october 28 Well, odds are good you'll find a man.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.Sleepless nights! Sleepless nights, I tell you! Well, just one, actually. I have absolutely no patience. And (as Forrest Gump might say) that's all I have to say about that.
Things I will instead talk about happily:
Well, it seems October is going to be the month in which my past happens in my present. When I was about eight or nine, I used to play with the next-door neighbor kids, Steven and Bernard Friedman. Steven was just about my age, and we were both dogged by having younger brothers approximately the same age, so all four of us usually ended up in one anothers' company. I have more memories of being over at their house: They had a picnic table in the basement (ours was mostly laundry and shelves) and a sofa, and we were endlessly doing some kind of "let's put on a show" setup that would take most of the day. We always thought we'd invite the neighborhood to come watch and charge a nickle and be rich; the planning and prep and costumes and union fees (well...) took so long, though, that we never got around to actually having a finished product.
The closest we ever got was (and I still have no idea how we wheedled this out of my dad -- it involved money spent on film and time out of his busy, busy schedule) after a day's worth of prep and costume and union fees, we had Star Wars down to about a two-minute drama. Being the only girl (and with long hair, natch) I could easily be a Princess Leia, Steven (being a little more alpha-male than my brother Craig) could be Luke Skywalker, Bernard could be Han Solo (he had a black vest) and Craig had a brown corduroy winter coat which, if you turned it inside out was quite furry. With a hood, he made a passable Chewbacca. The picnic table turned into the Millennium Falcon, Steven had a toy light saber, and we were off. I believe the plot had them on the Falcon coming to save me. I was conveniently over by the water heater, tied up; within seconds they had my bonds broken and we were off again in the Falcon. There was no sign of Darth Vader or a Stormtrooper -- we were out of people. Anyway, we practiced this for ages and got Dad to come over and film the whole thing on our Super8 recorder, which had gotten very little use since Craig and I had grown out of our cute stages. I still have the film; it's roll around on the floor funny, and I wanted to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Good blackmail stuff.
did they have sneakers on the boat? I was such a doof I even wore those stupid Danish hair braids to school one day; I have a vivid recollection of taking them down in the girl's toilet early in the day after merciless teasing. I never did have much fashion sense; once I wore bell-bottoms that were out of date even then; once I went to school in a long denim skirt (ack, left, with neighbor-friends/sisters Marci and Missy Drimer, oh, where are you now), white shirt and bandana. Mom said I looked like I just got off the boat. Today, whenever I see anybody in one of those do-rags a lot of trendoids wear these days, I have to think I was ahead of the curve. By about 20 years. All of which has no relevance whatsoever. Although I am very, heartily sorry for once whacking Steven in the eye with a baseball bat. Memory blurs as to whether I meant it or not; I think I might have at the time. Evil brat. After all, he did save me from an invisible Darth Vader.
So. I blame Steven for getting me into my preadolescent insanity. Every Sunday (I think it was Sunday) night, after dinner we'd want to hang out and do more stuff in the basement. But he'd insist on seeing CHiPs. To me, it was adult TV and adult TV was boring as crap, but I stuck around in the last few minutes or so until he was ready to go out again. At least, this is kind of how I remember it. Then all of a sudden I came over earlier and earlier and wanted to see the show myself. And why would that be? Oh, come on, why did any heterosexual female in the United States watch CHiPs, circa 1978? I'll give you a hint: It wasn't for the bowl-haircut-meets-Farrah-flip golden boy on the far right.
No way, man, I had it bad. I wasn't even A Woman yet (heh, heh) and there was this guy in a uniform with all of that hair and all of those teeth and he looked like he had a permanent tan (which I guess he did, being of Hispanic heritage, though I didn't compute that in those days) and I was a goner. Next thing I knew I was rabid. Had to have every photo, every picture, every everything with Erik Estrada on it. I wrote little fantasy stories about how we'd meet while doing an episode of That's Incredible! (my other cheesy late-70s favorite show) and fall in luuuuuv. Or something like that, not knowing much about what falling in luuuuuv entailed -- though watching Grease gave me some idea it was something that happened in high school between singing and dancing and there were cars and rings and pink ladies involved. My little fantasy stories were in a small notebook which I punched a hole in the far right margin through the whole notebook and locked with a mini-lock. Dad got ahold of it (mainly by nearly taking it from my hands) and read enough to give me a nauseated look, which I think was totally indicative of our relationship for the rest of his life. Anyway, who cared? There was Erik Estrada, man.
So for a while, I cut things out of the paper, I kept them neatly in a box, I saved pictures, I plastered things on my wall. And then -- I can't possibly say exactly when -- I lost interest. It's over, babe. I think I kept watching the show for a while longer, but closer to age 10 I got heavily into pop music and didn't really look back. Erik The Poster came with me to our new home, which we moved into when I was 11, and he was up in my room for a while, but pretty soon I'd moved on to the cheese factor in pop music (Rick Springfield, Air Supply, Blondie -- who actually was not cheese at all) and found myself moved in other ways, in other directions, right down the road to perdition with Guys Who Had Accents. I blame Tristan Rogers for this. But that's another story.
