Well, dear readers, it’s the day of the night of our CD release partay, and I have way too many things to attend to, most importantly, ordering the food, which didn’t get done yesterday for reasons I will get to momentarily. Speaking of momentarily, yesterday was one of those nice yet thoroughly annoying days. For example, I got up – that was nice and there was nothing annoying about it – yet. I then had to toddle off to the breakfast meeting, at which point the first of the annoyances kicked in. Just what in did to deserve being kicked is anyone’s guess. Where was I? Oh, yes, the first of the annoyances. I got on Laurel Canyon to go over the hill. Halfway to Mulholland, traffic stopped completely, and I do mean stopped. Halted. No movement. Of course, it was raining a bit and we all know LA cannot deal with more than four drops of rain before completely falling apart, both city-wise and driver-wise. Luckily, I’m very knowledgeable about roads, and luckily I was at the last place where you could turn left before Mulholland – so, I turned left. That road took me up to Mulholland and I turned left again and took Nichols Canyon over the hill – Nichols Canyon never has traffic and yesterday was no different. But it did add ten minutes onto my trip. Very annoying. The breakfast meeting, however, was very nice. Then I went to my booklet designer’s home environment and we went over all the booklet and inlay card stuff for our new limited edition Kritzerland release, David Shire At The Movies. That done, I went to the mail place, where there was nothing but a Kritzerland CD being returned because it could not be delivered after three tries. That was annoying. I contacted the person and their response was, “Oh, I was in New York, can you send it again?” In New York for four weeks, since the first try at delivery was on January 3rd and there were two subsequent delivery tries, one in the middle of the month and one at the end. Now I have to ship it again, which actually puts me in the red for postage. People are so stupid. That, and the fact that this is a person who blocked all e-mail blasts from Kritzerland. I do hope this will be their final purchase. After that, I got a call from my mail place saying a package had arrived. I went and picked it up – it was the replacement lamp for my TV. That was nice, and a day early. I got home and got to work. The lamp unit slid out perfectly, but when I went to slide the new unit in it was almost impossible – I really had to push hard and after about four tries I finally got it to go in. I re-screwed all the screws, the lamp error light went off and I turned the TV on. Nothing. That was annoying. I unscrewed everything and tried again. This time the lamp light (the error light) went on and stayed on and now I can’t even turn the TV on. Mitsubishi was already closed by this time, so I couldn’t do anything further. That was annoying. So, either they have to tell me what I did wrong or they have to send a new bulb and I’ll send this back – either way, I’m another week from being able to watch TV and I shall have to watch the Oscars from the bedroom. I’ll be calling them this morning – I just hope I didn’t break anything trying to shove this thing in there. If so, then I have to call GE to get someone out here on my five-year warranty. After that, I began to deal with the food situation for the partay. I called Jerry’s Deli, from whom I got two large meat and bread platters for the Stages release party – those two trays came to three hundred bucks a little over a year ago. First off, I got switched to six different people – they kept telling me they’d have to call me back and I kept telling them I had to leave. I finally got some total idiot on the phone who insisted that this meat and cheese platter basically cost sixteen dollars a person. I said I wanted what I had before – and he kept telling me that a $150 platter would feed maybe ten people. I asked to speak to someone else, I was put on hold, and I finally hung up. I will be calling Jerry’s corporate offices today. Meanwhile, I didn’t order anything for the party, but Adriana went to Von’s and they say if I get in there early this morning and do the orders they’ll have them ready by four or five – that’s fine, and it will be half the cost of Jerry’s, which is finer. After that, I sped over to Disney Studios to attend the final Disney/ASCAP workshop.
I attended the final workshop because the show was one of the ones I critiqued two weeks earlier. My co-panelist was also there and we were interested to see what changes they made. Unfortunately, they chose to start their fifty-minute presentation at the end of act one, so we had no idea if they’d done anything to the beginning of the show. The show was still confusing, dramatically inert, and the songs, while pretty and perky, never served a dramatic purpose. The panel consisted of Tim Dang (of East-West Players), Jason Robert Brown (of Jason Robert Brown) and Susan Dietz (producer). They all basically had similar things to say, all of which were what I said above. This is the second time I’ve seen Mr. Brown on the panel and he’s the antithesis of how I and others are – he’s loud, bombastic, and his comments are frequently about how he would do things. It’s not that he doesn’t have interesting things to say, but there are nicer and better ways to say them. But, he is who he is. Stephen Schwartz, as always, was amusing and intelligent. I saw lots of friends, including Miss Karen Morrow, Miss Nancy Dussault, Mr. Michael Lavine, Mr. Rick Starr, Miss Adryan Russ, my booklet designer, Mr. Doug Haverty, and a few others. One of the cast members, a little boy from Hawaii (many of the cast members flew in on their own dime) gave me a small box of chocolate macadamia nuts, which was very sweet. That was nice.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because we need to leave all the annoying things in this section, and now have only nice things in the next section.
All right, out with the annoying and in with the nice. Today we shall have only nice things and if anyone causes anything annoying to happen they will RUE the day, do you hear me? They will RUE the day.
Today, I have an incredibly full day of doing only nice things. This morning I have to call Mitsubishi and see what’s what. Then I have to get to Von’s by nine to order our two big meat and cheese platters, bread, rolls, vegetable platters, condiment platters and some desserts. I also have to buy all the liquid refreshment. I shall also write more than a few pages to make up for the small amount of writing I actually got done yesterday – which was about four lines, thanks to having to get the web designer all of the information needed for the David Shire CD. I’ll be saying more about this CD over the next few days. It’s our first limited edition, it’s a great, great album, and, at seventy-seven plus minutes, it’s jam-packed with great Shire material from such films as The Conversation, Return To Oz (his masterpiece), Only When I Laugh, Something For Joey, The Earthling, The Promise (the gorgeous song I’ll Never Say Goodbye), Farewell, My Lovely, Norma Rae (the Oscar-winning It Goes Like It Goes) and many others. The four Maureen McGovern vocals are worth the price alone. The CD is limited to 1200 copies and given the current soundtrack market, I’d preorder sooner rather than later.
Tonight, of course, is our CD release partay. I have no idea how many people will be there, but lots of the cast will be, as well as many of the creative team, and a nice number of guests. No matter what, we’ll have a very good time. I’m bringing the rough cut of the video with me, as well as the CD to play.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, write, jog (weather permitting – right), order platters, figure out the TV lamp situation, and attend a release partay. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Friday – what is currently in your CD player and your DVD/video player? I’ll start – CD, the film music of William Alwyn Volume Three and the film music of Vaughan-Williams Volume Three, both on Chandos, neither of which are very good, recording and performance-wise. DVD, next up, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Your turn. Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, and let’s accentuate the nice or they will RUE the day.