My muse must have taken the last couple of weeks off

... and gone to Florida on vacation or something, because I cannot think of one solitary thing to write about. Well, that is not exactly true, Mabel. I thought of several things to write about and started off with high hopes, only to end in despair. I gave up on each one of them as a bad job, and discarded them all, gave them the old heave-ho. Had I been writing with an actual pen on actual paper instead of pecking away on this keyboard, there would be by now a large and growing pile of crumpled-up paper balls in the corner of the room, my inability to toss anything through the basketball hoop neé wastebasket in my office being legendary. Michael Jordan I am not, or Larry Bird, or Kobe Bryant, or Wilt Chamberlain, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Heck, Mabel, I'm not even LeBron James.

We are apparently in the midst of creating a new tradition at our house. For the third Sunday in a row we have not turned the television set on. The silence is wonderful, only it is not really so silent. I can hear the clock on the mantel ticking, and the grandfather clock competing with it from across the room, and the refrigerator running in the kitchen. I can hear the dog next door barking, and a little girl walking past our house talking to someone else, and our little dog Abby breathing as she sleeps in my arms. It is absolutely amazing what one can hear when one's television set is turned off. I remember reading several years ago that Larry Hagman -- surely you remember him, Mabel, he was the actor who played J.R. Ewing on Dallas and he was also in real life the son of Mary Martin of South Pacific fame, that Larry Hagman -- did not speak at all on Sundays because he wanted to rest his vocal cords, but he did whistle. Seems counter-productive to me, but what do I know?

When the well runs dry and the muse is away, there's always trivia.

I suppose young people today do not even know who Mary Martin is, or rather was, but she was the original Nellie Forbush in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific on Broadway in 1949, the original Peter Pan in their Peter Pan in 1954, and the original Maria von Trapp in their The Sound of Music in 1959. She was not Anna in their The King and I, that was Gertrude Lawrence, nor was she in Carousel or Oklahoma!, but there for a while she helped Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lot of money. If people think of those musicals nowadays at all, they probably think of the film versions, not the theatrical productions. Mitzi Gaynor played Nellie Forbush in the film version of South Pacific instead of Mary Martin, and Rossano Brazzi played Emil de Becque instead of Ezio Pinza, although Giorgio Tozzi dubbed all the singing that was supposed to be Rosanno Brazzi.

No one has ever explained to my satisfaction why a French planter named Emil de Becque would be portrayed by an Italian non-acting singer in the theater and an Italian non-singing actor in the film version.

Moving right along on our stroll down memory lane, in the film version of The Sound of Music Julie Andrews famously had the role of Maria von Trapp instead of Mary Martin and many theater people were appalled. What goes around comes around, though. Several years later after Julie Andrews played Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady on Broadway, Audrey Hepburn was chosen to play Eliza in the film version (this time Marni Nixon dubbed the singing) and many theater people were appalled once again.

Why I remember this knd of stuff instead of, say, the last 25 winners of football's Heisman trophy or the last 25 Final Four in basketball's annual March Madness or the last 25 winners of the Kentucky Derby is anybody's guess. By the way, a horse named Medina Spirit won the Kentucky Derby last Saturday afternoon in what amounted to an equine version of the Final Four as you can see right here (0:44).

Speaking of whistling, Mabel, did you know there is a kind of whistling that does not involve the lips? Well, there is and it is called laryngeal whistling. Here, in fact, is an article about it from the late 19th-century, a presentation made by a Dr. J.O. Roe, MD, to the 1881 session of the American Laryngological Association in Rochester, New York.

You must admit, folks, that I go to great lengths to keep you entertained, even when my muse is on vacation.