"Where am I?"

"In the Village."

Hello Surrealists.  Welcome Dadaists.  It's a Meet & Magritte.

Every day, if the fiber kicks in...I meet the New Number 2.  I've Resigned, myself to it.

You know my name.  Look up the number.

What's in a number?  You know Number 6.  Have you met Number 54?  He's the Music Arranger.  Has a Studio.  The House Band?  Why...The Village People, of course.  Number 8 is the DJ.  If you try to leave, your progress is halted by a floating disco ball.  Known as Raver.

Como?  Who is Number Juan?

Meanwhile...

On Perry Mason the other night, Season 6, Volume 2 (how CURIOUS!), the lawyer's client was a toothless prospector who couldn't afford the legal fee.  Perry took his false teeth.  He told secretary Della Street to make note of the retainer.

If Shirley Temple had married The Saint, would she have been Shirley Templar?

If the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. had married Austin Powers, would she also be known as Stephanie Powers Powers?

Did Ironside ever listen to Leadbelly?

Did the Streets of San Francisco ever clean up during sweeps?

How could Frankenstein produce a Son if he was Baron?

Have Gum, Will Chew.  Wire Pallidentures, San Francisco.

It's true what they said about Ed Sullivan.  He had "a Really Big Shew."  And anyone with "a Really Big Shew" had a Really Big Foot.

When the Italian Mouse replaced Jon Anderson in Yes, Tales from Topo Gigio Oceans was briefly rehearsed.

When Wayne and Shuster broke up, followed by Simon and Garfunkel...Simon and Shuster was also considered.  "Book them!"

Topo Gigio was once a member of the Rat Pack.

Senor Wences once tried to enter the fast food business with a brand of cole slaw only sold at Christmas.  It was called Good King Wences' Slaw.

Christopher Walken's first attempt in pop music was to join Missing Persons.  The song Walken in LA, has never seen the light of day.

The Shadow had the "power to cloud men's minds."  Did he also have the power to cloud Carly Simon's coffee?

Simon and "a Really Big Shew" stir.  It all makes perfect sense now, tee-hee.

"What do you want?"

"I have nothing to worry about. Except Ken Russell."

It was early Monday morning (what would have been SPR time), on the computer, answering a letter to my friend David Fontana, when I clicked on the IMDB page and saw the news "Ken Russell dead at 84."  Four hours ago...

Surprise and sadness to see that this person who had influenced my antenna was gone.  My last blog, "Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3," had included him in the Fantastic Five: Fellini, Bunuel, Antonioni, himself and Roeg--now the only remaining name on the fungfmeisters.

Russell and Roeg were major early influences on my Seventies mindset, and even earlier with Ken.  I saw his BBC Isadora Duncan biography on PBS on initial airing, probably before I saw Cammel and Roeg's Performance.  Billion Dollar Brain, the third Michael Caine Harry Palmer espionage film, I saw in a Westwood theatre.  I dug Women in Love and The Music Lovers, but The Devils blew me away.  For over a decade I thought The Devils and Performance were the two best films I had seen.  I would debate with film students from UCSB that Russell and Roeg were in the calibre of Fellini and Bunuel.  They snickered at me as if I had said Russ Meyer was as good as Eisenstein.

I loved Ken Russell because he embraced being both intelligent and outrageous.  Like the Goons (he had done a BBC piece on Spike Milligan, Portrait of a Goon, which I still haven't seen), Ken was smart, silly and surreal.  And sexy.

Russell popped up in my stuff all the time.  My short play, Void in Wisconsin, seems like Russell meets Kovacs with Zappa's 200 Motels.  On Space Pirate Radio, Ken Russell and Federico Fellini wrestled in a pre-Monty Python bit for the title of Most Surrealist Director.  And in the play Casanova's Lips, a pre-Amadeus Mozart shows up at a seance, worried only that Ken Russell might film his life story.

