Well, dear readers, in my movie theater reverie in yesterday’s notes, I did manage to leave out one of the key theaters of my childhood – can’t believe it did, but I did. So, just a moment to talk about the wonderful Wiltern Theater on Wilshire and Western, one of the most gorgeous movie palaces ever. To think it was slated for destruction before saner heads prevailed is astonishing. It is, of course, a successful concert venue now, but I just don’t want to go there because my memories of my movie going there are printed so indelibly on my mind. My first vivid and conscious memory of seeing a movie at the Wiltern was in 1956 during summer vacation – the movie was Lisbon, starring and directed by Ray Milland. It was in scope and color and very pretty to look at. I got to the theater a half-hour before the show, which is when they opened the doors for the first showing. I’d had the chef at my father’s restaurant make me a turkey sandwich to eat in the theater. That wasn’t really something you were supposed to do, but I never had a problem sneaking it in. I ate it before the movie began. Then, and this is the reason I can remember it as if it were yesterday, I had an allergy attack – one of the worst I’ve ever had. Thankfully I had a handkerchief with me, although it was soon so disgustingly wet I couldn’t use it anymore. I just kept sneezing and blowing (I was probably one of five people in the theater) and my nose was raw and red as a ripe tomato. So, I don’t really remember much about Lisbon other than I spent a good deal of time in the bathroom blowing my nose with toilet paper. The bathrooms at the Wiltern were works of art – downstairs there was a huge lounge, which was bigger than some of the Cinelplex movie theaters. The bathrooms were always spotless and they were cavernous. The sneezing and the blowing got so bad that I could barely touch my nose it hurt so much. I somehow made it through to the end of the film, and then I walked back to the restaurant and was taken directly home. Now, I’m sure I’d seen other movies there before that, but can’t remember what they were. But after that, I was there a lot. Some of my key memories are Tammy and the Bachelor – opening day and seeing Debbie Reynolds in person there, handing out 45s of the title song. I actually wrote about that in Benjamin Kritzer but took it out because I needed the story to move along – I have it somewhere.
Of course, that’s where I saw Li’l Abner and North by Northwest multiple times. I loved the curtains there and they had a huge screen. I saw both Hercules and Hercules Unchained there, and Jack the Ripper and The Interns and Hatari and tons of others. It was a theater I absolutely adored. In the same neck of the woods was the Embassy – I walked by it many times but never attended until my college days. And south down by Olympic and Western was the Uptown theater (now a strip mall) – I only remember seeing one movie there – Have Rocket, Will Travel. And further east on Wilshire we had the Vagabond. It became a hugely successful revival house, but I was there in 1956 – one of the many theaters where I saw The Court Jester that year.
Now, since I don’t have all that much to report about yesterday, and since so many of LA’s unique and great restaurants are gone, razed or replaced, I thought I’d do a little walk down the food memory lane. I talk about many of these jernts in the Kritzer books. Every neighborhood had tons of eateries in LA (and I’m sure other cities everywhere). When I was very young, we had a great barbecue place two blocks south of where we lived, over on La Cienega, called Pete ‘n’ Percy’s. I have been looking for memorabilia from there forever – have never found one damn thing. The floor had sawdust on it, and the food was really good, not that I really knew anything about barbecue food. But that was “our” barbecue place and after it bit the sawdust I’m not sure we ever went to another. It would be many years until I found a great barbecue jernt. That was in my LACC days – it was just north of the campus on Santa Monica Blvd. and it was called Crosby’s – it was great. They also had a branch at the corner of Beverly Blvd. and La Cienega where Kiddieland was and prior to the Beverly Center replacing everything there. Then we had our two local coffee shops, Gaby’s and Stat’s. Gaby’s was closest and we liked that, but Stat’s was a little tonier and we liked that better (it was on Pico near Robertson). It was only three years ago that I realized that the famous Burbank coffee shop Paty’s had been a Gaby’s – there’s footage of it on You Tube. Who knew? At Stat’s I always had the cheeseburger – it was unique there – the cheese was melted INSIDE the burger. Gaby’s is now a Versailles and Stat’s is long demolished.
“Our” Mexican restaurant was on La Cienega near Pico and called Casa Cienega. I have managed to find a matchbook from there, and I have a menu from Gaby’s – but I’ve never found a menu from Stat’s – I keep looking, though. Amazingly, I can still smell the food at Casa Cienega, I can still taste their fresh tortillas and butter. It was unlike any other Mexican restaurant I’ve been to and it was REALLY good. We had “our” two Chinese restaurants – both on Pico. Near La Cienega it was Kowloon, and over near Robertson it was Wan-Q, where Cesar Romero was a regular patron. Both were excellent Cantonese restaurants and we split our time between them. Kowloon was torn down, but there’s still something there where Wan-Q was. Of course we had our local Fosters Freeze and a small branch of Piece o’ Pizza (Had a Piece Lately), although that came later, around 1960. Also opening sometime around 1958 was an Eyetalian jernt called Scarantino’s, which is featured heavily in Kritzerland. Every Friday my friend and I would go there, get spaghetti and meatballs to go, come back to my house and we’d watch the brand new episode of The Twilight Zone. That was a ritual.
