If you are of a certain age, you will happily recall the golden days of live television. And whether you can remember those days or not, you will have the opportunity, through Quad City Music Guild’s production of My Favorite Year, to go back in time to the year 1954, and experience the trials and tribulations of producing a weekly segment of a fictional TV show titled King Kaiser’s Comedy Hour.

From the moment you step foot into the Playcrafters Barn Theatre for its production of Mama Won’t Fly – a comedy by the popular team of Jamie Wooten, Jessie Jones, and Nicholas Hope – you’ll hear Route 66 cruising music that gets you in the mood to take a road trip. The show itself subsequently delivers that trip, plus a few extra surprises.

It’s 8:08 a.m. when comedian and former Quad Cities resident Tammy Pescatelli calls for our arranged interview, and right off the bat, she apologizes, unnecessarily, for running eight minutes behind schedule.

“I’m calling you late because the principal from my son’s school called,” she says. “Whenever you hear that the principal is calling, you get nervous. First, you see that the school is calling, so you’re like, ‘Oh no ... is he sick?’ And then when it’s the principal, you’re like, ‘Oh, God ... what now?’ I mean, he’s never been in trouble, but you know ... . You become a kid when the principal calls your house.”

It turned out, however, that the principal was calling with good news: Pescatelli’s son Luca, who turns eight on February 26, had qualified for the gifted program. I tell her that’s great, and also congratulate Pescatelli on her 2013 comedy special Finding the Funny, the Netflix-streaming title I’ve viewed and enjoyed numerous times over.

“Then you know how excited I am to find out that my son’s in the gifted program,” she says upon hearing that I’ve seen her stand-up act. “’Cause you know the other side of his genes.”

On a cold night indicative of February, weary of politicians and the weather, I escaped to Rock Island for the latest District Theatre offering Moon Over Buffalo. A Tony-nominated play that debuted on Broadway in 1995, author Ken Ludwig's farce is a comedy of silly, exaggerated humor, and probably not to every theatre-goer’s taste. But in my opinion, and judging by the belly laughs coming from Friday's opening-night audience, the humor as performed here clearly worked for a number of us.