I never met Ken Russell but I met a lot of people who had worked with him.  Georgina Hale and Glenda Jackson in London.  Amanda Donohoe in Santa Barbara.  My wife has met Kenneth Colley in her Star Wars universe.  Most of these actors have worked with Russell and Roeg, and often.

When Space Pirate Radio co-promoted a Rick Wakeman concert in Ventura, the wife and I plus friends had a lovely chat with the man post-show.  Wakeman's involvement with the man in Lizstomania was a first question, having done double duty as actor and composer.

Ironically, I purchased not far back, the Ken Russell BBC Collection, released only in the States.  I rewatched the Isadora Duncan one and saw for the first time, the Debussy biopic with Oliver Reed.  Rossetti, Delius, Elgar and Rousseau still call out.  And not too long ago, I bought the Warners Archive release of Savage Messiah.  Like Orson Welles, he's not long out of radar.

And did I say Ken Russell's films are sexy?  Very sexy.  And scandalous.  Pan-Sexual.  He got Richard Chamberlain out of the closet with the Music Lovers and a smashing performance.  He brought Oscar Wilde back to film.  Louis XIII says in The Devils, "Women. Some men love them."  And oh, how we loved those women.

Talking to Georgina Hale in her dressing room (her wearing an amazing dressing gown that I'm sure was designed by Ken's wife, costumer Shirley Russell), did I ever go into Third Person and realize this was that outrageously daring, powderfaced nymphet from The Devils, the woman who danced naked with a classic phonograph player, fondled by SS Gestapo men on Gustav Mahler's coffin?  Or Amanda Donohoe (pictured) being the vampiric snake woman, biting into the intimate bits of a young boy scout in Lair of the White Worm?  She would rejoin Ken again in his version of D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow.

Glenda Jackson, Labour Member of Parliament, writhing nude on a train to a horrified Tchaikovsky?  Helen Mirren as Nude Descending Staircase in Savage Messiah?  Twiggy in The Boyfriend?  Twiggy and her boyfriend in The Devils?  The Devil and her boyfriend in Twiggy?  Sorry, seized by a moment of Russellmania.  How about Ann Margaret in an orgy of baked beans, a flood of fecal fiber in Tommy?

Rest in Peace, Ken Russell. I would have loved to thank you in person for all the passion, philosophy, photography and pinching at the petticoats of the petite bourgeoisie.  Much appreciated.

And I'm sure you hated it all.  How a great work by Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon, that JFK conspiracy of 17th Century France, and the play adapted from it, which was the basis of your most important film...

That from all of this would come the genre known as Nunsploitation.  From the solitude of my monastic cell, I salute you.

Bye, Bye Blackbird.

"For his sake, I hope he lives forever."

"I don't know who you are Sir, or where you come from, but you've done me a power of good."

Hello folks!  A September ramble here.  Computer was down, so I listened to an old Goon Show that I probably hadn't heard since the mid Seventies or early Eighties.  "The Great Regent's Park Swim" from October 1957.  Recently released on the BBC's ongoing CD series.  During those decades, I was fortunate to have had one of the most complete collections of Goon Show tapes from a variety of sources.  These included reel to reel tapes of BBC World Service recordings throughout the years.  David Ossman of the Firesign Theatre was kind enough to lend me his personal collection of transcription discs.  He had broadcast them originally in New York.  And over the years, I met fellow Goon fanatics who had the odd show, different from the original, highly edited EMI/Parlophone LPs or the later BBC vinyl series.  Each new show was a cosmic/comic find of immense psychedelic proportions.

So as we hit September 8th, the twin birthdays of Peter Sellers and Sir Harry Secombe, I feel that modern rhythm Min!

Those with nothing better to do have seen in previous pages my meager encounters with the Goons in varying degrees.  Peter Sellers was always a big influence.  I have spoken before of my involvement with the Sellers Estate, especially with his widow, Lynne Frederick.  Her initial blessing on the Sellers documentary I had put together, "Life is a State of Mind: The Life and Work of Peter Sellers," pretty much capped my obsession.

