{"id":94600,"date":"2026-01-04T23:21:16","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T07:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/?p=94600"},"modified":"2026-01-04T23:21:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T07:21:16","slug":"ghosts-of-christmas-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/blog\/2026\/01\/04\/ghosts-of-christmas-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts of Christmas Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just before 2025 came to a close, <strong>Barry Manilow <\/strong>did five benefit Christmas concerts at the <em>McCallum Theatre <\/em>in Palm Desert.&nbsp; It was after those shows that he revealed his doctor had detected a spot on his lung.&nbsp; It was diagnosed as stage one lung cancer.&nbsp; Barry had surgery, the spot was removed, and signs are good the cancer hasn\u2019t spread.&nbsp; He hopes to be back onstage at the <em>Westgate Las Vegas <\/em>in time for Valentine\u2019s Day weekend.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dick Van Dyke <\/strong>turned 100 in December and let it be known that he still has professional aspirations.&nbsp; He\u2019d like to play Ebenezer Scrooge.&nbsp; He even posted a photo as the lead in <strong><em>A Christmas Carol<\/em><\/strong>.&nbsp; While I would love to see Dick in one more project, I suspect insurance would be an issue, as it always has been for actors of a certain age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just before 2025 came to a close, Barry Manilow did five benefit Christmas concerts at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert.&nbsp; It was after those shows that he revealed his doctor had detected a spot on his lung.&nbsp; It was diagnosed as stage one lung cancer.&nbsp; Barry had surgery, the spot was removed, and signs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94601,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94600\/revisions\/94601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.billymasters.com\/custom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}