By MARK KENNEDY, AP Entertainment Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Some people see the glass as half full and some as half empty. Marc Shaiman is something else entirely.

“I’m not even happy with the glass,” he says with a laugh.

The award-winning Hollywood and Broadway composer and lyricist cheerfully likes to call himself an “Eeyore” and “a card-carrying pessimist” despite many of his biggest dreams coming true.

“Just as soon as something good happens, something bad’s going to happen,” he tells The Associated Press. “I am always waiting for that other shoe to drop, and it inevitably drops.”

His career and personal ups and downs are on full display this winter with Tuesday’s publication of his memoir, “Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner,” which is filled with funny stories from a man who has helped fuel popular movies and musicals for decades.

“I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot and I’ve been lucky enough to have an outrageous longevity. I thought, ‘Let me write it down, finally,’” he says.

This cover image released by Regalo Press shows “Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories from a Sore Winner,” a memoir by Marc Shaiman. (Regalo Press via AP)

Tales of Bette Midler, Stephen Sondheim and the ‘South Park’ guys

The memoir charts the New Jersey-born musical prodigy’s rise from Bette Midler’s musical director in his teens to scoring such films as “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Mary Poppins Returns” and Broadway shows like “Hairspray” and “Catch Me If You Can.”

He’s worked with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Luther Vandross, Raquel Welch and Rob Reiner, sparred with producer Scott Rudin and had a spat with Nora Ephron (“I’m certain she’s in heaven, telling all the angels she doesn’t like harps,” he writes). He also played at the White House and was a force in the early days of “Saturday Night Live.”

There was the time in 1999 that he got legendary composer Stephen Sondheim so high on pot at a party in his apartment that the iconic composer collapsed three times. “I’ve killed Stephen Sondheim,” he thought to himself. (Sondheim asked him to tell the story only after he died.)

He tells the story of hearing Meryl Streep repeatedly working on a song for “Mary Poppins Returns.” Moved, he and his writing partner, Scott Williams, knocked on her door to say how impressed they were by her dedication to rehearse. “Well, guys, fear can be a powerful motivator,” she told them.

“I’m mostly just trying to show how human everyone is — even these bold-faced names,” Shaiman, a two-time Grammy winner and two-time Emmy winner, says in the interview.

Shaiman isn’t above mocking himself, as he does for becoming an inveterate pothead and cocaine user. “I should go into the Guinness Book of World Records for being the only person who put on weight while being a cocaine addict,” he writes.

There are stories about how a misunderstanding over an unpaid bill with Barbra Streisand left him shaken for days and the time he insulted Harry Connick Jr. (Both would later reconcile.)

Then there was the time he found himself dressed in an ostentatious powder-blue suit and feather boa alongside Matt Stone and Trey Parker on a red carpet for “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” — they were dressed as Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez.

One lesson from Shaiman: ‘Show up’

One lesson Shaiman hopes to teach aspiring artists is to go for it: “What you can do is show up. Show up to everything. Say yes to everything because I’m a good example of that.”

He tells the story of Midler organizing a world tour and offering his services but being told she was only hiring local Los Angeles people. So he withdrew all his money from the bank, hopped on a flight from New York and called her from a phone booth: “I’m in L.A. Where’s rehearsal?”

“Even if you don’t get the job, keep your spirit up because someone in that room is going to remember you for another thing. That’s the thing I think to really learn from the book,” he says.

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As a sign of Shaiman’s pull on Broadway, the audiobook will feature performances by Crystal, Short, Matthew Broderick, Megan Hilty, Nathan Lane, Katharine McPhee and Ben Whishaw, among others.

“I had included a lot of lyrics in the book and then I suddenly realized, ‘What, am I going to sing them all or speak them all?’ So I started calling friends, some who had sung those songs and some who had sung the demos,” he says.

Crystal met Shaiman at “Saturday Night Live” and quickly hit it off. In a separate interview, Crystal called his friend funny and quick to improvise, with an almost photographic memory of music.

“Look at his range: From ‘Misery’ to the beautiful score from ‘The American President.’ And I brought him in on ‘61(asterisk)’ and then the ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ score,” Crystal says. “He’s just so uniquely talented as an artist.”

