My pal, the inveterate Chris Dunn is oft-mentioned around these parts, for a variety of reasons, mostly positive.  Well, he is now the inveterate Emmy-winning Chris Dunn, having won a Daytime Emmy award this evening.  (Personally, I think they should have the Daytime Emmys ceremony during the daytime, and I find it a bit duplicitous that they hold them at night.)

He writes for the daytime drama The Young and the Restless, and it my personal, wildly-biased belief that broadcasting is better for it, in part because it keeps him off the streets. and therefore out of the scandal sheets.  But also because no one writes natural disasters into scripts like he does.

So, a big Hat's Off to Chris Dunn today.  If you see him on the street, ask to see the statuette since it is my hope that he will be carrying it around everywhere.

This week's contestant is composer Paul Hanna of Tallahassee, Florida.  The hidden song has a tricky twist, and I'm pleased to say that I got it -- fairly early on, I must say, though I didn't have full confidence in being right, since it did have that tricky twist, after all.  But eventually, I felt sure enough to officially make it my guess.  Alas, I didn't get the composer style, an annoyance since it's someone I quite like.

Today is the 93rd birthday of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist Sheldon Harnick, whose works include Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, She Loves Me, the Apple Tree and much more.

Several years back, I interviewed him for my radio program at Northwestern University, when he returned to the school to be Grand Marshal for homecoming.  I turned the interview into a half-hour radio documentary and wanted to get him a copy of the tape, but didn't know how.  When I move out to Los Angeles for graduate school, I brought the tape with me, figuring I might meet someone someday who would know Sheldon, and know how to get the tape to him.

About 15-20 years passed, and I actually became friends with someone, the lovely Treva Silverman (herself a two-time Emmy-winner) who knew "dear Sheldon," as she referred to him and had his address.  Finally!  Persistence paid off!

That weekend, calling home to Chicago, I brought up the story to my mother and told her that I had finally found someone who knew Sheldon Harnick.  "Oh," my mother said, "you mean Aunt Joan?"

What???!!!

It turned out that my Aunt and Sheldon and grown up together in Chicago, were very close, and even went to Northwestern together.  In fact, a famous family story (which I had never heard) was that when he had made his decision to move to New York to try and have a life there, my Aunt's mother said, "Oh, Sheldon, do you think one can have a career in the theater?"

I wrote him -- from the address Treva gave him -- sent along the radio documentary after all those years, finally, and also mentioned who my aunt was,  When he wrote a letter back, the very first line was, "Joan Sered!  Oh, my God!"

We didn't stay in communication, those years later, thanks to a Huffington Post article I wrote about Fiorello!, we did get back in touch and became email buddies of a sort, and even met up back in Glencoe where I grew up and the wonderful Writers Theatre was putting on a production of his She Loves Me.  (Side note: it starred Jessie Mueller, who went on to win the Tony Award, playing Carole King in the musical Beautiful a few years ago.)  And I coordinated schedules so that my Aunt could come to the same performance, where she and Sheldon had a chance to meet and have a joy visit for the first time in decades.

Anyway, in his honor, here's an interview he did a few years back when he was 86 on the New York cable show. Theater Talk, and he performs one of his songs (wonderfully...-- he has occasionally performed a little cabaret act of his material) with Kate Baldwin.  (Side note: Baldwin put out a CD of her singing Sheldon Harnick songs, and a couple of years ago appeared in the New York Encores! production of his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning ​Fiorello!)
​

And as a bonus, here is Zero Mostel, recreating his role as Tevye on the 1971 Tony Awards, six years after opening in Fiddler on the Roof, and singing "If I Were a Rich Man.
​

The other day, I mentioned that Bette Midler just returned to Broadway in a revival of Hello, Dolly! and posted a couple brief videos of the curtain call on opening night.  I thought it might be nice to revisit the original show.  And in a pretty special way.  More on that in a moment, but first a little background to put it all in perspective.  Bear with me, I think it's worth it.

The original show, which starred Carol Channing, and featured David Burns as Horace Vandergelder ("the well-known half-a-millionaire") opened in 1964, won the Tony Award for Best Musical and ran for seven years, closing after 2,844 performances -- which at the time was a record, making it the longest-running show in Broadway history.  It was directed and choreographed by Gower Champion.

