Monday, March 3, 2025
On the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special the other night, one participant you might not have noticed (for he was seated in the audience, and at 5’2″ is easy to miss) was forme…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:42AMSunday, March 2, 2025
Believe it or not I actually know where I was — not because it was a major trauma for me, but because it was when I first took note of the name in the first place. Cookie Mueller (Dorothy …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:18PMToday marks the 125th anniversary of the birth Kurt Weill (1900-1950). (I sure love his music, but pictures of him always make me think he would have been good in the lead role in M. This wa…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:12PMSaturday, March 1, 2025
March 1, 1925 was the release date of the silent comedy/adventure Too Many Kisses, which contains the earliest extant footage of a Marx Brother prior to the release of The Cocoanuts fo…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:18PMBorn 100 years ago today, the man who brought the Beats together Lucien Carr (1925-2005). (Confusingly, this important figure has nothing to do with either Lucien Truscott IV or C. Carr, who…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:12AMFriday, February 28, 2025
We love to share the lives of remarkable people here on Travalanche — on rare occasion they’re still alive! So it is with Diane Kiesel, a New York Supreme Court Justice for almost 20 yea…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:48AMThursday, February 27, 2025
Marian Anderson (1897-1993) retired the year I was born (1965) but she continued to be widely revered as an American institution long afterward. Anderson reigned as something like America’…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54AMWe wake to the sad news of Gene Hackman’s passing, along with wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog. All sources are vague about the manner of death. The police say they don’t suspect foul p…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:54AMWednesday, February 26, 2025
Great fun at the Zeppo Marx birthday at the Algonquin Hotel last night, sponsored by the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, all in celebration of Robert Bader’s new biography Zeppo: The Reluctant M…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:18PMFor the Great One’s birthday, a navigational aid to our many posts about, or relevant to, the comedian. Some additional posts, about particular films that Gleason appeared in, are planned.…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:06AMTuesday, February 25, 2025
Well, now! This isn’t the post I was expecting to write about Carrot Top (Scott Thompson, b. 1965) at all. To be honest, until recently I’d really only known about Carrot Top second hand…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:24PMIt’s been so long (over four years) since I’d posted in the “Forgotten Shows of My Nonage” section of Travalanche that I’d almost forgotten that it existed. In fact, I may have for…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:54AMBorn 100 years ago today, character actor Bert Remsen (Herbert Remsen, 1925-1999). Like many, I became aware of Remsen as a devotee of Robert Altman; he was a key member of Altman’s cinema…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:54AMMonday, February 24, 2025
Though he directed nearly 200 movies, some of them enduringly famous, we have had but one occasion to mention director Richard Thorpe (1896-1991) thus far on Travalanche. He was the second d…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:12AMSunday, February 23, 2025
“I dig my father. I wish he could open his eyes and dig me.” — Peter Fonda (1940-2019). It seems significant that Peter Fonda came into the world at around the same time audiences were…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:18AMFebruary 23, 1965 was the day on which Stan Laurel (Stanley Jefferson, b. 1890), best known as one half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, made his way toward the Pearly Gates. In a way…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:18AMSaturday, February 22, 2025
Thanks Eve Golden, Daughter of Three Gods (Hermes, Aphrodite, and Thanatos) for relating the sad news of the passing Lynne Marie Stewart (1946-2025), best known as Miss Yvonne (The Most Beau…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:48PMWorld Sword Swallowers Day happens every year for the last Saturday in February. It falls a little early this year. We hope you will use the opportunity to peruse the Travalanche Sword Swall…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:48PMBorn 100 years ago today: illustrator, author, designer Edward Gorey (1925-2000). While primarily celebrated for his book illustrations, Gorey did cross over into stage and screen success br…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:32AMFriday, February 21, 2025
Born 100 years ago today, Hollywood’s original poet of violence, Sam Peckinpah (1922-1984). I reckon it was always forgone that Peckinpah would not live to see this day. The man consumed v…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:06PMFounded 100 years ago today, that seminal American organ of taste, craft, wisdom, and discernment (and almost always several good laughs), The New Yorker. The New Yorker was the innovative b…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AMFebruary 21 is International Tourist Guide Day, sponsored by the World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations. As it happens, I had the great honor to be invited to speak to their local af…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:32AMThursday, February 20, 2025
Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie (b. 1941) was back in the news just a couple of weeks ago, and I bet she’s glad that we’re living under a tsunami of catastrophic headlines, for hers…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:18PMHaving frequently come across clips of the original CBS broadcasts of the game show What’s My Line?, which ran from 1950 through 1967, I grew curious about its host John Charles Daly (1914…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:54AMWednesday, February 19, 2025
There are a number of people on my calendar to write about today; with the government currently attempting to erase LGBT community, trans people in particular, I figure I’d better go with …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:48AMTuesday, February 18, 2025
February 18 is the birthday of Billy DeWolf, Adolphe Menjou, “Little Angie” Rossitto, Hugo Haas, Allan Melvin, Edward Arnold, George Givot, George Kennedy, George Kirby, Jerry Fujikawa, …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:12AMMonday, February 17, 2025
Few are the American actors as significant and solid yet as unknown and forgotten as Arthur Kennedy (1914-1990). Kennedy’s chief claim to enduring fame is his having created key roles in t…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:02AMSunday, February 16, 2025
Back in 2016, some P.A. on a documentary asked me if they could use a clip from one of my old vaudeville shows at Surf Reality circa 1998 in a new film about burlesque, and I said yeah and p…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:12PMSaturday, February 15, 2025
February 15 being National Wisconsin Day, we now add it to the small number of American states to which we are paying tributes in a series, making a sort of midwestern trilogy with our two r…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:12AMFriday, February 14, 2025
Comic strip artist Carl Thomas Anderson (1865-1948) was born of a Valentine’s Day, just like Jack Benny, Gregory Hines, and tellingly, Teller of Penn and Teller. Teller is just as silent a…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:02AMThursday, February 13, 2025
The big year for Susan Oliver (Charlotte Gercke, 1932-1990) was 1964: in that one year she was the female lead in Jerry Lewis’s The Disorderly Orderly, the Hank Williams bio-pic Your Cheat…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:02AM 