Despite being a Tony Award winner in 2003 with “Hairspray” and earning two other nominations for “Catch Me If You Can” in 2011 and “Some Like It Hot” in 2023, Shaiman is flustered by Broadway.

His last two shows — “Smash” and “Some Like It Hot” — earned great reviews but closed early, a victim of high costs and fickle audiences.

“I wish the shows kind of stunk and I could go, ‘Oh, man, that really stunk. People are really not liking this,’” he says. “But when they’re enjoying it?”

Shaiman really has nothing else to prove and yet he laughs that his skin has gotten thinner — not thicker — over the years. He’d like to take it easy, but that’s not what Eeyores do.

“I don’t know how well I’ll actually do with retirement, but I’d like to give it a try.”

By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Woe to the cookie, cake or waffle lover who discovers, often after years of stomach upset, fatigue and skin issues, that the culprit of their health issues is gluten, the protein found in grains like wheat, barley and rye.

Most everything you find in a bakery, grocery store cookie aisle or on the sweet side of a breakfast menu is made with flour. Which means that those with gluten sensitivities or allergies are often out of luck when it comes to sweet treats.

One of my sons has celiac disease so I’m always on the lookout for gluten-free products that don’t include hidden sources of gluten such as soy sauce or malt vinegar and actually taste good, or at least good enough to justify the high cost. (Gluten-free cereals, pasta and snacks can be up to 139% more expensive than their gluten-containing counterparts, according to the nonprofit Celiac Disease Foundation.)

Dilettoso, a gluten-free baking mix brand founded by Italian nutritionist Stefania Dilettoso in 2024, offers a tasty and super-convenient solution for the home cook.

Dilettoso baking mixes, which come in Vava Vanilla, Choc-o-Lotta and Bella Berry flavors, are an easy way to make a quick and easy gluten-free breakfast for your child. (Gretchen McKay/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/TNS)

Made with a blend of finely ground organic whole oat and brown rice flours, organic tapioca starch and natural flavorings, its Amore mixes are low-fat, preservative-free and because no sugar is added, fairly low cal (a serving counts just 120 calories).

For many people, texture is just as important as taste in baked goods. Because these mixes are made with naturally absorbent oat flour, the batter retains its hydration and bakes up light and fluffy. When it comes to breakfast foods, that translates into pancakes and waffles that rise beautifully, with an airy, light interior.

They’re available in three kid-friendly flavors — Choco-Lotta, Bella Berry and Vava Vanilla — and can used to make pancakes and waffles with the addition of water or milk (and an egg, if you want the extra protein). They also can be used as a gluten-free base for cookies, brownies, cakes and muffins with the addition of other ingredients.

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One 10-ounce box of the Amore mixes — Italian for “love” — makes around 15 4-inch mini waffles or a half-dozen 7-inch regular waffles.

We tried the Vava Vanilla variety, which like the other mixes is leavened with baking soda and cream of tartar.

My toddler grandson gobbled them down just as quickly as the “regular” pancakes he gets to eat on weekends with my husband and me at Eat’n Park. But the real thumbs up came from my son, who said they were “pretty good” for a gluten-free product.

However, their price means they will probably be reserved for special occasions. They were $13.95 per box on Amazon (or $35 for a three-pack and $49.50 for a six-pack). That’s nearly $2 a waffle or 93 cents per mini waffle.

©2026 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Edward Lotterman

You can take an applied economist away from their computer but you cannot stop their brain from recognizing economics as they travel our nation. Here are examples from rambling from St. Paul to Austin, Texas.

Overlooking the Missouri River in Atchison, Kan., just below Amelia Earhart’s childhood home, one sees why grain trucks from South Dakota and southwest Minnesota drive northeast to the Twin Cities before shipping grain toward New Orleans. This observation helps understand why we now are wasting billions deepening more seaports than we need.

