Mark Evanier's Blog, page 81

Around the World…

London welcomes in a new year…

Mark's Hanukkah Video Countdown – #2

Any song can be a Hanukkah song if you have a cantor, one or more menorahs and a whole batch of Jews in it. You can even turn a hit song from a Broadway show into a Hanukkah song. This is Julie Benko and Cantor Azi Schwartz performing in Times Square with a batch of Jewish Broadway performers and a couple of other cantors and I think I see Seth Rudetsky in there and I also think this is just wonderful…

The Last Day of the Year

And of course, I'm spending it writing. I spent most of this past year writing and — since Sunday, January 21 — dealing with the ankle I broke that evening. It's almost healed but I'm still walking like a seriously drunk person trying to make his way to the men's room. Apart from umpteen visits to doctor offices, 33 days in a rehab center and my five days at Comic-Con in San Diego, I spent 2024 upstairs in my house commuting — by whatever level of mobility I was capable of at the moment — between my bedroom, an upstairs bathroom and my office.

If this sounds horribly confining, let me tell you this: It hasn't been that bad. If I hadn't broken my stupid ankle, I probably would have spent almost as much time where I am now: In my office at my computer. And I'd have slept just as much and used the bathroom just as much…and I didn't miss that many events and shows I would have wanted to attend.

I've had a nice stream of friends visiting me here. If I had a camera crew in my office, we could have YouTubed ourselves one helluva great talk show. And it's nice that I didn't break my ankle until everyone had the equipment to do business meetings and interviews on Zoom. (I even visited a few doctors via Zoom.)

For most folks, I would imagine, 2024 will forever be characterized by the outcome of the presidential election — whether you're happy with it or suicidal. I continue to believe that while bad things will happen — including bad things that Trump voters will think are bad things — it won't be as bad as some are predicting. And that's as much as I feel like delving into politics tonight except to suggest a visit to the blog of Kevin Drum and a look at some of the year-end charts he's posted. You might be surprised at how well things are going in some categories.

Thanks to everyone who donated toward the upkeep of this blog. In case you're interested, there are now 32,470 posts on this blog, at least 300 of which are about things that matter. I'll try to put up a few more in 2025.

Today's Video Link

Ed Graham was an advertising man who specialized in animated commercials and this led to him producing the Linus the Lionhearted Show for CBS's Saturday morning schedule in 1964. I didn't think it was a great show but there were moments of wicked and very different humor in some of the cartoons. It also had good, solid voice work by some pretty famous folks outside the usual talent pool including Sheldon Leonard, Jonathan Winters and Carl Reiner.

After the show went off, Graham produced a few short cartoons and this one, in which he teamed up with Reiner, was one of them. It's called Funny is Funny and I think it's funny — especially to those of us who've watched eighty-two squadrillion other cartoons…

Mark's Hanukkah Video Countdown – #3

This year, our number three slot goes to Adam Sandler…

Today's Alternate Video Link

Linda Lavin not only performed "The Boy From…" on The Mike Douglas Show in the seventies — as seen here earlier today — she did it a few years ago in an online Zoom concert to celebrate the 90th birthday of Esteban Rio Nido Stephen Sondheim. My longtime amigo Joe Brancatelli thinks this is a superior performance so here it is. Take your choice…

(What I want to know is did she have to learn the lyrics all over again to do this or were they firmly embedded in her brain forever after umpteen performances of the song on stage?)

So…What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

Me, I'm staying home with a friend. I don't like going out on New Year's Eve, she doesn't like going out on New Year's Eve…it's perfect. There was a time when I used to party-hop but — no offense to any friends who threw those parties — I never enjoyed any of them. And worse, getting from one to another, I was sharing the boulevards with some seriously alcohol-infused drivers. So I'm staying home.

If you're staying in like we're staying in, you might enjoy some or all of a special six-hour (six-hour!!!) program hosted by my friends Stu Shostak and Jeanine Kasun. It's a holiday edition of Stu's online TV/radio program, Stu's Show, and it should be of special interest to those of you who are interested in old TV shows and especially old game shows. They'll be showing both and Stu will be interviewing two in-studio guests. One is"Shotgun" Tom Kelly, the famed radio personality. The other is Rick Greene, who has a new book out on the promotional material for the classic Laurel and Hardy comedies.

You can watch it on your Roku TV. You can watch it your computer. You can listen to it without watching it. Details on how to do these things can be found over on this page. And no, you're not obligated to watch or listen to all six hours.

Today's Video Link

I never met Linda Lavin even though I was involved briefly with her show, Alice. I also don't think I ever saw her perform on the stage which, gauging from the rave reviews she routinely got, was obviously my loss. In case you haven't heard, the world lost this talented lady the other day.

One of the first things she did on stages in New York was the 1966 off-Broadway production of The MAD Show, based on guess-what-magazine. In it, she introduced this song, "The Boy From…" which was kind of a sideways parody of what was then a recent hit, "The Girl From Ipanema."

The music from the show was written by Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard, and the lyrics for just this one number were credited to "Esteban Rio Nido," whose name is in quotes because that was a pseudonym for Stephen Sondheim. The joke in the song — which I didn't get when I first heard it at age fourteen — is that the lady singing it is unaware that the boy from Tacarembo la Tumba del Fuego Santa Malipas Zacatecas la Junta del Sol y Cruz is gay and is moving to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to be with his boy friend. The latter location is a real village in Wales, whereas the first location is a name made up by Mr. Sondheim.

Please forgive whatever the unhyphenated length of the latter place name does to whatever screen or device you're using at the moment.

Here is Ms. Lavin performing the number — probably the exact same mostly-deadpan way she sang it Off-Broadway — on The Mike Douglas Show with Mike in the background…

Magic Words

So I just spent so long on a phone call that I thought I might miss New Year's Eve…and I don't mean the one tomorrow night. I mean the one after that. My problem was one of these robo-operators whose artificial intelligence is not only artificial but largely missing. "She" kept asking me to enter the number of a prescription I was calling about and I kept entering that sixteen-digit prescription and "she" kept telling me "she" could not locate any prescription by that number and there didn't seem to be any way to move the call to any sort of next step until I'd entered one that "she" recognized.

In dealing with such robotic logjams, there's usually a magic word or phrase you can say that will get them to kick the call over to an actual human being. I tried "agent" and "human being" and "representative" and "pharmacist" and everything else I could think of and finally, "she" said she'd connect me with someone. I think but am not certain the magic words were "live agent." I've jotted that down in the Notes section of my phone listing for this company. But wouldn't it be nice if they told us what those magic words were up front? Or if they all worked on the same magic words…like "Open Sesame" or "Swordfish" or "Human being?"

Mark's Hanukkah Video Countdown – #4

Here are the Maccabeats with their parody of the song "Shut Up and Dance With Me." Again, very nice voices and some dicey rhymes…