Earlier, I was proud to get Spike Milligan's consent to do a cameo in my "Space Pirate Video" pilot.  He turned down a video project with Rolling Stones member Bill Wyman, but agreed to mine.  No offense Bill, but there was a slight glow in the Space Pirate's intestinal system.  Spike's secretary, Norma Farnes, treated me very kindly in Spike's office off Hyde Park in Orme Court (having introduced the Italian band Le Orme to U.S. audiences on Space Pirate Radio, I was always fond of the street name).  I'm sorry the event did not come together, but I am pleased that Norma continues to carry on all artistic matters Milligna (the famous typing error).

Never met Neddy.  Probably the sanest of the three (or four if we count original member Michael Bentine).  Bentine or Milligan.  Which one is Syd?

Didn't connect with Sir Harry, or his daughter, whose phone number and address was always on the desk, but I never felt like intruding.  Son Andy, yes...see previous Star Wars entry.

Ray Ellington...Ellinga or Rage Ellington as Sellers called him in one hopped up episode.  No.  Nor his son, who portrayed his father in that HBO Sellers film.  Wally Stott or the transformed Angela Morley?  No.

But that great harmonica player, the butt of Jewish jokes and the Great Conk?  Max Geldray.  Yes.  He was cool.  And harmonicas are cool

Quick, into the re-Tardis.  But first, a Time Laird Gnote...

Sellers was born in 1925.  Secombe was born in 1921.  Milligan was born in 1918.

Sellers died first.  Secombe died second.  And Milligan died last.

It's all in the mind, you know.

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed or numbered."

Let me insert another photo of yours truly with King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford.  This picture was taken outside the soulless, modern KTYD studios in Goleta, after having left the eighth floor of the historic Granada Theatre building.  Note, I am wearing the unusual wooden glasses that I had bought from France, imported into Santa Barbara to an optical store on State Street and Micheltorena.  It's the '80s folks, and these are my Salad Days (what the Hell does that mean? That I couldn't afford the main course?).  I loved those glasses.  They were made of lightweight Asian wood.  Comparisons were made to Elton John or Trevor Horn, but I never saw anyone else have a pair.  And at the time, I thought they fitted in with what I was trying to do.  A little style, a little Art, for one who felt ambivalent about show and biz.  I used to joke about the frames: 1) I would say that the wood was from the Original Cross, and 2) that the wood was so light, that if I ever drowned, you could locate the body where the frames were floating.

Anyway, I make a long story longer...

Those glasses...the picture...in front of the soulless studios.  Later on, a photo was taken of the radio staff (in front of the same studios) for a Christmas Greeting Card.  We are now run by a GM who breaks the mold in hyper, right wing paranoia.  He is my bete noire.  My wooden glasses have broken their spring-based ear stems.  I can't wear them for the photo. I will have to wear my older, John Lennon-like wire frames for the foto shoot.  GM goes Bobby De Niro or Al Pacino fumed nutso. Pulls Program Director aside and sez, "What's Guden trying to say? That modern rock sucks and we should go back to the '60s? Fire him!"

This was not the first time El Jefe tried to remove yours truly.  It started during the election of Reagan against Carter.  On election day, boss man comes into the studios, eyeing me as the soul member of a '60s based mindset (I still had the longest hair among the Sales types).  He boasts that he was the first to vote in the early morning hours at the Santa Barbara Court House ("I wanted to be the first one to vote for Reagan").  He mentions that he stumbles on a couple of long-hairs, camped out to be the first to vote for Carter.  "Your people, " he digs at me.  I reply: "Well, I voted for Carter, so my vote cancels out your vote."  Surprise, surprise!  It's AMAZING what you can say to a high octane fueled, ultra paranoid Big Biz type that can set him off.  He pulled off his dutiful Program Director into the Secret Sanctum and commanded: "Fire him!"  The PD rather timidly pointed out that someone couldn't be fired for their democratic freedom of choice at the ballot box.  But the V for Vendetta was put into place.  "Find a reason...and Fire Him!"  Ah, those were the Good Old Days, Mein Herr (und Meine Dammen).

