So I just checked the LA Times site and was surprised to see a Burbank story on its home page. Unfortunately, it was this story that was linked to:  the suicide of a local police officer who was under investigation.

The photo shown is of the corner of  our old house. Meaning this incident occurred two doors from where we lived for six years. The officer who is quoted in the story is a friend.

A sad story for a city that is still in many ways a very small town.

Yes, I still feel like a fool every morning when my paid-for LA Times arrives carrying news and features first presented five days previous for free online.

Other people have been quicker to act, as this chart of declining circulation shows:

As you can see, in the 20 years that I’ve been reading it, the LA Times has lost fully half its readership. (Through no fault of my own:  Again, I’m the dummy still paying for it.)

There are two kinds of newspapers that continue to prosper and, yes, even grow:  community newspapers and ethnically specific (often foreign-language) papers. And, as witnessed above, there’s the Wall Street Journal, which provides its own example. What characteristic do they all share? They all serve a specific function or niche. Want to know what’s going on in, say, Burbank? Then you might check out The Burbank Times, which recently doubled its page count (and therefore its local coverage) and its distribution. What’s major newspaper in Los Angeles is growing? La Opinion, which serves readers in Spanish.

And then there’s the Times, which mystifyingly for the entire 21 years at least that I have been here has somehow not pursued being the newspaper of record for the entertainment industry. The Times, which first turned its various metro sections into the California section, and then eliminated that section, reducing all “local” coverage into an area easily stored in a matchbox. You can find out some of what’s going on in downtown LA’s City Hall (which is almost entirely irrelevant to many of us) and some of what’s going on in Sacramento, but little about those environs between — including the San Fernando Valley, where I live, population 1.7 million, which is more people than live in 12 different states (Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, and Vermont), each with at least one daily newspaper entirely to itself.

In its zeal to serve a little of everything to everyone, the Times is serving almost nothing to almost no one.

Maybe it’s not a great song. (Or even a good one.) But the video’s got perhaps the best unrecognized camp line in movie-promotion music video history: “Flash, I love you — but we’ve only got 14 hours to save the Earth!” It’s got that, plus blow-dried hair and reflective clothing. 1980, where did you go?

The nuts my daughter will crack but not eat.

The cookies she baked with my sister that I said look like chipmunk scat.

The spatula that fell onto the heating element in the dish washer.

The dog who needs a walk every night and gets it.

The cigar from that walk.

The glass of orange juice from our tree that I drank while posting this.

The current issue of Details carries a profile of the aging and unapologetic Pee-wee Herman. (Am I still pissed? You bet.)

(By the way, no, I don’t subscribe to Details. But I now seem to be getting it free in the mail. Hey, if they’re going to offer all the content for free on the web, why not print it and mail it for free, too? Which makes me wonder if the Pennysaver giveaways didn’t have the right idea all along.)

Back to Pee-wee:  When I finally finally was able to get through to Ticketmaster about the ticket “exchange,” I found that my order had been “canceled,” but now I had the delicious opportunity to order worse seats for far more money. The humidity in Burbank that day came from all the steam pouring out of my ears. And then, to add insult to injury, as though the bait and switch weren’t bad enough, the refund didn’t come until two weeks after promised, meaning they banked my money the entire time and took a float on it.

Yes, Pee-wee and his management team and everyone else involved will be getting a letter from the state department of consumer affairs as soon as I file a case.

I’m going back to mourning Soupy Sales now.

Last night for about the 10th year in a row, my friend and I went to Knott’s Scary Farm. Want to know what was truly scary? How few people were there. In past years, the event has been sold out and you ran the risk of being turned away if you didn’t buy in advance or scalping tickets. This year? The Vampire Lestat would have starved to death looking for warm bodies. The effects of the recession (and increased competition from Universal Studios’ offering) was spooky.

Here I am outside Uncle Bobo’s Big Top of the Bizarre.

And here’s one of Uncle Bobo’s evil clowns making sure he’s on the schedule. I don’t blame him. All across the land, 1 out of 8 evil clowns is out of work.

If you’ve ever tried to find a good business application for the iPhone using the App Store, you’re no doubted tempted to say, “There’s some crApp for that.” Whoever said that every library should post a sign warning users about all the bad advice that could be found within would have a field day with the range of apps for the iPhone.

But now we have this: The no-junk business iPhone apps finder.

Some people in Maine are campaigning against equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Let’s hear what an 86-year-old World War II vet and lifelong Republican who fought on Omaha Beach has to say about equal rights.

Why do I work in the theatre? Yes, I love the thrum of immediate, live, audience response. But tonight, again, I wondered if maybe it isn’t the actors who keep me coming back. The good, competent, skilled, professional, incredibly talented actors who are fun to work with because they have incredible passion for what they do and because they can channel up human expression and the depths of our experience and present it to us in ways that are eerily true and unexpected.

Case in point:  this guy, my friend Brian Newkirk.

A little background:

I have known and worked with Brian Newkirk for about 12 years. I don’t know how many plays we’ve done together now with me serving as director or producer, and he may have been in one or two of the plays I’ve written as well and I’ve honestly forgotten, and if so, I apologize, but it just seems that we’ve done countless projects together. For all 12 years, Brian has been the consummate pro. I know that people who don’t work with actors all the time have this stereotype that actors are flakes. Neurotic, drooling, pampered, skittish, impossible flakes. No — those are stars (and just some of them). Actors — real actors — do things like show up on time, and know their lines, and give their all, and will do anything for a good part, and ask for little in return except maybe that you respect their craft. Sometimes you get a person who is both actor and star; I did three gigs with Alfred Molina, and I can tell you, he is a star and an actor. There are plenty of other examples, too. But to do theatre, you’d better be an actor. There’s no one there to bail you out, and there’s nobody who’s going to yell, “Cut,” and there’s no fixing your performance in post.

Which brings me back to Brian Newkirk. During the rehearsal of “The Incident Report,” a world-premiere play by EM Lewis that I’m directing, one of my actors took ill. Throughout the weeks of rehearsal, he kept going to doctors and hospitals and labs and getting every test known to man — and still made it to rehearsals and even made it to opening night before, finally, two days ago, he was hospitalized with, wait for it, a heart infection. Yes, an infection in his heart. And he still came to opening night and blew me and everybody else away, before he finally got diagnosed with something so serious that there are miles of tubes and other artificial plumbing now running in and out of his chest in a hospital at UCLA. So, Monday, two nights before the next performance, enter Brian Newkirk, who nobly agreed to go on in this other actor’s stead. How many rehearsals did Brian get with me? None — unless you count the “rehearsal” we did today over the phone.  Yes, I have now done everything one can do as a stage director on behalf of “the show must go on,” because I have now rehearsed an understudy over the phone. And by “rehearsed,” I mean we discussed his character arc and his intentions and an approach to the character, in about 15 minutes. And tonight, two days after getting tapped to go on for the rest of this run, and with one linethrough with his fellow actors yesterday and 15 minutes on the phone with me today, Brian Newkirk went on tonight. No script in hand, all of his lines and his blocking committed to memory. And he was fantastic.

I love this story. Don’t  you love this story? Because don’t we all like to believe that if you just put your back into it and your heart and soul, you can do amazing things?

I knew I’d forgotten to mention two other critters encountered on our trip.

Because we were in the high desert, it figured that this guy would run across our path (which he did).

And while we didn’t see his arch-nemesis, his constant yammering at night certainly kept my dog entertained.