The musical has a classic, joyful score by Jerry Herman, with a book by Michael Stewart -- but its history goes back far longer than 1964.  In fact, it has pretty solid source material, based on a stageplay by acclaimed writer Thornton Wilder, called The Matchmaker..  If you're interested in seeing how the musical and play compared, The Matchmaker was made into a movie that starred Shirley Booth and had the wonderful Paul Ford as Horace Vandergelder, about as perfect an actor for the part.  (Interestingly, in supporting roles, the young apprentice Cornelius Hackl -- portrayed by the outlandish comic actor Charles Nelson Reilly in the stage musical version -- was played by about as opposite an actor as one could imagine:  Anthony Perkins!  And his buddy Barnaby Tucker was played by Robert Morse, who re-created his role from Wilder's Broadway play.)  By the way, the original Dolly on Broadway in the play was Ruth Gordon.  And in a fascinating historical note, the original Horace Vandergelder in the play on Broadway was performed by Loring Smith...who a decade later played the character in the original London production of the musical version, Hello, Dolly!, opposite Mary Martin.

But the show's history goes back even farther than The Matchmaker -- because Thornton Wilder's work is itself based on an Austrian play, Einen Jux will er sich machen,written back in 1842.  And even that is based on a one-act English play written in 1835, A Day Well Spent.  And that's not even the end of its history, because the story is well-regarded enough that in 1981, no less than Tom Stoppard adapted the Austrian play into his own version, called On the Razzle.  (I recall seeing a PBS version around that time that they did of it.)  So, as you can see, it's a story that has traveled well for a very long time, under some impressive auspices.

Carol Channing famously toured with the show four times -- in 1965, 1977, 1981 and then 1994 (30 years after the original production!) -- taking it back to Broadway in '77 and '94.  In all, she played the role for over 5,000 performances.  And famously never missed a single one, only having to be replaced once halfway through for food poisoning.  I saw the original tour when the show came to Chicago at the Shubert Theater, and Carol Channing was in that tour, as well.  Three years later, I saw the show again on Broadway (still in its original run) with the all-Black cast starring Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway.

I had lunch with a friend today at the Taste Chicago restaurant in Burbank.  That wouldn't mean much to most people, but it's probably the most low-key celebrity restaurant in the world -- co-owned by actor Joe Mantegna and his wife Arlene.  It's a little joint that seats about 50 people and serves (as the name implies) Chicago food -- Italian beef sandwiches, Chicago-style deep dish pizza, and Chicago hot dogs, and more.

While there, Joe Mantegna showed up -- as he apparently does on Fridays, if he isn't filming.  (As do other Chicago actors on occasion.)  And since my friend had directed him in an episode of Criminal Minds, he stopped by for a chat.  I kept quiet for the most part, but since I knew he was a huge Cubs fan (the place has a lot of Cubs memorabilia on the wall, and a big Cubs blue W on the side wall outside, along with other items from Chicago sports), I mentioned often hearing him on Cubs broadcasts when he shows up in the booth.  He smiled and said that in fact he was going to be in the booth and lead the crowd in "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" next Friday, when the Cubs play the Yankees.

​You have your scoop.

“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going.  This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

-- Donald Trump, in an interview with Reuters


With all due respect to the office -- although given the quote, no such disclaimer is necessary since he pretty much acknowledges it himself --  the man is an idiot.

Who else but a knowing idiot would think that being President of the United States -- commander-in-chief of the U.S. military forces, chief executive of the nation, and most powerful man in the entire world -- is an easier job then being a real estate developer and licensing your name to slap on a meat company??  Who else but a knowing idiot would think that reality would be harder than being a reality TV star -- where they actually feed you the lines, and you get re-takes, and commercial breaks?

He didn't know the job would be this difficult?!  Hey, remember when people thought it was pathetic that Sarah Palin (R-AK-Half-term] didn't know what the Vice-President did??  That seems so quaint now.

Then again, this is the same man who boasted during the election, "I alone can fix it."  And now just a few months later we get, "I thought it would be easier."

The best I can figure is that running a fraudulent university scam is a whole lot harder than most people think, trying to stay one step ahead of the law while paying off lawsuits.

"I thought it would be easier" certainly explains a lot.

