Well, dear readers, we had a fun Zoom session – only took ninety minutes rather than the three hours that were scheduled, and we’re now done until Monday, so a nice day off for me today, just a ME day with one Kritzerland rehearsal and filming the Indiegogo spiel. If I were to add a berg to the spiel, we’d have a spiel berg. We don’t allow groaning here at haineshisway.com. What else can I tell you on this waning Saturday evening? I can tell you the evening is waning, certainly. Certainly, the evening is waning. It is a waning evening no matter which way you slice it, waning evening-wise. I was listening to the soundtrack to the Japanese film, Shall We Dance, which I wish they’d put on Blu and Ray. I’m still reading the Rutanya Alda Mommie Dearest diaries. It does tend to become repetitive, but there are fun morsels along the way. Did you ever feel that words like repetitive have too many letters and that the entire word feels repetitive? I do. What else can we talk about. Certainly not any new listening experiences, music-wise, since I’m still waiting on some CDs to arrive. Some wait for Godot, some wait for CDs. The luck of the draw, I suppose. Speaking of the luck of the draw, are any of you dear readers poker players? I have been known to play a hand or two, beginning in the early 1970s. I even ventured to Gardena to play in the poker clubs there and did pretty well. In those days everyone smoked and being a non-smoker, that caused me much discomfort. The first time I went to Las Vegas was with an actor friend of mine, maybe 1972 or thereabouts, and I played there and paid for the entire trip. But it’s the luck of the draw and the ability to strategize. I played mostly draw, which seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird, and I also like seven-card stud. Now everything is Texas Hold-Em, a game that didn’t even exist when I played regularly. I find it a bore and annoying and it’s all anyone plays anymore and so I don’t play. In the late 1970s, I played every Tuesday night with the writers of Hollywood Squares – there were some real sharks in that game and while I occasionally won, I also lost, especially when the sharks, in the last hour of the game, would make it no-limit. I learned quickly to walk away from that. Peter Marshall even joined the game a few times.
And then David Wechter and I became friends and he, too, loved poker. And since we were both out of work, we formed a company called Magic Hour. We went to the Bicycle Club poker palace, met with the advertising executive, Paul something-or-other, and he hired us to make a promo video that would show off the club. We did, and it came out great and we ended up doing several other videos for them. And every time we were in Paul’s office, there was the cutest gal doing graphic work in the main room and she was very flirty and I was even more flirty, and we went out and ended up dating for a year and then became very close friends and that lasted over a decade.
After that, we went to the Commerce Casino, and they hired us to make a series of how-to videos for the various games they played there, as well as a promo video like we’d done for the Bicycle Club. We did the promo and hired Kevin McCarthy to host it. We loved him, but he loved his liquor, and he drank a lot at lunch and getting through the rest of the day with him was challenging, but we did it. For the how-to videos, we hired Susan Blakely to host (she didn’t drink and was a delight to work with), and Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall to be in the how-to stuff. We made them funny and fun and still managed to have it be instructional. We were completely cutting edge in terms of how they were put in the club. First off, the budget was very healthy, so we hired a company that would make five kiosks that would be put around the club. The videos were edited and then put on laserdisc. Those industrial players were put into the kiosks with a video screen, push buttons to navigate to which video you’d want to watch, and it worked perfectly and was probably the best investment that club ever made. Those kiosks lasted close to fifteen years there. Since then, I haven’t played much – David and I went to the Commerce about ten years ago – it was much changed and part of a hotel at that point. We played for a bit and left. And he’s hosted a game every now and then and that’s always fun. Why am I talking about poker? Oh, the luck of the draw. Funnily, I had all this stuff about Magic Hour and the poker stuff in the final chapter of There’s Mel, There’s Woody, and There’s You, but when I ended up cutting twenty-seven pages because they were stopping the flow of the book as it went to its conclusion, all that went away.
Yesterday was not quite a day, since I got ten hours of sleep and didn’t arise until one. Once up, I determined that I wasn’t ready to shoot the Indiegogo video. I determined that there were three package slips at the mail place, so I drove over there and of course there was only one – the other two slips were from the day before. The one that was there was a screener, another copy of The Father. Whilst at the mail place, I called Casa Vega and ordered one beef taco and one burrito ranchero. They said fifteen minutes, so I drove over there and arrived right on time. It took about five minutes to bring me the food. I came right home, and the taco was already not hot, just tepid, but I ate it. The burrito was completely cold (it must have been sitting there for a while before they got it to me), so I nuked it for a minute then ate it all up. It was good, but not something I’d order again. Then I did some stuff on the computer, and then it was time for our Zoom session. As mentioned, that went very well, and we finished ninety minutes early for the evening and a full day ahead of schedule.
After that, I had chips that came with the food, so I ate a few of those with their excellent salsa. And that was pretty much it.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll hopefully pick up a package that’s purportedly coming, I’ll shoot the Indiegogo video and try to finish the perks stuff, then at four o’clock I’ll have a Kritzerland rehearsal with our very own Robert Yacko, which I know will be fun. Then I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow, we have another project two session at six-thirty, but prior to it I have to get all the Indiegogo stuff ready to launch, either on Tuesday or Wednesday. The rest of the week is Kritzerland show rehearsals, our encore showing of project one aka Tonight’s the Night, getting everything to the engineer who’ll be mixing the Tonight’s the Night tracks for the CD, and whatever else happens to need doing.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, hopefully pick up a package, shoot a video, eat, have a rehearsal, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, and what dreams may come are strictly the luck of the draw.