Alicia Keeton
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
I first met Alicia Keeton when we began attending Ankeney Junior High during our seventh grade year in 1984. I can’t remember the time or the place, or which classes we might have had together – if any. But what I do recall vividly was that Alicia was not only very pretty (as seen at right with the high hair of 1989), but very nice to everyone with whom she came in contact. That was rather uncharacteristic for most pretty girls that age – who seemed to be anything but nice to geeks like me.
I must say that Monday, October 6, 2008 was shaping up to be one of the best days of the year – if not my life. The first dream of my ‘dream come true tour’ had come true that morning: a visit to the 
The Wileys and I had gotten a fairly good night’s sleep in our separate rooms in Lyon, France and were up and ‘at ’em’ bright and early the morning of Wednesday, July 16, 2008. The hotel had been nothing to write home about, but the breakfast was once again outstanding. In fact, I became less impressed with the Disney breakfast after seeing virtually the same layout in the breakfast room of the tiny Campanile hotel. Lunchmeat, sausages, eggs, cheeses, breads, you name it. I was a little later at getting down to breakfast than the Wileys so I dined alone. I was so excited with the food that I left my water bottle at the hotel before I rushed out with my luggage to meet them in the lobby. 
P.J. Soles was an attractive young actress who made her mark in several notable movies of the the mid-1970’s through the early-1980’s. Among the memorable films in which she appeared were Brian DePalma’s Carrie, the classic John Travolta TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and Private Benjamin. The roles that I knew best though were her portrayal of Lynda, the doomed high schooler who had a penchant for saying “Totally!” in the classic horror flick Halloween – and her part as MP Stella Hansen in the Bill Murray comedy Stripes (above right), which I used to watch repeatedly in the early 80’s. Also noteworthy was that she had a part in one episode of one of my favorite sitcoms Cheers in 1984. 
I posed this question in the last California posting: who would have thought that a visit to the Playboy Mansion would not be the big story of Monday morning, October 26, 2008? Jimmy had no sooner pulled out through the gates of the Playboy Mansion, that Dick Bann was making a startling exclamation from the front seat of the car: “Look…that’s Brian Wilson!” Now how Dick could pick out Brian freakin’ Wilson as we pulled up behind him as he was taking a walk (away from us) is beyond me. God Only Knows. I still have visions of Dick not spotting him, as Jimmy, Dick, and I obliviously drove past one of the most iconic figures in the history of pop music.