Barge-loading docks on the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa, are only half as far by truck from South Dakota or southwest Minnesota as ones in the Twin Cities. Even those downriver in Omaha, Neb., are nearer than Savage or Shakopee. Driving south toward these Missouri river ports is more on the way to the Gulf of Mexico than the Twin Cities. Yet, despite spending billions improving navigability on the Missouri, grain shipments on it dwindle to near nothing. What gives?

Yes, topography disadvantages the Missouri. But we had already spent barge loads of dollars improving the Mississippi and Ohio rivers for transport. That engendered political demands for the same on the Missouri. That is hard for Congress to resist.

Start back two centuries. Steamboats on readily navigable interior rivers jump started a century of rapid economic development. New Orleans formed a natural seaport. From there, steamboats of diminishing sizes could make their way up the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri rivers and smaller ones like the Tennessee, Arkansas and even the Wabash. Small steamboats made it to Mankato and to Fort Benton, Mont.

Cheap transportation facilitated selling farm, forest and mine outputs early on. Riverboats brought household supplies and raw materials for new industries.

Railroads were the eventual alternatives for extending shipments far from navigable rivers. Over time, steamboat service shrank back. But then, diesel-powered towboats pushing covered barges supplanted Mark Twain-era sternwheelers and deck cargos multiplied the payoff of low-cost water transport.

Congress funded initial construction for a series of locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, in June 1930, before the Depression really hit. But public works spending always has political support. Its employment-boosting potential attracted both presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. By 1940, the system was complete from Alton, Ill., to coal and petroleum docks below the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

Similar work was done on the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. The Arkansas was being made navigable to Tulsa, Okla. A large hydroelectric and flood control dam was built at Fort Peck in northeastern Montana. Destructive floods in 1943 prompted funding of five more “main stem” dams in the Dakotas, completed by 1960.

Thus, making the Missouri as navigable as the Mississippi and the Ohio seemed sensible. Measured in 2026 dollars, billions were spent. But the Missouri was always a wild river twitching its bed from side to side across its flood plain. Six large dams upstream did make flows more regular. Yet floods in 1951, 1952, 1984 and 1993 still shifted the main channel enough to push Nebraska farm runoff into Kansas and vice versa. Ongoing dredging cost tens of millions.

Topography is the culprit. From the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri near St. Louis, the Mississippi rises only 330 feet in elevation to reach St. Paul. The Missouri rises nearly 700 feet to reach Omaha and then Sioux City. Mileages are similar, but the Missouri is steeper and its current faster.

That would be true even without 26 locks and dams on the Mississippi. The cumulative lift of these locks roughly equals the difference in elevation between St. Louis and St. Paul. The Corps of Engineers essentially built a stair-step of flat lakes joined by locks. Water moves south, so there is a current, but it is a mile or two per hour versus four to six on the Missouri. Anyone who has tried to paddle a canoe upstream knows what that means.

Why not build the same on the Missouri? The flat topography over most stretches make that impossible just as it would for the Mississippi itself south of St. Louis. The next best alternative is building structures that anchor the main channel in place and deepen it enough for barges. The most common measure is “wing dams.” These look like jetties or breakwaters jutting into the river from the bank that one wants to preserve. The dams are constructed of pilings driven into the riverbed with rock piled on either side.

Such wing dams are visible from the house in Atchison in which aviator Amelia Earhart was born. Every quarter of a mile in the river below is a wing dam projecting out and downstream from the bank on the Missouri side. Each is 300 or 400 feet long. Drive the river road or look at Google Earth and they go on for miles.

So there is a channel usually deep enough for barges needing nine feet. But few travel it, at least not carrying grain downriver or fertilizer up. The confined river is deep enough for barges, but often very narrow compared to the Mississippi. Sharp bends are numerous. Towboats must fight the current going upstream and fight to maintain control coming down when the river is high and fast. Instead of the nine 1,500-ton barge tows usual on the upper Mississippi, your see two or four on the Missouri. But crew numbers for each towboat are the same.

The result is that Missouri River barge cargo is dominated by sand and gravel carried short distances for local use, just as barges from Grey Cloud Island used to come to concrete plants in northeast Minneapolis. The most recent year’s stats for Sioux City list about 160 barges loaded for movement to St Louis or beyond. Numbers from the Twin Cities vary from 3,300 to over 5,000 in recent years.

