11,881 stories by "Trav S.D."
Today is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic. Like the Countess, I was very much appalled to see online where several young people “had no idea” that the Titan…
Today is the birthday of Lita Grey Chaplin (1908-1925). A child actress, she appeared in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) and was slated to co-star in The Gold Rush (1925) when the six…
Today is the birthday of Lew Leslie (actually Lessinsky, 1888-1963), known, despite his Russian extraction, as the “Black Ziegfeld“. Born in Orangeburg, NY, he got his start with…
Today is the birthday of Empress of the Blues Bessie Smith. For more background on her, go here. And here she is singing one of the most seminal of classic blues classics: To find out more a…
Three cheers to the Farrelly Brothers for getting the most important aspect of their long awaited Three Stooges feature right. The fidelity to the Stooges’ comic style is really as tru…
Today is the birthday of Flournoy Miller of the team of Miller and Lyles. For a full article on the team, go here. Here’s some audio of them in action from 1921 courtesy Okeh Records: …
The incomparable Poor Baby Bree revives her show I Am Going to Run Away at LaMama tonight (full details here). We love her so much we made her our first first Vaudephone recording. For an…
Today is opening day for the annual Congress of Curious Peoples at Coney Island USA. For full information please go here.
Today is the birthday of the birthday of the great dialect comedian Willie Howard. For more on Willie and his brother and comedy partner Eugene, go here. And now here’s Willie as the Y…
Today is the birthday of David Letterman (b. 1947). How odd to think that he has been sitting behind that desk even longer than Carson had ruled The Tonight Show . My perspective on…
You'd have to heave a heart of stone not to feel for the victims in Bully. Lee Hirsch's documentary follows five families as they struggle with the effects of schoolyard bullying. But whi…
Today is the birthday of the great songwriter Yip Harburg (1896-1981). I wrote a little more about him here. To mark the day here’s one of his best songs (above). I sang this once in h…
Today is the birthday of Bert Gordon (1895-1974) best known as “The Mad Russian on Eddie Cantor’s radio show and in comedy films of the 1930s and 40s. NOT to be confused with Ber…
Today is the birthday of Lulu McConnell (1882-1962), best known as a cast member on the radio & tv parody game show “It Pays to be Ignorant” from 1942 through 1951. The daugh…
Today is the birthday of that complex American phenomenon (and child vaudevillian) Walter Winchell. For his full bio go here. And here is delivering this exceptionally strange promo for Jerr…
Drat, drat and double drat! I am traveling today or else I definitely would have attended this! Today, April 7th at 2:30, The Silent Clowns Film Series will present… “Forgotten Funny…
September 3, 1923 was an important date. It was opening night for the Broadway show Poppy, written by Dorothy Donnelly and starring Madge Kennedy as the titular New England heiress, and W.C.…
Good news for fans of the dying art of the witty screenplay. After a 14 year hiatus, Whit Stillman open his latest Damsels in Distress in theatres in New York and L.A. today! He needs your s…
The 3rd Annual Comedy in Dance Festival April 5-7 and 12-14, 2012 at 8pm at Triskelion Arts: 118 North 11th Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn  Mari Meade Dance Collective. Photo by P…
The Four Fords, a.k.a. the Four Dancing Fords were a legendary brother and sister dancing act of the early part of the last century. It all appears to have started with the fifth dancing For…
Mt friends from Charred Oak Films start shooting their new film The Widowers next month, written by and starring Richard Lovejoy, who was in my play Willy Nilly and whose Dark Heart of Meteo…
Author DeAnna Cameron tells me she used No Applause to research her new historical romance novel Dancing at the Chance. (The “Chance” is the name of a vaudeville theatre in the s…
Today is the birthday of the seminal cartoonist Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff. For more on him and his vaudeville bona fides go here. And for a visual argument: To find out more about…
Today is the birthday of the great fan dancer Sally Rand. For a bit on her life story go here. For a glimpse of her at work go here: To find out more about the history of vaudeville, …
I was lucky enough to get into Charles Busch’s latest workshop at Theater for the New City yesterday, a take-off on D.W. Griffith’s early epic Judith of Bethulia. This is the sec…
