Sunday, May 5, 2024
Happy National Cartoonists Day! A good a time as any to peruse the comics and cartoons section of Travalanche, with its 180 or so posts. It’s not our main bailiwick, so be prepared for a b…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:06AMSaturday, May 4, 2024
Never mind Star Wars Day, May the 4th is the birthday of Pete Barbutti (b. 1934). How this performer would have throve in vaudeville! Barbutti is a comedy musician, a raconteur who tells lon…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:06PMFriday, May 3, 2024
Born 100 years ago today, the great stage director Tom O’Horgan (1924-2009). Few who emerged from what used to be called Off-Off Broadway flew higher than this man, though his work is bett…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:18PMThursday, May 2, 2024
May 2 was the birthday of Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796), popularly known as Catherine the Great. Catherine is one of history’s most storied monarchs, renowned as much for her legend a…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:24AMWednesday, May 1, 2024
Well, it’s May Day! We’ve visited the topic a few times in the past; see links for related writings on: May Poles, May Baskets, the Green Man, Renn Fests, Robin Hood, and May Day Eve. To…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:02PMBorn 100 years ago today: announcer, quiz show host, news anchor, and actor Art Fleming (Arthur Fleming Fazzin, 1925-1995). It was Fleming’s bad fortune to have his most notable accomplish…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:36AMTuesday, April 30, 2024
I was invited to attend the TCM Festival a few days ago (they screened a bunch of old Vitaphones featuring the original technology) but I wisely opted to pass at the last minute, as I had (a…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:06PMGut Walpurgisnacht! I was shocked — shocked! — to discover that I have never even mentioned this holiday on this blog, despite having gotten AWFULLY close, by writing about May Day, whic…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:36AMMonday, April 29, 2024
April 29 is the birthday of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), considered by many to be one of the principal fathers of modern ballet. Most (if not all) of the 80 ballets he created are lost …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:36PMBert Woodruff (1856-1934) is best known (to some of us anyway), for his iconic role as Pop, New York’s last horse-drawn trolley driver, in Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928). Speedy was one of…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:24AMSunday, April 28, 2024
Born 100 years ago this day, Margrethe Blossom Dearie (1924-2009), known professionally as Blossom Dearie. She is not to be confused with Blossom Seeley or Blossom Rock! H’m…I used to th…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:06AMSaturday, April 27, 2024
I’ve just realized a long-standing goal by reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885). I’ve wanted to do that since reading about them in Mark Twain’s own memoirs many decades…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:12AMFriday, April 26, 2024
Some 50 episodes after my last appearance (Look at Chicolini), I had the good fortune this week to return as a guest on the Marx Brothers Council Podcast to talk about my new book The Marx B…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:42AMSynchronicitously, I learned about Renate Müller (1906-1937) from two trusted sources within days of each other a few months back. One was Eve Golden, who wrote terrific articles about the…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:24AMThursday, April 25, 2024
As we wrote in our recent send-off to Robert McNeil, hard journalists are generally outside of our biographical wheelhouse on Travalanche. But celebrity journalism is a horse of a different …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:24AMWednesday, April 24, 2024
The 20th century produced so many great Southern chroniclers of crackerdom (William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee and childhood friend Truman Capote, James Agee, Kat…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:32AMTuesday, April 23, 2024
With late April and all of May clogged with events, your correspondent has been hard at work trying to get some events on the calendar for June. A couple of new book talks are in the works, …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:48AMFor obvious reasons, I was going to wait and launch promotion of my newest book at Marxfest next month, but, like a thief in the night, sales have already begun online, and today being World…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:36AMApril 23, 1896 was a pivotal date in the histories of both live vaudeville and cinematic exhibition. On that day, Koster and Bial’s Music Hall topped off their presentation of six variety …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:32AMMonday, April 22, 2024
Like the man says — that anniversary is today! And I’d love to share a little article about it here with you…but for the fact that I’m presenting a talk on that very topic this Sunda…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:18PMTrue fact: over a period of 16 years, through 8,000 blogposts, I have only used the phrase “bad movie” on Travalanche eight times, and in most of those cases, I either put the phrase in …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 07:42AMSunday, April 21, 2024
The title of today’s post is to clarify that is not about the excellent recovery sit-com (2017-2020) starring Ron Livingston and my man Mat Fraser. Though it would be very hip to learn tha…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AMSaturday, April 20, 2024
For Harold Lloyd’s birthday, a new finding aid to help you navigate our nearly four dozen posts on the great silent comedian: Poster Boy for the 1920s (Main Biographical Post) Selected Sho…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:48AMFriday, April 19, 2024
I head this post with Rembrandt’s 1662 painting The Syndics of the Drapers Guild naturally because since 1911 the image has been used to represent Dutch Masters cigars, famously associated…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 04:24PMThursday, April 18, 2024
Comedian Conan O’Brien (b. 1963) has been in show business for about 40 years, and he’s been known to the wider public for about 30 of those. By rights, I ought to hate him more (I’ll …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:02PMWednesday, April 17, 2024
As I pen this, it’s the 500th anniversary of Verrazzano’s historic discovery of New York harbor, But I’ve already blogged about that, on my other blog. So now we treat of the screenwri…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:12AMTuesday, April 16, 2024
PBS’s Robert MacNeil (1931-2024) passed away back on April 12. On the Newshour, Jim Lehrer, like most of MacNeil’s friends and colleagues, used to call him “Robin”, but I’ll refrai…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:24PMWith the exception of the Marx Brothers (and there are five of them) Charlie Chaplin (1889-1975) is the stage and screen performer about whom I’ve written the greatest number of articles o…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:12AMMonday, April 15, 2024
We have a duel objective in giving the Travalanche treatment to Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his distinguished family this morning. The first is that the Peales figured in the Ameri…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:24AMSunday, April 14, 2024
On April 14, 1894, the first Kinetoscope parlor in the world opened, at 1155 Broadway in Manhattan, not far from Madison Square Park and the Garden. Originally, my headline was more specific…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:18AMSaturday, April 13, 2024
Word has just come down that the conjoined Schappell twins, Lori and George (b. 1961) passed away on April 7. Wait! You’re already a little confused, I bet. How can identical twins be diff…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:24PM 
