11,729 stories by "Trav S.d."
Ye Gods, how did this happen! My good friend Seth Shelden the Nobel Prize winning Harpo Marx impersonator wrote me TWO MONTHS ago to let me know his mom, the educator, scholar and feminist D…
January 9, 1972 was the launch date of a kids' show many of us, of a certain age, associate very much with Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Zoom was produced at WGBH in Boston and air…
There were four MacQuarrie Brothers in silent films. They emerged from the San Francisco theatre scene: George (1873-1951), Frank (1875-1950), Murdock (1878-1941), and Albert, or Al (1882-19…
Tampa Red (1903-1981) was one of the most influential and prolific of early blues guitar plays. Born Hudson Woodridge in Smithville Georgia, he was orphaned as a young child and went to live…
The daughter of MLB player Albert "Cod" Myers, Ernestine (1900-91) was born in Terre Haute to himself and Flora LaTart. When still quite young, she followed the slightly older local Valeska …
Just heard that Peter Bogdanovich (b. 1939) has passed away at the age of 82 of "natural causes". That's pretty young nowadays to succumb to the call of Thanatos, so I wasn't expecting this …
Our previous post on Loretta Young (1913-2000) was beyond cursory. Written in 2014 when my main focus for new posts was silent film, I wrote (and with substantial brevity) about a single fil…
Let me quickly clarify the meaning of my title. It refers not to the nostalgia of Boomers for their own era (at least not primarily) but for the time before they were born, that of their par…
January 4, 1964 was the premiere date of the ABC tv variety show The Hollywood Palace. As it debuted before I was born, and went off the air in early 1970 when I was four years old, then was…
Mad respect this day for the example of William Haines (1900-1973) who was given a choice: to be himself or to continue being one of Hollywood's top movie stars. He chose the former. Haines …
No (apparent) relation to Charlotte Greenwood, Winifred Greenwood (1885-1961) was also a veteran of vaudeville and stock companies. Originally from the greater Rochester area, she made her s…
As promised nearly two months ago, our review of David Crump's epochal new biography Fred Karno: The Legend Behind the Laughter. Though I have had the book for weeks, it's taken me that long…
Proof palpable that all Danes are not melancholy was comedy-musician Victor Borge (Børge Rosenbaum, 1909-2000). Borge came to America too late for vaudeville but not too late for radio an…
Let's be real. While people are talking trash about the horribleness of 2021, I honestly think that, while, yes, it was plenty atrocious, it was also better in many ways than the five years …
A celebration today of the influential folk singer Odetta (Odetta Holmes, 1930-2008). Odetta was one of those performers who seemed to live at the hub, smack dab in the middle of everything,…
On the eve of putting Travalanche behind a canvas gateway like the peepshow that it is, we close out the year, as we usually do, with a little stock taking. Travalanche began in 2008 as an o…
We were reminded of how much we adore Tracey Ullman (b. 1959) during the pandemic, when my wife and I whiled away the endless hours by reading to each other and listening to books-on-tape. O…
A short nod to the multi-skilled Richard "Dick" Bruno (1901-1986), best known as the faux French ventriloquist Monsieur Brunard, with his dummy Joe Flip. Bruno's original orientation was mus…
Fun fact, and it's too exciting to make you wait for: the British movie director Carol Reed (1906-1976) was the illegitimate son of the great English actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, as well…
We just learned that Monday evening's shooting spree in Denver has touched the lives of some of our sideshow and musician friends, a couple of whom knew the most prominent victim, Alicia Car…
Much hoopla about Lucy of late, what with Aaron Sorkin's recent bio-bic, but that red-headed lady clown wasn't the only Ball in show business. There was also the great sword swallower John G…
Born 100 years ago today, the one and only Johnny Otis (Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes, 1921-2012). We'll get to his ethnic identity and other interesting trivia betimes, but first, his accompl…
Robert "Bobby" Scheerer (1929-2018) had many fine credits as a movie and TV director, but nonetheless I confess I was briefly muddled about why I'd put him on my calendar to write about this…
Long have I been a fan of Charles Dingle's turn in William Wyler's 1941 screen adaptation of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes opposite Bette Davis, one of his first, biggest, and flashiest…
Not for the first time. I find myself in the middle of a painful artistic and institutional divorce. It happens a lot in the arts; I've witnessed dozens of these break-ups from nearly every …
