"I've never seen a beautiful lady reading The Guide... so far away from the TV... you must really like television...."

Goodbye to the actor Sam Lloyd, who has died at the age of 56.

Lloyd is best remembered for his portrayal of lawyer Ted Buckland on the comedy-drama series Scrubs and the sitcom Cougar Town. He and his uncle [Christopher Lloyd] both guest starred on Malcolm in the Middle, Lloyd as a housing lawyer and his uncle as Hal's father. The two also guested on The West Wing, Lloyd requesting the White House to release information about UFOs and his uncle as a constitutional law expert... Aside from acting, Lloyd was an accomplished singer with the a cappella group The Blanks, who made many appearances on Scrubs under the name "The Worthless Peons" (also known as "Ted's Band"). He also played the bass guitar in a Beatles tribute group called the Butties; although right-handed, he learned to play bass left-handed like Beatles bassist Paul McCartney to maintain authenticity.

"This is my band. We're all working from different departments in the hospital":

Plague forces cancellation of play about the plague.

"Madison’s Overture Center for the Arts has cancelled... The Amateurs, Forward Theater Company’s play about a troupe of actors trying to avoid the Black Plague in 14th Century Europe...." (Wisconsin State Journal).

The play ran in NYC in 2018. From the review of the NY performance in the NYT. The play within the play is called "Noah's Ark." In that play, the actor playing God is "a mellifluous blowhard named Larking" who is doubting God's existence because of the Black Plague. The troupe encounters problems filling the roles as actors die.

In a moment of stubborn curiosity that alters the aesthetic history of mankind, [the actress playing Mrs. Noah] asks what would happen if Mrs. Noah just didn’t feel like getting on that ark one day.

What would happen, [the playwright, Jordan Harrison] suggests, is the Renaissance, or very nearly. The beginning of self-consciousness, he argues, is the beginning of enlightenment. If this sounds a bit heady for a rollicking tragicomedy in which pratfalls and death throes are tumbled together, that is part of the play’s unusual scheme....

[I]t really is a thrilling, expansive, world-changing moment in a very sneaky play when [the character playing Mrs. Noah] first asks, What’s my motivation? Which is a question you can only begin to contemplate after asking, What is God’s?