Catching Up

Well, let's see: Where do I start?  Last Thursday evening, I drove down to San Diego (130 miles) to attend the San Diego Comic Fest.  I had my great friend Maggie Thompson with me and we made it in about two and a half hours.  When I got to my room, I did what I always do upon arrival in a new hotel room.  I set up my CPAP unit without which I cannot sleep.  (If you don't know from CPAP, click here.)

Problem: My CPAP unit didn't work.  I spent about twenty minutes trying to get it to work and came to the wise, informed deduction that it was broken.  Fortunately, I have others.  Unfortunately, they were in Los Angeles and I wasn't.  So I notified my house-sitter than I'd be sitting (sleeping, actually) in my house that night and I hopped back on the freeway.  Since you can usually drive faster later, I made it home in two hours, (another 130 miles) slept there, got up the next morning and drove back to San Diego.  This time, it took 3.5 hours, bringing our total up to 390 miles in about 15 hours.  I brought along another CPAP which worked flawlessly throughout the trip.  If it hadn't, I was going to just go home and never leave again for the rest of my life.

That was the second thing that went wrong.  The first was that my lovely friend Amber was unable to accompany me due to a last-minute matter.  But then things started to go right.  The convention was great fun…quite different from the immeasurable Comic-Con International in San Diego each July but enjoyable, nonetheless. Smaller means smaller, not less fun. The pace is slower, the crowd is tinier (and somewhat older) and the focus is mainly on old comic books, not so much current product.

I like that I got to talk to a lot of people — and eat with many of them: Maggie and I had dinner on Friday night with Jackie Estrada and Batton Lash; on Saturday night with Steve Leialoha, Trina Robbins, Buzz Dixon and Buzz's terrific spouse, Soon-ok; and on Sunday night with Scott Shaw! and his friend (and mine) Jann Morris-Penrod.

Monday morning, Maggie and I went to brunch and to the offices of IDW Publishing for a visit, then up to Solana Beach where we observed/heckled Frank Ferrante's tech run-through for his show that evening. A lot of folks are unaware of the work that goes into a performance before the performance. Frank tours the country with his one-man-plus-pianist show as Groucho Marx and in every city at every venue, he has to preside over a very-long session to make sure the set is right and then to make sure that set and the guy in it are lit properly. There are cues to be rehearsed, decisions to be made about levels of light and sound, choices to be made about where he'll be on the stage and how he'll get on and get off it, etc. He doesn't just show up in a new town and commence Grouchoing.

So Maggie and I observed and when asked, offered our opinions. I also got to have a nice conversation with Frank's current accompanist, Gerald Sternbach. I've observed Gerry for years as he has established himself as one of the best musical directors for stage productions, most of them based in Los Angeles.

Have I mentioned here yet that Reprise! is starting up again? Reprise! is a company that stages revivals of classic musical comedies and if you search back on this blog, you'll see dozens of reviews and reports on their shows, most of which I liked very much. Due to financial complications, the shows stopped for a while but they're starting up again and a new season kicks off on June 20 with Sweet Charity, to be followed later in the season by Victor/Victoria and Grand Hotel. With Gerald Sternbach as Musical Director.

I will be there for all of them. If you want to be there for all or any, you can buy tickets right this minute right on this website.

Maggie and I then met up with a bunch of friends — Marv Wolfman, John Plunkett, Phil Geiger and Monica Walker Jordan — for dinner and were joined for a while by Frank before he had to run off and prep. Then came the performance and yeah, I know: I rave a lot here about how good this guy is at transforming into the man who was arguably the world's greatest comedian. But there's a reason I've now seen this show more than a dozen times. He's really good. Check this calendar to see if and when he'll be doing it in your vicinity.

Got home late Monday night. Got up early Tuesday morn and headed down to L.A. City Hall with John Plunkett and Maggie. We went not to fight City Hall (you can't do that) but to attend the proclamation of yesterday as Leonard Maltin Day in the city. The L.A. City Council, whose next order of business was to debate some bill about spaying and neutering, took time out to honor my friend, the best film historian-critic in the field. A whole mess of his colleagues were present and being film buffs, we all kept talking about how City Hall was filmed for the exterior shots of the Daily Planet Building on the George Reeves Superman show.

Leonard, who I've known for many a year, is a valuable and wholly benevolent asset to the film community. He cares deeply about movies and about doing his job right…and I hate to think how much history we would not know if not for his efforts. I can't think of anyone I know more deserving of having a day designated in his honor. Even if he did insist that even though it was Leonard Maltin Day, he still couldn't fix a parking ticket.

It took a long time to get back to my place after the ceremony. First, we stopped at this wonderful place for lunch. Then we encountered oodles of traffic, especially in my neighborhood, because it was Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day with massive demonstrations. It was so bad in my area that I called the office of my City Councilman — who by the way did not show up for the proclamation of Leonard Maltin Day. I complained about that while I complained about the way the police were blocking off what seemed to me like the wrong streets and detouring traffic down other wrong streets. (The situation was not helped because other streets near me were blocked off because James Corden was shooting a Carpool Karaoke segment nearby.)

Complaining on the phone was frustrating because most of the folks I spoke to — I kept getting referred from office to office — could not grasp the fact that I was not complaining about the marchers. Almost everyone I spoke to was telling me, "This is a First Amendment matter, sir. We can't prevent people from marching in protest" and I had to tell person after person, "I'm not calling to complain about the marchers. From what I know of the history, I think I support their cause. I'm calling to complain about how the police are handling the increased traffic. I think they're making it worse out there, not better."

And every time I did make someone understand what I was griping about, they'd say "I need to transfer you to another department" and then the person in that department would tell me, "This is a First Amendment matter, sir. We can't prevent people from marching in protest." Eventually, the traffic began to dissipate along with my patience and I gave up. Later, one of those folks called me back and said, "We're still looking into it, sir, but it looks like someone got confused and closed off the streets on one list that were supposed to be open and left open all the streets on that list that were supposed to be closed." Yeah, that might do it.

So I guess that brings us up to date. Blogging here will resume at its normal pace as soon as the rest of my life does. Oh, yeah — and I still have to unpack.