I gave up candy around 2007 when my love of sweets mysteriously disappeared. But even when I did eat candy, I never sampled any of The 10 Candies That You Forgot Still Exist in this video. I didn't forget about half of them because I never heard of them. The rest didn't sound like something I'd enjoy…or at least, wouldn't enjoy as much as my other immediate options…
It's like: Here's a candy bar you've never tried. Here's a candy bar you know you love. Which one are you going to pick? I always picked the one I knew I loved.
I'm a little fascinated by old candy bars and I'm also a bit fascinated by the editing on videos like this where someone goes through twenty clips a minute of visuals, some of which are only remotely pertinent. How long must it take someone to find all those videos and edit them together? It looks like it would take about a month per minute. Here, take a look…
This is the problem with working all night as I did last night: It resets your body clock in a different way and suddenly, your life is Day for Night.
My father used to go to bed each night on schedule. If he didn't have to go in to work the next day, he'd hit the sack between 11:30 and Midnight. He always had to watch the 11:00 news and then maybe a little of Johnny Carson or some other late night show. Then it was off to beddy-bye. If he did have work the next day, it would be an hour earlier, i.e., the Ten O'Clock News. His body seemed to need between 7.5 and eight hours of sleep per night so he'd be up at eight…or on work days, seven. Like clockwork.
My mother went to bed when he went to bed. They were, as I've written here many times, a perfectly-coordinated couple. It may have been the happiest marriage I've ever seen. Both were willing to bend as necessary to the needs of the other person and my mother bent to make her sleeping habits coordinate with him. Those hours were not organic to her.
After he died, she began sleeping on the schedule which felt more natural to her: No schedule at all. She'd sleep when she felt like sleeping and be awake when she felt like being awake. Except when doctor appointments or the arrival of her cleaning lady (or, later on, caregivers) required she be up at a certain hour, she'd sleep in no discernible pattern. She might be up all night and go to bed at 10 in the morning. She might sleep two hours, then be up for four hours, then sleep three more, then be up for nine…
No pattern. No schedule. When I asked her how many hours of sleep she got a day, she answered honestly, "I have no idea." I'm pretty sure it was not the same every day. When I took her to Las Vegas, she'd ask me to make sure to pick a hotel where there was a coffee shop that served breakfast 24/7. She loved a full, restaurant-cooked breakfast — eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, etc. — and wanted to be sure she could get it at any hour, not just in the morning.
I did not inherit my father's sleep-on-a-schedule trait and I rarely sleep more than six hours a night. Five is more often the case. 10 PM until about three in the morning are sometimes my most productive hours for writing…and then the phone starts ringing with calls I don't want to miss between 9 AM and 10 AM. So 3 AM is a good time to go to bed but I sometimes go earlier or later.
It can vary because of a script deadline. It can vary because I have someone sleeping with me. Or it can vary just because I feel like it. Once in a while on a script, I'll hit a brick wall. I have no idea where to go with it next so I'll go to bed and worry about it the next morning. Sometimes, that works great and sometimes, I find myself lying in bed, wide-awake and thinking for what feels like hours about the next part of the script. If I come up with what feels like a great solution, I might get up and trudge back to the computer and do some more…
…and yes, I've been known to get up the next morning, re-read my 4 AM "solution" and decide, "Well, that wasn't such a hot idea…"
The last decade or so, I find my sleep pattern increasingly resembling my mother's after my father passed. That is not always a great idea because it can put you seriously outta sync with the rest of the world. Sometimes, I've found myself in sync with other time zones and not my own. On the various Garfield shows, I often had to interface with Jim Davis (who started his workday in Muncie at 6 AM his time, aka 3 AM my time) or animators in France or Taiwan. It has also been my experience that about one in five editors in New York will forget that when it's 9 AM where they're working, it's 6 AM where I'm sleeping. Or trying to.
Speaking of 6 AM here: I'm going to wrap this up, take the dishes that held my dinner down to the kitchen, feed Lydia if necessary (and it will be necessary) and turn in. It's Sunday so maybe I won't be awoken by someone calling or coming to the door. With careful planning and judicious napping, I might reprogram myself tomorrow to get back to the normal hours I'll need to be up on Monday. I could maybe have made a better start at that goal by not writing this. Good night.
The numbering on my three posts about My Graduation Day got some folks confused so I've retitled and reposted the three chapters. Now, it's as easy as one…two…three!