And they found a way.  During the Christmas Holidays I got sick, so I called in a fellow employee to fill in for me.  This was a breach of command ("I should have called the GM, despite being unavailable for such trivialities, to authorize who would fill my time spot.  Unacceptable.  You're fired. 12 years with KTYD, goodbye...no severance pay... get out, f**k off.").

Now this came from a man who boasted that he had paintings on his wall that had swastikas hidden behind him, and he would invite his Jewish business friends over for dinner just to laugh at them for not knowing that they were there (!!!).  This man would tell you that a certain nightclub owner (who was a sponsor) couldn't be trusted because he was a coke addict, while he himself was doing lines of coke in the business room.  It was a movie, folks.

And you wonder where my cynicism comes from.

Like I said before, my own egocentric behaviour wanted to be the longest surviving member of KTYD.  And I was.  This totally noncommercial, really weird program of electronic and foreign music, mixed with sound collages and very odd humour...it should have died years ago.  And yet, with all the format changes and other bullshit...it lasted.  Why?  Because the audience knew...far more than the sales wonks, that love it or hate it...it was the real deal.  With all it's flaws, and I take full responsibility for its content...it was free.  Freedom of choice.  Freeform.  No corporate strings were pulling the show.  It was up to the audience.  Here's the music.  Do you like it or not?

So, with that, I let go of my desire to set a Guinness World Record for being the most noncommercial radio program on a commercial radio station; silently told coke-fuelled General Manager to go fondle his tiny penis...and went down the street to have the best radio job of my life.

For a while, at least.  Then came the General Manager who thought the station should have a news helicopter, loved to drive the streets in the news car at 3.A,M.... like he was in the Batmobile, and would call me during Space Pirate Radio and tell me to play "Smuggler's Blues" by Glenn Frey.

Hey...any Space Pirate Radio listeners with tapes, remember "Smuggler's Blues" popping up somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Amon Duul 2?  No?  I didn't think so.  Guess where that decision went?  After dealing with so many chemical infused, ugly bosses, I didn't care about protocol anymore.  When new toady boss called me during the show and told me to play "Smuggler's Blues," I said, "You can come in and play it yourself."  "You're NOT going to play it?" he barks.  And smart ass me sez to to Bossman, "In 20 years of Space Pirate Radio, no one has told me what to play in the show and you're not going to be the first.  So come on in and play what you want and I'll go home.  Otherwise go f...k yourself."  Well, I was marked by then.  He hired 3 program directors to fire me, but the first: I clued him to how he was actually going to hire the man who was going to replace him; the second was an LA pro who knew how successful Space Pirate Radio was and he wasn't going to let it go; the third was his hit man.  I bet he liked "Smuggler's Blues."

The show remained faithful, as best as it could.  But the background continued to be ugly.  It was a business.  And business was usual.  Unfortunately, it was I who continued to remain unusual.

Sorry, old habits die hard.

"We can make it better with a little bit of razzamatazz."

Mentioning my 1973 play Nothing is Sacred in the last entry has brought back thoughts about being daring and nutsy on stage during those early '70s.  It was great, folks!  A tremendous amount of freedom, again in thanks to Santa Barbara City College drama instructor Max Whittaker.  The school would put on its regular productions and then allow the student run Theatre Guild to mount its own show.  All of us at the time had been fortunate enough to be in involved in the comedy production of Love Rides the Rails.  This old time melodrama had been hipped up enough (thanks to the cool direction by Mr. Whittaker) to be the most successful play in SBCC's Little Theatre history.  I was Theatre Guild president at the time, so it was my desire to take the momentum of the first comedy and be more outrageous with the second.

