Writers for Sid Caesar include Mel Brooks (front, lower right corner) and Neil Simon (back row, upper left corner.)
Credit courtesy of S'more Entertainment
David Susskind's pioneering talk show ran for almost 30 years. In 1970, he hosted an installment called "How to Be a Jewish Son," featuring actors George Segal and Mel Brooks.
The two DVDs I want to talk about today are hilarious, but they aren't sitcoms. They're talk shows — well, one's a talk show, and one's a filmed seminar. But they're both fascinating examples of a specific pop-culture moment frozen in time.
And they're something else as well: Both are highly entertaining real-time examples of talk-show Darwinism. Both shows feature a large, unwieldy guest roster, all of the guests competing for attention at the same time — and by the time the programs are over, the winners are apparent.
Twenty million people practice yoga in the United States. William Broad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for The New York Times, is one of them. Broad started doing yoga as a freshman in college in 1970 and has been practicing ever since.
Brooklyn drummer Matt Wilson keeps busy with many bands and projects — other people's and his own. Two new Wilson albums find him as part of a co-op all-star trio, and at the helm of one of his own quartets. Part of Wilson's appeal is that he keeps things light, in a good way.
As of 2012, Meryl Streep holds the record for the actor with the most Academy Award nominations — her tally stands at 17.
Credit Twentieth Century Fox/Photofest
In the 1983 drama Silkwood, Meryl Streep played Karen Silkwood, who died in a mysterious car accident while investigating the plutonium plant where she worked.
Credit The Weinstein Company
Meryl Streep stars as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady.
Credit Jonathan Wenk / Columbia Pictures
Meryl Streep played Julia Child in the 2009 Nora Ephron film Julie and Julia.
Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill were a couple of Alabama boys in their teens when they started writing songs. At first, the only place they had to record was in a room in the back of the Trailways bus station in Florence, Ala. But one of the songs they recorded there, "Sweet and Innocent," became a small local hit, and a guy named Tom Stafford read about it in the local paper. He built a recording studio above City Drugs in Florence and went into business with the two young men. It didn't last long: Sherrill was hugely ambitious and was soon off to Nashville.
