Saturday, September 13, 2003

Yo B, how come you never call the house already, ready, ready, Torn Slatterns and Nugget Ranchers?

Step off wit yo good foot
A San Jose State football player, Neil Parry, an amputee, is playing with a specially outfitted artificial leg. One day the equipment manager forgot to bring the artificial leg to practice and boy was Parry hopping mad. (Once again, taking the high comedy road)

Parry’s doing really well, in fact he is doing better than the Cincinnati Bengals who, this year, don’t have a leg to stand on. (Boo. Hiss)

Since you asked
Sad about John Ritter. Notice how they have bent over backwards to express that Ritter was a great guy, always nice and funny to his Hollywood co-workers? The implication, obviously, is that most of the other Hollywood stars are colossal jerks.

As Ritter was somebody who enjoyed huge fame and success in the Seventies, you have to ask if his heart trouble might have stemmed from a certain excess widely dispensed on mirrors in Hollywood during that era. Now I don’t know if Ritter was so inclined, but, from what I hear, it would have been truly hard to avoid back then. He sure was a lot thinner then, but who wasn’t? But I do know it is flat out bizarre that a fairly young guy in good health would have his heart flake out like that.

Either way, you can bet there will be a bunch of other movie, TV and rock stars, in their late forties and fifties, nervously waiting in line at the cardiologist Monday. How Joe Walsh is still standing up, I can’t figure.

Also sad about Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash. Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” was a favorite with my Dad. I was a fan of both but not part of their cults. Why do these celebrity passing always go in threes?

If I could do it all over again I would have warmed up better before timing the forty in football my senior year and pulling my hamstring from my foot to my neck; I would have gone out with Denise Bernier instead of, well, some others; I would have gotten better grades instead of working so hard to be an underachiever, and I would have traded all of my– this is the most painful to admit – Dan Fogelberg records (Hey, it was the late Seventies and driftwood sculptures were the rage) into Warren Zevon albums.

But then again, (Using my best Disco Dirk the diggidy dog voice) the ladies they surely loved the Fogelberg. Yessireee, compadre, a Fogelberg album on the turntable, a strawberry scented candle, some California Chablis, an absent dorm roommate, and you were good to go, Torn Slatterns and Nugget Ranchers . . . huh? Oh, sorry, I got lost there for a second. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, Go Cubs.