Nothing is Sacred was meant to be a surreal day in television.  In the spirit of the Firesign Theatre, Ernie Kovacs and the Goon Show, I wanted to try and go further--especially in visuals and sound.  We were young and we had energy.  Madness, really!  Here's the proposal:

What would happen if the characters from the early morning kiddie show would carry on... through the matinee movie, into the afternoon soap opera, continue into the evening news, and then wind up in the late night entertainment show?  And sandwich this story in the trappings of a day of trivial broadcast crap, done hopefully in provocative parody.  Let's mix the chemicals and see what happens.

The main theme was centered on the cheezey Red Scare sci-fi film of the '50s, entitled Crabs, that was being played on the Ben Hummer Matinee Movie.  A real parody, now long forgotten.  The film, somewhat inspired by the actual movie, Attack of the Crab Monsters, focused on the dismal life of a man named David Typical.  A person who, having been given a slight case of the crotch squirrels by his girlfriend, has the bad fortune of, while visiting his dentist for x-rays, having his lower jockey shorts area exposed to the radiation rather than his teeth.  Are you following this so far?  The radiation affects the infestation of crab lice and before you can scream "Jim Arness," the community is dominated (in a Bert I. Gordon sort of way) by giant mutated crabs.  Why not, I say?  It's only f..king Santa Barbara.  A harbour town.  Deal with it, you poncey bastards!  You got CRABS.  GIANT CRABS!!!  And they're crawling on the Arlington Tower...the Granada Theatre building.  All those oak trees (what else are you going to find for a forested pubis habitat)?

So the poor, hapless bastard becomes crab infested in the movie, winds up desperate for medical attention (that will NOT be given to him on the soap opera Cottage Cheese Hospital), generates giant crabs that will appear later on the incredibly mediocre and amateur local news...and finally wind up as guests (the giant crabs, that is) and destroying the late night talk and entertainment program...the After Death Show, with your (g)host...Post Mortem.

Cool!

I was fortunate enough to do this show with all the actors from the mega-successful Love Rides the Rails.  The cast included R. Leo Schreiber, who had played the lead villain Simon Darkway to my side-kick henchman Dirk Sneath.  He had the talent to assume a multitude of characters for this crazy production and gave his all in shape-shifting madness.  It was fun times 2.  Double Fun.  He was great to work with, always on my wavelength, easy to direct and a solid character actor.  Also in the cast was Sue O'Reilly (her married name) who later became Sue Dugan (her maiden name).  A talented comic actress, who was also my girlfriend at the time.  Like R. Leo, she had the ability to do a comic repertory.  It was like doing SCTV before it happened.  Sue could be a ten-year-old adenoidal child one moment and then turn into a fifty-year-old society matron the next.  Also in the cast was Ken Brigance, a free spirited cat who could do Gabby Hayes meets Slim Pickens types on the spot.  An artist as well.  He drew the KCOW logo that would be the symbol of the show (Hee-hee! We shot down 2 out of three local crap network affiliates).  Mary C. Webb, a lovely lady (pictured in the introduction as Sally Fetish, the Weather in Leather Girl); Billie Vrtiak, the solid actress with the delightful dark Jane Fonda-like shag haircut; and Frank Califano, one of the sweetest and most sensitive actors I ever met (like those character actors from the '40s who would play tough but were really children) rounded out the cast. This was a smart cast.  We had come off the success of Max Whittaker's Love Rides the Rails, so feeling cocky, we wanted the party to continue.

And we still felt like creative anarchists.  Santa Barbara, like certain other areas of the U. S. of Ah, was a certain contradiction.  Extremely hip and free spirited in some ways, the city also housed the ultra-powerful--the types who stepped out of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel.  People who had something to hide and could afford to hide it...found the Big Avocado a delightful community to step out of the limelight and merge peacefully in the sun drenched shadows.  A community of oxymorons, if ever there was.

