Five Years Gone, Moving On

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On this day five years ago, I watched someone I cared for take her last breaths, something I’d only experienced once before, and that was only watching a cat be put down. Being in the room as it transpired was sad, as Eileen was only 62, taken from us when there was still a great […]



Met Him Once, Felt Stupid, My Fault

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Actually, my encounter with David Ogden Stiers, the actor best known for playing Major Charles Winchester III on “M*A*S*H” for 7 seasons, and who passed away Saturday, was one of the more sane moments of the early-1980 evening where our paths crossed. In 1979, San Francisco’s cabaret scene was vibrant enough that a group of […]



Celebrity Meltdown Onstage – 40 Years Ago Today

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If it wasn’t exactly 40 years ago today, well, so be it. Unlike a post from four years ago where I told about a bad celebrity encounter, but didn’t name him until he died a year or so later (it was Adam West), this former Rock Star is still alive amazingly. The woman we’re talking […]



Top 5 and Bottom 5 of 2017

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This gets harder to do each year, mostly because I listen almost entirely to BBC Radio 2, which doesn’t play certain types of popular music, i.e. Hip Hop, Dance, and R&B, that comprise such a vast majority of the top selling tunes. But as sort of a catch-up, I listened to Radio 1’s countdown of […]



About 60 Years Ago Today

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Firstly, I’ve actually made it to the age (67) where things that happened 60 years ago I’m actually able to recall in detail, and secondly, the substances I ingested in those ensuing 60 years didn’t completely destroy my ability to remember.  If I’m still around 20 years from now, you can ask me again, and […]



Jongleurs Memories

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First of all, in medieval France and Norman England, a jongleur was an itinerant minstrel who sang songs and told stories. That would have certainly applied to me in most of my adult life. In UK, Jongleurs was a chain of for a time very successful comedy clubs that began in 1983 with a club […]



Met Him Twice

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When Harry Dean Stanton passed away Friday at age of 91, thus ending a film and TV career that spanned well over six decades, many people still needed a point of reference, i.e. his picture, and then they could say, “Oh, yeah, THAT guy.”  “That guy” was in 115 films and 84 TV shows, including […]



The Day I Opened For Jerry Lewis — Sort Of

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We were on the same bill, anyway. It was early September, 2002, and my friend Steven Alan Green was putting together a comedy show for a charity known as High On Laughter. The event was to be at The Palladium Theatre in London, and I was excited to be on the bill, not so much […]



Holiday-ed Out

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It doesn’t usually happen that I go away for a week, then go away again a week later, but that was just the way things went over the past couple of weeks. I gotta say Maggie & I were very lucky we chose to travel to Spain when we did, as the newspapers this week […]



Do You Know The Way To Felixstowe?

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In the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumphant speech at the Glastonbury Music Festival, which I was a mere 200 miles away from, I couldn’t wait to see how the conservative Daily Mail would report it. They didn’t let me down, reporting accusations (probably from their own staff) that it was another case of BBC Leftist […]