11,867 stories by "Trav S.D."
Today is the birthday of that peculiar American phenomenon Mitch Miller (1911-2010). Most of us today know him from scratchy old record albums, listened to for camp value on holidays, featur…
Originally posted in 2010. Probably no surprise here, eh? Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (born this day in 1883) first started doodling for the local papers in his native San Francisco befor…
Originally posted in 2011. When I adapted the Hawthorne short story “The May-Pole of Merrymount” for Metropolitan Playhouse’s Hawthornicopia festival in early …
Originally posted in 2011. How fitting that the Father of American Songwriting was born on the Glorious Fourth (1826). Stephen Foster grew up in Western Pennsylvania where his educ…
It being July the 4th and all, I thought it might be fitting to do an appendix type post celebrating some of George M. Cohan’s material (as opposed to musical) legacy. Especially…
Originally posted in 2009. The only thing I'm proud of about vaudeville is that I got out of it. The houses are not all Orpheums and Keith " not by a long way. There are only a few goo…
Today is the birthday of Gloria Stuart (1910-2010). To hell with Titanic, she had a great career 60 years before, in James Whale films like The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invi…
Today is the birthday of Timmie Rogers (1914-2006). Originally from Detroit, as a boy he danced on the street for change. Gradually he worked up to singing and dancing in nightclubs and blac…
Today is the birthday of one of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Irving Caesar (Isidore Caesar, 1895-1996). Raised on the Lower East Side, his father was a socialist lawyer who ran a boo…
Giacomo and Giovanni Battista Tocci were conjoined twins born in Locana, Italy born on either July 4 or October 4 somewhere between 1875 and 1877. The pair were unique in possessing separate…
Reblogged from Amusing the Zillion: Update: July 3, 2013, 5:00PM... At a press conference this afternoon, Luna Park officials announced that the Astrotower would be torn down, according …
Reblogged from biblioklept: The Declaration of Independence in American by H. L. Mencken 1921 WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other count…
Filed under: BROOKLYN, Coney Island, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Cloud City All-Stars, Coney Island, Solomon the Peculiarist
Leon Errol's schtick was a comic drunk bit, which he milked for most of his career. The character was not a down-and-outter. Usually, it was more of a bourgeois hail-fellow-well-met…a Rota…
Our friends at Untitled Theatre Company #61 are celebrating their 20th anniversary this summer and we want to wish them a hale and hearty mazel tov as well as another 80 years or so of…
Today is the birthday of Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966). For someone who’s so well known (to blues buffs anyway) his professional bio is incredibly short. A Mississippi sharecropper…
Today is the birthday of Jack Earle (Jacob Ehrlich, 1906-1952). Born underweight, he was small for his size until his seventh birthday when a growth spurt suddenly began that made him six fe…
 Kevin Maher wrote and directed this comicalriffic and gastronomically evocative video just in time for the grown-up version of the contest that will take place two days from now on the …
Here’s one that’s been totally swallowed up by the swirls and eddies of time, so much so that I can’t even find any clips of it online. On the Rocks was a sit com ab…
We caught this interesting bagatelle last night in Horse Trade’s Mini-Fridge Festival. “Gregor” is a vague amalgam of literary and cinematic characters from Weimar (or pre-…
Isaac Van Amburgh (1811-1865) was the first lion tamer of the modern (post-Roman) era. By that I mean of course he trained and performed demonstrations with all manner of big cats, no…
Today is the birthday of Dan Aykroyd (b. 1952). Aykroyd is a comedian with a genius so peculiar that mainstream show business hasn’t known what to do with him, and he clearly hasn̵…
Today is the birthday of the greatest of electric blues songwriter/ lyricists Willie Dixon (1915-1992). Introduced to the blues on a Mississippi prison farm, he later learned to sing, and pl…
The Hall of Hams is my series on some of my favorite actors who have brought the art of melodramatic acting into the modern era. Today is the birthday of the unspeakably great Charles Laught…
Today is the birthday of Alice Guy-Blaché (Alice Guy 1873-1968). Hers is a name that ought to be taught to every schoolchild: she was not only the first female film-maker, but one of the fi…