The Big Avocado.  RIPE for parody.  Fools Rush In...

"Morgan is sad today. Sadder than yesterday."

Thinking back to the early days of the Diamond Bar Players has gotten me in an old theatrical mood.  I loved the drama classes in high school, but my constant fights with authority took away my enthusiasm for the academic life.  When I was at John A. Rowland High in Rowland Heights, CA, I wanted to be treated like a college student.  Dress in my mod, chord jacket and turtleneck look and pursue a career in English literature, speech and drama.  But I kept running into battles with the principal and some uptight P.E. coaches over hair length and dress code.  And this is where they lost me.  The rather moderate academic being created into the subversive radical.  The suburban anarchist.  I had some very cool teachers.  Looking back now, it is easier to tell the more free thinking staff from the closeted (and I mean this is in an almost gothic sort of a way), neurotic stick-up-the ass instructors who brought their hidden home abuses and inflicted them upon the tiny pets that they make bark and cower.  It is very clear.  The storm trooper types hated clever.  Or at worst, the smart ass.  But most of all, in these hallowed halls of learning, they despised any student who asked questions.  You were only supposed to have the answers to questions that had already been asked, with only one correct conclusion.  NEVER ask a question that hasn't already been answered.  Only in this way can true progress be controlled.

So there were the cool teachers.  I wish I could go back and talk to some of these people now and see how they really lived.  I remember that the hip ones were drama teachers, English teachers, an occasional eccentric math teacher or the cool sports instructors, the gymnastic cats.  An anecdote here: I hated physical education. Year after year, freezing my nuts off in the morning drizzle, while neanderthal coaches, heavily bundled, drank their coffee and told us to do laps.  Swine!  Slacker whiffs of Leni Riefenstahl.  Showering with smelly alpha-males. Jock-straps shot like sling shots.  Is this how civilized people live?  I hated it.  But I had a good yet goofy friend in Diamond Bar named Brian Brumby who never had to attend a P.E. class in his life.  How?  Because he signed up as a coach's assistant, attending all the after school games.  Football.  Baseball.  Basketball.  Doing the stats and such, and coming home after six or seven p.m. on the last bus.  By my Senior year, I realized this was the way to get out of the army.  No more sit-ups for me.  What sport wasn't taken up my friend Brian?  Gymnastics.  Section 8, sign me up.

And trust me, the cool guys were the coaches on this sport.  Individual achievement as opposed to team sports.  The coach didn't give a fart about my longer than normal blonde hair.  As long as I could write what the high jump numbers were in the little book, that's all that mattered technically.  And the assistant coach was a Bryan Ferry looking like cat who I'm sure read Playboy and had a liquor cabinet next to his folk records or Blue Note jazz collection.  I recall having conversations about his previous night's escapade with some bird de jour.  I may be reading more into this than was real, but I do know it was the uber-butch baseball coach, who kept bitching about me having my hair too long and sending me over to the principal's office to get a reality check.  I probably reminded him of his ex-girlfriend. Or...?

Anyway, to make a long story longer...my thanks to the cool teachers.  The others, being so uncool, must find the heat excessive.  I will come back to these moments.  Examples of this kind of madness popped up in junior high.  High school definitely changed the equation.  I lost a sense of discipline until two colleges later.  At Santa Barbara City College in the Drama Department, that early love of academia returned.  I got it in the Speech class as well, but I was still uninterested in all other required subjects.  Coming around to my original inspiration for this entry was the fact that only in the drama classes were we (in an artistic sense), able to ask the questions that did not have a preordained answer.  Call it a liberal bias if that's your hang-up, but the questioning of authority seemed to be in the drama department. 

My first play at SBCC was the distinctly anti-war work, Bury the Dead.  A drama in the spirit of Orson Welles' Mercury Players, this almost Brechtian meets Rod Serling production considered the possibility of war dead refusing to die and being martyred and ultimately forgotten for the sake of war profiteers.  I was one of the undead.

