Fred Bonetti when he was young, a serious actor at Pasadena Playhouse.
“Confucius said, ‘A day spent in idle conversation is a day well spent.’“
Fred was drunk when he told me that.
I was drunk too, so I believed him.
Well, what’s not to believe? It’s a cool observation attributed to one of the supercool philosophers in history.
Problem is, Confucius didn’t really say it, apparently. I’ve Googled the shit out of it. I think Fred made it up.
Fred and I talked a lot of philosophy during our late night conversations. After the onstage curtain calls and the final theater patrons had left the building, out came the large bottle of Albertsons vodka and a couple of cans of Diet Sprite. From that moment into the wee hours of a Saturday or Sunday morning Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were our bitches.
I couldn’t quote philosophy but I could understand the concepts, sorta. Fred could quote famous thinkers word-for-word and explain what they meant. Sometimes he even took issue with the likes of Kant and Kierkegaard. He considered Descartes a fool merely for being French.
Fred has been gone for almost twenty years. I miss him, even though he was irascible and often insufferable. He was also one of the funniest men alive. He could noodle on a piano with a four-inch ash dangling from his “ciggy-poo”, as he called it, while reducing his fellow comic actors to puddles of laughter with his bawdy jokes, his rubbery face and his exquisite sense of timing. He was the master in a house full of funny people.
Most of my dear friends from Stagedoor Comedy Playhouse are gone now, as is the building itself. I loved that time of my life and though I’m not inclined to be overly nostalgic I do enjoy basking in fond memories from time to time.
I miss the laughter and my drunken conversations with Fred.
I took this picture near our home in Texas. It’s a big place with small beauties.
I’m starting a week of vacation tomorrow. I like my job but it forces me to focus on the world’s problems and there’s never a shortage of them.
Today I’m checking out from the big world of bad news. Putin, the pandemic, politics and the price of gas will swirl on without me for a few days. I’m on time-out.
I just came in from the patio where I drank coffee and watched the dogs rush back and forth chasing birds thirty feet above them.
It’s a beautiful day. Spring isn’t far off.
We sprang forward last night. I don’t like time changes but I’m not going to fuss about it right now.
Photo by my uncle, Michael Webster. He sees things the rest of us look past.
CarolAnn is having a fun day out with one of her girlfriends. (“Girlfriends” sounds kinda silly at their age, but I’ll never admit I said that.)
I’m sipping coffee, listening to classic country, thinking happily of my kids and theirs.
Cora, the cat, just plopped down beside me and begged for a chin scratch.
The world is a mess, but at this level it’s still filled with miracles and joy.
It was 72 degrees in North Texas yesterday. Today we’ll top out at 36. Windy as hell. I love Texas weather.
Nick Nolte, 1986
Picking away at a novel I have been picking at for 34 years, I needed a character description for my protagonist. Nick Nolte sprang to mind because I like him. Not the 80 year-old Nick Nolte, the one most of us remember from 1986, which is when my story is set.
That made me try to remember a particular movie he did with Barbra Streisand. I went to Google. It was called The Prince of Tides, premiered in 1991 based on the novel by Pat Conroy. I liked both, the book and the movie.
Gosh, they were gorgeous!
The book was published in 1986. Perfect.
Then I realized I haven’t heard much about Nick Nolte or anything at all about Barbra Streisand in recent years except for an occasional political outburst that I generally consider nutty. But who cares? She’s Barbra and she sings like an angel.
I Googled Barbra.
My first thought was, wow… why is she trying so hard to retain her youthful beauty instead of gracefully looking her actual, beautiful age? She’ll be 80 in April. I think looking 80 would be better than looking 80 trying to look 40.
Barbra recently. (No specific year given.)
My second thought was that I should be ashamed of myself for my first thought, judging her appearance. Still, I wondered what she’s been doing since her last semi-memorable movie, Meet the Fockers, which came out in 2004.
Say what you will about Barbra, she’s one of the few true superstars in our lifetime who is so blessed with talent that she’s immediately recognized by just her first name. She is an exquisitely gifted actress, both dramatic and comedic. Her voice is angelic, her ability to interpret lyrics with refined passion is unequaled. Her voice simply takes me away.
I can overlook Babs’ nutty politics. And hey, if she likes what she sees in the mirror, good for her.
