Allison Janney
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
The West Wing is one of my all-time favorite dramatic television shows – and one of the show’s key main characters is C.J. Craig, portrayed by Allison Janney. In fact she played this particular role so well that it garnered her four Emmy Awards and two additional nominations. She has also starred in the Academy Award winning film American Beauty, and other acclaimed films such as Nurse Betty, Juno, and The Hours. Disney buffs might know her as the voice of Peach in Finding Nemo. Read the rest of this entry »
One nice thing about being on California time is that – despite the incredibly long day I spent on Saturday – I was up bright and early on Sunday morning, October 5, 2008, having felt as if I had slept in even though it was only 7am. This left me plenty of time to get ready and load my stuff back into Bob’s car – and still make our breakfast meeting at 9am. Bob and I meandered down to the restaurant in the Marriott hotel lobby area for a nice big breakfast buffet. Generally, almost all of the celebrities from the Hollywood Collectors Show stay in the hotel – and we spotted a few of the in the restaurant. Among them was Margaret Kerry, who was not only in the restaurant, but sitting at our table and eating with us. 
I always felt a little hometown pride – and probably a little jealousy – to have a nationally syndicated cartoonist living in my hometown of Beavercreek, Ohio – just over in Tara Estates next to our very own neighborhood. His daughter Tracy attended our school, so it was a bit hard to process the fact that Mike Peters was a national celebrity. He didn’t start out that way though. Originally, he was a local political cartoonist for the Dayton Daily News (which incidentally I delivered to homes in Peters’ hometown) in 1969. 
I don’t think that anybody would argue that despite Barry Bostick’s one-hundred or so roles in films and television, his most notorious appearance came early in his career when he portrayed Brad Majors – a hero – in the 1975 ultra-cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His second most notable role was as Mayor Winston in the popular Michael J. Fox sitcom Spin City. Of course, I am not the average fan – so I naturally have chosen a completely obsure role to call my very favorite. 
When I first began to plan my October 2008 trip to California nearly a year before it took place, there were four goals that I had in mind which I hoped to accomplish while there – and I had no idea if any of the four would even be possible to arrange. Soon things began to really take shape and not long before I left, I had made arrangements to make three of them actually happen – and these all will be covered in this series of postings. I will go ahead and tell you the fourth since it didn’t happen: an old high school friend is employed by NBC in the publicity department and I had hoped to set up a private tour of the facility and sets. She didn’t seem to think that there was anything of interest that she could show me (or perhaps she just didn’t want to), so that prospect was quickly nixed. Turns out her job took her to New York before I even arrived in California, so it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.