The Will Fly for Food Trilogy - the Left Coast

The Soundview Cafe in the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington.

Welcome back to our third and final installment of Will Fly for Food.  As I mentioned in the previous two posts, there were times in my 18 year flying career as a flight attendant that I would actually pick up a trip with a particularly overnight in one of my favorite cities just for the food.  Previously, I have covered some of my favorites along the East Coast and then the Midwest and South.  No, my wife didn't ask me to make any deep dish Chicago-style pizza after last week's post.  She didn't volunteer to make any corn bread or beignets either. 

In today's installment, we finally come home to the West Coast.  Some Stews preferred to only work short flights - up and down all day long.  Others preferred medium flights - back and forth between the East Coast and Florida, for example.  Moi?  I was always a long haul kinda' guy.  One and done.  Get that baby up in the air and let's fly six hours to the  West Coast.  No sitting around, no long duty days, no plane changes and only one boarding (it was really the boardings that wore you out on a long day). 

Philly to Seattle on Day One.  Seattle to Boston or New York on Day Two.  Boston to San Francisco on Day Three.  Back to Philly on Day Four and hop on that flight back home to California.  That would have been my perfect four day trip.  And for years I was able to work trips like that.

Speaking of Seattle, that was my favorite West Coast overnight.  We usually stayed in nice hotels right downtown.  I have enough Irish blood running through my veins that I was never bothered by a little rain or overcast - even in July.

The Pike Place Market - the oldest public market in the country - is the Queen Jewel of Seattle.  Great food, shopping, buskers and views of Puget Sound.  Even the original Starbucks, if that's what you're into (not me).

Pike's Market is best experienced early in the morning when the vendors and fruit stands are coming to life.  Just watch out for the flying fish. 

My favorite breakfast stop in Seattle was the Soundview Cafe, deep down in the basement of the Market.  Casual and quick with gorgeous view of the ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound. They served a mean bowl of granola topped with chopped nuts, raisins and bananas (only five bucks!).  Yum.  One bowl and you were good to go for the rest of the day.  The only catch is that they would give you the milk for the granola in a small drinking glass without a spout.  I could never figure out how to pour the milk out without spilling some on the table.  I alternated the slow and fast techniques, but nothing ever worked.  "How would Cary Grant pour this milk?," I would ask myself, as it dribbled all over the table.  Cary probably knew to skip the granola at the Soundview Cafe. 

I have lived in the Bay Area most of my life, so I never even counted San Francisco as a "real" overnight.  On any overnight more than 16 hours, I drove home to be with my family anyway, but once in a while I would stay in The City, or my lovely wife and kids would come down and meet me at the hotel, and we'd visit some tourist spots around town.  Our crews stayed in the same hotel on Van Ness and California for years, so we all got to know the neighborhood quite well. 

Piccadilly Fish and Chips on Polk Street in San Francisco.

 

A couple of blocks behind our hotel was an old-fashioned, no-nonsense fish and chips shop.  A chipper, as they'd call it back in Ireland.  The fryer, pictured above, was made in Cardiff, Wales.  Ever since I lived in Dublin, I've acquired a taste for authentic chips (hold the fish).  They need to be thick, not thin; wrapped in newsprint, not put in a cup or on a plate; and most importantly, they need to be covered in salt and vinegar, not ketchup.  It's rare to find the real deal in California and the Piccadilly shop on Polk fit the bill.  They could always be counted on to meet my chips fix.

When you are in San Diego, Mexican food is not to be taken lightly.  When you are a flight attendant working a morning flight out of San Diego, a breakfast burrito is as critical to your departure as your cockpit keys and  Flight Attendant Manual.  There was a Rubio's, famous in San Diego for their fish tacos, right in our terminal before security.  A combination of scrambled eggs, home fries, cheese and salsa wrapped in a fresh flour tortilla.  Muy bueno!  I would eat one of those on the flight East and not be hungry again until dinner.

The dancing waters show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

Finally, we all have our guilty pleasures in life.  I would find myself spending the night in Las Vegas more often than I care to recall (not a fan).  One overnight a year in Lost Wages would have been plenty for me, but I stayed there 6 or 7 times a year.  Ugh.  And yet as much as Las Vegas made my skin crawl, I must admit that I loved the "dancing" fountains show at the Bellagio.  A free light, water and music show every 15 minutes.  What's not to like?  It was spectacular on a warm, clear evening.  Best of all, there's a little cafe that serves gelato right inside the door nearest the fake lake.  Gelato and Frank Sinatra singing Luck Be a Lady - not a bad way to spend a few minutes on the Strip.

Thanks for joining me on a nostalgic look back on some of my little flying for food hang-outs around the country.  Granola, fried chips, breakfast burritos and gelato.  As you can tell, I'm ALL about the glamour.

Crossing the Blue Line

Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers (left) tussles with Sean Avery (right) of the New York Rangers.

