Bettie Page
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Since the Summer of 1997, I had been making some sort of initiative every day to attempt to secure one autograph or another. As we began to sink into the heart of December, Christmas preparations no doubt deterred me from continuing this effort. And then as we got into 1998, my efforts began to falter, so it wasn’t until around April of that year that I resumed. The initiative that had been going on from July thru December 1997 came to it’s climax and close with my last successful effort being Bettie Page. Read the rest of this entry »
In doing this posting, it is going to be necessary to admit that I have not watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy from director Peter Jackson. I’ve seen some of the first one, but that’s it. Yes, I know that one of these films is an Academy Award winner for Best Picture, and that these movies have been acclaimed and loved world-wide. But although I own them, I have never watched them. Having said that, I can in fact claim that I have met one of the principal players from the film. 
It may be a disservice to Oscar-winning actor George Kennedy, but every time I picture him in my head, two images come to mind – and neither one of them flattering. The first is the scene from Naked Gun when he and Leslie Nielsen are shoveling red-dyed pistachio nuts into their mouth and emerge from the police car with bright red lips. The second involves Kennedy at the baseball game in the same film as he is seen shoveling various ballpark food (hot dogs, pizza, ice cream, etc.) into his mouth in cutaway shots. Hey, I can’t help it. Apparently I like to watch George Kennedy eat. 
While not a complete Star Wars junkie, I am a fan of the franchise, so when the opportunity presents itself, I generally snap up any autographs of members of the cast of both the original films and the later prequels. On Monday, December 8, 1997, I got the chance to meet two members of the Star Wars family at the Bookery Fantasy comic book store in my hometown of Fairborn, Ohio: Kenny Baker, the dwarf actor who was the performer inside the R2-D2 costume in all six of the films, and John Hollis, who played Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back. At the time, I had no idea that Hollis was Lando Calrissian’s cyborg aide – but that didn’t stop my from purchasing one of his photos. 
Phylicia Rashad will forever be remembered as being the wife of Bill Cosby…even though they were never married. I began watching Cosby’s groundbreaking series The Cosby Show when it first debuted in 1984, back in the day when she was still going by her maiden name Phylicia Ayers-Allen. Her named changed, naturally enough, when she was married to her third husband, NFL wide reciever and sportcaster Ahmad Rashad. Fresh from the stage, The Cosby Show was her first major screen work and she was called upon by Bill Cosby once again to be his screen wife when he began his new series Cosby in 1996, four years after the former series ended. And I might add that she starred in the pre-show of the Dinosaur ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.