Fabulous Baker Boys

Garrison Keillor sings songs about the election with lyrics by Calvin Trillin. Caricature from The New York Observer.

Sheedy's Web

She once wrote a book entitled She Was Nice To Mice, but evidently actress Ally Sheedy also has a soft spot for pigs. Caricature from The New York Observer.

Last Monday l took the kids for an outing with another family to Oaks Park, the local roller rink I used to skate at back when I was a teenager. l hadn’t been skating in years,and I figured  it was about time for the  kids to learn- Rebecca is already pretty good on ice skates. My accident happened when I decided  to take a break from circling  the  rink and get a drink. Decelerating as I went from the wood rink to the carpeted outer area, I heard a pop and stumbled- I thought somehow the shoe had broken until an Oaks employee pointed out my broken shin and asked if I wanted someone to call 911(Please disregard any rumors you may have heard that my broken leg resulted from a rinkside run-in with Tonya Harding).. Eve has done research and tells me this injury happens to a lot of guys like  me- that  is,  middle-aged hotdogs with an old man’s brittle bones- though  it  usually results from something more macho like a football tackle or a motorcycle crash. At least my downfall didn’t happen to  cheesy organ music- the rink has switched to nonstop oldies.

l was taken by ambulance to Legacy Emanuel, where I received excellent care, had surgery the next day and got home the day before Thanksgiving. I had hoped to get some comics drawn during my  hospital stay but I was on heavy medication and mostly took naps.This was all I could manage:

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I have known my friend Geoff for something like forty years. We met at school, were roommates in New York for a while and corresponded when we lived in different cities. Now he lives nearby and comes over every couple of weeks to show me movies. Geoff is a serious film buff whose tastes run to obscure noir and horror, and I believe he sees it as his mission to fill in the gaps in my education. The last film he brought over, The World’s Greatest Sinner, is  so obscure it never had a theatrical release, even though it stars and was written and directed by one of my favorite actors, Timothy Carey. A tall, memorably sinister John Turturro type, Carey  was usually cast as a  secondary thug in obscure crime pictures, but he had small parts in East Of Eden and The Wild One, and larger ones in a couple of classic Stanley Kubrick pictures, The Killing and Paths Of Glory (probably his best performance- one of Carey’s persistent mannerisms was grinding his teeth like a bad Kirk Douglas imitator, but in this one he lays off, possibly because Kirk himself is the star). His distinctive mug almost makes caricature redundant, but here goes:

Timothy Carey

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