Wayne Simmonds is a professional hockey player (a right winger) for the Philadelphia Flyers who is about to play his fourth season in the National Hockey League.  Mr. Simmonds is 6' 2", 185 pounds, 23 years old, will make $1.5 million this season and hails from Scarborough, Ontario.  Nothing about Mr. Simmonds is exceptional in the NHL except for one thing:  Wayne Simmonds is black.

There were 29 black players in the NHL last season, an average of less than one per team.  The (former) Atlanta Thrashers had the most with four.  Many of those players were bi-racial.  29 black players out of approximately 700 total players in the NHL.

Mr. Simmonds was the centre of a racial controversy in the hockey world last week when a fan in London, Ontario threw a banana peel in front of Simmonds as he attempted a shot in a shoot-out.  He avoided the banana peel and scored a goal.  Media outlets all over North America immediately played up the story.  Simmonds took the high road and only expressed surprise it happened in Canada.

If you Google "Wayne Simmonds & banana," you will find about 900 news articles written about the racial incident directed at Mr. Simmonds in the past week.

Sean Avery is a professional hockey player (a left winger) who plays for the New York Rangers who is about to play his twelfth season in the NHL.  Mr. Avery is 5' 10", 195 pounds, 31 years of age, will be (over) paid $4 million in the final year of his contract and grew up in North York, Ontario - the same province as Mr. Simmonds.

Sean Avery - the pest every hockey fan loves to hate.

Avery is what is known in hockey as a "pest" or "agitator."  Unlike most agitators in the NHL, Mr. Avery has also been known to score the occasional goal.  He has reached double digits in goals scored - 10 or more - five times.  But it's Avery's mouth, not his goal scoring, for which he is most famous.  Or infamous.

Most infamously, Avery walked into the visitors' locker room in Calgary, Alberta in December of 2008 and asked the reporters in the room to gather around him.  He told them he wanted to make a statement.  Avery had previously dated Canadian actress Elisha Cuthbert (24), and she was then dating Defenceman Dion Phaneuf - a star player on the hometown Calgary Flames.  After he had everyone's undivided attention, Avery told the assembled media the following:

"I'm just going to say one thing. I'm really happy to be back in Calgary; I love Canada. I just want to comment on how it's become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds. I don't know what that's about, but enjoy the game tonight."

Ouch.  If a player like Avery, who is primarily paid to be a pest - get under the skin of an opponent  - is willing to say something like that in public to a large media gathering, imagine what he is capable of saying out on the ice to try and get an opposing player off their game.  The NHL suspended Avery six games for the crude remarks.

So it was a little ironic this week, when the Philadelphia Flyers and New York Rangers met in an exhibition game, that Wayne Simmonds, not Sean Avery, got into hot water during a trash-talking scrum by calling Avery a "faggot" during the game (Avery has been an outspoken proponent of gay marriage in New York).

Trash-talking to try and distract an opponent is a long tradition in most professional sports, and the NHL is certainly no exception.  Only this time the homophobic slur was apparently heard live on the TV broadcast and it was so easy to read Simmonds' lips that they were blurred out in Canada on that evening's hockey highlights and news broadcasts.

Just a week after the banana peel incident, Simmonds was now on the other side of the racial/hate debate.  And to make Avery, who regularly is voted by hockey fans as the most hated player in the NHL, look even remotely sympathetic is no small feat.

So the debate became in today's politically correct world, in which every word from every public figure is scrutinized, is it too much to ask of our athletes to keep p.c. in the heat of battle?  I don't believe for a moment that Simmonds is homophobic, or that Avery is a racist, but that word was the quickest thing Simmonds could think of to get back at Avery.

On the other hand, as the rarest of beings in the NHL - a black player - should Simmonds have been even more aware of not making disparaging remarks about another minority group?  After all, the only thing more rare than a black player in the NHL is an openly gay player.  There aren't any.  Never have been.  Notice I'm saying openly gay, not just gay.  I'm sure there are gay players in the NHL.  Dozens.  But in the macho, testosterone-driven world of professional sports, they are forced to stay in the closest - just as they are in baseball, basketball and football.

In the abstract, I really don't care what professional athletes do or how they behave.  Juice up all you want on steroids, beat up your wives and girlfriends, drive drunk and kill your dogs.  I think it's crazy to look at professional athletes as any kind of role models just because of their proficiency in sports.  All it means when a guy can hit a ball a long way is that he can hit a ball a long way.  That's it.  Nothing less and nothing more.

The problem I have is when their bad behavior - the steroids and racial and homophobic trash-talking, etc. - trickles down below them to the Junior leagues, the high school leagues and then the youth leagues.

In other words, whatever hate speech players like Avery and Simmonds are using in the heat of the moment to gain an edge over an opponent - and many of these derogatory words that we never utter in polite society are freely spoken dozens of times throughout an NHL hockey game - the kids are going to pick up on and use as well.

