An' THAT's the way ya do it!

I loved that book so much, despite its refusal to become quite what I wanted it to be. Part of the fun was figuring out what decade it was set in.

I had the exact opposite reading of that dynamic. John Legend is the future of music, bringing jazz nuances to R&B and pop. He's a pretty clear "good guy, good musician." Gosling, while incredibly gifted, is stuck in 1967, a purist. An academic, white-guy view of a musical diaspora he doesn't realize is changing and…

"My fellow Americans, I wish I could had had an abortion so I could truly be the voice of my generation. Adam Driver's penis is huge… Wait, what?"

WE'RE Westworld now.

You're not wrong- it's not a coincidence that the rise of more heavily plotted musicals as opposed to "a string of songs and a shoelace of plot" came about as the encore era ended. The two traditions are hard to maintain simultaneously.

Inuit are Pokémon. (As, if we're using this linguistic rule of thumb, are sheep.)

Synthless? Ever really notice how that song is nearly guitarless? It's almost a Ramsey Lewis Trio pastiche, instrumentally speaking, until the guitar lead comes in. (They had recorded it with layered rhythm guitars, but decided that the non-lead guitars just cluttered up the sound they were going for, which was…

My theatre professor in college lamented the age of cast recordings, because it killed his favorite lost tradition: the encore. Audiences at musical used to routinely stop a show and demand a song be sung again, because they would never get to hear that song performed by that singer again.

You heard it here first, folks- Helen J. Burnham killed and ate her own family.

The Memberberries, who speak with a cartoonish Mexican accent and say "I 'member, you 'member?" are an obscure reference to Dannyboy, a character George Lopez would portray in his stand-up act. Dannyboy made appearances on the sitcom "George Lopez" as a voice head on the phone or from the other room, allowing Lopez to…

BEAR DOWN FOR MIDTERMS

I actually found that a clever moment: the brass blast hits a staccato and cuts away when the famous Star Wars fanfare is supposed to play on a long crawl. There wasn't a long tracking shot, either: it was a willful subversion of your expectations of a "main series" film.

Don't forget the chocolate!

TRUE SHOWBIZ TALES #31: In 2012 I wrote a stage musical comedy adaptation of Snow White on commission for a professional theatre company. Much discussion and debate was raised over a gag in Act 2 in which the Evil Queen was to eat the cooked pig's heart that she believes is Snow White's, only to respond, mouth full,…

An actor friend of mine passed away from cancer last year. He had been about 50. He was short and athletic but balding. When we did shows with "teens" and "adult" characters, a running gag with the company was that he would put on a hat and dance in the teen numbers all but unnoticed, then remove his hat and be a…

Isn't that generally an old-school Jewish-diaspora pronunciation? I remember a running gag on "The Goldbergs" where his parents keep on pronouncing it Robut but Adam F. insists on the more modern, Americanized "robot"

He used to be a "he-man woman hater," one of those tropes that has disappeared throughout the decades. His original catchphrase was even "Dames? Phooey!" Makes him sound like he was going to trade his crown in for a fedora.

Alt-pop band Jellyfish covered the insipid Archies tune "Sugar and Spice" and turned it into a pretty good 90s power pop nugget: https://www.youtube.com/wat…

Homosociality, the preference for the company of men over women despite no sexual or romantic attraction to them. It's frequently linked to misogyny of some level- HP Lovecraft is one of the most noted homosocialites, and Edward Gorey (although his whole thing was more complicated, being asexual but never entirely…