11,752 stories by "Trav S.d."
Filed under: Burlesk, Contemporary Variety, PLUGS Tagged: Bettina May, Chris McDaniel, Dangrrr Doll, Gary Beebe, Gotham Burlesque, Grace Gotham
Today is the birthday of the great television satirist (and frequent Presidential candidate) Pat Paulsen (1927-1997). He attained his fame on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in the l…
Today is the birthday of rock and roll pioneer Bill Haley (1925-1981). While some make claims for him as “the first rock and roller” (and plenty of those claims were contemporane…
Today is the birthday of Australian swimmer, vaudeville performer and film actress Annette Kellerman. The clip above is from her 1914 silent film Neptune’s Daughter and includ…
Gale Sisters there were four, two sets of twins in fact (not Quadruplets, as billed): June (1911-1996), Jean (1912-1974), Jane (b. 1911) and Joan (1912-1998). Their real names were Doris, Le…
Today is the birthday of Charles B. Tripp (1855-1930). Born without upper limbs, he taught himself to do nearly everything a person with arms can do: dress himself, shave, write with a pen, …
(adapted from a talk given at the Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, CT, November 2005) Most books on vaudeville devote at most a mention or two to P.T. Barnum (July 5, 1810 " April 5, 1891). In …
Trixie and Monkey’s “AMERICAN MORONS” $15 in advance, or at the door. Sideshows By The Seashore Flipping and stripping for AMERICA! Celebrate America’s birthday with …
Today is the birthday of Dell Henderson (George Delbert Henderson, 1883-1956). A stage actor from Ontario, he started out at Biograph in 1908, around the same time as D.W. Griffith and Mack …
Today is, oddly enough, also the birthday of Neil Simon (b. 1927). I confess to having something of a love/ hate relationship with him as a playwright. On the one hand, he’s the first …
Today is the birthday of that peculiar American phenomenon Mitch Miller (1911-2010). Most of us today know him from scratchy old record albums, listened to for camp value on holidays, featur…
Originally posted in 2010. Probably no surprise here, eh? Cartoonist Rube Goldberg (born this day in 1883) first started doodling for the local papers in his native San Francisco befor…
Originally posted in 2011. When I adapted the Hawthorne short story “The May-Pole of Merrymount” for Metropolitan Playhouse’s Hawthornicopia festival in early …
Originally posted in 2011. How fitting that the Father of American Songwriting was born on the Glorious Fourth (1826). Stephen Foster grew up in Western Pennsylvania where his educ…
It being July the 4th and all, I thought it might be fitting to do an appendix type post celebrating some of George M. Cohan’s material (as opposed to musical) legacy. Especially…
Originally posted in 2009. The only thing I'm proud of about vaudeville is that I got out of it. The houses are not all Orpheums and Keith " not by a long way. There are only a few goo…
Today is the birthday of Gloria Stuart (1910-2010). To hell with Titanic, she had a great career 60 years before, in James Whale films like The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invi…
Today is the birthday of Timmie Rogers (1914-2006). Originally from Detroit, as a boy he danced on the street for change. Gradually he worked up to singing and dancing in nightclubs and blac…
Today is the birthday of one of the great Tin Pan Alley songwriters, Irving Caesar (Isidore Caesar, 1895-1996). Raised on the Lower East Side, his father was a socialist lawyer who ran a boo…
Giacomo and Giovanni Battista Tocci were conjoined twins born in Locana, Italy born on either July 4 or October 4 somewhere between 1875 and 1877. The pair were unique in possessing separate…
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…
