But who killed it?

Smokey Robinson sang:

Surely you’ve heard by now that the iconic American institution, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will perform its last show this May. That’s when the Big Top will come to a big stop. They will be out of business, killed by the changing entertainment tastes and crushed by animal rights groups. 

Vegas shows such as Caesars Palace’s Absinth mocked the traditional circus.

When the commercials started airing on your local channels in between I Love Lucy episodes you would write down the dates and ask mom or dad to get tickets. It was a wonderful thing in a time before horror movies demonized clowns, turning happy minstrels into something creepy and malevolent (even I have been guilty of that…). It was before PETA decided that circus animals were being humiliated and mistreated. It was before the internet made the circus blasé. It was before showy Cirque du Soleil made traditional circuses seem about as hip as my Members Only jacket.

The post The Circus Has Died appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

Jack Kent Cooke (second from the left) at the Forum Groundbreaking.

Hockey meant more to me than a fan pulling for his team while time passed before my eyes over countless chill-inducing goals, bone crunching fights, and milk-curdling screams. Hockey was family, starting straight at the top of the organizational chart: Jack Kent Cooke.

Many of you might not know Jack Kent Cooke. Cooke was the visionary owner of the Los Angeles Lakers and starting on February 9, 1966, he was the owner of the Kings as well. Lucky me, my dad’s second wife worked for Cook’s Fabulous Forum in Inglewood, California. At some point, she imploded and gave back her title as “dad’s wife”, exchanging it for her new moniker as “Carina, the Mystic Psychic.” I’m not sure what others thought, but to me she was definitely more psychotic than psychic. Yet I digress..

As Stan Kroenke brings the Rams back to St. Louis with grand dreams of Inglewood, let is be known that Cooke was the original King of Inglewood. The Fabulous Forum was regarded as one of the best arena in the United States, a great place to watch a game before corporate suites, stadium sushi, and $35 parking took over the fan experience.

WARNING: Shameless self-promotion coming. In my forthcoming book (When? Don’t ask!), loosely titled “Behind The Mike: Mostly True Stories from the Media Guy” chronicles my time working for the great Jack Kent Cooke. (Did I mention before this is my fifth book in print? There I go digressing again!). Well, enough patting myself on the back because I think I’ve pocketed enough change from these four tomes to pay a month or two of car insurance premiums. Sounds good on paper, but unless you’re J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or E. L. James, don’t quit your day jobs boys and girls.

Perhaps I need to add some initials to my name. Maybe that’s the ticket.

Regardless, here’s an excerpt from the book:

Spending hours learning the intrinsic points of astrology with Carina night after night convinced me she was more psychotic than psychic. Nonetheless, she worked in the ticket office of the Fabulous Forum. What did this mean? It meant that tickets for any Los Angeles Lakers and Kings games or the best concerts in the Southland that weren’t sold out, would be ours for the asking. Although Inglewood is eyesore now, in the mid-seventies, the area had not yet been overrun with urban blight and crime. A five-year-old could still walk four blocks to save three cents on a gallon of fifty-three cent milk and attend professional hockey games, alone. 

And attend I did, to the tune of 200 Lakers and Kings games in three years. We could barely make rent, but I had seats just as good as Dyan Cannon and Jack Nicholson, and I knew more about offsides and rebounding than any six-year-old on Earth. But that wasn’t the best thing about Carina’s job.  

When there was a sold out event in town—something like the circus or the Harlem Globetrotters or Led Zeppelin—I earned my admission by working for a few days in her office. No adult in the office could touch my speed and accuracy stuffing season tickets into envelopes, matching them to the correct address label, affixing postage and getting the mail out by 4:00 P.M. Screw OSHA and whatever child labor laws existed back then, I was the king of direct mail (even at six years old). 

Can you imagine the late Dr. Jerry Buss entrusting a five- or seven-year-old with $5000-a-seat season tickets today? Yeah, I don’t think so. 