And that - just like making Sean Avery look sympathetic - is not good for the game.

When You Luck Upon a Star

Actor Anthony LaPaglia, years after he appeared as a terrorist in our student film.

After writing my recent post about making a student film in Venice Beach, California, I received a little note (a small miracle in itself) from my best friend from college asking when I would write about the time she and I  made our student film (she was my producer) about a terrorist threatening to blow up the Olympic Marathon - starring the then unknown Anthony LaPaglia.

When you're starting off in film school, or any other creative endeavor where you have to write, the first instructions you usual receive are "write what you know" and "keep it simple."  Taking that to heart, it will be no surprise to hear that what I wrote and directed as my first student film (Super 8!) was a simple story about an Australian terrorist (the terrorist's nationality wasn't stated in the script, that change was made after casting) threatening to blow up the Olympic Marathon.  All it required was numerous actors, several vehicles - including a large limousine - and locations all over Southern California, including a house along the coast in Newport Beach and a Hollywood mansion.  It was anything but simple.

It's been written many times by filmmakers and historians that there's something indefinable about what makes a movie star, but you immediately know it when you see it.  It's why screen tests have been a staple of Hollywood for decades.  Someone may be beautiful and a great actor or actress in person, but for reasons that no one can predict or quantify, they just don't come off well on camera.

Others -  a lucky few - are touched by the gods of cinema.  They may be someone you would never even notice on stage or at a party, but you put them in front of a camera and magic happens.  The phrase you often hear is "The camera just loves them."

I unexpectedly learned this lesson in star power on my first student film in college.  Local struggling actors would leave their 8 X 10 "headshots" - consisting of a photo and their acting resume - in numerous binders in the main office of the film department.  When we were looking for actors for a film project, we would browse through binder after binder of actors willing to work in a student film.

We would take notes and call the ones that matched a look we wanted for our film.  You would give them a call and meet them somewhere to go over the script, get a sense of how reliable they were, and see if it was a good match.  In exchange for working in our film for free, we would provide them with a ride (if they needed it), food and a credit in the film, of course, and, most importantly to them, a copy of the finished film on VHS tape for their demo reel.  You usually had to kiss a few frogs to find your Prince.  That's casting.

On my first film, we got lucky.  We saw a picture of a young man, thin and in his mid-20's, newly arrived in L.A. from Australia.  He was looking for film acting work.  We gave him a call, had a brief meeting and quickly cast him as the lead in our little film.  He reminded me and my producer of a young Mel Gibson.  He was articulate, looked great and seemed enthusiastic to work with us.  His name was Anthony LaPaglia.

We shot the film over the next two weekends in Newport Beach and Hollywood (for those of you unfamiliar with the geography of Southern California, those two places are 50 miles apart).  Anthony was money.  He was punctual, easygoing, engaged, knew his lines, worked his butt off and was just a great guy.  I tried to treat him with the utmost respect and professionalism, but  I felt a little sheepish having him work in my cheesy little Super 8 student film.

We got the film developed and watched the dailies - the raw, unedited footage - at school a few days later.  We were all impressed.  Anthony just came off incredible on film.  The camera "loved" him.  I wish I could say that my brilliant writing and directing gave him a firm basis from which to perform, but I was just a stupid, young kid and he elevated the material.

My producer and I really thought this guy was the real deal.  He had all the tools to become a huge star.  We were curious if he was as good as we thought or if he would eventually have a career.  There are so many variables to success in Hollywood.  Talent is such a small part of the equation.  Timing, luck, work ethic, looks and access to casting directors all play such a crucial role in becoming a working actor.

It took Anthony about two years to start getting regular small parts in television.  His big break took four years, when he got the leading role in a TV movie in 1988.  He didn't do anything spectacular, but he kept working.  Kept plugging away, pounding on doors, working at his craft, and going on auditions.  My producer and I would let each other know through the years when we'd seen him in something new.

But a funny thing happened along the way.  He didn't become the next Mel Gibson, as we would have predicted when we worked with him; he lost his Australian accent and developed an East Coast American accent and started playing the ethnic/Italian guys.  Eventually, he was rewarded with large roles in the shows Murder One, Frasier and Without a Trace.  Usually playing an Italian guy from New York, not an Australian.

So he didn't quite become a huge film star, but he's had a damn fine career.  And we gave him his first break in Hollywood.  As young and inexperienced as we were, our star detector was spot on, even way back then.  It was just so obvious.  We were lucky enough to have a star in our first little student film - and then sit back and watch how a star is born.

Now here's the sad part: I've moved around so many times since then, that I have NO idea where the copy of that film is.  I know I wouldn't have ever thrown it out, and it will probably show up in the bottom of a box when I'm old and gray.  I know I took a couple of rolls of pictures on the set during filming, and I can't find any of those either.  You shoot the film, turn it in and get your grade and finish the class - and then it gets boxed away somewhere never to be seen again.  A common story in Hollywood.