You're reading the third and final part of the story of my Graduation Day at University High School in West Los Angeles. The date was June 19, 1969 and you can read Part One here and Part Two here…or, at least, you should have. Do that before you plunge into this chapter if you haven't already. It will begin after this brief cautionary banner…
As I'm sure you remember, the ceremony was over, I'd shed the silly cap 'n' gown and now my Aunt Dot was insisting that me, my parents, my uncle and her — the five of us — head off for downtown L.A. She'd made a reservation at an Italian eatery called Little Joe's and it was important to her that we get there on time. It was important to me to say goodbye to my fellow classmates and to locate three young ladies I wanted to stay "in touch" with.
In the above paragraph, "in touch" is a euphemism for getting their phone numbers and some sign that it was okay for me to call on them for dating purposes. In all my years before that day, I'd never asked a lady out due to a cowardice of which I am now ashamed. It also felt to me like it would be wrong to not say more goodbyes to students I'd known for the past three years at Uni and, in some cases, since Junior High or even Elementary School.
One more photo of University High School.
When last we left me, I gulped and said, "I need some time to say goodbye to some people." She said, "Well, okay. But make it quick."
I dashed off to an area where many of my classmates were gathered and I suddenly saw something I hadn't expected, something that will seem trivial to you but which had a big impact on me at that moment.
I saw my classmates kissing.
Girls were kissing guys goodbye. Guys were kissing girls goodbye. I'm sure we must have had some gay students there but it was 1969 and no one was "out," at least at Uni. I assume that has changed.
We were all, allegedly, not only heterosexual but vigorously so. By '69, magazines like Time and Newsweek had had a year or three of articles about how freer These Kids Today were about sex and how teens weren't waiting for marriage anymore. Such pieces were full of quotes from anonymous kids my age about how even the homeliest among them were losing any and all virginity well before they got out of high school.
My friends and I would read those articles and ask The Heavens, "When, pray tell, is this trend getting here? And for God's sake, can you do something to hurry it up?" We'd debate whether it was true anywhere except in Newsweek. Our school, after all, was in Los Angeles, California and had no small amount of rich kids with parents in show business. I'd argue, "If this is not going on here, how could it be happening in Kansas?"
Oh, sure: I knew guys who couldn't change in or out of their gym clothes without boasting about who they'd banged the previous date night and how many times. Locker room talk, we called it then as our president does now. I didn't believe very many (if any) of my bragging classmates. I still think Uni graduated 500+ virgins that day and I know for certain one of them was me. I hadn't even kissed a girl for real…a condition I rectified then and there. I decided Aunt Dot and Little Joe's could wait forever.
What pulled me away from that was the realization that none of the three ladies I wanted to find were in that group of goodbye-kissers. I began running around, searching for them. A lot of families were moving towards the parking lot and to get there, I had to run past my family. "Mark, we need to leave," Aunt Dot called to me and I pretended not to hear her.
In the parking lot, I found Potential Girl Friend #1 with her family. We hugged — I didn't have the courage to kiss her in front of her parents — and I pulled her to one side so they couldn't hear.
Mustering every bit of bravado I could muster, I asked: "Is there any chance you'd go out with me some evening for dinner and maybe a movie?" She said, "Sure." She said it so directly that I was startled. I'd expected to use every tactic of persuasion I'd learned studying Sgt. Bilko reruns to con her into it…but there it was. If only I'd known it was that easy…
"Let me give you my phone number," she said and I wrote it down — which was wholly unnecessary since I still remember every digit. We couldn't say much more than that because her aunt, who I'm assuming was named Dot, was urging them all to head for the restaurant where they had a reservation.
We parted and I began looking around for Potential Girl Friends #2 and #3. There was no sign of them but I ran into my friend Bill and asked if he'd seen them. #2, he said, was up in the tables area outside the cafeteria just a few minutes ago. I thanked him and scurried off with the speed of Barry Allen with two seconds to save the world from total destruction. My mission, of course, was more important.
Getting to the cafeteria required passing Aunt Dot again. She was angrily yelling, "Mark, we have to go! Mark, we have to go!" I yelled back, "One more thing I have to do" but I don't think she heard it.
Potential Girl Friend #2 and her family were just wandering away from the cafeteria when I ran up and we played out the exact same scene I'd just played with Potential Girl Friend #1. I asked her. She said "Sure" and began rattling off another phone number I still know. Everything was identical except she didn't have an aunt with a restaurant reservation. She had a party back at home to get to before other relatives arrived.
