11,755 stories by "Trav S.d."
Madame Petty was P.T. Barnum’s long-haired lady, photographed here circa 1870. A Brooklyn native, she was married to sea captain Henry Petty, who lost at sea off Cape Hateras in 188…
Today is the birthday of Star of Vaudeville #399: Tim Moore, best known as Kingfish from the Amos and Andy tv series (for more on his vaudeville history go here). In honor of the day, an epi…
Today is the birthday of second generation vaudevillian Broderick Crawford (for his full bio go here). Showfolk from the cradle he was far from the thugs he typically played in the movies an…
Today is the birthday of the unspeakably awesome Neil Innes (b. 1944). He played the John Lennon character (and wrote all the music for) the brilliant Beatles parody project the Rutles (co-c…
Today is the birthday of the great English poet John Milton (1608-1674). I go back to Paradise Lost periodically as in inspiration both as a writer and as a rough draft of a human being. But…
Today is the birthday of John Elroy Sanford a.k.a Redd Foxx (1922-1991). He was born in St. Louis and raised in Chicago, where he became known as Chicago Red on account of his reddish hair. …
Arthur H. (“Al”) Wheatley was born in Perth, Australia in 1901. Many who knew him give out his name as Albert or Alvin, but more official sources, including his granddaughter con…
Born Samuel Kahn (circa 1870), Major Atom was the nephew of Leopold Kahn a.k.a Admiral Dot. Weighing in at 15 lbs, he sand and danced and was often billed as "the most symmetrical man of his…
One of P.T. Barnum’s “prodigies” she was said to weight 579 pounds, which is prodigious indeed. She was appearing at Barnum’s American Museum in 1849 when Currier and…
Today is Sammy’s birthday (for my full post on him and his vaudeville background go here) . As I said last year, it’s always difficult for me to locate online clips of him tha…
Today is the birthday of Georges Méliès (for my full article on him go here). I write about Méliès at some length in my new book Chain of Fools (due out in late February). Here is one of…
Today is Flip Wilson’s birthday (1933-1998). The Flip Wilson Show is undoubtedly not as “forgotten” as most of the ones I post in this series. After all, it ran for four…
Today is Jim Morrison’s birthday (1943-1971). Influenced by all the right people (Neitzsche, Artaud, Rimbaud, the Beats, the Living Theatre), his own writing and performance have to be…
Today is the birthday of George F. Reuschling, a.k.a. George LaFollette a.k.a the Great LaFollette a.k.a Rush Ling Toy (1886-1960). As we have described here, Chinese magicians were all the …
A century ago, a minor show business figure named Barney Davis passed away. Never heard of him? How about his stage name, Plutanor? Nothing? Oh, well. It used to be, a man’s fake name …
Marley was dead; that much was certain. Nothing was certain but death and taxes, and death was one of those. Now old Scrooge knew the truth of the latter part of that Yankee aphorism,…
Today is the birthday of Raymond McKee (1892-1984). Born in Iowa, Â he began acting in stage melodramas as a boy after the family moved to Chicago. He broke into films in 1912 in the Flori…
Today is the birthday of New Orleans-born, Sicilian-American jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Prima (1910-1978). Prima was one of my mom’s favorites; she often raved about seein…
I was saddened to learn just now that Helen Guditis, director and founder of the Theatre Museum, passed away on Monday, finally succumbing to the cancer that had been wracking her body for t…
When I was a young, aspiring stand up comedian of 19 and 20 I idolized, idolized Steven Wright (still do). The early-mid 1980s, when he first hit, were his perfect time. His minimalist…
Today is the birthday of silent western star William S. Hart (1864-1946). I’ve got a westerns project coming up but that’s a couple of years down the dusty dirt road. In t…
Today is the birthday of Agnes Moorehead (1900-1974). One of the marks of a good actor is a willingness to take risks, to be as “bad” as often one as one is “good”. A…
Today is the birthday of Kathryn McGuire (1903-1978). A dancer by training, she studied seriously both in her native Illinois and in Hollywood when her family moved there in 1917. In 1919 sh…
Today is the birthday of Walt Disney (1901-1966). The highlight of my short NYU career was the course I took on Disney taught by the world’s pre-eminent Disney scholar John Canemaker. …
