Well, dear readers, I’m feeling a bit better as I write these here notes – very stuffed up and gunky in the morning, but it went away fairly quickly and the good news is that there was much less coughing, hardly any, in fact. Currently, I’m listening to some mid-1960s Stan Kenton in great Capitol stereophonic sound. And I did manage to watch two things last night – the first was a documentary about an author I knew nothing about, named JT LeRoy. It’s a pretty interesting tale how this flavor of the month because famous and then a cause celebre. Because it turns out there WAS no JT LeRoy, young teen writer who took literary circles by storm. No, it was a twenty-nine-year-old odd lady from Brooklyn, who took on many different personalities and characters as her “creation” overtook her. She eventually had her boyfriend’s sister play J.T., a kid who didn’t know if he/she was a girl or boy. It worked until it didn’t and the New York Times outed her in an expose. Laura Albert was her real name and she’s on camera for much of the documentary – she’s weird, as you might imagine. She also recorded all her phone calls with various people and those are used throughout. After that, I watched a 1996 motion picture directed by friend Larry Cohen, his final directorial effort from a script that he didn’t write, although if I had to guess, he probably rewrote some of it because it’s very Larry. Entitled Original Gangstas, it stars Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Ron O’Neal, and Richard Roundtree – so you know what you’re in for and I must say I thought it was a whole lot of fun seeing these old boys and one gal take on a street gang and put them in their place. The rest of the supporting cast includes some wonderful folks, most importantly Oscar Brown, Jr. but also Paul Winfield, Wings Hauser, Robert Forster, and Charles Napier. I really enjoyed it quite a bit. Not a classic, but fun. Would be more fun if it were fifteen minutes shorter.
Yesterday was a pretty okay day, most importantly because we did get a modern major miracle that was very helpful. I got nine hours of sleep and once up I answered a lot of e-mails, worked through my congestion and gunk, ascertained that the green WGA envelope STILL hasn’t arrived, then had Taco Bell for lunch – under 1000 calories. I did a few things on the computer, and then I watched the documentary and the movie. After the movie, I was hungry as I hadn’t eaten in nine hours. I wasn’t going to succumb to it, but in the end I got some stuff from 7-11 – two small bags of potato chips, a tiny thing of pistachio nuts, and some ice cream thing called Dibs – little bite-sized ice cream treats. In all, I probably had about three hundred calories, which was fine.
Today, I’ll be up by eleven, I’ll shave and shower, then I’ll mosey on over to the Music Center at 12:15 which will get me there by 12:45. Hoping traffic won’t be bad and that the parking lot won’t be too bad that early. I’ll walk around for a bit, then I’ll see The Secret Garden and believe me we’ll have a full report for you. After the show, I’m sure I’ll see our own Ava Madison Gray, who’s on in the lead role of Mary, then I’ll come home, probably stopping to pick up some food along the way. Then I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow is a ME day, then next week will have its own stressful stuff including needing more major miracles, and there’ll be book stuff to attend to, we’ve begun entering the first episode of Sami into some festivals, we’ll get the Sami website up and working and hopefully we’ll hear back from Amazon sooner than later. There’ll be some meetings and meals and David Wechter and I will wrap up work on our project’s revisions, which I’m frankly pretty much over doing.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by eleven, shave and shower, attend a matinee, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What hoax, literary or otherwise, captured your imagination and fancy? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy and relieved to have had a modern major miracle.