After noodling around on Google some more, I’m thrilled to report that Barbra is still singing as beautifully as ever! Here’s her latest, released just last August. (Notice, she’s not seen in the video. Just sayin’…)
And now you know how I can spend 34 years writing one-third of a story.
This morning I took my almost-four-years-old grandson to school.
His parents are out of town and though he spent the night with his maternal grandparents they both leave for work very early. So, I had the honor of driving to their home at 4:30 AM and being on hand when Tyler awoke around 7:00.
He was very pleased to see me.
“Oh, yeah!”
Still wiping the sleep from his eyes he had suddenly remembered that I would be here for him this morning. He flashed a drowsy grin and ran to me, bare feet slapping the wood floor, his favorite soft baby blanket slung over one arm. His arms went up as mine went down and I lifted him high over my head. We hugged and smiled as is our habit and standard greeting.
I guess he thinks I’m sort of special.
At first, I just sat on the couch and held him on my lap, allowing him to wake up gently.
I don’t like brisk, lively beginnings to a day. I like slow, quiet starts and I think Tyler does, too. At least this morning he did. I held him in my big, bear-like grandpa arms and spoke to him softly.
“Did you sleep good?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you ready for a great day?”
“Yeah!”
February 10, 2009
We talked like that for maybe ten minutes, me asking leading questions designed to put him in a happy frame of mind, him responding affirmatively and with increasing animation. Finally, we decided it was time to get dressed and off to school with a stop at McDonald’s for breakfast.
And that’s the way my day began. No big deal and yet quite remarkable.
As I look back on nearly sixty years of life I am amazed at how little of it I remember with any degree of detail or certainty. I remember the big things but not much of the ordinary and that just makes sense, really.
On a cold, dazzling-bright February morning Tyler and I ate hotcakes and sausage at McDonald’s surrounded by old men in ballcaps sipping coffee and solving the world’s problems.
I took this picture of our grandson, Isaiah, ten or eleven years ago when he presented himself to me in our kitchen, wearing his skivvies on his head, proclaiming himself Captain Underpants.
Today is his first day at boot camp in the U.S. Navy as Seaman Recruit Isaiah Daniel King.
We got to talk with him on the phone yesterday before he took his oath to tell him we love him and are proud of him. He said he wasn’t nervous but I don’t believe it. When I was 19, as he nearly is, I was scared to death going to Air Force basic training but I didn’t tell him that. I told him some funny stories about my days in basic and he enjoyed them. “You’ll work very hard and be very tired but before you graduate,” I said, “you will be proud of the man you’re becoming.”
He told his Nana he was excited because they told him he’ll get paid his first day in the Navy. When she told me that later I laughed my ass off.
“Yeah, they’ll pay him,” I explained. “Then they’ll march him to the base barber and he’ll have to pay to have his head shaved. After that they’ll march him to the base exchange and give him a long list of personal items he is required to buy with his new money: toiletries, mostly. No snacks, no toys, just gear. Then they’ll march him into a building where he’ll be ordered to strip down to his underwear, give him new underwear and basic training uniforms for scrubs to carry in his arms as they they send him through a gauntlet of people who will inject both arms multiple times with vaccines to ward off every disease known to man, most of which you’ve never heard of.”
I’ve told these stories as endearing memories I’ve kept for more than fifty years. It won’t be funny to Isaiah tonight but I assured him it will be, eventually.
When Isaiah gets back to his barracks today they’ll call him outside for his first day of torturous physical conditioning. They’ll yell him into the chow hall, yell at him to hurry up eating and yell at him some more before yelling it’s time to go to bed. He’ll fall into his “rack” next to fifty other kids as the lights go out. Some of them will be sniffling and crying as quietly as possible in the dark but he’ll hear them.
The next morning will arrive hours before sunrise with the demon sergeant throwing on the stark overhead barracks lighting and yelling at him to wake up, make his bed and fall out.
I suppose things have changed in 50 years but I hope not too much. This is how the military turns boys into men. They know what they’re doing and they almost always get excellent results.
They’ll work his butt off, shouting at him all the way, for the next eight weeks. He’ll be dog tired all the time, collapsing on the floor to sleep next to his bunk because he doesn’t want to mess up the bed he was ordered to make with crisp hospital corners so tight that a drill instructor can bounce a coin off the top blanket.