Clutching two phone numbers in my head and hand, I began racing around the campus, looking here, there, everywhere but not finding #3. A lot of folks had left by now and I was thinking I was too late and, hell, two outta three ain't bad, right?
me in my high school yearbook
I had just given up on ever seeing #3 again when I saw her again. She and several members of her family were walking towards a gate to the street. With an energy I'd never been able to muster in gym class, I sprinted towards them. When I was within ten feet and they hadn't yet noticed the hysterical kid running towards them, I braked to a casual stroll and tried to act like I was just walking and I happened to run into them.
Potential Girl Friend #3 saw me there, turned and threw her arms around me. This is a moment I still recall vividly. I thought of going for the lips but my peripheral vision showed me her father eyeing us so I thought better of it. She quickly introduced me as "that boy I've told you about who says all those funny things and draws all those funny pictures." At my best moments, that was me in high school. Or at least, that's who I tried to be.
Her father had a big grin as he shook my hand. He said, "She's told us over dinner every funny thing you ever said to her!" I froze and quickly tried to recap what I'd said to her, some of which I'm sure was strewn with sexual innuendoes and double entendres. But Dad seemed to like me. He actually said, "I was always kind of hoping you two would go out on a date so I could meet the young man who said —" and here he quoted some quip of mine I'd be embarrassed to quote here.
I turned to P.G.F. #3 and said, "Well, to make your father happy, I guess we'd better go out some time." When she eagerly agreed, I felt like I should go give back the diploma due to sheer stupidity on my part. What the hell had I been so afraid of? I could have been taking this girl out all semester. I could even have been hinting in the locker room that we'd been doing far naughtier things than would probably ever have occurred.
She did not give me her phone number. She didn't have anything to write on but her father pulled out a scrap of paper and wrote it down. I gave his daughter a final (for now) hug, promised to call and did a sporty victory lap back to Aunt Dot.
"We can go now," I announced. She apologized for rushing me so and then the five of us crammed into my father's car and spent a long, long time getting to Little Joe's. I thought the food was pretty mediocre there — way worse than my pick, Zito's — but maybe that was because I was so lost in thought. I was trying to readjust my mind to just how much of my life had changed in the previous few hours. I hadn't expected it be as emotional as it was. I hadn't expected to actually feel my life changing.
But I was out of high school. That was a good thing. And I'd said goodbye, probably forever, to a lot of friends, plus I had my first dating opportunities. I also now had no excuse not to begin pursuing my lifelong plan of becoming a professional writer.
I'm not going to tell you what happened on the dates. This isn't that kind of website and, besides, I'm still in touch with one of those Potential Now-Former Girl Friends and she reads this blog. I will however tell you what happened when I made my first really-truly serious attempt to sell something I'd written, therefore embarking on whatever this career I've had has been.
I'll tell you that on the fiftieth anniversary of that day, which occurs later this week. I'm sure hoping the President declares it a national holiday but knowing him, he probably won't and I'll have one more reason to dislike him. Like I need more.
The last part of my three-chapter remembrance of my high school graduation will be up later today. Yesterday was very busy and I've been up all night writing a script that has to be in on Monday. The third chapter is done but I want to give it a final read 'n' tweak before I post it here. And before I give it a final read 'n' tweak, I want to get some sleep so I'll have some idea of what I'm reading. Good night, Internet.
A lot of folks this morning are talking like they've forgotten there are many more debates ahead. They're also forgetting the many times someone has done well in one debate and poorly in others — or vice-versa. I'm not particularly a fan of Joe Biden but I haven't seen anyone say "he hurt himself last night" who wasn't eager for Biden to hurt himself last night.
Maybe he did. But if we've learned nothing from Donald Trump's success, it's that it's possible for a candidate these days to say something that sounds like it'll cost him a lot of his support…and then not lose any support. Let's wait and see the polls…and let's remember that at various points in the last election, they had Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Jeb Bush in the lead for the Republican nomination.
People today are laughing today about some of Marianne Williamson's more bizarre ideas and I wrote a tweet that lumped her in with Michele Bachmann. But let's take note of this tweet from Robert Maguire…
If you think Marianne Williamson's ideas are kooky, wait til you hear about the guy who says windmills cause cancer, thinks you need to show ID to buy cereal, and doesn't exercise because he thinks the human body is like a battery with a finite amount of energy.
