Hustling to Meet Pete Rose
March 5th, 2011
Besides seeing Pete Rose on the ballfield when I was a kid, I had only seen the baseball legend known as Charlie Hustle once in person. He was signing autographs in Las Vegas at a sports memorabilia show in 2005, and the prices were exorbitant. In addition, he wasn’t doing photos with fans, so I bypassed him entirely. But as luck would have it, the opportunity came round once again to get a photo with him in 2011. This time I had home-field advantage, as he was doing signings of his new documentary DVD 4192: The Crowning of the Hit King – along with assorted merchandise related to the movie – at three of our Kroger stores. Gambling issues aside, baseball players don’t get much better than Pete Rose. Read the rest of this entry »
To die-hard buffs, Billy J. Kramer’s name will be inextricably linked to the Beatles forever. For starters, both the Beatles and Kramer were managed by Brian Epstein. The ‘J” in Kramer’s name was suggested by John Lennon to give him an ‘edgier’ sound. Then when they were assigned to Parlophone Records, they begun working for producer George Martin, who produced nearly the entire Beatles catalog. Then the Beatles gave Kramer a barrage of Lennon/McCartney compositions to launch his career. These include: Do You Want To Know a Secret?, I’ll Be On My Way, I Call Your Name, Bad To Me, I’ll Keep You Satisfied, and From a Window. The latter three of these were among a very small group of Lennon/McCartney songs that the Beatles themselves never released. 
The good news was that I had managed to time my cruise just right that I could head out to Los Angeles immediately after it ended and attend the winter Hollywood Show on Saturday, February 12, 2011. The bad news was that unlike most shows that I’ve attended over the last few years that had over 100 celebrities, this show had less than 70 scheduled. The good news is that even with only 70, there were roughly 30 celebs that I was interested in meeting and getting autographs from – including some real draws like Otis Day, Tracy Nelson, and Rich Little. 
Had Lesley Ann Warren been given either of two major roles that she tried out for – as Liesl in The Sound of Music or as Lois Lane in the 1978 version of Superman – I would have been all over getting her autograph in the past. As it was, I had bypassed having Bob get any signatures from her when she appeared at the Hollywood Show in February 2010. But when she made an appearance at the Chiller Theatre Show in Parsippany, New Jersey on Saturday, October 30, 2010, I did a little more research on her and found that she had been in something that interested me. 
We were in Miami and I had an agenda. That much you can count on for sure. I had suggested to Mom that staying in Miami for a day before we embarked on our four-day cruise was imperative. After all, I had no idea when I might get back to see the Hard Rock Cafe and other things. The Hard Rock in Miami we had picked up the night before, but we still had a full day’s adventure ahead of us on Sunday, February 6, 2011 – otherwise known as Super Bowl Sunday.