Later we did The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, another pacifist play.  Then later, Abelard & Heloise, on suggestion from yours truly, who had seen the show done in Los Angeles with Diana Rigg and Keith Michell.

A quick slide back to the tyrants who ruled the high school.  Our school had a principal whose last name sounded very close to the word Anus.  Well, this Anus kept suspending me for my ultra cool Illya Kuryakin look of wearing my blonde hair slightly over the ears, and not buzz-cut on the neck like I just landed off of Iwo Jima.  So I was suspended just before the end of my Senior year.  I trimmed my cool mod looks down to a slightly "I've just been released from Baden-Baden camp thanks to the Allies" look by wearing a low cut shirt rather than my usual turtleneck.  Anus sez, "Well, that's good enough ('guden auf') to get back into class.  But you will have to cut it again for Graduation.  You can't look like that if you want to get your diploma."  My response?  "Mail it to me."

A further side note regarding principal Anus.  Long after I left the multi-purpose rooms of John A. Rowland and was doing my thing in Santa Barbara, I saw my old alma mustard mentioned in the news regarding a political embarrassment.  It seemed the high school band had been invited to play at President Richard M. Nixon's arrival at not-so-nearby Ontario airport.  A band member, not being a fan of Tricky Dick, but still having to play for the Fearless Leader's arrival, felt he would show his right to dissent by placing a McGovern sticker in his tuba horn bell.  The result from my former principal Anus...total expulsion from high school...and those rip roarin' raiders. You can't write better drama than this.  I wonder where my Anus is today?  He seemed to give us all PILES of trouble.

Drama folks.  It started with the Greeks, maybe earlier.  The Trojan Women or Johnny Got His Gun.  Liberal Arts.  Me likee.

"No, thanks. Bad luck. Three on a midget."

Happy Valentine's Day, folks.  "Love is in the air."  And it's stuck on the bottom of my shoe as well.  Seriously, folks.  I was going to write more about Space Pirate Radio, but I thought in honour of the holiday I would keep it light and airy.  So we are back in the re-Tardis and voila!  We are in Diamond Bar, CA 1969.  Look, my first car.  The Melting Watchtowre has now presented photographs of all three cars that I've purchased in my life.  Los Trios Autos Blancos.  I believe it's a 1964 Volkswagen.  But with the onset of senility, it could be a 1962.  I'm not that sure anymore.  I do know that I had to have a Bug because it was the hip, bohemian car to own.  It never sunk in that Adolf Hitler promoted this car.  "The people's car."  The Volks Wagen.  A free spirited, hippy girl I knew at the time had one, so I was just a copycat.  My car was a bit different, though, as it had actually been a grey model which had been in a wreck and had been repainted white.  This made the front interior grey, rather than the normal interior for the white Bugs of the time.  Grey being my favourite colour, this made my Bug a special travel machine.  Any VW owner knows: a snug fit, a funky shift and the sound of driving a washing machine.  No silent escapes from a late night tryst in that car.  Dig this.  I even had one of those label maker stickers on the glove compartment.  It was a quote from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet:  "But He that hath the steerage of my course, Direct my sail."  What do you expect?  In 1968, Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet had been released and we all thought we were Shelley With A Stick Shift.  We drove madly down the San Bernadino freeway, guided by the image of Olivia Hussey. 

Diamond Bar, folks.  I lived there when the city first began.  A former ranch located north of Orange County and south of Pomona, it became incorporated in the mid-60s with one set of track houses at the south end and another set of track houses at the north end.  Brea Canyon Road twisted up from Fullerton and Brea into what seemed like an urban version of Borgo Pass from Dracula.  The rolling hills dotted with oak and walnut trees reminded yours truly of being in Mario Bava's Black Sunday.  It was quiet.  Deer would come down from the hills and drink in the fountain that welcomed the weary traveler into this new Stepford community.  For a while it really was tranquil.  An escape from the madness of Orange County.  Ugh, Orange County.  Flat and Republican filled.  A place where its sense of history was re-fabricated in Disneyland.  Every street corner was the same.  Three gas stations and an Alpha Beta.  I used to say to people that if they wanted to get rid of me, all they would have to do is break my glasses, put me on any corner (like Beach Blvd.) and I would never know where I was.  But I digress.