But there is fun to be had along the way. In memory, at least, if not at the moment.
I told Isaiah of the time our basic training flight (that’s what they call a group of scrubs in the Air Force) was marching down the street with our drill sergeant screaming in our faces the whole way. Everybody had knit sphincters, not least of all a young man from Metairie, Louisiana, named Dawson. He was a pure Cajun kid who talked funny and couldn’t keep in step with the rest of us. The harder he tried the worse it got and the more he was yelled at. He had one permanently crossed-eye that flicked every which way but the right way as he tried in vain to follow directions. I was marching next to him as the beast with four stripes screamed at him barely inches from his terrified face.
“DAWSON! GET IN STEP! DON’T LOOK AT YOUR FEET, LIFT YOUR HEAD, SHOULDERS BACK, GET IN STEP! EYES STRAIGHT AHEAD, DAWSON! EYES STRAIGHT AHEAD!…BOTH OF THEM!”
When Sergeant Tenorio said “both of them!” six of us collapsed in hysterics. That’s what he was aiming for. He screamed at all of us to get the hell out of his flight and march in shame behind the rest of the group.
Isaiah laughed. That’s what I was aiming for.
He’s a good boy and now he’s becoming a good man.
Here’s my first chapter in the Captain Underpants story, written 11 years ago. It includes the origin of the name.
Sacramento’s Stagedoor Comedy Playhouse was my home away from home in the 80s and 90s. For several of those years between marriages, it was my home instead of home.
I was Felix to Dave Grosby’s Oscar in Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” Gosh, we were terrific.
I don’t have an exact count but I’d guess I performed in some 20 plays at Stagedoor and directed another ten or so. I wrote a few, too. After each performance, the cast and crew would gather around the beer and wine bar in the lobby and relive the glories and horrors of that night’s show. We drank and laughed while learning the fine points of our craft, of action, reaction and timing, through our shared experience. We kept at it until the wee hours, then reluctantly headed to the parking lot with the happy promise that we’d all get together the next night and do it all again.
I was in my thirties then and thoroughly immersed in my life as a single father and my blossoming radio career. But I still had dreams of a different, distant future.
“When I get old,” I told my theater family, “I’m going to get acting jobs in movies and TV. All the young, hot bodies are fighting for stardom. I’ll wait until they’ve all burned out,” I said. “Then I’ll just scoop up all the old man character roles.”
Remember this old man? Burt Mustin. He was on every big and small screen in the 1950s and 60s.
It was my retirement plan. Seemed like a good idea at the time when TV shows all featured the same two or three old men playing minor roles and window dressing, actors who had been around forever learning technique and aging into the life experience needed for old man character roles.
Forty years have slipped away. I guess it’s time.
I just filled out a form for a casting agency to appear as an extra in a TV series filming in the Fort Worth Stockyards. It’s a prequel to the hit series, “Yellowstone”, called “1883”.
I love Westerns. I’ve eaten dust on horseback.
I loved playing cowboy 60 years ago and I loved being on stage 20 years later. Maybe I’m ready to saddle up again, or just walk down a wood plank sidewalk as a body comes flying through the swinging doors of a saloon.
50 years ago today I got married. We were both barely 20.
Five years later we had a son. Five years after that we got divorced.
Today is our 50th anti-versary. That’s the term I invented a few years after we split up when the emotional angst was mostly behind me and I realized something I still think was pretty insightful:
Our marriage didn’t fail, it just ended.
Now, 50 years later I’m proud to say that my high school sweetheart is still my close friend. So is her husband, and they share a happy friendship with my wife of 33 years.
We’ve all shared the best of life over the past several decades: kids, grandkids, a wonderful daughter-in-law and her loving family, holiday gatherings and a lot of happy memories made of special events and activities.
Jeremy & Emily’s wedding, 1997. The kids pledged their eternal love as John and I sealed our family ties. L-R: Emily’s parents, Gloria and George, Karen, Emily, Jeremy, John, CarolAnn, me.
My wives, former and current, have spent days together shopping and taking the grandsons to Disneyland. This past June my ex and her hubby joined us for a weekend road trip celebrating CarolAnn’s and my anniversary.