Here's a link to Anthony LaPaglia's IMDB page.

My best friend who produced the film with me?  Yes, we're still friends and she had a damn fine film career as well.  Here's a link to her IMDB page.

Turns out I was the real slacker on that set.  And that's a wrap.

The Statues of Dublin

Dublin native Oscar Wilde, author of The Importance of Being Ernest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, lounges comfortably in Merrion Square.  This is my personal favorite of the statues of Dublin.  Dubliners have nicknamed it "The Fag on the Crag," "The Quare in the Square," and "The Queer with the Leer."

Ireland is an island of only five million people, and in the past hundred years has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature - only two less than the United States.

These two women on Liffey Street are known as "The Hags with the Bags."

There's a tourist trap castle in the Southwest - Blarney Castle - that draws millions of tourists a year to pay a few quid to lie upside down and kiss an old rock that has been kissed by millions of other people - all in the name of acquiring the Irish "gift of gab."

Irish literary legend James Joyce still stands just off O'Connell Street in Dublin, but if you're meeting a Dubliner by "The Prick with the Stick," you're in the right place.

The Irish love to talk and many of them love to write.  Ireland produces acclaimed writers and playwrights at a pace that far outweighs its population.  Words and language are a vital part of Irish life.

Sweet Molly Malone, subject of a famous Irish folk song, now plies her trade selling "cockles and mussels" at the bottom of Grafton Street.  Dubliners have dubbed her "The Flirt in the Skirt," "The Trollop with the Scallop," "The Bitch with the Hitch," "The Dolly With the Trolley", and my personal favorite: "The Tart with the Cart."

Dublin, Ireland is a city of statues.  You can't turn a corner in the City Centre without encountering another statue or piece of sculpture commemorating something or someone.  And as quickly as the Irish government can plan and erect these statues, the Irish people can come up with witty and hilarious nicknames for them.  Many of these statues have multiple nicknames that are known by every Dubliner. 

The statue of Anna Livia (from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake) in its original location on O'Connell Street in Dublin's City Centre.  Dubliners nicknamed her "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi."

Dublin went a little overboard for the new Millennium, erecting new statues and landmarks around the city.  A digital clock counting off the time until the new Millennium was placed in the dark waters of the Liffey, the river that runs through the centre of Dublin.  Dubliners were ready and doled out several nicknames for the odd clock that lay in the murky Liffey.

Dubliners quickly dubbed the Millennial Clock "The Clock in the Dock" and "The Time in the Slime."

The largest piece for the Millennium celebration was a few years late to the party.  The "Spire of Dublin" is now located in the space vacated by "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi" in the middle of O'Connell Street - the main street that runs through the centre of Dublin.  Before the cement was dry, Dubliners had a series of nicknames ready including "The Binge Syringe," "The Stiletto in the Ghetto," "The Nail in the Pale," "The Pin in the Bin," "The Erection in the Intersection," and "The Rod to God."

"

The World's largest sculpture is officially known as The Spire of Dublin, but many locals refer to it as "The Stiffy by the Liffey."

I have no clue which notable Irishman or what landmark event will next be commemorated by a statue or monument in some open space or square in Dublin.  But I'm quite confident that in a pub in Dublin, around a few pints of Guinness stout,  several Dubliners will brainstorm up multiple nicknames before it passes the planning commission.  And I'll drink to that.  Sláinte.

Welcome to the Big Apple

St. Vincent Ferrer Priory on New York's Upper East Side.

I have had a lifelong love affair with New York City that began during Spring Break in April of 1984.  My Uncle, a Dominican Priest, was living in New York at the time, and invited me to visit and stay with him.  He lived in a Priory attached to St. Vincent Ferrer's Church on Lexington and 66th, on the Upper East Side, in the heart of Manhattan.  It seemed like an acceptable neighborhood - Richard Nixon's townhouse was around the corner - so how could I refuse St. Vincent's hospitality?

I landed at New York's John F. Kennedy (JFK) airport right at the height of the evening rush hour.  Traveling light, as always, without any checked bags, I walked right off the Pan Am 747 and straight to the curb.  I found the Carey bus stop and hopped on the big bus to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan.  I didn't mind the slow rush hour traffic, as it gave me a chance to gradually take in the City as darkness fell and we crept closer.  The bus went through a toll booth, down into the Midtown Tunnel and under the East River.  We came up a few minutes later and I was right in the middle of Manhattan for the first time in my life. 

As a film buff, my expectations of New York drew from famous films shot on location in New York - I'm walking here!  Are you talking to me!  It's showtime!  Attica!  Attica!  - including All That Jazz, Annie Hall, Dog Day Afternoon, Fame, The French Connection, Godspell, Midnight Cowboy, My Favorite Year, Network, Taxi Driver, Tootsie, West Side Story and, of course, Woody Allen's masterpiece, Manhattan.  All those movies made it seem as if New York was the center of the universe. 