But my first pizza were the slices at Big Town market – in some ways that was my favorite of all – they made it fresh there every day (you could watch them do it). Then, further north of us we had Restaurant Row. But before you got there, we had two really nice restaurants south of Wilshire on La Cienega – Dick Webster’s Home of the Lemon Meringue Pie, and Scampi, a restaurant that specialized in shrimp scampi. I ate there on my tenth birthday. I do have a menu from Dick Webster’s and I have menus for Kowloon and Wan-Q. We all loved Lawry’s, of course, and Richlor’s (Lawry’s is now located where Richlor’s was and something else is where Lawry’s was). It was an exciting time and all those high end jernts were always jumping. Then special mention must be made about Kelbo’s – the original location, which opened in the year of my birth – we went there all the time. It was kind of a Hawaiian jernt with the best spareribs ever, great barbecue beef sandwiches (with a circular pineapple slice on the plate), and THE greatest and most unique 1000-Island dressing ever. They had one on Fairfax, too, near CBS but I never thought that one was all that good. Surprisingly, we rarely went to delis. The only one I can remember going to occasionally was on Fairfax, called The Bagel. I think the feeling was that if you wanted Jew food it was better at home. I’ll go into the restaurants outside of our neighborhood in tomorrow’s notes – those wonderful Westwood jernts and Hollywood jernts of my youth.
Before we go any further, I’ve been meaning to post this video from last week’s Kritzerland show – our very own Robert Yacko doing a beautiful rendition of You and Me Against the World.
Yesterday, I got nine hours of sleep and missed the morning. That was fine by me. I did some work on the computer, then eventually went and had a Philly cheesesteak sandwich and a cup of chili for my side dish. After that I came home, did more work on the computer, had a telephonic conversation and then sat on my couch like so much fish.
Last night, I decided to zone out with a movie on the Flix of Net. I watched The Net, actually, the thriller starring Sandra Bullock, from 1996. I remember seeing it back then and thinking how preposterous it was and how the Internet and computers could never do the stuff that was being done. Well, here we are, almost twenty years later – now, obviously the computer games, viruses and hardware in the film look like antiques and are easy to laugh at in our enlightened technical age. But boy was this film prescient with its tale of hackers and horrible identity theft and screwing up the world by hacking into supposedly secure sites and databases – that all seemed terribly far-fetched but sadly it’s all a fact of life these days. But boy have we come a long way since 1996, Internet and computer-wise. I mean, you look at those silly floppy discs or the crude computer screen graphics – it’s amazing what’s happened in the past twenty years. Even the cell phones of 1996 were HUGE unwieldy things, more like a gun than a phone. And at the end of the film, there’s a demonstration going on in the street – guess what it’s about – well, the signs they’re carrying all say “Health care is a right, not a privilege.” Everything old is new again. Miss Bullock is engaging, but the problem with the film isn’t the script or the other actors – it’s the director, Irwin Winkler, who simply was a better producer than director – I have never seen any movie that he’s directed that was good. He has no sense of pacing and he either allows or has directed the villain, Jeremy Northam, to be a complete cliché and even unintentionally funny. There are other astonishing prescient things in the film, most interestingly in the opening scene when a politico kills himself because information has been spread that he has AIDS (we find out the character was a homophobe) – it’s no different than what happens twenty-four hours a day on Facebook, where people share completely false memes about living people – filled with misquoting, outright made up quotes and outright lies. Everything old is new again. But the real shocker is Netflix having a zoomed in full frame transfer of a 1.85 movie – THAT’s shocking.
Then I had some trail mix, wrote the opening section of the commentary for the next Kritzerland show, and that was that.
Today, I have a lunch meeting at noon-thirty, then I’ll hopefully pick up some packages, then I have an early evening meeting in Hollywood.
Tomorrow and the rest of the week is meetings and meals, hoping I hear about successful clearances for new projects, finishing the commentary and figuring out the show order for the last four songs – up to those songs the order seems very good. Then I have to decide whether I’m going to my fiftieth high school reunion. I kind of don’t want to go, but we’ll see how I’m feeling towards the end of the week.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, have a meeting, hopefully pick up packages, have another meeting, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What were your favorite neighborhood restaurants, those that were in close proximity to where you grew up? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have taken a look back at my childhood restaurant row.