Some people think this is highly unusual if not downright weird. But I ask you, how do you throw away 50 years of love and respect out of spite? Why would you do that?
The four of us are separately happy together.
Karen and I learned to keep the good times and dump the bad.
So, happy anti-versary, Karen. Give John a hug for CarolAnn and me.
I heard a guy on the radio this morning waxing nostalgic about the time he met his childhood hero, Bart Starr. At that point he employed a clever trick we radio talkers carry in our toolbox, asking rhetorically, “Did you ever have a chance to talk with your idol?”
It’s what we call a hook. It engages the listener. We get you personally involved in a topic. This is called active rather than passive listening. It works every time, even on me.
I’ve told these stories here before but hell, I’ve been telling one of them for about 60 years, the other for 32. Why stop now? They still haunt me.
I met Willie Mays when I was ten or twelve years old. For reasons I still don’t understand a security guard protecting the San Francisco Giants players’ parking lot from an excited crowd of kids waving pens and gloves opened his gate just wide enough to admit me, and me alone, into the autograph promised land. The other several dozen kids were left clamoring at the chainlink barrier like starving waifs in a Dickens novel.
This was my golden ticket, even before Willie Wonka was created.
When my hero emerged from the locker room door my heart started pounding and my mouth went dry. I walked toward him calmly, on rubber legs; I politely raised my baseball glove and pen to his world-famous face and muscular shoulders, forcing my thick, parched tongue to stammer, “Mr. Mays, can I have your autograph?”
Willie kept walking. He didn’t slow down, look at me, smile, or shoo me away.
He made me doubt my existence.
Willie got in his car, I went back to my dad and we started the sad two-plus hours drive home.
Willie Nelson was much nicer. He smiled and nodded as I looked at him dumbly. I mean that in the literal definition of the word, I was struck dumb, so enamored by his presence that I was unable to utter a word.
I was no kid at this point. I was 38, host of the highest-rated morning radio show in Sacramento history, but at that moment I was dumb as a fencepost.
CarolAnn bailed me out, as she often still does in social settings. She smiled sweetly at Willie, fluttered those gorgeous eyes, and asked him to sign our ticket stubs. He did so with a charmed (and may I suggest, slightly lecherous) smile.
As I chewed on my tongue to reduce it to a usable size, my wife-turned-radio producer, asked Willie if he could find a few minutes to talk with me on the air the following morning by phone. He kindly explained that he’d love to but he would be sleeping in his bus hundreds of miles away on the road to Utah. He might not even have a cell phone connection.
Then the Red-Headed Stranger smiled again and tipped his hat to the love of my life, giving me a quick, curious glance as he left.
“Radio show?” he thought, “The guy can’t even talk.”
North Texas stays surprisingly green in the summer.
Nice things happen when scooting cumulus clouds briefly block the sun of a North Texas summer day. The heat becomes bearable and the breeze gives voice to the poplar trees which rattle their leaves in harmony. The birds and even the cicadas quiet down to listen.
I’m on another writing sabbatical. I just arrived. This is my warmup piece to loosen up the mind and cool down my inclination toward purple prose.
Before I left home today, I got a haircut and had a nice conversation with a thirty-something barber named Jade. Being naturally shy and a native Californian I don’t easily begin conversations with strangers – I feel like I’m intruding in their quiet thoughts – but Jade is a pure Texan with no conversational hesitancy. I don’t remember how she started but she quickly shared a synopsis of her life. She told me about her mother and her mother’s divorce from her father who recently passed, I learned she is remarried and heard a bit about her husband and their kids: a 14-year-old stepdaughter who lives with them, and their 10 month old son. She adores them all, she told me. And there, she stopped. I guessed it was my turn.
Texans suck me in like that. I started talking.
I told Jade I’ll be turning 70 in about a month and that’s a significant milestone. I explained that I, too, have been married twice and that CarolAnn and I each have sons and grandsons we’ve shared from our previous lives.
I may be shy but men staring 70 in the face have no reluctance in sharing our hard won wisdom of age with just the slightest encouragement. Being a Texan she was polite and attentive, which was good enough for me.
I told Jade that I have had many lives: as a child, as a young adult, and through the long journey to creeping old age. I am a man pretty well in tune with life, I said. It was a prideful statement but I said it with quiet dignity.