And I don't get all this talk about what someone might do on Day One of their administration. Has anyone from any party in any past presidential election ever done anything important on Day One of any administration? I mean, apart from having the Oval Office fumigated?
I know we're eager for this thing to be over but it'll be a long time before this thing is over. Please remain in your seats for the duration of the flight with your seat belts fastened.
It is a custom at Wrigley Field in Chicago that during the Seventh Inning Stretch, someone leads the crowd in singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Here from last night is the best-ever musical performance at a baseball field. As far as I'm concerned, this easily beats out The Beatles at Shea Stadium…
I don't know who's going to be the Democratic candidate for president and I'm not even sure about the Republican nominee. But I hope there'll be at least three debates between Marianne Williamson and Michele Bachmann, preferably on this planet.
My longtime friend The Great Jerry Beck sent me this message about the preceding video embed…
That was a great Johnny Mercer music video you posted today, featuring clips by The Great Chuck Jones. I hadn't seen that before and will be sharing it with others.
But I wouldn't be a typical reader of the blog by The Great Mark Evanier if I didn't point out that the clips contained therein also included work by the Great Bob Clampett (1:32 – Elmer in drag from The Big Snooze), The Great Friz Freleng (2:25 – dancing Do-Do's from Dough for the Do-Do), and The Great Robert McKimson (3:35 – Foghorn Leghorn from Crowing Pains).
The Great Jerry Beck is right. The Great Mark Evanier lowered his greatness a few notches by not noticing what The Great Jerry Beck noticed. Henceforth, he shall be The Not-as-Great Mark Evanier. He is shamed.
One of my favorite "old school" bandleaders was The Great Billy May. I met the man once…at a party at Stan Freberg's home and it was like…
"Mark, would you like to meet The Great Billy May?"
"That man over there…that's The Great Billy May!"
"Could we get a drink for The Great Billy May?"
It was like that was his name. He certainly recorded enough hit records in his day, with his band and with the top recording artists of the time. This is a video made recently to a song he did with The Great Johnny Mercer. Mercer co-wrote the song, which I like a lot, and sang the lead vocal on it. I'm not sure who set it to clips from old Warner Brothers cartoons directed by The Great Chuck Jones but whoever did it was probably The Great Somebody…
I may change my mind tomorrow but right now, I want Elizabeth Warren to be sworn in as the next president but Joe Biden to run against Trump and I want Kamala Harris to be the nominee who faces Donald in any debates. Any way we can get those three to tag-team the nomination?
So it's June 19, 1969, the day I graduated from University High School. I'd attended Uni for three years but it somehow felt like thirty. Days passed slower when I was that age. Christmases were actually one whole year apart.
This is the second part of a remembrance of that day. If you missed Part One, it's here and it should be read before proceeding. If you have read it, let's proceed right after the following warning…
Now then. I was eager to get outta high school for several reasons, one being that I felt I'd long since stopped learning whatever there was to learn there. I was going to enter U.C.L.A. the following fall but before that happened, I wanted to somehow launch my career as a professional writer…a career I'd decided on more than ten years earlier.
No kidding: I wanted to be a writer from around the age of six. When you're that young, adults seem incapable of asking you much of anything except…
When's your birthday?
What's your favorite color?
And what do you want to be when you grow up?
I had all the answers: March 2nd, orange and a writer. In that order. "A writer?" they'd puzzle. "Don't you want to be a spaceman or a cowboy?"
"Nope," I'd say. "A writer." Right now, I'd feel like a total failure in life if I'd picked being a spaceman or a cowboy. At this very moment, I'm doing what I wanted to do when I was six…something that as of less than a week from now, I'll have been doing for fifty friggin' years. That's five-oh.
Still, though I'd decided on my life's work early on, I hadn't decided what I wanted to be a writer of. There were plenty of enticing options: TV shows, movies, comic books, cartoons, plays, novels…
Since I didn't have to commit at that age, I figured I'd wait 'til I got old enough and see which if any of those became feasible. To my grand surprise, most of them did.
I was 17 on 6/19/69 — younger than most of my classmates because I'd skipped a few grades — but old enough, I thought, to begin figuring out the "of." I wanted to begin actually being a writer and just as much if not more, I wanted something else. I wanted a girl friend. I'd had friends who were girls but there's a big difference between having a girl be your friend and having her be your girl friend. And it's not the same difference as having sex and not having sex.
