Table of contents for December 17, 2023 in Parade

Dick Van Dyke started under contract to CBS in 1955 with the CBS morning show, followed by The Dick Van Dyke Show and Diagnosis Murder, which adds up to almost 70 years affiliated with the network. In return, CBS is throwing a 98th birthday special in his honor, Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic (Dec. 21 on CBS and Paramount+). The two-hour tribute will showcase songs and archival footage from the best of his nearly century-long career, including Mary Poppins, Bye Bye Birdie and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as well as his TV series and guest starring roles. But first, we take our own look back at his life with these fun facts. He made his acting debut playing baby Jesus in a church Christmas pageant. He cried through…

THE PIZZA YEARSY Nov. 10, 1991 “I l-o-o-o-v-e pizza!” an 11-year-old Macaulay Culkin, who was starring in the film My Girl, told Parade. Pepperoni was his pizza of choice. “Just don’t add anchovies,” he warned. Pizza, the magazine reported, was second only to hamburgers as America’s most-popular fast food. Oct. 15, 2017 That’s a 24-year-old rising country star Kelsea Ballerini on Parade talking about her favorite snack. “Sometimes inspiration can happen when you’re casually hanging out with your songwriter friends. Four of us decided, ‘Let’s order some pizza.’ We wrote a song called ‘Love Me Like You Mean It,’ which got me a record deal and my first No. 1 song. So, cheers to pizza!” Nov. 11, 2001 Comic-actor Ray Romano and the whole wacky cast of Everybody Loves Raymond…

Send questions to marilyn@parade.com Numbrix ® Complete 1 to 81 so the numbers follow a horizontal or vertical path—no diagonals. For more Numbrix puzzles, go to Parade.com/numbrix. Dear Marilyn, My natural temperature is 96.8°F. If I take my temperature, and the thermometer reads 98.6°F, do I have a fever? If the thermometer reads 101°F, is that like a fever of 102.8°F for an average person? —Sandra Greenwood, Lancaster, Pennsylvania One’s body temperature varies during the day, with the low typically occurring around 4 a.m. and peaking in the late afternoon to early evening. But let’s say your daily average is indeed 96.8°F, you visit your doctor for an annual checkup, and your temperature is 98.6°F. Even if you tell the doctor that your usual temperature is 96.8°F, will he or…

Your album has an interesting title, Love Ain’t Pretty. Is that the theme? When you are little, love is pretty. It’s the little candy hearts, the valentines you give to somebody, but as you get older you realize that when you love, you leave yourself vulnerable to pain, to loss, to the gamut of emotions you can feel, and it can be devastating. And so, the song lists all those things, but it doesn’t stop there, it says, “Love ain’t pretty, but damn, it’s beautiful.” So, for a while, you think it’s somebody who’s against love. On the contrary; it’s beautiful, it’s deeper, it’s richer than pretty, but you’ve got to give it respect and you’ve got to be ready for anything. That serves very well as the title track…

It didn’t win any Oscars, spawn any sequels or cost as much—or make anything near as much—as the mega-movie released just weeks before it, Titanic. But the little love story called You’ve Got Mail that opened in theaters 25 years ago continues to do something big: It makes people happy. “It’s the greatest film ever made!” effuses Erin Carlson, an entertainment journalist and author of three books on Hollywood history. “It’s my favorite movie of all time. It was such a fantasy for me. I draw so much comfort from Tom and Meg. They make me feel good.” The comforting 1998 romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and written and directed by Nora Ephron “harkened back to those romantic comedies starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Margaret Sullavan…

AMERICAN FICTION (IN LIMITED THEATERS DEC.15, EXPANDING ON DEC. 22) In In his latest outing, American Fiction, Jeffrey Wright gets satirical as Monk, a frustrated novelist who is fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on weary and offensive cultural depictions. So, when the novel he hopes to sell doesn’t because it isn’t “Black” enough, out of spite, he assumes a pen name and crafts an outlandish “Black” book that does, and then gets drawn into the same hypocrisy he was denouncing as it becomes a bestseller. “I thought the script offered a lot for me in terms of a character to wrap myself around, but also in terms of not just the themes, but also the construct, the ways in which the story is told,”…