11,837 stories from Trav S.D.
And why not? We've done as much for most of the other major classic comedians here, and this will help you navigate your way through the many posts we've done about the team. And, anyway, It…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is surely our second most notable English opium eater, after Thomas de Quincey, though certainly the one whose artistic productions are the more celebrate…
Happy Bela Lugosi's birthday! We've amassed several posts about the Hungarian heart-breaker here on Travalanche over the past few years. In honor of the day we introduce this new hub to help…
October 20 was the birthday of the man credited with devising the modern stage revue, Édouard Marchand (1859-1905). In 1886 he was hired by the Folies Bergère to devise stage shows for …
October 19 was the birthday of actor George Nader (1921-2002). Lebanese-American Nader was a local L.A. kid who studied theatre at Occidental College, got experience at Pasadena Playhouse, a…
I'm just the kind of sucker who can be taken in by a screen name like Bob Custer (Raymond Glenn, 1898-1974). I literally did wonder whether the western star was related to the ill-fated Gene…
I stopped doing "bundled" biographical posts a very long time ago, but this week three Hollywood actresses passed away within days of each other, adding up to a theme of sorts. It's possible…
October 16, 1923 was the release date of Alice's Wonderland, the film that set 21 year old Walt Disney on a successful career track as a professional animator. Previous to this, Disney had r…
50 years ago today (October 16, 1973) was the first time the acronymic band name ABBA was put to paper. It stands for the initials of its four members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus,Â…
40 years ago today, The Right Stuff (1983), Philip Kaufman's quicksilver adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book about the American space program, premiered (appropriately) at the Kennedy Center. The…
Not be confused with Lieutenant General Chesty Puller, the most decorated U.S. Marine in American History. Although Chesty Morgan (Ilana Wajc, b. 1937) was pretty well decorated herself. It …
A century ago this year (1923), the UK-based firm Lever Brothers introduced Lux Soap on the market. Five years later, the J. Walter Thompson agency cooked up an ingenious campaign to get Hol…
The date on which I write this post on Cliff Gorman (Joel Goldberg, 1936-2002) has significances beyond the fact that it was his birthday. One is that it also happens to have been the birthd…
Happy National Farmers Day! As I've indicated now and again, I am 100% farm stock, descended from Connecticut Yankees on one side and Smokey Mountain Hillbillies on the other (with the odd e…
Art Blakey (1919-1990) has been higher in my consciousness in recent months from hearing Steve "Epstein" Krantz's stories about managing jazz clubs back in the '80s. Blakey was in his last d…
First, some personal reflections on the bad news. To someone who was a kid during the Yom Kippur War, which just had its 50th anniversary (surely among the reasons for the timing of the Hama…
I'd like this to be a world where audiences always know the backstory for every artist. You can't tell the players without a program! The world has never been perfect as far as that goes, bu…
Columbus Day has become a day of eroding celebration and increasing introspection on the topic of colonialism in recent decades. That feels like a particularly relevant subject as war consum…
Haywire Mac (Harry McClintock, 1884-1957) cleaned himself up for that photo above. Normally you see him in cowboy or hobo gear, and it wasn't really a costume. He was a folk singer not unlik…
Tell me, O Octopus, I begs/ Is those things arms, or is they legs? /I marvel at thee, Octopus/ If I were thou, I'd call me Us. " Ogden Nash, "The Octopus" For World Octopus Day (October 8) a…
It's been months and months since I've organized any Zoom events, but I have a good excuse: I've been hard at work on my next several books and the Chain of Fools audio-book which will be th…
Today we sing of Italian-American actor-crooner Al Martino (Jasper Gini, 1927-2009). "Hold the phone"Jasper?" you ask? Well, his father's first name was Gasparino. Al was named after him, bu…
A shout-out today to comic book entrepreneur Alfred Harvey (Alfred Harvey Wiernikoff, 1913-1994), who founded Harvey Comics in 1940, and employed his brothers Leon and Robert to help him run…
Thanks muchly to Lauren Milberger and Jesi Mullins, lovely cohosts of The Murphy Brown Podcast, for inviting me to participate in a special bonus episode of their show to talk about one of m…
I swiped this particularly fabulous and glamorous photo of my high school theatre teacher off of social media. I hope she doesn't mind, for it makes her look like a movie star. Her name is D…
