The Terrible Catsafterme

The classic 1983 film A Christmas Story has become ingrained in my mind – and I’m sure on the minds of anyone else under the age of 40 – as a necessary staple of the holiday season… especially now that it seems to play on a continuous loop for the entire month of December. In fact if you looked up ‘holiday film’ in the dictionary, you might find a picture of the leg lamp. As part of our Ohio tour, on July 27, 2008 Bob and I visited the primary house in the slums of Cleveland that was used in the film as the home of the Parker family.

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On Friday, October 7, Bob, Jimmy, and I headed from Bob’s place in San Bernardino toward Las Vegas. The main reason: to see the Penn & Teller live show at the Rio, which I covered in a previous posting found here. But while we were in town, Bob wanted to show us around a bit. I thought that this sounded great as it would provide even more great things to do and report in our family Christmas Newsletter. As much as my website helps drive many of the adventures I go on these days, the Christmas Newsletter helped drive events back in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

Most people would have thought it a little strange – in fact even I thought it a little strange. As I approached Adriana Caselotti at the Hollywood Collectors Show on June 24, 1995 to purchase an autograph, she began singing to me Someday My Prince Will Come. Of course this wasn’t quite as bizarre as it sounds if you know that Adriana Caseloti provided the voice for none-other-than Snow White in Walt Disney’s very first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Now as a professed Disneyphile, this is an incredible memory to have, even though it was a bit strange and off-putting at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Of note at the Hollywood Collectors Show on June 24, 1995, was my encounter with Art Hindle. He had an impressive array of film and even more television credits that included guest roles on such TV shows as Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, Barnaby Jones, and Murder, She Wrote. But it was the first two films in the Porky’s franchise from which I knew him best. He played Ted Jarvis, the Angel Beach police officer and older brother of Mickey, who memorably assists in the revenge on Porky and his brother-in-law cop, played by Alex Karras. Read the rest of this entry »

It had been eight years since I had been on the west coast, but it had been even longer since I had seen Penn & Teller perform live, ten years having passed since I last saw them locally at the Fraze Pavillion in Kettering. So the one request I made of Jimmy was that we go to Las Vegas and catch the bad boys of magic live at the Rio – and he obliged. In fact, when Bob heard that we were going to head out to Vegas, he decided to forego his weekend at Lone Pine and go along with us. Maybe he didn’t like his friends venturing out onto his turf without him, or maybe he thought the city would swallow us alive – but nonetheless he decided that we would all go to Vegas together. Read the rest of this entry »