11,840 stories by "Trav S.D."
This is the first in a promised series of posts containing details about my ancestry, for those four people who care. The first leg will take place over the next several days and will provid…
Today is the birthday of Vivien Oakland (Vivian Andersen, 1895-1958). The daughter of Norwegian immigrants, Oakland started out as a child in vaudeville in San Francisco, became a Ziegfeld c…
Filed under: Dixieland & Early Jazz, Music, PLUGS Tagged: Sidney Bechet Society, Sweet and Lowdown Reunion, Symphony Space, Woody Allen
 As we promised in our earlier piece on Penny Arcade, we here share some of the other things we discussed that didn’t make it into my Chelsea Now/ Village piece: On the development…
Tonight’s theme on TCM is “The 15th Century”. That’s all well and good, but there’s a sub-theme in tonight’s program in that they are showing two films fr…
Today is the birthday of Elsie Ames (1902-1983). Comedy is a matter of taste, of course. I’ve never encountered any comedian (no matter how popular or great) that I didn’t knowÂ…
Tonight on TCM, starting at 12:15am tonight (tomorrow) , four classic silent comedy shorts starring the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Double Whoopee (1929) One of the team&…
Tonight on TCM: two films set in the decadent cabarets of Weimar Era Berlin. We touched on this related art form in No Applause only a little. While a variety from, this type of cabare…
Tonight at 6pm (EST), Turner Classic Movies will be showing the John Ford  western classic Three Godfathers (1948). It is a remake of his own 1919 silent Marked Men, and is…
Today at 1:45pm, TCM will be showing the sci-fi horror classic Mighty Joe Young (1949). The film is sort of re-make of King Kong by the same creative team: producer Merian C. …
Filed under: Contemporary Variety, Music, PLUGS, Ragtime Tagged: Canary Cottage Dance Orchestra, Dan Levinson, Scott Joplin Tribute, St. Michael's Cemetery
I was so excited upon hearing that Retro Productions would be doing George S. Kaufman’s 1925 play The Butter and Egg Man, that I wanted to be among the first to see it, and last nig…
Filed under: BROOKLYN, Burlesk, Coney Island, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Cherry Delight, Coney Island USA, Coney Island Wild Cards, Shane Velazquez, Wolfheke Burlesque
Today is the 100th anniversary of the release date of the Keystone comedy Miss Fatty’s Seaside Lovers (1915). This was among the first silent films I ever saw. It came on a video…
The theatre is Lucy Van Pelt and her football; I am Charlie Brown. I keep getting sweet talked back, but really it’s really just a trick, and this is what inevitably happens: I went to…
Tomorrow morning at 9:15 am (EST) TCM will be showing the 1954 remake of A Star is Born, the one with Judy Garland and James Mason, directed by George Cukor, written by Moss Hart. This is…
When I moved to New York, Penny Arcade OWNED performance art. Her smash show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, her in-your-face response to Jesse Helms and the conservatives who de-funded the …
Tonight on TCM as part of their month-long series on disaster movies: the destruction of cities! (plus an island). This is one of my favorite genres and accordingly I have many notes and tho…
 The Mad Marchioness and I watched the great new documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck last week and, as a good movie will do, it unleashed a flood tide of thoughts and impressi…
Tonight on Turner Movie Classics, the guest programmer will be my old boss international singing sensation Mr. Tony Bennett. Tony often expresses his love of Charlie Chaplin in intervi…
With spring in full swing yesterday I finally took Kathy Biehl (our Margaret Dumont from I’ll Say She Is) up on her offer to show me around the former show biz resort of Lake Hopatc…
Today is the anniversary of the release of the Charley Chase comedy short Movie Night (1929). Do the math — this is one of the last silent movies that anyone in America saw at th…
Today at 5:30pm (EST) on Turner Classic Movies: Gypsy (1962) This is clearly TCM’s Mother’s Day tribute to the ultimate stage mom? What can I say about this poem to American show…
Filed under: African American Interest/ Blackface/ Minstrelsy, Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Brown Girls Burlesque, Dirty Honey Shake, Joe's Pub
Tomorrow at noon (EST) Turner Classic Movies will be showing the classic Howard Hawks western Rio Bravo (1959). In essence this is Hawks’s last truly great film. The next one, th…
