The Entire Staff of The Stand will be focused on the WSLC Legislative Conference today, so there will be no Daily News today. We’ll be back on Monday. Until then…

T.G.I.F.

► On this date in 1956, a virtually unknown 21-year-old named Elvis Presley made his first-ever appearance on television. It was on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show — live from New York on Saturday night! A few months later, he appeared on more popular programs like the Milton Berle Show and the Steve Allen Show. It was during one of those performances that Presley halted an uptempo rendition of “Hound Dog” with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow grinding version accentuated with exaggerated gyrations of his hips. Ben Gross of the New York Daily News wrote that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos.” The pearl-clutching critics may have been scandalized, but by the end of that year Presley was a national sensation. Here’s that first TV appearance from 66 years ago today.