I walked off the bus across the street from Grand Central Terminal, my backpack slung low across my back, and was momentarily stopped by the sensory overload that was, and is, New York City.  So many people!  Such huge buildings!  What were all those awful smells? 

My uncle had told me to be sure when I got off the bus to walk in to Grand Central Terminal and take it all in before I hopped on the Lexington Avenue subway.  The inside of Grand Central was, as advertised, awe-inspiring.  The ceiling was huge.  I tried to navigate this bewildering place to find my subway line uptown.  This was going to be a little bit different than riding B.A.R.T. back home in the Bay Area.

Nothing about the process was clear, friendly or automated.  A bored, older lady sat in a small booth, pushing subway token after subway token through the small hole in the plexiglass that looked about a foot thick.  I pushed a dollar through the hole and she pushed a tiny metal token out the other way, so it dropped into the hole on my side of the booth.  I stared at it for a moment, looked at the woman, reached for the token, grabbed it and moved toward the subway turnstiles. 

I was looking for the Lexington Avenue - that's the Green line - subway line uptown towards the Bronx.  Like Jon Voight's hayseed cowboy in Midnight Cowboy, I just stood there for a moment trying to navigate my way in the correct direction while hundreds and hundreds of New Yorkers jostled around me in every direction.  I double-checked my pants pocket for my wallet.  The energy, as my Uncle had always told me, was incredible. 

I made it safely up to the mean streets of the Upper East Side and went out to dinner with my Uncle.  We walked out of the Priory and my Uncle immediately hailed a cab.  I now felt like I was off and running in my own New York movie.  I'm still amused how even the shyest, most docile New Yorker can become a human megaphone when they're trying to hail a cab - Hey!  Taxi!

Moments later we were speeding through Central Park, heading over to the Upper West Side, to meet a couple who were friends of my Uncle's, one of whom was an actor and the other a playwright.  We had a great night eating at a neighborhood Italian place and winding up at their apartment for desert and late night New York/Theatre talk.  I was amazed how small their apartment was and how long they had lived in the same place.  They told me once you find a good rent-controlled apartment in New York, you usually have to live there for rest of your life, if you're staying in New York.

The next day my Uncle had some things to do, so I headed down to Times Square by myself to see what Broadway shows were available that afternoon for half price down at the TKTS booth.  I looked at the board and saw the latest Stephen Sondheim show that was still in  previews.  It was set to open the following week.  It starred Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters.  I didn't recognize the title or know a thing about it, but I figured Sondheim was a good bet.  After waiting thirty minutes in line, I reached one of the windows, put my thirty dollars up on the counter and said, "One for Sunday in the Park with George, please." Yes, that was my first Broadway show.

Sunday in the Park with George, my first Broadway show.

The show was fantastic!  I was entranced for two and a half hours.  I rarely see previews of shows, but there's something to be said for walking into a show when you don't know a thing about it.  It was the first and only time I would see either Mandy Patinkin or Bernadette Peters live on stage.  Patinkin was very hot at the time in New York, fresh off his run in Evita.  Peters had not appeared on Broadway in ten years, and I must admit, I knew her mostly as Steve Martin's ex-girlfriend and co-star in The Jerk.  She would become Broadway's darling by the end of the decade.

Even sitting in my half-priced seat in the very last row of the Orchestra section, the show just completely blew me away.  It's still my favorite Sondheim show.  Patinkin and Peters were both incredible.  Their stage presence and magnetism extended to every seat in the theatre. 

I walked out of the Booth Theatre thinking to myself, "Well, okay, I really get the draw of this Broadway show thing."  Little did I know then that I would go on to see dozens and dozens of shows in New York, but I don't think I ever topped that one. 

The show also, of course, made me a huge Seurat fan.  It would take me years, but I vowed some day to travel to Chicago to see the painting that inspired the show, Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grand Jatte, at the Art Institute of Chicago.   

George Seurat's Un Dimanche Après-Midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (1884).

 

 

The next couple of days I spent hours and hours in the Metropolitan, Guggenheim and Modern Art museums, with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) becoming my favorite.  I've never been able to draw or paint anything, and other than my Father's sister, there isn't any evidence of artistic talent in my family.  I have no recollection of either of my parents ever taking me to an Art museum as a child.  I have no idea why or where I acquired my appreciation of great paintings, but I think it was solidified on that trip to New York.

New York's Lincoln Center performing arts complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Sensing I could use a little high culture at some point during my trip, my Uncle had purchased us tickets to the Mostly Mozart festival in Lincoln Center to finish my visit.  I don't recall the pieces that were played that night in Fisher Hall, but the theatre was beautiful and the New York Philharmonic sounded incredible.  The fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center is always a scenic place to be at night.

