This past weekend I saw one of the final performances of The Pretty Trap, which played Off-Broadway on New York’s Theater Row.  A one-act play by Tennessee Williams, it was an early attempt to create a play about the Wingfield family, something Williams would achieve quite astoundingly when The Glass Menagerie emerged on Broadway in 1945.  So, The Pretty [...]

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I’m delighted to announce my forthcoming e-book, Screen Savers Part Two: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies, due out this fall.  Although this is my fifth movie book, it is my first exclusively for the e-market; it won’t have a print edition.  It all came about when my publisher, Jon Hansen, suggested an e-book of selected posts from my blog [...]

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Sandwiching the great Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday on August 6th are two other centenaries lost in the shuffle:  actor Robert Taylor’s on August 5th and director Nicholas Ray’s on August 7th.  (Taylor died at 57 in 1969; Ray died at 67 in 1979.)  An ideal tribute to these two men would be to take a look [...]

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While visiting friends on Fire Island this past weekend, I was tickled to see that one of the houses in Cherry Grove is named “623 East 68th Street.”  Devout I Love Lucy followers won’t need to be told that this is a loving wink to the fictitious address of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.  How fitting to [...]

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