

So one Sunday morning when I was five or six, I awoke to the following news flash from my mother: The Easter Bunny, she said, had visited our home in the wee small hours of the morning and hidden a dozen eggs for me. Being the considerate sort of Easter Bunny, he had not hidden them in my bedroom or my parents' bedroom, lest he disrupt our sleeping. My father, in fact, was still sound asleep in theirs. Said Bunny had also not hidden them outside. They were all somewhere in our living room, front hall, dining room, back hall, kitchen, hallway or any closets in those locations.

Excitedly, I leaped out of bed in my jammies and began searching for the eggs my mother had hidden. I knew she, not some mythological hare, had done the hiding but it seemed to be part of the game to play along with the myth. Within minutes, I had located all twelve eggs and I even, since I didn't know any better, had attempted to take a small bite of the orange one. You can replicate this experience for yourself by gnawing on a rock. The sound effect of "PTUI!" ricocheted throughout our home and briefly rousted my father from his sleep.

I presented the twelve eggs to my mother to prove I had found them all and I said, "That was fun! I wish the Easter Bunny would come by and hide them all again!" Then I went to my room to get dressed and a few minutes later, my mother popped in to tell me my wish had come true: The Easter Bunny had hidden another dozen eggs in all the same rooms of our home.

Finding the first dozen had taken me about seven minutes. I found the second dozen in less than five…all twelve of them and the orange one even looked like some idiot had tried to take a bite out of it. Later on, the Easter Bunny hid twelve more in the backyard. These took me about six minutes to find and — again — the orange one looked nibbled-upon.

That was the last I saw of any Easter Eggs in our home until the following Easter. That was when, again, my mother the Easter Bunny hid twelve eggs of the exact same colors…and again, the orange one had a big chip exposing its hard-as-stone interior.

And I think she hid them again the following year but after that, they had mold growing on them or barnacles or something and we both agreed I'd outgrown the game. She threw the alleged eggs out and I asked her why she'd bought that kind instead of ones made out of delicious chocolate and/or fit-for-human-consumption marshmallow.

She smiled and said, "What? And waste food like that?" My mother was a smart lady and not a bad Easter Bunny.

Another One of These…

FACT CHECK: Tariff Grosses

Trump keeps talking about how much money his tariffs are bringing in…so much, he says, that this country may be able to do away with the Income Tax. Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog says that the numbers Trump is citing are bogus. So the idea that you will soon not have to pay Income Tax is unrealistic…unless, of course, you're really rich.

Today's Video Link

We haven't had a Laurel & Hardy film here for a while so here's Perfect Day, which was released on August 10, 1929. When it first appeared, it did not have the famous "kuku" song that you'll hear in the opening here and which most of us know as the boys' theme song. That didn't appear until a year or so later but it was later edited onto earlier films when they were reissued.

This was their fourth "all-talking" film and, in my opinion, the first really good one. The film is lively, funny and it gains a lot from the participation of the great character actor, Edgar Kennedy. Reportedly, the material you'll see in this short — the family heading out for a picnic — was only supposed to occupy the first half of this short but with on-set improvisations and add-ons, it ran so long so they decided to not shoot the picnic and end it as it ends here…

ASK me: Dick Van Dyke Show Filming

Dan from Nova Scotia is one of many who've asked me about the episode I saw filmed of The Dick Van Dyke Show…

I assume that at the end of the filming of an episode, the actors were re-introduced, and the audience gave them one last cheer and applause?

Can you share any anecdotes about that? Did the audience get to mingle with cast and crew?

Mingle? No. Actually, I was hoping that would happen because, if you recall the story, my parents and I went to a filming on the invitation of Morey Amsterdam and he said he'd introduce me to Dick and Mary and Rose, et al…but as it turned out, the week we chose to go, it was an episode that did involve Morey or Rose Marie so they weren't there. Usually, they did the warm-up and the hosting duties, welcoming the live audience and keeping us interested during lulls. Instead that week, Carl Reiner did that. He was very, very funny and charming…which I suppose doesn't surprise anyone.

But there was no opportunity to meet anyone. I did talk to Dick Van Dyke a little from my seat in the front row of the bleachers. I don't know of any show that at the close of a filming or taping lets the studio audience mingle but I suppose somewhere, on some series, it may have occurred.

That evening and at every filming/taping I've ever attended, they bring the cast members out for a final bow before they thank everyone for being there…and you reminded me of a moment in my life. It was at the taping of the third or fourth episode of Welcome Back, Kotter that I worked on back in the previous century. The taping was over and Gabe Kaplan was bringing out the cast members, one by one, for some applause and a couple of them were doing something backstage and couldn't get out there when Gabe wanted to introduce them again.

He was filling time, waiting for Travolta or Hegyes or someone to get out there and he spotted me in the wings. Just to have something to keep the energy going, he yelled out, "Here's one of our writers, Mark Evanier!" So I stepped out and took a bow. It was the only time that ever happened on that show or any other show I ever worked on but it made two people very happy. Gabe had no idea that my parents were in the audience that night.

I think my father wanted to come to every taping ever thereafter just to see that again but I assured him it was a one-time occurrence, not to be repeated.

FACT CHECK: Water, Coal and Colors

Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post tracks some of the inaccurate things Donald Trump has said about water over the years.

FactCheck.org tracks some of the inaccurate things Trump has said about coal.

And FactCheck.org tracks some of the inaccurate things Robert F. Kennedy has said about food coloring.

Today's Video Link

Disney has had a formidable presence on Broadway for thirty years now.  Here's a concert celebrating the shows that have played — often for long, long times and even still — on The Great White Way in that time. The performers are Michael James Scott (the current genie in Aladdin), Kara Lindsay (who was in Newsies), Rodney Ingram (also from Aladdin), Kissy Simmons (The Lion King) and your host Ashley Brown (Mary Poppins, Beauty and the Beast). Be our guest…