I bought a small, laminated New York subway and museum map that I used so much during that stay that I thought I was going to wear it out.  I would continue to use it so much during my New York overnights as a flight attendant, that I did have to buy another copy ten years later.

New York had everything you could possibly want in a big city.  Great food, shows, movies, museums.  It was so compact and easy to get around.  People could be a bit rude and abrupt compared to California, but everyone I met during my stay seemed friendly and intelligent.

Unlike many a young romance, my New York love affair has never waned.  I've always wondered what it would have been like to have lived in New York for a few years when I was younger, but then I doubt our affair would have continued this long. 

It has now been over five years since I've been back to New York.  That's the longest stretch since my first visit.  Of all the cities I flew in and out of in my 18 years as a flight attendant, New York is still the one I miss the most.  The approach into LaGuardia airport  from the south never got old.  You only saw the city's beauty from the air, especially at night, but yet it still looked so close that you could reach out and touch its sparkling lights. 

Once in a while, a van driver would take the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan from the airport, and I was never too jaded not to enjoy that view.

My Uncle stayed in New York for a few more years.  He ran the New York Marathon and encouraged me to do the same.  I finally went back and ran it in 1987, sealing a love affair with a great city that I'm sure will endure as long as I live.

My oldest son is heading back to New York City for the first time in a couple of weeks.  I won't be traveling with him, so I'm a little jealous, a little nervous, but mostly, I just hope he has a great trip and sees her like I did that first time, and falls in love with the same city I did  twenty-seven years ago.

Will Fly for Food Part Deux - Midwest & South Edition

The deep dish pizza from Edwardo's in Chicago.

Last week I thought I would write a little post on all the unique places in cities around the country where I used to like to eat in my prior life as a Flight Attendant.  As I started writing and adding pictures, the post grew longer and longer, and I grew hungrier and hungrier.  I finally decided to divide the posts geographically into three parts, and today would be post number two, focusing on several good food cities I love in the South and Midwest.

The other thing that occurred after my post last week is that my wife read it, got really hungry, and requested that I try and reproduce the famous sandwiches from Primanti's.  Mon Dieu!  It had never even occurred to me to try and make a Primanti's sandwich at home.  How can you improve on perfection?  Would you visit the Louvre and ask your spouse to copy the Mona Lisa?

But seeing as how we won't be making a trip to Pittsburgh in the near future, and that my lovely wife is very sweet, I gave it a try.  How did it go?  Uh, I'd give it about a 7 on a scale of 1-10.  Not too bad - edible - for a first time out.  I think it's worth trying once more with a few tweaks to see if I can get it up to an 8 or 9.

Frequent Traveler Survival Rule #1:
  

     Don't sleep in a restaurant and don't eat in a hotel.

There are some cities that offer great food but when I was flying there food wasn't my first thought.  Chicago is not one of those places.  Anytime I saw a long overnight in "ORD" - the three letter code for Chicago's O'Hare airport - on a trip sheet, my mouth would immediately start salivating, and I would start daydreaming about Chicago's justly famous deep dish pizza.

My apologies, New Yorkers, and I realize I'm about to alienate several of my East Coast pisans, but this Californian will take Chicago's deep dish pizza ANY DAY OF THE WEEK over New York's thin crust pizza.  Sorry.  Maybe it's because my father was from Oak Park (a western suburb of Chicago), and it's in my blood, but I just have to call 'em as I see 'em.  Chicago pizza rules.

Some of my urban overnights in my flying days were spent in less than desirable hotels in less than desirable neighborhoods, or nice hotels in the middle of suburbia.  Not in Chicago.  We stayed in a great, little boutique hotel just north of Division street, right in the middle of the action.  Just a block from the El (Chicago's subway), I could walk out the door and be at Wrigley Field in 10 minutes.

But the real draw for me was Edwardo's "Natural" Pizza, a small, friendly local chain that had a location just at the end of the block from our hotel.  I think they would stay open until 11 p.m., so on a night when I was arriving late I could usually call in my order on the van ride in from the airport (you know you're a flight attendant if you have the take-out numbers of three or more pizza places around the country in your cell phone) and pick it up just before they closed.  When you're flying all day, there's nothing worse than getting in late, tired and hungry, and unable to find anything to eat.  That was never a problem in Chicago.

Each time I ordered another pizza from Edwardo's, I would tell myself that I should just get a small - that would be more than enough - but then I soon convinced myself that I could buy a medium, eat half that night, and save the other half to eat on the plane for lunch the next day.  I always ordered a medium pie and never had anything left over to eat the next day.  I would wind up laying on the bed in my hotel, stuffed and bloated, like my dog after discovering a box of chocolate under the Christmas tree.  But it was worth it.

In Mi Tierra's
Huevos Rancheros
We took some Polaroids
Right at the table

     - Lyle Lovett's San Antonio Girl

Frequent Traveler Survival Rule #2:

ALWAYS eat at a restaurant Lyle Lovett has mentioned in a song.