The immortal Jack Kent Cooke was a whole different story. 

The 1974 Lakers, Kings and Fabulous Forum were owned by the colorful and eccentric Cooke. He loved sports, also owning the Washington Redskins and a stable of race horses at one point. He was married five times with the last lady being a former Bolivian drug runner forty years younger than him.  

Cooke was the reason everything worked at the Fabulous Forum. He was more than an idea man. He was a doer. Everybody talks about you have to have an idea. Whenever one of his advisors would come to him with a bright idea, the first thing Cooke used to tell his advisors was: “IDEAS ARE OVER-RATED UNLESS YOU HAVE A GUY WHO CAN EXECUTE IT.” 

His people would always come up to him with these ideas. Getting the Beatles back together was brought up a few times while I was around. He would say you have to come up with an entertainment plan that you’re smart enough to execute it. And, he wouldn’t stop there.  

“You don’t have to be brilliant to come up with an idea,” he bellowed in his graveled, yet pitchy voice. “But you DO have to brilliant to come up with an idea and then execute it for fifteen years. There are a million people who open restaurants with great ideas. Sixty percent are closed in two years. So you have to be able to execute.” 

Then he would take a breath before instructing his idea people to “come back to me when you have a plan; not an idea.” 

Cooke was always nice to me. The ladies in his office loved it when he would talk to me and give life lessons. Essentially I was his puppy; a chick magnet if you will. He introduced me to F. Scott Fitzgerald saying that his life was “better than any of that guy’s crappy novel.” He let me turn on the arena lights a time or two. He showed me the preliminary artwork for media guides and the pocket schedules. Jack Kent Cooke gave me my first taste of the media. 

I loved this guy because he was a very hands-on owner; at least with the female staff. As a matter of fact, I can’t recall seeing anyone on his direct staff than was a man. Never saw a guy around him who wasn’t a reporter, player or public relations-type person. 

Controlling the message was key for Cooke; at the office, with reporters, around the media. He wasn’t about to be played by them. It was so important, that he once paid $176 million for the Los Angeles Daily News newspaper.

A couple of times he let me stuff those aforementioned envelopes in his office while being interviewed by the newspapers. He commanded the room with his humor. His colossal entrepreneurial acumen blended effortlessly with his no-nonsense business sense. Cooke handled everything his way. 

And, when the media was around, he owned them quite simply. In this respect, I wanted to be just like him. (I’m still working on that part.)

Excerpted from Behind The Mike: Mostly True Stories from the Media Guy by Michael Lloyd.

Copyright © 2016 by Michael Lloyd.

Excerpted by permission of me, Michael Lloyd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Typos give me nightmares. 
Really they do. 

In my early days as the PR Guy, you would have to get your news releases printed at an offset printing facility. You would have to collate multiple pages together, staple the pages neatly in the upper left hand corner, make a tight z-fold and stuff them into an envelope and mail them out to the media. I did this quite a bit for the Lakers and Jack Kent Cooke in the early seventies as a kid. (If you want these details, you’ll have to buy the book, literally!) Yet I digress as usual.

Anyway…If you noticed a typo, you would have to re-type your work and deliver the new manuscript to the printer and wait for a day for a reprint. It was expensive and your entire release schedule would be blown.

Today, big agencies employ proofreaders who read copy all day long. That’s all they do. They check for typos, grammatical mistakes, and general copy screw-ups. I used to do that. I was pretty good at. Still am. But, it’s a real drag. And the worst part is, it’s nearly impossible to proofread your own work.

Monica? You may never know. She’s undercover.

This blog has a proofreader. Her code name is Monica. I’m on my third Monica, much like Roy Rogers had a bunch of Triggers and Elizabeth Taylor had husbands. I still get nightmares about typos and when I get a text or an email from a reader pointing out a typo, my face sports the ass of the baboon (meaning I turn bright red). I don’t get mad at Monica. After all, you get what you pay for; in this case: nothing.

