(Pictured above:  The Melnor XT... which is not a phone)

The script was called The Shadow Riders, the call was from producer Ed Elbert (The Mighty Quinn) and the phone call happened to be answered by my elderly mother. 
 
With divorce comes many sacrifices, one of which is being flat broke and having to move in with a family member. Bless her heart, that person happened to be my mother. I repeatedly briefed my mother on the importance of any incoming call but somehow the constant admonishments on my part faded over the days, weeks and months and the dire importance of this particular call became as unimportant as any other of the lifestyle choices I had made. 
 
It was summer, the sky was blue, a rarity in Oregon at the time, and a weekend with my daughter was just getting started. As a celebration of the rare Portland weather, I had set up sprinkler in the front lawn and was showing my four-year-old the ins and outs of racing through an abundant water supply. My daughter, was getting the hang of it quite well, squealing and delighting in every dash and dodge through the Melnor 4500 oscillating fun. At forty years of age, and no slouch myself in this department, I was more than willing to provide examples for her for trips through the watery fantastic.
 
I did not hear the phone ring.
 
She could have played their all day but eventually I talk my daughter into going back inside, so we could both dry off and share our stories of humans versus water. At four years of age, it is all about the challenge. We adjourned inside my childhood home and were greeted by mother.
 
“You had a phone call,” she said pleasantly. 
 
My ears perked up. Were they still on the line?
 
“I told them you were busy.” 
 
“Who was it?” I pleaded. “And why didn’t you call me?”
 
“It was someone named Ed,” she answered innocently. 
 
Ed, was of course Ed Elbert the producer of The Mighty Quinn starring Denzel Washington and my favorite femme fatale and poker player, Mimi Rogers. Ed had been producing for over twenty years, while alas, I had only been playing in sprinklers.
 
“What did you tell him?” I gasped
 
“I told him you were playing in the sprinkler.”
 
“With my daughter, right?” You told him I was playing with my daughter?”
My mother offered too long of a pause before answering. She too must have sensed that it was much too late for any salvation from this call and only offered in signature admonishment when confronted with a complicated question. 
 
“I’ll fix you two some lunch?”
 
The phone call was made from a nearby phone booth, the option was eventually signed, and the subject was never brought up between Mr. Elbert and myself.  Several months later, Maverick starring Mel Gibson came out and Hollywood’s taste for westerns once again went dormant. 
 
For the record, the sprinkler remained popular until early Fall.

Honestly, I could give a flying fuck for any award show, let alone the Oscars. I am still personally pissed about my own slight from years ago. I was quite confident that Axe to Grind would have least won for the Best Picture Made For Less Than Three Hundred Dollars. Alas, Avatar won. I know, right? 
 
I must admit at delighting at the prospect of what qualifies and what doesn’t. This little pandemic has seemed to settle little Stevie Spielberg’s argument about what really constitutes a motion picture and what does not. Let’s not stop at Netflix or Amazon. Personally, I think we should open the list of nominees from YouTube and the media drive from your personal computer. Academy Members, put that in your ivory pipe and smoke it. 
 
And the nominees for Best Motion Picture are:
 
Cat Jump Fail. Directed by GO54Ever and Directed by Pet2PleezU.
 
The Nutcrackers: TikTok Groin Hits. Directed by Doscajones and Produced by BallBstr7
 
MILF Cucks Hubby 3: The Reckoning, Amateur69 Director and Produced by Porn Hub
 
Baby Talks to Golden Retriever. Produced and Directed by James Cameron.
 
And the winner is… Oh, they are all winners in my book. And don’t forget to thank God. Very important.
 
All of these events are really self-aggrandizing fashion shows. I
 
“You look simply ravishing. Who are you wearing?”
 
“Thank you ever so.  My outfit was completely designed courtesy of The Bass Shop. And in lieu of blood diamonds, I have adorned my sequined fishing vest in tie fly flies, most notably the colorful but practical Tungsten Jig Bugger.”
 
There’s just too many Award shows now:
 
The Golden Globes
The Grammys 
The Oscars
The Spirit Awards
The SAG Awards
The Emmys
The Tonys
And, of course,
 
The Grammies "Edna, this is your year, dear' 
 
“The award for best hard candy wrapped in a tissue goes to… Oh my god, I am so nervous, I can’t even get this open.”
 
Even a pandemic can’t stop these award shows. They are the cockroaches of televised events. Each year the ratings get worse and worse and each year we get more and more of them. I honestly think they are reproducing. 
 
Oh, what’s the use.