I hadn't even tried to get a girl friend for about eleven reasons and all of them were Fear. This is going to sound like the most cowardly, gutless thing in the world to anyone who hasn't been in my position but this is what I was afraid of: That I'd ask a girl out, she'd say no and then I'd have to sit next to her in Geometry for an entire semester being reminded of that turndown. Graduation Day was not only the day to make my move, it was Now or Never.
Another shot of University High School.
There were a number of girls in my class that I liked but there were three that I really liked. Really, really liked. Since at least one of them reads this blog, I won't say which of the three I preferred but I would have set fire to my comic book collection for any one of them.
Wait. No, I wouldn't have. That's the kind of thing that comes out of you if you're desperate enough. Let's just say I wanted just one of them to say, "Sure, Mark. I'd love to go out with you some evening." The graduation ceremony was going to be followed by a milling period where we graduates could all say farewell to each other. My plan — if you can call it a plan — was that I would locate as many of the three as I could and ask them for the phone numbers and some sort of signal that they wouldn't call the police if I asked them out to dinner.
There were also a few guys — just a few — that I wanted to make sure I stayed in touch with, plus a few more I didn't particularly want to stay in touch with but I felt a pleasant "Goodbye forever" was in order. I managed to talk with all of them and exchange contact info with the few before the ceremony so that was done.
Sitting there, waiting for the boring speeches to end, I kept thinking, "Get on with this! I have phone numbers to get! I didn't imagine that my plan had one major obstacle: My Aunt Dot.
I've written here before of Aunt Dot, a lovely, sweet lady who was incapable of intentionally harming another human being, me especially. But she sometimes had odd ideas and she could be fairly stubborn about them. She was at the ceremony along with my father, my mother and my Uncle Nathan. Nathan was my father's brother. Dot was their sister. Aunt Dot had decided that after the festivities, we should all go celebrate at a rather famous Italian restaurant downtown called Little Joe's.
None of us had ever been there before but Aunt Dot had heard it was wonderful and that's where she insisted we dine. I suggested that instead, we go to Zito's, which was my favorite restaurant of any kind, Italian or otherwise. Like most folks with major food allergies, I have never liked trying new places to eat. Aunt Dot, alas, was one of these "you should always try new things" people. The fact that none of us had been to Little Joe's was, to her, an inarguable reason for going there and not to Zito's.
Zito's was a lot closer…like, a ten minute drive as opposed to 45 minutes in rush-hour traffic. At Little Joe's, we needed a reservation (which she had made) whereas we could just show up at Zito's and get a table. I argued all that, plus the notion that since it was my graduation, maybe we should go where I preferred to go?
Nope. We had to go to Little Joe's. After all, why drive ten minutes to a place we know we'll love when we can drive forty-five to a place we might not like? If I sound like I'm dwelling overlong on this, it may be that after one week plus half-a-century later, I'm still having some residual anger about it.
It started ten seconds after I was handed my diploma and I walked over to where my parents, aunt and uncle were sitting. They all congratulated me, my mother helped me out of the silly cap and gown, and then Aunt Dot said, "Let's go! We have a 5:00 reservation and it's a long drive."
I gulped and said, "I need some time to say goodbye to some people." She said, "Well, okay. But make it quick."
What happened next will have to wait for tomorrow, folks.
I missed writing about this because of my trip outta town but fifty years plus one week ago today, I graduated from University High School in West Los Angeles. It was June 19, 1969, a date I thought would never come. Couldn't wait to get outta there.
To me, school was something you just had to get through. At the time, I thought I'd learned very little there and in terms of Math, Science, Foreign Languages and other subjects like those, I was right. What I did learn in those areas, I retained only long enough to pass the necessary tests, after which a little "You'll Never Need To Know That" filter in my brain released that information into the wild. I learned a few lasting things about English and History but a lot more from my outside reading and the watching of documentaries and such.
But from the awesome vantage point of hindsight, I later realized that I learned much that was of value at Uni. Most of it had to do with interacting with other human beings: How to get along with them, how to minimize contact with those you simply couldn't get along with, how to treat others, etc. One nice thing about high school is that you can make a fool of yourself before everyone and then, once Graduation Day is over, you have a kind of fresh start. You never have to see those people again.