I mean, cheese doesn't even do it justice -- this was real Velveeta from the start, and to my fevered little 8 year old brain (which would soon make room for other crushes on people like Tristan Rogers on General Hospital and the lead singer of Air Supply -- damn, there's something to be proud of) cheese was apparently the word. All of a sudden I had a big honkin' Erik Estrada poster in my room -- something like five feet by four feet, mostly of his upper shoulders and head; he had on The Uniform and was looking intently off to the right at something important, I guess. I used to tell people it was "so close you could see the pores on his face." And you could. What perfect pores they were. The poster manufacturers were morons: They'd spelled it "Eric," which I thoughtfully fixed by taping up a "k" over the "c." Always the editor. Somewhere full into obsession's flower I recall fishing a National Enquirer out of the trash 'cause it looked interesting. It wasn't our usual fare -- the daughter may have been into cheese but mom read Time and Smithsonian. I found pictures in there of da man, and figured this was my source. I begged for (and got, god only knows how or why) a subscription to the National Enquirer (I'm still the only person I've ever met who had one) so I could get caught up on all of the True Stories and photos of da man. And he was in there a lot. There was some scandal about his dating Beverly Sassoon, and from there on I really, really wanted to use Sassoon products.
Although I've either grown out of or heartily embraced the current cheese in my life, Erik, it seems, hasn't. That's okay; we weren't necessarily interested in him for his mind, after all. I mean, it takes a certain kind of fan to follow him into his latter ventures, like The Multi-View Mirror, and Mexican telenovelas (he didn't speak Spanish; they had to give him some lessons) and the inevitable reunion movie, which came out some 20 years after I began to lose interest. But nostalgia is a funny thing, and when he published his memoirs (Erik Estrada: My Road From Harlem to Hollywood), I was in line at the Barnes & Noble with the rest of the freaks to get it signed. I figured this was my one and only chance to meet the fella, and I hadn't seen him in any form in years, and I figured I should do this kind of thing since the opportunity presented itself.
And so, there I was (needing to lose some weight, oy, the fat days were bad) with all of my cheese, finally meeting up my first crush. I swear, all I could think of was that he was much ... well, duskier than I remembered from the show. That all-over tan wasn't a tan, that was clear. It was like he got darker as he got older! But then again I'd never seen him back in the heydays, so God only knows what TV does to you. I also recall him being quite short -- short relatively, of course; I'm 5'8" and I would have sworn he wasn't taller than me. But looking at the picture he's hunching down a bit and he's still taller, so that's memory playing a trick. Anyway, all of this to lead up to today, where I'm working full-time at a soap magazine, and where a soap called The Bold And The Beautiful has hired him for a couple of episodes. Freak that I am, I begged the kindly editor to let me do a brief "entrance" interview. After eliciting the promise that if Donny Osmond ever came on to my show I'd hand over that interview in exchange, I was given the okay. So this past Monday, the show's publicist called me and said I could call him in his dressing room right away. Here's how the opening sally went:
Ring, ring....
"Hello, Tony Orlando here!"
??
Well, the cheese is still there, and it's even more baffling now. We had about a ten or fifteen minute conversation (you'd think I could have kept it going for hours, but I just felt a little awkward and did not want to slide into any of the above insanity) which was fun, actually. He was very affable and charming and answered all of my questions (including the one which, in essence, was asking what it was like to have been a contenda once -- his reply, "I'm happier now. I stayed too long in the candy store back then"). He told me about a commercial he recently did for Dr. Pepper -- and he explained this with such enthusiasm it was hard not to be won over, but I did prevail -- which was a takeoff on CHiPs and featured two monkeys on motorcycles pulling over Erik in a Dr. Pepper truck. Something about the original being better than anything else. I remember a line from a Dennis Miller routine once about how if you reach the age of 30 and your job still requires a nametag, you've made a serious career error; it occurs to me that if you reach the age of 50 ("I'm 52 years young, babe!") and your job requires working with monkeys, you've made a career error. But who am I to talk?
And, though I did not ask in the least, he gave me his home phone number. 24/7 access to da man! Too bad it comes 22 years too late....
In other news, or at least to shore up the fact that I have a few cool bones in my body, here are two covers from recent Alternative Press magazines. I don't do as much for them any more as I used to (much like with Erik Estrada the passion I had for music kind of wore me out -- I still am a big music freak, and don't trust anybody who doesn't make music a major part of his or her staple diet -- but chasing after every Next Big Thing got exhausting) but they did get me in to talk to two copper-headed chantuses (can you tell I'm one of the only female writers the mag has?) over the past few months, at least one of which I remember writing about here. And that's just about it for this week. Nice theme: obsessive concerns. Look at those Playmobile heads on the left! The guy who I ripped that off of (okay, bad, bad) is doing all sorts of Biblical scenes using Playmobile characters! Here's more.
I came across this link for an interview I don't even remember giving -- that's right, giving -- ecept in very vague terms. I'm awfully ... well ... in your face in it. The author, "Jane Sane" is actually the first person interviewed, Jamie Roberts, a publicist with whom I was close and friendly with for a time, but who never showed up or made excuses for not showing up to a party I gave, so she's dead to me, dead.
Oh, and I wrote Marc Maron again, for the hell of it, and because his website had a link that didn't work. I thought he ought to know. Needless to say, no reply this time. And finally, Happy Halloween -- mom got her birthday present, I learned how to make an annoying flashing animated GIF (those are two shots of a pumpkin I carved a few years back -- good carving, crappy job on the GIF) and I'm attempting to be Martha Stewart, making some kind of Halloween craft out of balloons and tissue paper ... but can I just say that nobody at Home Depot or Sears has ever heard of wheat paste? Get with it, Martha!
