So What About Those Music Box Steps? – Part 2
February 3rd, 2008
After my visit to The Music Box stairs in 1997 (that and previous visits were chronicled here), I had no association with them for more than eight years…except for my minimal involvement in 2002 with a documentary about the stairs that was put together by my good friend Jimmy Willey III. And when I say minimal, I mean microscopic. When I saw this documentary, I was not only amazed with how well it was put together, I was thoroughly entertained from start to finish. I was extremely proud to have my name listed with “special thanks” although I think I only supplied Jimmy with one small fact during his production.
I’ve never quite jumped on The Simpsons bandwagon yet. Sometimes I travel in the sidecar…having purchased the first nine seasons of it on DVD, but not quite being done watching the first one. As a Disneyphile, I find the chintzy animation a little disconcerting – while being fully aware that the second-to-none writing more than makes up for it. I know one day I’ll really dive into them and then there will be no going back. In fact, I got into Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic strips way back before anyone had ever heard of The Simpsons. 
Thomas Benton Roberts was the only celebrity at the Hollywood ’80 Sons of the Desert convention who signed my autograph book twice. I reckon that I had him do this because I really had no idea who he was at the time. Later on I realized that he appeared in the classic Laurel and Hardy silent film Two Tars as the hapless victim of Stan’s gushy tomato. Still later, I found out that Thomas Benton Roberts actually meant much more to the production of the L&H films. He was what was referred-to-as a ‘stand-by carpenter’ – a less-than-glamourous term for a special effects artist.