11,754 stories by "Trav S.d."
Please Join Us For the FREE Chain of Fools Launch Event Wednesday, May 22, 7-9 pm at the Brick Theater, 579 Metropolitan Ave, Willismaburg Brooklyn Trav S.D. launches his …
Finally got my hands on a rarity last weekend. Long about 1935, when the smoke cleared from Buster Keaton’s final blow-up with MGM and no other studios were stepping in to sign him up,…
God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world  – Browning, Pippa Passes Today is the birthday of the poet Robert Browning (1812-1889). Though he never knew it, B…
Ivannow Wladislaus von Dziarski-Orloff (1864-1904) was billed (among other things) as the Transparent Man, or the Human Window Pane. In addition to completely atrophied limbs, he had skin yo…
Today is the birthday of Joe Fox (Joseph Monahan, 1852-?) With William H. Ward (1852-?) he formed minstrelsy’s longest-lasting duo. Having started in Cincinnati in 1868, they were stil…
There have been many variations on Neil Simon’s successful Odd Couple formula, most of them perpetrated by Neil Simon, who knows a good thing when he cashes it in. There was the�…
Today is the birthday of Frank Nelson (1911-1986). You just THINK you don’t know who he is. He’s that guy who had endless cameos and guest shots on sit-coms and commercials, who …
Today is the birthday of Harry Einstein, a.k.a Harry Parke, a.k.a Parkyakarkus (1904-1958). Einstein got his start on Eddie Cantor’s radio show, playing a comical Greek. He appeared in…
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 George Orson Welles (1915-1985). Bec…
Filed under: Music, PLUGS Tagged: David Mallamud, Laurie Beechman
Today is the birthday of Blind Willie McTell (William McTier, 1898-1959). Originally from Georgia, he was an exponent of the Piedmont style of blues picking. His recording career lasted from…
Today is the birthday of Alice Faye (Alice Leppert, 1915-1998). I’m not sure what to make of the claim in her Wikipedia entry that the New York City native “got her start a…
Today is the birthday of Arthur James Caley, billed as Colonel Routh Goshen, the Middlebush Giant (1837-1889). While Middlebush sounds very English, and he may have been born in a village on…
Captain Fred Walters (1855-1923) was an officer in the British army who was prescribed a compound containing silver to treat a certain neural condition. The regular ingestion of silver turne…
Today is the birthday of Albert Whelan (1875-1961). Born in Melbourne, as a young man he moved to Western Australia where he sang and danced for miners employed in the gold fields (…
Today is the birthday of Dick Dale (b. Richard Monsour, 1937), a major player in the development of what came to be known as surf music. A surfer himself, he began exploring ways to make roc…
Charles Nestel was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1849; his sister Eliza followed in 1857. Both were midgets. They began performing publicly in 1861 in a show called The Little People. At fu…
Today is the birthday of the great magician Servais Le Roy (1865-1953). Belgian born, he ran away to England as a boy, and began his career in magic in his teens when he became apprentice an…
Filed under: Burlesk, PLUGS, SOCIAL EVENTS, Women Tagged: April March, burlesque
Filed under: AMERICANA, BOOKS & AUTHORS, BROOKLYN, Indie Theatre, PLUGS Tagged: Brave New World, Moby Dick Rehearsed, Orson Welles, Red Hook, Waterfront Museum
These are exciting times in our exciting city (NYC) when there seem to be silent comedy film screenings going on all the time, as there do these days. Two great shows coming up this weekend,…
Today is the birthday of soul singer-showman Mr. James Brown (1933-2006). By rights I suppose I should include him in my Hall of Hams, so elaborate were his histronics. He and his Famous Fla…
Today is the birthday of Doug Henning (1953-2000). I’ll be frank: when I was a kid, Henning was the absolute measure of awful, unwatchable, the thing one must never do, the thing one m…
Having already done posts of just about all of the other principle cast members of the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz (most of them having been in vaudeville) it gives me great pleasure to f…
Today is the birthday of Percy Abbott (1886-1960). Originally from Australia, he began performing magic and ventriloquism professionally in his early twenties, at the same time working in a …