So the dreams — or delusions — of past officials proved false. The U.S. Treasury laid out billions with little payback. Didn’t anyone foresee this?

Yes, there were skeptics. But Congress naturally errs on the side of funding too many projects. If you guarantee a nine-foot channel on two or three major rivers it is hard to deny it to one more.

We face the same situation right now with harbors. The original 1914 Panama Canal locks accommodated vessels up to 40 feet in draft. That largely was to accommodate warships. Most cargo vessels drew 25 to 30 feet at most. U.S. Harbors were dredged accordingly.

Those lock dimensions defined a “Panamax” ship. But many new tankers, bulk carriers and container ships are built to “post-Panamax” dimensions that need 50 feet of water. In virtually all harbors, deepening to 40 to 50 feet instead costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The bigger the ships, the fewer there are. We really don’t need every port to accommodate them. But if you fund the dredging of Mobile, Ala., and Miami, it is hard to consign Savanna, Ga., or Galveston, Texas, to secondary status. Thus we are dredging out at least 15 ports to a depth of 50 feet or more. Little of the additional capacity will be used.

The same phenomenon occurs with cities that want their airports to be “international” ones. That means the federal government has to supply U.S. Immigration, Customs and USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service personnel and facilities to handle incoming flights, even if only package-tour charters returning from Belize or St. Lucia. But politics are such that these local requests are hard to refuse.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By Lisa Pham, Bloomberg News

One llama is sprawled on the grass with its neck craned, basking in a patch of sunshine. Another stands on a dirt hill, ears flattened defiantly. A third rushes to greet visitors with a friendly nuzzle.

This isn’t a petting zoo. The furry beasts are in Belgium for work.

Scientists have discovered the potential of the animals’ antibodies to thwart multiple diseases, and now drug developers are collectively plowing billions of dollars into a field that may yield a fresh generation of life-changing medicines. The targets include some hard-to-treat conditions like cancer, nerve pain and a chronic skin ailment.

The llamas are a vital part of the experiment. In between dust baths and grazing, they get injections to trigger the production of their precious antibodies. The animals are some of the few to produce the tiny proteins, dubbed nanobodies, which scientists praise as easy to produce, manipulate and engineer.

“They have this Lego-like nature that you can just snap them together any way you want to, which is really unique,” says Mark Lappe, the chief executive of U.S. biotech Inhibrx Biosciences Inc. “If you try to do that with regular antibodies, it’s wildly complex.”

The field is burgeoning, albeit quietly for now. A Sanofi drug for a rare autoimmune blood disorder was the first medicine developed using llama antibodies to hit the market. AstraZeneca Plc recently released results for an experimental medicine to treat another autoimmune dysfunction that could be a potential blockbuster. And U.S. pharma giant Eli Lilly & Co. has partnered with Belgian biotech firm Confo Therapeutics to gain rights to a product exploring a new approach to pain management.

“I do think nanobodies will be a mainstay of many portfolios going forward,” says Michael Quigley, Sanofi’s chief scientific officer. “Sanofi from our perspective is leading the field.”

Inhibrx, for its part, is working on a therapeutic that can induce the death of some tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue — a progress over some existing cancer regimens. The shares more than doubled after a study showed patients with a rare type of bone cancer and no treatment options lived longer on the experimental drug without the disease progressing. The treatment is undergoing tests for several types of tumors.

The immune system of all mammals produces antibodies to thwart viral and bacterial attacks. Those made by llamas and other members of the camelid family can squeeze into tighter spots and better penetrate tissue than human ones, because they’re smaller and simpler. Some have been reported to cross the blood-brain barrier, eliciting hope for neurological diseases.

For the llamas, it’s not necessarily a bad job. They get injected with an antigen a couple of times and some weeks later, when their immune system has reacted, a vial of blood gets drawn that contains antibodies scientists will then tweak in the lab.

When they get older, they might go on to a second career in wildfire prevention or as livestock guardians. Some will get adopted, while others will simply retire.

