Laurel and Hardywood Day 3: The Our Gang Reunion and Another Trivia Victory
Monday, August 31st, 2015
I’ll admit it. I’ll admit it. I wanted to win the trivia contest this year. We were tracking to win every other convention… and anytime we participated… and I wanted to keep it that way. David, Peter, and I had claimed our first victory back in 2006 in Augusta, Georgia. Then in 2008 the Europeans changed it up and made it some strange single player event in a circle in the middle of a banquet or something. In 2010 our team re-grouped and won again in Sacramento. In 2012 we felt a little snubbed as once again it was taken over by other hosts who hand-picked two-person teams while the former champs – us – sat idly by and watched. We made a production of how we would regain our crown in 2014. Read the rest of this entry »
The centerpiece of our massive two-week-in-July-2013 road trip was the Wilder Pageant in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and the driving force at the Wilder Pageant that made it some desirable was having a decent number of Little House on the Prairie TV cast members present at the affair. This was made even more amazing by the seats that we were given on that Friday, July 25, 2014, performance of the play. Two of the celebrities present happened to play siblings on the show, that of Laura Ingalls’ husband Almanzo Wilder and his sister Eliza Jane, both fictionalized versions of real-life people. 
If you saw him in The Hottie & the Nottie, or the episodes of Criminal Minds or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you’d probably want to pick him up and hold him and tell him that life will be okay young man. But of course if you were to watch the re-tooled 2009 version of Friday the 13th, you might have a little bit of a different opinion, knowing that this character Jason Voorhees would grow up to slaughter and mutilate dozens upon dozens of teenage campers, innocent bystanders, and Manhattan residents. 
I have to be honest. I didn’t do much research on Ronee Blakley before I met her at the Chiller Theatre show in Parsippany, New Jersey on April 26, 2014. I had noted that she played in the original Nightmare on Elm Street film as Nancy’s mother Marge Thompson, and I stopped right there. That was good enough for me. Of course if I had looked into her career a little bit further, I might have noticed that she carried one other ultra-special credential that would have made meeting her mandatory.