2000-12-29 - 8:32 a.m.

Victor Borge died last week. I remember snickering over My Favorite Intervals in my bedroom when I was a kid, and his hilarious punctuation-out-loud vignettes on Sesame Street.

Thomas G. Yohe, the creator of Schoolhouse Rock, also died last week. My favorite one of the lot is "Interplanet Janet" - so I watched it a couple of times yesterday at an SR site (hurrah for Quicktime!). It's even more fun now that I'm old enough to analyze how cleverly crafted and well-produced it is...

I never knew before that the lyricist and composer was Lynn Ahrens, whose name other theatre junkies may recognize as the co-author of Ragtime and Seussical. (Just talking about it makes me want to spend my next vacation in Manhattan...) She also wrote and performed "The Preamble" - which I remember my dormmates at Chicago singing to themselves over and over during one of the Scavenger Hunts as they attempted to replicate the opening lines of the Constitution--entirely in Alphabits. "We the people..."