11,731 stories by "Trav S.D."
Originally posted in 2009. One of the first tv shows I remember watching as a kid was a western called The Cisco Kid. The episodes were 20 year old reruns at the time, but it was perfect …
Today is the birthday of Anna Swan (1846-1888). Eighteen pounds at birth, the Nova Scotia native was four and a half feet tall by her fourth birthday and reached seven and a half feet in her…
Today is the birthday of George A. Whiting (1884-1943), the co-writer of the song “My Blue Heaven”. In 1911 he formed a two act in San Francisco with Sadie Burt (1893-1966), who …
Today is the birthday of pioneering female comedy writer Selma Diamond (1920-1985). Raised in Brooklyn, her first professional credits were cartoons and humor pieces for The New Yorker. I…
Today is the birthday of Joseph Merrick (sometimes known incorrectly as “John”, 1862-1890). Born normal, the physical deformities that gave him his nickname began to emerge in ch…
Today is the 102nd birthday of the still-living John Calvert (b. 1911). The Indiana native was inspired to take up magic by a boyhood trip to see the legendary Howard Thurston. He began his …
Today is the birthday of The Great Leon (Leon Levy, 1876-1951). This vaudeville magician was best known for his illusion “Fire and Water”, in which an assistant was wrapped in pa…
Filed under: Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: burlesque, Lone Star Follies, Texas, Triad
Originally posted in 2011. August 4, 1901 is the birthday of the great Louis Armstrong. (He gave it out himself as July 4, 1900, but the records tell differently). He never played vaudeville…
Originally published in 2010. Helen Kane was one of those figures — like Josephine Baker, Eddie Cantor, and Texas Guinan - -who defined the spirit of the 1920s. With he…
\ Today is the birthday of Abe Lyman (Abraham Simon, 1897-1957). Lyman started off in his youth as a drummer in Chicago night clubs. By 1919 he had his own nine piece band that was popular i…
Today is the birthday of the great showman William Cameron Coup (1836-1895). An Indiana native, Coup worked first as a printer and then (starting in 1853) managed the side show of Mabies Gra…
Today is the birthday of music hall star Charles Coborn (Charles Whitton McCallum, 1852-1945). Coborn was largely associated with two songs: “Two Lovely Black Eyes” (1886) andÂ�…
Filed under: Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Chris McDaniel, Gal Friday, Gotham Burlesque, Triad
Today is Tony Bennett’s birthday (Anthony Bennedetto, b. 1926). I worked for him as a factotum in the early 1990s (hence the above, taken at the Performing Arts tent in Beverly, Mass).…
Today is the birthday of Bill B. Van (William Webster Van de Grift, 1878-1950). He got his start as a child actor in a Philadelphia production of H.M.S. Pinafore, moved on to blackface mi…
Vera Fokine (1886-1958) graduated from the Russian Imperial School of Ballet in 1904 and married influential choreographer Michel Fokine the following year. In 1919 the two fled the Revoluti…
Today the Silent Clowns film series presents Louise Fazenda in Footloose Widows (1926) a snappy comedy about two gold diggers on the prowl at a swanky resort hotel. Sharing today's spo…
That heading may sound like internecine struggles amongst curators, administrators and philanthropists, but it really refers to two excellent exhibitions we saw at the Met Museum yesterday,�…
Today is opening day of Burlington, Vermont’s Festival of Fools, now in its sixth year. The Festival of Fools is a curated festival of street theater devoted to community engagement th…
Originally posted in 2009. Today is the birthday of Helen Morgan (1900-1941). Ms. Morgan created the role of the drunken, melancholy torch singer, sitting on top of a piano in a night…
Today is the birthday of James “Paul” Parrott (1897-1939). Parrott broke into films in 1917 through the good graces of his older brother Charles, a.k.a Charley Chase, who was the…
Today is the birthday of Bob Burns (1890-1956). Burns was just an Arkansas teenager playing in local brass bands when he invented his own humorous looking trombone-like instrument out of plu…
Filed under: BROOKLYN, EXHIBITIONS & LECTURES, PLUGS, SOCIAL EVENTS Tagged: Pirate Ball, Red Hook, Waterfront Museum
Today is the birthday of Dominick “Dom” DeLuise (1933-2009). Here’s something odd: DeLuise’s Wiki entry mentions everything about his career — all his movie app…
