Nice summation of the main character: "trying to reconcile who he is, who he was, and who he might become."

The short story for you to read, then, is "The Big Six" by Bruce Jay Friedman. A guy discovers that when he eats a clump of a certain brand of canned broccoli (there are six clumps in the can), he can time-travel back to a past failed romantic conquest and succeed this time around. But he gets his comeuppance. A funny…

DoctorMemory: " 'All You Zombies—' " is not only the first but the best Heinlein story that involves sex, because it's the most concise (I believe it's actually his last short story and that he wrote only novels after 1959) as well as the most clever and provocative. The narrator learns that "you can't resist seducing…

The first record I ever bought on my own was a 45, "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" by Tommy Boyce & Bobby Hart - I don't think I knew at the time that they were also responsible for "Last Train to Clarksville," even though I sometimes watched the Monkees TV series and my folks had the 8-track cartridge combining…

Sweet Liberty was directed by Alan Alda.

"there's nothing Liza does better than play a weirder version of Judy Garland" - well said, and one of the reasons I went to see New York, New York in 1977 and own the longer version on DVD (with the Larry Kert sequence cut from the theatrical version). I guess not many people enjoy that movie, but Liza's quasi-Judy,…

The only truly satisfactory Evita is the original studio album with Julie Covington. Check out "Buenos Aires" starting around 1:19 especially (https://www.youtube.com/wat….

"There's a place for us,
A ship in space for us…"

People (including me) may carp about the changes made in adapting West Side Story into a movie, but at least it didn't receive the treatment accorded to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Richard Lester et al. in 1967. That had been the first show for which Sondheim wrote the music as well as lyrics,…

Also featured in The Ridiculously Expensive MAD, their first (and perhaps only) hardcover anthology, circa 1969.

Yes, absolutely, that transition is for me THE great moment in the movie. And then at the dance we get John Astin too.

But the original lyrics of "America" are so much better, even if they (apparently) require a female perspective.

I have the original cast recording too, and irrespective of who the singers are, it sounds good with the final note of the song sung in octaves by Anita and Maria.

The East Side Story I know is the Mad magazine parody circa 1962 (lyrics by the great Frank Jacobs) in which the leaders of the two gangs are JFK and Khrushchev; the title is from the location of the UN headquarters.

They'd do better getting James B. Sikking to reprise Capt. Styles. He's only 80. As long as they don't bring back the even older Mr. Nimoy yet again… I just saw (on BBC America) most of Star Trek V and VI, and even then he looked like hell - and with all due respect, in recent years he sounds like hell too.

Another aspect of Star Trek movies that really hurts the whole concept is that they more and more often involve a THREAT TO EARTH (a planet that was never visited during the original series, except by time travel). Specifically, a nasty villain threatens Earth in two of the four TNG movies and both of the Abrams…

"Get one of us for your trousers,
get one of us for your haaaaair!!!!"

Not "by Lennon"? The words are all nearly verbatim from his "Lennon Remembers" Rolling Stone interview of 1971. (I don't remember who wrote the music, but the track has Melissa Manchester on piano before she became well-known as a singer.)

Dear AV Club editors,
Reposting an item from Deadline and speculating about it is beneath you - or should be. Deadline does not rise to the level of what I'd call journalism. C'mon, you can do better.

I was a big Night Gallery fan (although a discriminating one) during the original run when I was a teenager, and was even aware of the Emmy nomination for Outstanding Single Program for "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" - and cannot believe that the godawful syndication package is still being run on the newish…