11,732 stories by "Trav S.D."
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…
Today is the birthday of Lena Horne (1917-2010). She got her start singing in Harlem’s Cotton Club and other swank New York night clubs, performing with the likes of Adelaide Hall and …
Today is the birthday of the brassiest of broads, Susan Hayward (1917-1975). Stunningly gorgeous for the first decade of her career (which had begun in 1937 when the former fashion model cam…
Today is the birthday of George Chandler (1898-1985). Chandler began his show business career in vaudeville in 1915, billing himself as “The Musical Nut”. He arrived in silent fi…
Last Wednesday night we were sitting in our living room watching tv and suddenly heard a terrifying rumbling sound coming from our front room. We ran in and found that this had happened: Und…
A series wherein we record and chronicle contemporary busking performers for fun and very little profit. This hombre passed through the C train with his squeeze box yestiddy: Filed under: Bu…
Filed under: African American Interest, Blackface & Minstrelsy, Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Brown Girls Burlesque, Dirty Honey Shake, Joe's Pub
Today is the birthday of Frank Loesser (1910-1969). It’s a little known fact that the composer of Guys and Dolls, Where’s Charley?, How to Succeed in Business Without Really T…
Today is the birthday of the Fearless Frogman, Paul Boyton (1848-1924), showman, daredevil, and one of the early founders of the Coney Island amusement district. Boyton served in the navy as…
Today is the birthday of Tihany (Franz Czeiler (b. 1916). Originally from Hungary, he took magic lessons from Alfred Uferini and learned to pick pockets by watching Dr. Giovanni, a German pe…
Shortly after its birth, jazz made its way to the industrial north on riverboats puffing up the Mississippi. This 4th of July, celebrate America’s independence and her musical voyage, …
