The nWo Years
May 10th, 2013
I hadn’t really been ‘into’ professional wrestling since I was a kid in the fifth and sixth grade, moderately enjoying some of it through junior high, and then forgetting about it and moving onto other things. Then inexplicably, at the re-introduction by my Dad, I started to take note again in 1996. While visiting him at his house on Gainsborough Road in Kettering, then nighttime WCW wrestling program Monday Nitro began to capture my attention again. The presence of some of the wrestlers from my youth – namely Ric Flair – initially sparked interest and then the storylines started to get really juicy. The mere flirtation then became a true interest bordering on obsession when the nWo first came to be. Read the rest of this entry »
Who can forget such 1980’s classics as Valley Girl, My Chafufeur, or April Fool’s Day? C’mon…show of hands. OK, so almost no one. I do, because they were on frequent rotation on HBO. And I have a feeling there are a lot of others my age who were inundated by these or other similar low-quality-but-fun movies as youthful, impressionable boys. The common denominator among all of these films is that they all were lead by actress Deborah Foreman. She wasn’t just some bit player, she was the star! 
I had stayed up later than Bob the night before watching the TV pilot episode of Newhart on my laptop after Bob had already fallen asleep. The reason why is that I was sleeping inside the Waybury Inn, in East Middlebury, Vermont – which was used as the establishing shot of the Stratford Inn on one of my all-time favorite sitcoms Newhart. Mind you they never actually filmed anything here other than shots of the inn. Bob Newhart had never even been at the inn. But in watching the show, you see it two or three times per episode, so it had become ingrained in my mind, so since the beginning of this trip’s inception, staying here was a must. 
Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film Raging Bull is a movie that just keeps getting better the more times you watch it. I think it was somewhere around the third when I realized just how much of a masterpiece it was, how the period flavors swirled around the intense action, and how every nuance of every character had been perfected. The movie of course is the story of boxer Jake LaMotta, one of the most determined, but self-destructive, men who ever entered the sport of pugilism. Cathy Moriarty played opposite Robert De Niro as his ever-suffering wife Vikki to absolute perfection. She conveyed the part of a sexy and loyal woman who gradually watches her husband turn into a jealous monster.