​With you-to the end of the world!” 
― Rudyard Kipling
 
Anyone who knows me, understands that I am a man who changes obsessions as often as most people change their clothes. Films are mostly the objects of my compulsion, but I willingly confess that an occasional non celluloid subject can preoccupy my mind as well. For the sake of this blog, we will stick to film. When a film takes over my limited brain span, I am powerless to fight it. I watch it repeatedly, hum the soundtrack incessantly and replay scenes over and over in my head,
 
This week’s obsession is The Man Who Would Be King (1975), directed by John Huston and starring Michael Caine as Peachy Carnahan, Sean Connery as Daniel Dravot and the exceptional and late, great Christopher Plummer as Kipling himself.  
 
This was a pet project for Huston who first wanted Gable and Bogart, then Burton and O’Toole, Lancaster and Douglas until finally settling on Paul Newman and Robert Redford to play the leads. Newman wisely suggested that only true Englishmen should play the parts and I’m glad Huston took that advice. I can’t imagine anyone else playing the two working class soldiers who dream of becoming kings.
 
I won’t bore you with any more trivia that I liberally stole from Wikipedia. There is a racist moment that disturbs me involving Peachy, Kipling and a fellow passenger but it is not enough to take me out the rest of the movie. The rest of this 2 hour and 9 minute running time is damn near perfection.
 
Morocco doubles for Afghanistan and Huston, quite the adventurer himself, does an excellent job taking full advantage of the rugged location. The cinematography of Oswald Morris is Oscar worthy and the score by Maurice Jarre is rapidly becoming one of my favorites.
 
This is old fashioned adventure at its finest, directed by a master of his craft, and if you have not seen it, get your ass over to HBO Max and check it out.

​Seems like everyone now a has a one man show. Hell, back in the very early eighties I had one. It was appropriately titled, Casually Insane and I still have my clippings if you’re interested. But I bet you didn’t know that at the twilight of his career, Roderick George Toombs, aka Rowdy Roddy Piper, wanted to try his hand at one. See? I thought not.
 
Well, sit back and relax, because if you are a wrestling fan, a J.P. Linde fan or a follower of self-promoting, self-indulging, narcissistic stories starring down and out wrestlers and comedian/writers, this may very well be the story for you.
 
Unlike many of you, I watched WWF wrestling rarely.  To say that I was fully aware of the entire colorful cast of characters that somehow managed to bring down an entire civilization would be an exaggeration. But, thanks to a Cindy Lauper, I was aware of some of the key players and Rowdy Roddy Piper happened to be one of them. 
 
So, when I got the call, along with Art Krug, co-writer and creator of our two man show Dumped and Divorced, that Roddy was looking for collaborators, I jumped at the chance. Nothing makes for a quicker fan than a potential job and paycheck. There would be five of us at the creative summit including myself, Art, Barry Kolin, the producer, and the man himself, the star of They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper.
 
Roddy showed up fashionably late, with a drink in his hand, a chemically enhanced gleam in his eye and a perpetual sniffle in his nose. He looked a bit tired and haggard but enthusiastically pitched his idea. He immediately regaled us with colorful stories and anecdotes from his past. He handed us each a copy of his autobiography for research and documentation and so we were hooked.
 
The goal was to book the show in comedy clubs, testing the material out and then opening it up to larger venues. We would all be rich, Roddy told us, this was a going to be a surefire hit.
 
I had not yet officially retired from comedy and here is where the rubber hit the road. For the time being Art and I would not be paid for our writing services but would open up for the famed wrestler warming up the audience for a fee. I was to be last comedian on stage, introducing Roddy to the crowd. 
 
And now, here is the reason that Art and I never wrote a one man show for Roddy Piper. Roderick turned to me and with a coca enhanced grin, announced that after I brought him up on stage, he would lift me high over his head and throw me into the tables at least four feet below. “Don’t worry,” he concluded. “I will teach you how to land.”
 
Being thrown off a stage that is five feet off the ground is one thing, not being paid is quite another. Being much bigger than us, and cruising on god knows what combination of chemicals exactly, Art and I gracefully excused ourselves and later, when we were quite sure that Roddy did not know where we lived, declined the offer.
 
Someone else ended up taking on this prestigious job, but tryouts at the comedy club did not go well as Roddy was incapable of holding his train of thought for more than a few minutes. Sad, really.
 
The world of professional wrestling is a relatively short-lived career. A good portion of wrestlers crash and burn after being exploited by a system that seems to deal in tragedy. Some stories are even sadder than that of Roderick George Toombs. Before Toombs died, he got the chance on HBO Real Sports to finally tell his story, the real story; to talk about his life, his sport, the high price he paid and even predicting his own death. If only he had been well enough to share his real story with myself and Art. That would have been a one man show worth talking about.
 
“For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”