Well, dear readers, with the Tchaikovsky violin concerto playing whilst I begin these here notes, and still full from my four hot dog day (that’s it, though), I will recount in great detail the details of yesterday. This will go very quickly because it was a pretty boring day any way you slice it and I slice it on an angle. And always remember, without much effort at all angle can become angel and don’t we all need an angel in our lives as well as an angle? At least that’s what I glean from it. Of course, glean is angle and angel rearranged. Enough wordplay, let us get to the point. And what IS the point? Oh yes, the details of yesterday. Well, let’s see – I got seven and a half hours of sleep, I got up, I answered e-mails, and then I went to the mail place and picked up my Amazon Fresh delivery and came right back home. I ordered a cup of chili from Tommy’s and when that arrived, I made four count them four hot dogs – two with mustard and onions and two with some chili and onions. They were quite tasty, I must say and have said. And four hot dogs was, I’m happy to say, about 1100 calories. That was my food for the day. After that, I watched some irritating YouTube videos and finally had to stop, or I would have thrown my shoe through the TV. I watched half a movie, some B-thing called Mad Dog Coll from 1961 when, because of the TV show, gangster movies were all the rage and I saw quite a few of them, including Murder, Inc., Al Capone, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Pay or Die, and others, mostly at the Wiltern Theater.
All the titles I mentioned, by the way, were the top half of double bills. Mad Dog Coll was strictly bottom half and, in fact, in one of the oddest double bills ever, played with A Raisin in the Sun’s wide release. The week it came out, June 14, 1961, I was probably seeing Days of Thrills and Laughter at the Vogue, maybe Spartacus at the Pantages, definitely Romanoff and Juliet at the Beverly, and for sure Seven Wonders of the World in its revival showing, my first Cinerama movie and the last Cinerama movie to play the Warner Cinerama until The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm played a year later. I hadn’t quite begun my theatergoing in LA yet – had I, I could have seen Bye Bye Birdie with Bill Hayes and Elaine Dunn, My Fair Lady with Michael Evans and Caroline Dixon. Anyway, Mad Dog Coll stars John Davis Chandler and is directed by Burt Balaban, who also directed Murder, Inc. It’s not a very good movie but is notable for a few things: It marked the movie debut of Telly Savalas, it featured Jerry Orbach while he was still doing The Fantasticks, and, if the imdb is accurate, the film debut (uncredited) of Gene Hackman. It was edited by Ralph Rosenblum, who’d go on to edit Woody Allen’s first few films. The production designer was Richard Sylbert, who’d go on to do little movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Chinatown, and who briefly ran Paramount Studios and who uttered the immortal phrase to yours truly, “There’s Mel, there’s Woody, and there’s you.”
What else? I dozed off for a bit, and then watched a dinner theater production of A Chorus Line from the Grand Dinner Theater. The only name I recognized in the cast was Matt Zarley. It was pretty bad and had less people in it than it should have had and a “band” that seemed to consist of a piano, drum, and a Kurzweil synth doing everything else but sounding like a Casio. This was a very popular dinner theater in Anaheim near Disneyland. It closed down in 1991. It did have Equity artists and sometimes stars – they did the female Odd Couple there with Jo Ann Worley. At that time, there seemed to be dinner theaters everywhere in LA. All gone now, the last of them closing down just a few years ago. There are several Grand productions on YouTube, including an undernourished 42nd Street.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, which is probably nothing, I’ll shave and shower, and then I’m supping with frequent musical collaborator Richard Allen. After that, I’ll watch, listen, and relax.
This week will be writing, meetings and meals, an opening night, and doing whatever else needs 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, do whatever needs doing, shave and shower, sup, 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, happy to glean the angle of the angel.