There was a point in the mid-90's where I had a long overnight at least once a  month in  San Antonio.  We stayed in a nice, modern hotel right along the Riverwalk.  San Antonio was one of those "secret" overnights at US Airways.  I think it only occurred on one trip a day, and even that was on the Boeing 737 -  a plane many flight attendants didn't like to fly (because of the poorly constructed trips, not the aircraft itself).  And as someone from California, San Antonio was one of those cities that flew under the radar.  It was very Texan.  But I loved walking along the Riverwalk, watching the crowds and looking for good food.

The dining room at Mi Tierra's in San Antonio, Texas: open 24 hours a day.

One of the landmark Mexican restaurants in San Antonio is called Mi Tierra's, and Lyle Lovett mentions it one of his songs, San Antonio Girl.  If there's a restaurant in Texas that Lyle mentions in a song, that's good enough for me.  It's actually a few blocks away from the Riverwalk, in the older section of town, but it was always open 24 hours a day and a great option if you arrived late at night still hungry.  You couldn't beat eating their huevos rancheros after a long day of flying - or for breakfast the next morning.

And I'm sorry Pee-Wee, but there really isn't a basement at the Alamo.

There was another "hidden gem" overnight - also serviced by the Boeing 737 - located in the South that was always on my radar when I was looking through the trip sheets:  Charleston, South Carolina.

We didn't stay in the city of Charleston on overnights, but our hotel provided us with a courtesy van to and from the city.  Charleston is one of those beautiful, old towns that just has Southern Charm written all over it.  I loved walking around the old part of town, admiring all the Colonial era buildings.

The side of the renowned Hominy Grill in Charleston, South Carolina.

I just happened upon the Hominy Grill on my first walk around Charleston.  If you want reasonably priced, authentic, Southern "Lowcountry" cooking in a casual setting, then the Hominy Grill is the place.  It wasn't until after I had eaten there several times that I realized it was an obligatory stop for any food or travel TV show that came through Charleston.  Lots of  delicious Southern vegetables.  Don't leave without trying the cornbread.

Frequent Traveler Survival Rule #3:

Unless you grew up in the South, skip the "sweet" tea.

As a Californian, I should stop here for a moment and mention a classic beverage that Southerners have, in my mind, completely screwed up:  Iced Tea.  Simple, refreshing, the perfect beverage companion on a hot, muggy Southern day.  But Southerners have decided to put their own twist on Iced Tea: it's called "sweet" tea.  It's usually so sweet - I believe that the recipe calls for one cup of sugar for every cup of tea - that's to this palate it's completely undrinkable.  So go light on the "sweet" tea if you're a Yankee traveling in the South.

Unfortunately, I never had a long overnight in the food and music capital of the South: New Orleans (I did vacation there with my wife).  We didn't have many long MSY overnights when I was flying, and we stayed in a dumpy hotel out near the airport, anyway,  But I did have numerous New Orleans "turns."

A "turn" in the airline world is when you work a flight into an airport and immediately fly back out again - usually only sitting on the ground for 45 - 60 mins.  There was a place in the New Orleans airport - no, it wasn't Cafe du Monde - that sold beignets.  Each time we did a New Orleans "turn," the crew would recruit a volunteer - usually the junior person on the crew - to run off the plane as soon as a we arrived to buy the whole crew some beignets.  A great little treat for having to work those busy flights filled with cranky conventioneers in and out of the Big Easy.

My wife is from Louisiana, although she's not from the New Orleans area, and if I buy Cafe du Monde beignet mix - they sell it at most Cost Plus World Markets - she's kind enough to make me beignets on Sunday mornings.  It's not Jackson Square, but it's close.

Thank you for joining me again on our food tour across America.  I will try and wrap things up with my favorite foods from my travels out West next week.  In the meantime, if you're future plans once again call for blog reading, we do hope you'll come back and catch our smile.

Birthdates and Hockey

When you drive between L.A. and Phoenix, this is the scenery for four hours.

"Jesus had a lousy hockey birthday," my 14 year old son said from the back seat.

"Yes, I guess so, hon," my wife and I agreed from the front seat.

My wife, myself and my twin fourteen year old sons were racing through the Arizona desert at 80 miles an hour, our Honda Odyssey Minivan packed with odorous hockey gear.  We were en route to a youth hockey tournament in Phoenix, Arizona over the Winter Break.  It was only the boys' second time to play hockey outside of California.  The 800 mile/13 hour drive from Santa Rosa was definitely their longest trip for hockey, and our longest family trip by car.

Half of their team had flown down to Phoenix earlier that day, already comfortably settled into the team hotel.

We were halfway between Blythe and Phoenix.  I'd like to be more specific, but there isn't anything between Blythe and Phoenix: just dirt, rocks, sage brush and bare mountains.  Relentless reds and browns with nary anything green in sight.  Each time we pulled into a highway rest stop in Arizona, it was the greatest population center within 50 miles.