She’s a great lady. Fun, passionate about her work, and damn smart. She’s undercover and never shows herself to the world. With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to let her vent about proofreading and her life analyzing words.

MEDIA GUY: What happened to the long lost art of proofreading and editing? I’ve seen so many spelling errors on major news sites it saddens me. It wasn’t this bad when most of the news was via the newspaper.

MONICA the PROOFREADER: They say in outer space, no one can hear you scream.  And in cyberspace, no one can hear you screech: “Typo!” The Internet is all about speed of spreading the word. Grammar, sentence structure and typos take a backseat in the mad dash to promote ourselves often and early.

MG: When did proofreading become a non-starter?

MtP: Let’s blame the Internet. Everyone else does. Proofreading become a neglected skill and an unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming step.  It is to the 21st century what blacksmithing was to the 19th. Of course, typographical errors online come in a variety of flavors.  I may flinch when I stumble on one in the New York Times online or in print, but I acknowledge that it’s the price I pay to get reasonably good reporting on the 24/7 Internet clock.  I make the same allowances for the comments I read online attached to e-Commerce product pages or news site articles, now that I know there are thousands who think the verb “to lose” is spelled “to loose” or that “disappointed” packs two ses and two ps or two ses and one p.

MG: Please don’t get me started because English orthography is a bitch.

MtP: Still, you’d think that image-conscious businesses or government agencies would take a slightly fussier stance.  Spelling stuff wrong on an authorized web site or official communication suggests haste or carelessness or indifference.  Those aren’t impressions you want to leave on customers or constituents. But there’s a cost to correctness and clearly it’s too high for some entities in the information business.

MG: Has a typo of yours ever gotten you into trouble?

MtP: I have, and it wasn’t anything obvious! I sent an email to a colleague / ex-boyfriend. It was innocuous, but I signed it with a wink. That’s a simple semi colon and a parenthesis.  Big deal, you say. I say it too. However, I meant to sign it with a smile—that’s a colon and a parenthesis. So long story short, I created this all-day fight for him and his trashy new girlfriend—honest it was really a mistake — all over a semi-colon.

Who would have guessed the semi-colon would have that effect on a life? I mean it’s been sitting on the keyboard since the invention of it. Barely working. Barely making ends meet. Every now and again it would have to work in a bibliography just to pay the rent. But you have to give the semi-colon credit, don’t you? It’s a persistent punctuation mark who never gave up.

MG: Yet you digress…

MtP: Yes, sorry. You get me all revved up over copy! Anyway, he found his way into this argument and, you know, if it had been a colon — with both eyes open — and a parenthesis, it would have been a smiley face and not a problem. So a simple typo and it became a wink and she told him, “You’re still sleeping with her aren’t you?”

“Or her shift button is broken…” he said.

The semi-colon. The bastard child of the period and the comma. “Ah, some day,” the semi-colon must have said. You know, it literally has to look up to the colon. There it is below the colon on the keyboard staring up at it all day long biding its time. I can see it saying “Someday, I’ll separate email addresses and independent clauses and screw up budding relationships.”

The semi-colon is very powerful. Get a wink at the wrong time of the day and it’s on. That never happens with an exclamation point. You could say it’s the Viagra of grammar.

MG: What’s the worst editor you have ever had to work with?

MtP: I had a boss that used to keep me late a lot. When I would hand in my work he always tell me in a creepy voice, “”When God closes a door, he opens a dress.” Yeah, real nice.

MGS: What are some of the biggest mistakes you noticed recently?

MtP: The list is endless. Here are a few:

At a United Kingdom McDonald’s—Yes, grammar issues give me incontinence as well:

Another Walmart home run:

An unnamed framing store:

This is quite a gaff:

MG: What’s the feeling you get when you really crank out a good edit?

MtP: Have you ever had sex so good you say to yourself “someone is going to have a heart attack right here”? That’s the euphoria you get when you catch a really out-of-the-way mistake.

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