Good morning, all! I'm suspecting our E&T DRJoey is waiting to board a plane for his TALE OF TWO CIRIES jaunt to NYCthis morning. After the showing/whatever, it's back to LaGuardia and a return flight. Send him a lot of smooth sailing vibes todat. His schedule needs them.
I finished the two Mario Frangoulis orchestral pieces around 10:30 last night, wrote up an invoice and got them ready to deliver today. I've now got a lot of songs to work on for him this week, and today I also find what fresh hell the Men's Chorus wants to dump on me for their Dec. 14 concert.
Apartments? I had three different ones in Oxford, Ohio, one in Shippensburg, PA, for a year, then seven years chez Mom and Dad before moving to NYC, which was either the end of a really prolonged adolescence or the beginning of another.
My first apartment on 94th Street and Amsterdam was huge: 2 bedrooms, living room, dining room, and kitchen, The space was fantastic, but the ghost was terrifying and the landlord was insane. Every night, around 4:30 am, my bedroom door would violently and noisily burst open, which scared the hell out of me. The landlord was a young man but a total sleazebag who in the late 1980s was convicted of putting a hit on a tenant. His mother was the owner of many upper West Side buildings but he "managed" them for her.
My roommate at the time was a very pretty Irish lady, Melanie Cargill, stepdaughter of the actor Jack MacGowran who was in the film TOM JONES with Albert Finney and who died after filming THE EXORCIST. The landlord was always hitting on Ms Cargill, and we both hated him for being both a constant nuisance and a total loss as a landlord: about twice a week, around 2 am, water would pour from the lighting fixture in our bathroom ceiling and flood the bathroom. Our complaints to the landlord and drunk super, and finally to the City's apartment control offices, got us nowhere so Melanie finally called the board of health to complain: she told them that no one was responding to our calls for help and that if the water turned out to be sewage, she planned to swe the asses off every New York City bureau dealing with landlord/tenant situations. That afternoon the agents came to check out the bathroom and force the landlord to do something, after two or three months of this nonsense.
Melanie moved out shortly after that to marry her boyfriend and I went through several rounds of war over getting a roommate: the landlord kept trying to bring in cute young ladies he thought might date him if he helped with an apartment and I wanted a roommate with whom I got along and, preferably, already knew. A divorced friend from college was ready to move in but the landlord wouldn't accept the man's dog, although others in the building had pets. One day the landlord let it slip about how angry he was at me for having to pay for the bathroom repairs, and I decided it was time to get out. A mutual acquaintance of DRGinny's and mine ended up conducting the Richard Burton tour of CAMELOT in 1980, and he moved into the spare room. He mentioned one day how the landlord was stopping by daily for visits, and even asked him how much he was being paid to conduct CAMELOT. I started looking for a new apartment that day, found the one I now live in within a week, and by July 15, I had moved to this apartment.
The first night I was here, the phone rang, and it was my former landlord asking how the new apartment was. I said to him, "Never call me again," and he hasn't. I passed him on Broadway around 90th Street several months later ad ignored him. Now I hope the bastard's still in jail and somebody's bitch. I do miss the space, but my ghost here is much less terrifying.