Like saying, "No one knew that health care was so complicated."  Because everyone knew. Or not knowing that Korea was never part of China, yet needing to have the Chinese president explain basic Asian history to him during a phone call and then saying, "After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it's not so easy.” Imagine if he had to actually study and understand the several thousand-year history.  Mind you, the scary thing here may be that for the first nine minutes he did think that Chinese-Korean history was easy.  But grade school kids would figure that out after maybe 2-3 minutes.  Or one.

This may also explain Mike Flynn getting named his National Security Adviser, since it's not unlikely that Trump didn't know vetting wasn't easy either.

Sometimes, you figure it would be better if he would stay "unintelligible."

At one point in the interview, Trump was talking about this conversation with the Chinese president, when suddenly he stopped and abruptly and bizarrely started to give reporters in the room copies of a 2016 electoral map, with the states he won marked in red.

“Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers,” he said.  “It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”

Oh, man, who said that God doesn't have a sense of humor and have a wicked sense of irony?  "The red is obviously us."  Yes, obviously.  After all, it's what the FBI and congressional investigations are likely to prove..

"I thought it would be easier."

But then, that's what happens when you live in a world ruled by alternative facts.

I've written several times here about the new musical, Amelie, which I saw in a pre-Broadway tryout at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, and quite enjoyed.  I posted the video of a song from the show the other week, and though it was nice enough, it was intentionally a pop-arrangement that they did for wider distribution and didn't really give a sensibility of the tone of the show.  I came across another video which does a better job at that, though you still don't a sense of the full staging much since it was done fairly barebones on the Today show.

But it's the star Philliipa Soo (who won a Tony Award for Hamilton -- and is terrific in this show) along with the cast doing a medley of two songs.  So, you get the proper wistful arrangement, and at least a sense of the staging with the cast.

By the way, in a Media Alert, she is scheduled to be a guest tonight on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, so my guess is that she'll perform a song there, as well.  Unless, that is, she says, "Since Bob Elisberg had a video of me tonight on his website, I don't have to sing this evening and you can just go there to watch it."  (My guess though is that she'll sing, "Time is Hard for Dreamers," a verse of which she sings here.  Most of the video is taken up by the larger-cast number, "Tour de France.")

Google Maps has introduced a new feature that could be a very nice help for people who have a hard time remembering where they parked their car.

After you've parked, open the app and tap on the blue dot that shows your location.  A window will pop up that gives you the option to "Set as parking location."  That's it.  Easy!

Actually, it gets even easier, because the app uses the Google Street feature to show a photo of where your care is,  when you tap on the icon.

But there are other features.  A bar will show up at the bottom of the Google Maps screen called "Parking Location."  If you tap on it, other options open up to you -- like leaving notes, such as the precise location of your car in a parking garage.  And the ability to Share your location with someone who you might want to meet at your car. 

It's available for both Android and iOS.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the AP story where they did a one-on-one interview with Trump, and he was so incomprehensible that they had to insert the phrase, "Donald Trump is unintelligible" into the transcript 16 times.  SIXTEEN times.  If you were stopped by a police officer while driving and that happened, he'd bring out the breathalyzer.

And that doesn't even tough on the fantasy world he was in when being interviewed.  Saying he was "almost there" on accomplishing all his goals in his first 100 days -- with only a week to go.  And trying to pretend that he never had supported WikiLeaks -- even saying he'd never heard of them -- when he repeated had said (and it's on video tape) that "I love WikiLeaks" throughout the campaign.  And noting that when he would slam NATO during the campaign, he admitted he didn't actually know what they did.  (I don't know what's worse:  that he didn't know what NATO did, or that he relentlessly slammed them without knowing what they did.)  And more -- much more.

It's so bad what he's saying that "Donald Trump is unintelligible" is the good part, the one thing that even comes close to saving him.

The sad thing is, the "unintelligible" part of all this is just par for the course.  A few weeks earlier, the Huffington Post published an article that would have been hilarious if it wasn't pathetic about how professional interpreters  have a hard time translating Trump when he's speaking.  The problem they say they face is that he rambles so much and often makes so little sense that if they translate exactly what he's saying...they themselves look bad -- but people think they're the ones screwing up!  And it's not just because the words are a mess, but because he's saying things that are factually questionable, which they sense even as they hear the words and then have to repeat them in another language.  As one Japanese interpreter says, if they translate Trump word for word, "We end up making ourselves sound stupid," You can read the article here.  It's pretty funny...except for the hole "pathetic" part.