Sunday, April 20, 2025
Born 100 years ago today, magician Harry Albacker (1925-1994) — his oft-told tale that he was born on Halloween, 1926, right after Houdini died, was a show biz fib. A lifelong native of th…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 03:06AMSaturday, April 19, 2025
Well, I wish I was on Lexington Green today watching the re-enactors re-create what happened there 250 years ago, but c’est la guerre. I do have my “eyes on the ground” in Lexington an…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:36AMFriday, April 18, 2025
A quarter of a millennium ago, on April 18, 1775, occurred Paul Revere’s famous ride to alert the slumbering Minutemen to an eminent crackdown by British leaders on the rebel Patriots at L…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:48AMThursday, April 17, 2025
April 17 was the baptismal day of Jacobean playwright John Ford (1586-ca. 1639). That’s my copy of his collected plays above. (If you’re looking for the director of Hollywood westerns, g…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:54AMOlivia Hussey (1951-2024) would be turning 74 today; we lost her back in December. We tend to think of this actress in only one role because she was so iconic in it, but she actually had a t…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:48AMWednesday, April 16, 2025
April 16 is kind of a comedy holy day ’round here. It’s the anniversary of the release date of Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box and Way Out West and Chaplin’s The Cure, and the birth…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:54AMAn atypical post today, for it concerns an artist who was ambivalent about show business. Many of us are. For me it’s a love/hate thing. I hope I convey what I love about it here every sin…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:42AMTuesday, April 15, 2025
I found this picture of Eve Golden (reclining) from the Digital Transgender Archive. It shows her in an off-Broadway play in 1981. Eve hasn’t acted in some time, but she manifests the thea…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:03PMThe title of this post could take you down any number of legitimate paths — a playhouse named after the great Italian polymath, say, or biographical stage works about him. Instead, somethi…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:03PMThe title of today’s post is meant to differentiate its subject from the motion picture composer, although this John Williams (Hugh Ernest Leo Williams, 1903-1983) had a famous classical m…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:03AMMonday, April 14, 2025
I know this isn’t a very round anniversary, but ten years ago (at the 150th), Travalanche hadn’t much expanded beyond vaudeville and silent film comedy as far as subject matter was conce…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:12PMYeah, I said! Just got the word from Feedspot that Travalanche ranks #57 of all New York City based blogs and websites, which I call not too shabby given that the list is topped by the likes…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:12PMSome attention paid today to Hollywood screen actress Claire Windsor (Clara Viola Cronk, 1892-1972). Windsor was a major star of the 1920s and early ’30s, encompassing the late silent and …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:01AMSunday, April 13, 2025
This International Romani Day we thought we’d give you a head’s up about a new film that focuses on Charlie Chaplin’s Romani heritage and how it influenced his art. It’s directed by …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:32PMThis is the second time I’m felt the need to single out Bill Maher for conspicuous bad-acting. (The first was about five years ago). Now that he’s been to the White House to kiss the Kin…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:06AMSaturday, April 12, 2025
This will make an interesting companion piece to yesterday’s post, which concerned major players in the birthing of jazz. The music has no end, one hopes, but today’s post discusses a ma…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:24AMFriday, April 11, 2025
And just what do I mean by a very vaudeville kind of day? Well it’s National Barber Shop Quartet Day, as well as the birthday of Nick LaRocca of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, not to me…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:54PMWe choose the birthday of Dominic “Nick” LaRocca (1889-1961) for this tribute to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (original rendered as the Original Dixieland Jass Band). This seminal qu…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:36AMWednesday, April 9, 2025
April 9, 1813 was the date upon which Moll Pitcher (Mary Diamond) transitioned from this Mortal Plane into the Great Beyond. In modern parlance, Moll can best be described as a celebrity psy…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:06AMApril 9 is the birthday of singer and actress Paula Stewart (Dorothy Paula Zürndorfer, b. 1929) Stewart is very much still with us — I’ve even had the pleasure of interacting with her …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:12AMTuesday, April 8, 2025
Happy National Banjo Day! As I wrote in No Applause, this quintessentially American instrument originated in Africa, made its way here through the cultured of enslaved black people, and then…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 05:03PMThe name Victor Shertzinger (1888-1941) has not withstood the test of time but once you learn of his accomplishments you may wonder why it hasn’t. He was not only a movie director, but als…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 12:42PMMonday, April 7, 2025
As you might have guessed, western star Neal Hart (1879-1949) was a cousin of the much bigger western star William S. Hart. Less predictably, he was born on Staten Island! According to his d…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:42PMA belated centennial celebration and obituary for the late star Margia Dean (Marguerite Louise Skliris, 1922-2023). 101 at the time of her passing! I see dozens of articles idiotically parro…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 01:42PMToday, a tribute to Danny Wells (Jack Westelman, 1941-2013), a distinctive and memorable comedy character actor who was fairly ubiquitous on television when I was a kid in the ’70s. Tall a…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 08:18AMSunday, April 6, 2025
I was already planning a paean to the nation’s libraries for National Library Week, which starts today, but this year in particular invests our message of advocacy with an element of urgen…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 02:06PMSaturday, April 5, 2025
You don’t know with what pleasure I rode through New York on buses and trains this past Tuesday (April 1), conspicuously reading Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother in hopes that some strang…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:03AMFriday, April 4, 2025
I got a pleasant surprise (well…pleasant, but not a surprise) this morning when I grabbed a copy of the Queens Gazette and saw that my profile/interview had dropped. It was a few days too …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 11:18AMJohn Brown (1904-1957) was a beloved comedy character actor in his own time, and a bit of a legend in the biz, though his name has gone unremembered, largely one imagines because he shares i…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 09:06AMThursday, April 3, 2025
So…the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is coming up in just a couple of weeks. Remember? The war started at Lexington and Concord, over a year before the signing of the Declar…
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 06:06PMThe Jan and Dean saga deserves remembrance, not just because their binary star rates a bona fide place of significance in the pop firmament, but because theirs is a good yarn, with the same …
SOURCE: Trav S.D. at 10:36AM 