There were however several classmates I very much wanted to see again…a few male friends and three young ladies on whom I had what one might politely call "crushes." The part of this story that involves them will have to wait for the second part of this tale which I will post tomorrow. Right now, lemme tell you about the graduation ceremony…
That grand event was directed/choreographed by Mr. Rudoff, who was the boy's vice-principal. Mr. Rudoff was a nice, long-suffering administrator but he wasn't the swiftest adult on campus. He proved to be a lot more competent at sending students to detention and expelling them than he was at supervising the big show.
Our graduation exercises took place on a big athletic field and thousands of folding chairs were rented and set up for us and our families to sit in. On the north side of this field, there were some raised areas like steps but with dirt and grass in them. Our chairs were placed along them, facing south. Our families and guests were in rows facing us to form the audience. The podium from which various speeches would be made was at the center of the "stage" facing the audience so we mostly saw the speakers' backs.
University High School
Mr. Rudoff concerned himself primarily with us making our entrance, which was a long process since there were close to six hundred of us. It had been decided for some reason that we should march in in size-place, shortest kid in the front, tallest kid at the end. Half of a full rehearsal day was taken up just with figuring out who was in what position and we all could have thought of about eighty more efficient and quicker ways to do this than the way we did it.
He more or less had us all line up figuring out for ourselves where we should be — and that alone took half-an-hour. Then he went up and down the line saying, "No, she should be ahead of you…no, you should be back about ten places…no, he should be ahead of you…" The line was so long that at times, he had to use one of those electronic bullhorns to address us all: "Kid in the blue plaid shirt, you should be ahead of the girl in the pink top…"
Once we were all in line, each of us was assigned a number ranging from #1 (the shortest) to #585 (the tallest). Naturally, the front of the line was mostly girls and the end of the line was mostly boys. I felt sorry for one poor girl who was a hair over 6-feet tall and very self-conscious about it. She was pretty darned embarrassed to be #555 when everyone else in the last three-fifths of the line was male.
Mr. Rudoff reminded us about three times a minute for the rest of the day: "Make sure you remember your number!" I did. I still do. Being 6'2" (I would later grow another inch), I was #572 — and isn't it amazing that half a century later, I still recall that? I don't recall one thing that I learned in Chemistry other than that I hated Chemistry but I remember I was #572 at the graduation ceremony. I guess that filter in my brain decided that fact might prove useful eventually…say, when I wrote this article fifty years later.
We all filled out and handed in cards with our names and numbers. That was so our diplomas could be put in the proper sequence for us to each be handed ours as we filed out in the same order we'd filed in. If they'd just marched us in as per alphabetical order, someone would not have had to spend hours arranging the diploma piles.
The chairs were set up in six rows of 100 each and they were all numbered on little strips of tape someone had affixed to them. As we rehearsed filing in, the first kid in line took Chair #1, the next took Chair #2 and so on. Mr. Rudoff told the kids with #101, #201, #301, #401 and #501 to remember to start a new row, I guess he assumed that they wouldn't know to do that after the kid ahead of them took the last seat in his or her row.
We spent what now seems like many hours practicing our entrance. Things kept getting bollixed-up well ahead of me but finally, there were two runthroughs in a row where my ass wound up on Chair #572. Since everyone else ended up in the proper seat too, Mr. Rudoff pronounced us sufficiently rehearsed on entering. We then practiced exiting, which was a lot easier. On cue, Student #1 would get up and walk to where the Principal would be standing at a table with someone handing him envelopes, each with a student's name and number on the outside and the correct (it was hoped) diploma inside.
Student #2 would be right behind Student #1 and Student #3 would be right behind Student #2 and so on. How could that possibly go wrong? Just you wait. Just you wait.
Each of us would be handed the proper envelope (maybe) and then we were free to march over to our friends 'n' family in the audience and disperse forever from there. An announcement was made that some students would not have diplomas in their envelopes. Instead, there would a letter stating that weren't really being graduated that day. They had one or more make-up classes to pass or some other problem to fix before that could happen.
On Graduation Day, three things went seriously wrong with all this…
Seriously Wrong Thing #1: No one had turned off the automatic sprinkler system so overnight, it had watered the folding chairs. A crew had rushed in with towels to wipe them down but when the ceremony commenced, some of them were still damp and the athletic field was somewhat muddy.
Seriously Wrong Thing #2: At the last minute, it was decided that thirty or so students would not participate in the ceremony. I don't know if those were the aforementioned students who wouldn't be receiving their diplomas or if there was some other criteria. Whatever it was, it created around 30 holes in the lineup. Mr. Rudoff (I guess) decided that they didn't want those empty seats and it was too late to renumber from scratch…so the last thirty of us were reassigned to those places in line.