So Diamond Bar became a refuge for this young man with flights of fantasy.  I left the Alcatraz-like environment of Fullerton Union High School and began my sophomore year at the fresh, multipurpose room adobe of John A. Rowland High School, located in the dreamlike community of Rowland Heights, CA.  Home of the rip roarin' Rowland Raiders, this unique learning establishment tried its best to change European-styled yours truly, Guy de Maupassant--man of letters and culture--into my actual namesake, Guy Madison--branding, tumbling cowpoke.  This made for an amusing clash; a mutation of merriment, which I will discuss in detail later. 

Diamond Bar was the home of the illustrious Diamond Bar Players.  A high spirited group of theatricals nestled in this quaint community, I auditioned for them and they were impressed by my youthful Orson Welles-like vocal gymnastics.  I suckered them, folks.  And like Dick Powell in those Busby Berkeley films, for a while, I became their perennial juvenile.  I did a number of plays for them: George S. Kaufman stuff like The Solid Gold Cadillac; Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, playing psycho red herring Christopher Wren (pictured); and a piece of fluff called Slice It Thin.  Acting in these productions got me in prison.  Of which, I mean, this little group was invited to bring our humble productions to all of the illustrious penal institutions conveniently located near our dream community.  Besides doing our productions in one of the local schools, we would hit the road and go on tour, bringing our little repertory company to the entertainment starved felons of the Chino Institute For Men, the Norco Narcotics Rehabilitation Center, and (my favourite) the Corona Womens Prison.  Let me tell you, folks, a young man's hormones can light up the imagination when you're in The Big Bird Cage or Cell Block H.  Young girls holding hands would give the heavily made-up Illya Kuryakin looks of invitation.  You could feel the subdued power of tension in this incredible B-rated drive-in movie.  The facility in Norco was an interesting place--a former posh hotel resort turned into institution.  My companions wondered why I kept humming the theme from the Great Escape as we entered through the gates.  Chino was interesting as well.  I remember the male lead who looked like Jack Cassidy being made-up by one of the inmates, heavily tattooed and rugged.  As he was being shaved and powdered for his role, the slighty nervous lead asked the man, "so what are you in for?"  As the blade trimmed the actor's neck, the inmate replied, "I murdered my wife."  There was no need to powder the actor's face.  He had become white enough. 

Ah, the memories come flooding back.  The problem of poor plumbing at this age.  Diamond Bar in the early days before it became the inspiration for the TV series Weeds.  It all went to hell when they put the Orange Freeway in.  And all those special folks got smog-trapped within the once beautiful but now barren hills.  It was time to rethink the area after the Pomona Freeway became an alternative route into Los Angeles, instead of the previous choices of the Santa Ana Freeway or the San Bernadino Freeway (which I tended to use the most).  I left in 1970 and have not returned to Diamond Bar for even a visit.  My wife has heard enough stories about the area.  And when I've had more psychic courage, have told her that perhaps we should look and see how much it has all changed.  Personally, I'm afraid the shock would kill me and that's why it hasn't happened so far.  So we look at the photos instead and share a few mildly amusing anecdotes.

By the way, before I owned the first white car, I had a motorcycle.  It was a Bridgestone 90.  I thought I was a midget version of Steve McQueen in the Great Escape.  Do you hear it?  Do you hear it?  There's that theme again.  The thrill of driving in those pre-helmet days on the highways near Walnut, CA.  There's nothing more fun than having some big green bug squash in your mouth.  One bug leads to another.