“We have a llama pension plan,” Cedric Ververken, the chief executive officer of closely held Confo, said in an interview. “Once we’ve immunized them and have generated the antibodies, we want to make sure that the llama still has a happy life.”

A look behind the scenes confirms the animals at one large farm in Belgium live freely on a big, partly wooded terrain divided into multiple enclosures, each with a shed.

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The llamas live in herds with one dominant member. They are social animals and their mobile ears betray their state of mind, much like horses’: ears slanted forward, they’re curious, ears flattened back, they’re alert and somewhat suspicious. Unlike horses, they can kick sideways. One testy female, Jane, is known to spit at her carer if her daily serving of hay and pellets isn’t delivered fast enough.

The exact location of the farms is often kept secret, though the use of llamas in medical research is regulated.

The beasts also play a big role when it comes to branding. Inhibrx has a picture of the furry creatures in a brochure about its clinical pipeline. The investor presentation of Swiss company MoonLake Immunotherapeutics includes friendly-looking cartoon animals. Dutch-incorporated biotech Argenx SE, which deals with another type of llama antibody, also shows cartoon images on its website, including one wearing a beret to denote some of the animals they use live in the south of France.

“People love the llama,” Tim Van Hauwermeiren, Argenx’s chief executive officer, said in an interview. “They want to know all about the llama. Retail investors want a stuffed llama when they go home.”

Much of the nanobody activity is rooted in or near Belgium because the Free University of Brussels is where the antibodies were first discovered. The original findings related to dromedaries, but researchers soon found that other types of camels, llamas and alpacas shared the same properties, as did sharks.

The university, a large block of mismatched buildings on the outskirts of Brussels, has given birth to a number of the field’s first biotechs along with the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology. One example is Ablynx NV, which Sanofi bought in 2018 for €3.9 billion ($4.6 billion) after outbidding Novo Nordisk A/S. Lilly’s partner Confo is another.

The Brussels campus still houses work on nanobodies — a term trademarked by Ablynx. VIB Nanobody VHH Core, which engineers these camelid antibodies for pharma and biotech clients, works out of a set of barracks in a leafy corner of the campus. The group focuses mostly on treatments and diagnostics for cancer and inflammatory diseases, but it’s also investigating nanobodies for other applications, including a new type of contraceptive for the Gates Foundation.

“Everywhere you have a target an antibody can bind to, you can have a nanobody application,” says Steve Schoonooghe, one of VIB’s scientists. “Give us a target on a cancer cell and we can make a nanobody against it.” One goal, like at Inhibrx, is to tackle tumors while avoiding the damage wrought by chemotherapy.

For now, the nanobody world has yet to prove it can deliver a blockbuster. Sanofi’s Cablivi drug was a trailblazer, but after about seven years on the market for a blood-clotting disorder it has only garnered sales of €202 million in the first three quarters of last year. The French drugmaker has stopped research on five experimental nanobody drugs in recent years, although it’s still working on others. Two in particular are undergoing tests for ailments including asthma, diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease.

The field has endured setbacks as well. MoonLake’s market value crashed in September after a study of its experimental skin treatment prompted analysts to conclude it was no better than a rival medicine.

“It’s important to remember the overarching arc of drug discovery and development, and the maturation of any given platform, which takes time,” says Quigley, Sanofi’s chief scientific officer.

A big hit could help turbo-charge things, and AstraZeneca’s experimental rare-disease drug gefurulimab is billed as having that potential. The medicine could become a blockbuster in 2031 and is one of four nanobody medicines the UK drugmaker is developing.

“From my perspective, nanobodies represent a very important new tool in our toolkit,” said Seng Cheng, head of research and product development at Alexion, Astra’s rare-disease business. “We still haven’t tapped all the potential of what it can offer.”

The need to work with actual llamas could soon be made obsolete by artificial intelligence, but for now the animals still serve a purpose.

Inhibrx’s Lappe estimates the California-based biotech has immunized more than one hundred llamas located in rural San Diego County. Like some others, they lease the animals instead of owning them because “we’re drug developers — we’re not really farmers.”

—With assistance from Ashleigh Furlong.

©2026 Bloomberg News. Visit at bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.