Amber Smith
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
I have two confessions to make. The first is that for the longest time I only knew Amber Smith from her Playboy pictorial from the March 1995 issue of the magazine. In the 1990s, her appearance alone would have been enough for me to be interested in an autograph/encounter with her. But the second confession is that I’ve matured and no longer seek out celebrity encounters with Playmates based on the strength of them being featured in the magazine. Therefore I had passed up meeting Amber Smith on a couple of occasions when she made personal appearances in the past. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a rainy day in Berlin, Germany on Thursday, October 4, 2013, and we were there to enjoy it to the fullest. Mom & Bob, Diana & Tom, Bryan & Erine, and I continued our trek-on-foot through the historic industrial city. As it was now 1pm and we had finished up at Potsdamer Platz without finding anything to eat, the first order of the afternoon was to nourish ourselves. It didn’t take us long at all to find a perfectly acceptable cafe with the unlikely name of Eleven. Diana & Tom treated us to lunch and I had the tasty Spaghetti Carbonara. There was also a bit of drama going on as one of the customers wiped dog poop from their shoes to the entrance mat and was called out on it in German. Eeps! 
I think that I learned that I must not be 5 foot 11 inches tall when I met Kristanna Loken. Because that’s how tall she is, and she was taller than me. I remembered that she was taller, because you don’t soon forget standing next to a gorgeous blonde girl whom you’ve witnessed as a cold-blooded liquid-metal killer. And in the case of Kristanna Loken, you don’t soon forget her regardless of the whole killer thing. 
When I think of the stereotypical image of New England – the fall leaves, the bright green grass, the serene neighborhoods, the flowing maple syrup – I think of the upper three states: Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. I had never been to any of these so I was quite anxious to get into them. On the other hand, the stereotype of New York is the hustle and bustle of Times Square, which the northern part of New York is really nothing like. On Thursday, July 12, 2012, I got to travel from one area to the other and experience the seamless transition between the states. Of course, this was no simple afternoon drive; it was all part of the quest that my friend Bob and I were on as we wove our way through the New England area. 
I sometimes wonder what it must to do one’s self-esteem to continually be cast as the evil villain. That’s a question I should have asked Billy Drago when I met him at the Chiller Theatre show on October 27, 2012. There must be a limited number of actors in the business who have a higher ratio of ‘bad guy roles’ to ‘good guy roles’ than he does. And clearly he does it well. I’m not familiar with a lot of the evil roles he played, but you might catch him as a gangster in an episode of Moonlighting, a corrupt deputy in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider, or most notably as Al Capone’s henchman Frank Nitti in The Untouchables.