I explained that I work at staying current with events, social trends, and cultural changes, even the ones that baffle or annoy me. The trick is to go with the flow and don’t worry about things that don’t concern you. I only half jokingly told her I had spent decades trying to fix the world and change other people to my liking before I realized it’s a fool’s errand. I’m fixing myself and that’s all I can do, I declared. She seemed to like that and I took it as encouragement to continue.
I talked of lessons I’ve learned through the trauma of love lost, single parenthood and a new, lasting love found. My CarolAnn and I just celebrated our 33rd anniversary and are still on our honeymoon, I said proudly.
Jade was entranced. Or, she’s just a very good haircutter.
I told her that life will find its way to a happy conclusion if you’re a good person and get out of the way to let it happen.
Picking up the thread from a moment earlier Jade told me that her husband’s ex is a nice lady and that the two women are discovering the things they have in common. Sharing kids is a big achievement, she boasted. I told her my CarolAnn and I just shared our anniversary with my ex and her husband. Jade laughed and was thrilled by at that.
“Why shouldn’t we all be able to get along?” she exclaimed.
I told her about CarolAnn’s ex and how we’ve shared in raising their son, and that we all embrace the wonderful realities of our tangled lives:
“We were in love, once. We’re in love again,” I said. ‘Why should we lose any of that?”
It was a little like a barroom conversation except neither of us was drinking or bitching. We managed it all in about fifteen minutes.
Rising from the chair I said, “Jade, it was nice meeting you. You did a great job and I’ll book you again.” She smiled sweetly and told me she enjoyed our talk.
I tipped her appropriately but not too much. It was a good haircut but the conversation was priceless.
This morning at 7:20 I had oral surgery to remove a tooth infected below the gum line. Scary, right? I didn’t feel a thing. Except, to be more accurate what the doctor told me is that I would essentially be awake for the procedure but when it was over I wouldn’t remember anything about it.
She was right. I really don’t remember anything at all between signing a credit card and what seemed like two seconds later being told I could go home. No time passed for me at all. That’s freaky.
I wonder if I kept them cracking up with witty dentist jokes while they were excavating my mouth? Probably not.
Isabel Lyon & Mark Twain
When I got home I continued reading a very interesting book called Mark Twain’s Other Woman. It’s about Sam Clemens’ relationships with his wife, daughters, and in particular, his personal assistant/secretary, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. She was something of a writer, too. Happily, she made detailed notes about each day she spent with the Clemens family, and though she never expected anyone except herself to read them she unwittingly treated us to some wonderful historical insights and this gem of an observation:
As the days of life increase in value, the wit to write of them decreases – Their significance is too profound.
– Isabel Van Kleek Lyon
That was an epiphany. It validates the ways I’ve changed over the years. I don’t write as often as I used to for several reasons but chief among them is that I just can’t stop appreciating my ordinary days long enough to write about their mundane glories.
The oral surgeon said I must keep a patch of gauzelike material plugging the new hole in my gum for at least six hours and I was not to lie down. The antibiotics make me sleepy but the lovely-and-feisty Carolann Conley-Williams forbade me from napping today except upright in my chair. So, I flipped on YouTube and was sucked in by a series of videos, recent concert footage of members of the bands of my youth. I’m not usually nostalgic but sometimes I really enjoy an occasional visit to the past. Today was one of those.
So, that was my day, unremarkable except for its beginning. I have total faith in modern dentistry but the thought did lurk in the back of my head that people still occasionally die under general anesthesia with implements of destruction in their mouths. That didn’t happen so I came home and read a book and then watched some YouTube videos.
Nothing to write home about, really.
The days of our lives really do increase in value, even those that are unremarkable except for the everyday joys to be found in them that aren’t even worthy of comment.
Tomorrow you might actually enjoy the smell of coffee just as you do nearly every day. You could have a good hair day and like the new shirt you’re wearing. That will put a smile on your face.
When you leave home in the morning don’t just tell your dog goodbye, take a moment to really love him/her.
Take note of the first person or experience that makes you laugh tomorrow. It happens every day and it’s precious.
For me, Isabel was right, the wit to write about our days decreases. Their significance is too profound.
