11,508 stories by "Trav S.D."
January 27 was the birthday of stage star Benay Venuta (Benvenuta Rose Crooke, 1910-1995). Old time movie fans will probably know her best from the movie musicals Annie Get Your Gun (1950, a…
It's Australia Day, and I've already done my big Australia omnibus post, so this year I thought I would do a short piece that flows very naturally out of my recent ones on Martin Sharp and t…
January 25 is National Florida Day. Two of my brothers have retired to the Sunshine State, and they keep inviting me to come down for a visit, which I have half a plan to do. The origin of t…
I'm not sure why I never thought to scratch beneath the surface of the career of classic Hollywood director Henry King (1886-1982) before, as I love several of his films. But I'm glad I did …
January 23 is the birthday of Chita Rivera (Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero Anderson, b. 1933). I'll risk getting New Yorkers' backs up by being overexplainy about who she is, for her l…
Norman Jewison (b. 1926) has passed away at the age of 97 and so we thought it incumbent upon us to toss in a few words of eulogy, if not ululation. He's been retired for 20 years, being on …
I've long wanted to do a piece on Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010) that posited him in the impresario tradition of Colonel Tom Parker, Brian Epstein, Andrew Loog Oldham, and others. This year mar…
Happy 80th birthday to Shelley Fabares (Michele Ann Marie Fabares, b. 1944). For reasons of age (youth for once) my fandom for this star of film, television and the recording arts went backw…
Martin Sharp (1942-2013) is now my favorite Australian, by a distance of about 17,000 miles. Sharp was kind of a psychedelic Renaissance man; I'd heard about him in one context, then another…
The long life of Sid Raymond (Raymond Silverstein, 1909-2006) brought old time show biz awfully close to our time. In his early years, Raymond had worked as a tummler in Catskills resort hot…
January 20 is David Lynch's birthday. To date, our only dedicated post on this great director focused on The Elephant Man (1980), for the obvious reason that our jumping off point with the b…
Quite coincidentally, three slim and tasteful tomes have made their way to my mailbox (the real one, not the virtual) within the space of a week, so I thought it made sense to bundle them to…
This one goes out to friend Bob Berger, who told me not long ago that he was the great-nephew of the famous star of New York's Yiddish Theatre scene, Seymour Rexite (Shayele Rechtzeit, 19…
Benjamin West's 1816 portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) is misleading in one significant way beyond the fact that we can assume that Ben's experiments were not guided by cherubim. He …
The British-Canadian poet Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was born this day 150 years ago. I'm quite certain I posted on him here many years ago, but later trashed it in a one-time frenzy a wh…
Born 100 years ago today, the multi-talented voice-over actor, children's entertainer and three or four other things, Allen Swift (Ira Stadlen, 1924-2010). The name may not ring an immediate…
Back in the late 20th century, though there were more important things to worry about, I was nonetheless dismissive of Liz Taylor's designation of Michael Jackson as "King of Pop", for the m…
Born 100 years ago today: actor Guy Williams (Armando Joseph Catalano, 1924-1989) Our previous excuse for a post about Guy Williams was pretty much all about Lost in Space, so I thought toda…
Just got the bulletin about the passing away yesterday of Joyce Randolph (Joyce Serola, b. 1924), best known as the actress who played Trixie on The Honeymooners, both as a series of sketche…
January 13 is the birthday of the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus (b. 1961). JLD has been a star now over 40 years, which is particularly painful for me to say because I'm only four years younger …
A post this morning on an important but forgotten figure from vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood history Jack McGowan (John Wesley McGowan, 1894-1977) While I've long known about some of the…
I'm very sorry to hear of the passing away of author David J. Skal (1952-2024). When I signed with FSG to write my first book, one of the first things my visionary editor Denise Oswald did w…
A gent named Mark Thompson took the color pix I share below; I borrowed them from his spread on the RI Memories website, which I feel okay doing since I also link you to the full page here.Ã…
The title of this post is a little bit of a "gotcha" for Coney Island fans. The fact is, Coney Island's Luna Park was so culturally influential that scores of amusement parks all over the wo…
Today's homily (an occasional one here) concerns the truth that Hollywood is not necessarily the be-all and end-all for all performers. Case in point: singer-actor George Houston (1896-1944)…
