11,933 stories by "Trav S.d."
Today is the birthday of Virginia Fox (1902-1982). A native of Wheeling, West Virginia, she was a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty by 1919. Within a year, she had become Buster Keaton’s …
Today is the birthday of Leonard Harper (1897-1943). A second generation performer, he got his start as a child with medicine shows in the rural south. For a time he traveled with a small st…
Today is the birthday of Vivienne Segal (1897-1992). Originally from Philadelphia she was classically trained in voice and made her debut in Carmen in 1915. The following year she went strai…
“Happy” Jack Eckart (1874-1937), the son of a Fort Wayne cigar maker, weighed 19 lbs. at birth. At the time of his passing at age 63 he weighed 739 lbs and had to be buried in a …
Today is the birthday of Arthur Lake (Arthur Silverlake, Jr., 1905-1987.) His father and uncle had a circus trapeze act called The Flying Silverlakes. Then his father and his mother (Edith G…
Caveat: contains spoilers. You’ve two weeks left to see Mass, Robert Honeywell’s ambitious, thought-provoking rock musical at the Brick Theater. Inspired by the tempestuous r…
A series wherein we record and chronicle contemporary busking performers for fun and very little profit. This chap gave his rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” last night at t…
Today is the 100th birthday of Bill Durks (1913-1976), the “Man With Three Eyes”. The irony is that his third eye was painted on with make-up, but he was easily unique-looking en…
Today is the birthday of the heavenly Dusty Springfield (1939-1999). I have nothing to say about her but that just watching this clip and listening to the tune (which she admittedly only lip…
Today is the birthday of the Polish Prince, Mr. Bobby Vinton (b. 1935). In the clip below Clive Davis calls Vinton a performer in the “vaudevillian” tradition, which is true, alt…
Today is the birthday of the original Mademoiselle Fifi. For my full bio on this interesting chanteuse go here. And here she is in a clip from The Girl from Calgary (1932): For m…
Hubba hubba! Snarl, snarl! Today is the birthday of of Edie Adams (1927-2008). With her birthday falling on the same day as Christine McIntyre’s, today we are essentially a porn site f…
Born into unimaginable poverty and obscurity, by his mid-twenties Charlie Chaplin was one of the richest and most famous men in the world. One of capitalism's great success stories, he was e…
Today is the birthday of the head-turning Christine McIntyre (1911-1984). Trained as an opera singer, her film career began in 1937, for the next seven years appearing in RKO musicals and B-…
Paul, Inez and Trinidad Rodriguez were a trio of midget siblings from Spain (they also had twelve normal sized brothers and sisters). Paul, the smallest, was 19″ in adulthood. Carmen, …
Today is the birthday of Empress of the Blues Bessie Smith. For the full skinny on her, see my essay here. And here she is singing the rather naughty “I’m Wild About Tha…
Today is the birthday of Gale Henry (Gale Trowbridge, 1893-1972), one of American cinema’s first truly funny comediennes. A California native, she began he career at the Temple Opera C…
Roger Imhof (1875-1958) was part of the John Ford stock company, appearing in Judge Priest, Steamboat ‘Round the Bend, Three Godfathers, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, an…
An interesting divergence of opinions of the origins of the performer Che Mah Che Sang (1838-1926). One source says he was originally from a farm in Ningpo, China; another says that he was a…
Today is the birthday of Jay Robinson (b. 1930). I learned something about myself today, dear reader. I was about to attach the words “unspeakably awesome” before RobinsonR…
Today is the birthday of Sir Arthur John Gielgud (1904-2000). Through one of the great peculiarities of our culture and the “industry” which entertains it, I (like so many oth…
Today is the birthday of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), probably the twentieth century’s greatest and most influential playwright, also much admired for his essays, fiction and poetry, bo…
Today is the birthday of Don Adams (Donald Yarmy, 1923-2005). It’s inevitable that I’ll write about the television perfection that was Get Smart. I just watched an episode a coup…
Today is the birthday of one of my heroes, Charles Ludlam (1943-1987). I consider it one of the great ironies of my life that I moved here just a few weeks after he died. I would have been a…
Don’t be so smart. When I say “forgotten” I’m not talking about his current CBS night-time show, or even the long-running  NBC late-night show that preceded it. Th…