I was still #572 but now #572 came between #32 and #33. both of whom were girls who were each 5'3". It wasn't as bad as it could be. When we took our seats, my weight and the muddiness of the ground caused my chair to sink about an inch-and-a-half into the mud and bad posture lowered me an inch or two more. I still felt like Gulliver seated among the Lilliputians but I didn't tower over those around me as much as I might have.
Which brings us to Seriously Wrong Thing #3: The overnight sprinklers had not only moistened the chairs but knocked a lot of them over. Whoever set them all back up apparently had heard that we'd lost thirty graduaters (if that wasn't a word before, it is now) and they decided that while they were at it, they might as well rearrange so the last row wouldn't be half-empty. Instead of six rows of 100, we now had five rows of 111, so all that concern about which students would start a new row was out the window —
— and I just remembered a Seriously Wrong Thing #4: At the last minute, someone ruled that twelve or so of those who'd been told they couldn't be in the ceremony had to be in the ceremony. The grounds crew people scurried out to get a dozen chairs off the truck and then they had to figure out where to put them and how to get those twelve last minute additions into them…
That plus Seriously Wrong Thing #2 meant that when you got to the spot where the principal would hand you your diploma, the diplomas were not in quite the right order and…oh, it was a mess.
But we didn't care. At least, I didn't. I was finally getting out of high school!
The speeches were deadly dull…a few of my fellow students and a couple of administrators, all talking about Tomorrow and The World Ahead Of Us and The Future Being Ours and How We Owe It All To University High School and I didn't care because I was finally getting out of high school!
The main oration came from Tom Bradley, who in June of 1969 was the former track star, L.A. police officer and city councilman who had recently been defeated in his first attempt to unseat Sam Yorty as the Mayor of Los Angeles. A few years later, Mr. Bradley defeated Yorty in a rematch to become the only African-American Mayor of Los Angeles and the longest-serving Mayor of the city. But that day, a lot of my fellow students remarked that it said something about our graduating class that we were being addressed by a loser.
What did he say in his speech on my graduation day? I haven't the foggiest. I wasn't paying attention and why should I? All that mattered was that I was finally getting out of high school!
Plus, most of my attention was focused on my immediate, post-ceremony mission. I'll tell you how that turned out in the second part of my Graduation Day Memories, which will be posted on this blog tomorrow.
The Broadway show King Kong will will play its final performance on Sunday, August 18. A tour of Shanghai has been announced for 2021 and there will possibly be others. I'm enormously intrigued by the question, "What do you do with a 2000-lb., twenty-foot-tall ape puppet that takes more than a dozen people to operate?"
Where do you store it? If you take it on tour, how long does it take to set it up in one theater and then move it to another? Can it even work in some theaters? And then what do you do with it when the tour is over? I'm thinking you find some tourist center to set it up as a permanent attraction, not necessarily in the musical for which it was built…but maybe it's too expensive to maintain and operate to do that.
I hope there's an American tour and it makes its way to Los Angeles. I wanted to get back to New York to see this show, just in case it's never performed again. It doesn't look like I'm going to get there in time. I heard mixed things about the musical as a musical but even the folks I know who went to see it and didn't care for it said, "You have got to see this puppet in action."
Another Broadway production — The Cher Show — closes the same night, even though it won two Tony Awards. Its main Cher, Stephanie J. Block, got Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and Bob Mackie won for Best Costume Design of a Musical but those wins apparently failed to boost the box office enough. It wouldn't surprise me if that show toured for a long time…and hey! Maybe the producers of The Cher Show and the producers of King Kong could team up, dress the puppet in huge Bob Mackie gowns and have it sing, "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves." Wouldn't you pay to see that? I know I would.
Saturday, October 7, 2016: The Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump is released with Trump telling the interviewer that he may just walk up and start kissing a woman they are about to meet. He says, "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
What does Senator Lindsey Graham have to say about this? He tweets, "Name one sports team, university, publicly-held company, etc. that would accept a person like this as their standard bearer?"
Friday, June 21, 2019: Journalist E. Jean Carroll publishes an article in which she claims Donald Trump raped her.
What does Senator Lindsey Graham have to say about this? He tells a reporter, "He's denied it. That's all I needed to hear."