We bypassed the one rest stop that was located right next to a state prison, and then all had a good laugh at the road sign a few miles later that read, "Don't pick up hitchhikers!"  Gee, ya' think?  

What you miss when you fly that distance instead of drive is all the quality family time.  You hear everything the kids have on their minds.  And they always have plenty on their minds.  Even going so far as to ponder the ramifications if our Lord Savior had played ice hockey.

During the desert portion of the drive, I had been telling the boys about a new, interesting book I had just read entitled Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell (highly recommended to all, but especially to any hockey fans out there).

In the first chapter of his best-selling book, Gladwell discussed birthdates and how important they were to the development of young athletes.  He took ice hockey, the sport our boys play, as an example.  Because the eligibility dates were January 1st to December 31st, most of the kids born earlier in the year had a slight advantage in a physically demanding sport where size plays such a key role.  Gladwell meticulously went through how players born in the first half of the year were disproportionately represented on NHL and Olympic rosters.

(Here's a link to an interview Gladwell did at the time with ESPN.)

We went through the birthdays of the kids we knew who played hockey and, sure enough, the majority, but not all, of the good hockey players we knew were born in the first six months of the year.

When I coached youth hockey, the birth dates of the players on our team would always be listed next to their names on the team roster.  I thought this was invaluable to remember as a coach.  Even though they might be born in the same birth year, you can't expect the same performance from a child born in November or December as a child born in January or February.  A ten month span was huge for a child's mental and physical development at an early age.  I was never sure coaches were as cognizant of the age differences on a team as they have been.

Our boys were born six weeks premature, common in twins, on November 25.  A lousy hockey birthday.  Had they gone to term, and been born in the first week of January, they would have had the best hockey birthdays imaginable.  Not that birthdates alone should be used as an excuse for skill or performance, but it certainly plays a role in youth sports.  My boys have worked hard and are excellent hockey players, but they would have been much better players, especially when they were younger, had they not been born prematurely.

Hey, NHL great Mario Lemieux was born in October, you say.  Fair enough.  But Wayne Gretzky was born in January.  Six of the top ten NHL scorers of all time were born in January, February or March. 

So an hour or so of that Gladwell-inspired birthdates discussion in the Arizona desert eventually led to my son's astute observation above.  If we had flown to Arizona instead of driven, we may have never had that discussion and realized that Jesus had a lousy hockey birthday.  Maybe so.  But I hear he had a hard wrist shot.  Wicked hard.

The Strange Case of Kathryn Bigelow

A scene from The Hurt Locker (2008), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

Since the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences first started awarding Oscars™ for film excellence in 1927, there have been 324 nominees for Best Director and 85 people have won the award.  On March 7 of last year, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.  She also was the first woman to win the coveted Director's Guild award as Best Director.

She directed The Hurt Locker - the gripping tale of a company of demolition experts on the front lines in Iraq.  There were few female characters in the movie.  It was what Hollywood refers to as an "Action" picture.  In other words, the first woman to win the Best Directing award, won for directing a film a man would usually be called upon to direct. 

Don't get me wrong,  I'm not implying in any way that Bigelow won as any part of a sympathy or movement vote - i.e, she only won because it was finally time to give the benefit of the doubt to the next woman eligible.  I would have voted for her among the five finalists that year.  And you must admit, her win was all the sweeter when she beat out her former husband, James Cameron (is there really an attractive woman left in Hollywood who hasn't been married to James Cameron?), who directed Avatar, that year's champion at the box office.  Art winning over commerce. 

Kathryn Bigelow holds her Oscar™ for directing The Hurt Locker.

Why does Hollywood consider directing such a male-centric position?  Why have there only been four women to even be nominated as Best Director?  (The other women nominated have been Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (one of my all-time favorites).

87 men have been nominated for the Best Director award multiple times, a lucky 18 actually winning 2 or more Oscars™.  No woman has been nominated more than once. 

I mention this because the Director Guild of America announced the results of their annual diversity report last week. 

The DGA analyzed more than 2,600 episodes produced in the 2010-2011 television season from more than 170 scripted television series.  The report showed that women directed only 12% of those episodes.  Eight TV shows didn't have a single woman director the entire season.  And while this study only applied to television, I'm sure the figures for feature films directed by women are even lower.  And if you're a minority woman?  Forget it.  You can share 1% of all episodic TV directing jobs.

I was a film major at a large, Southern California university back in the 1980's, and there were plenty of women in the program back then (I would have guessed 30-40%) - I'm sure those figures are even higher today.

So I think the numbers of women aspiring to be directors are there, and Ms. Bigelow has shown that a woman can excel in the position on a physically demanding action picture, with mostly male actors, in inhospitable conditions (much of The Hurt Locker was shot in Jordan during the middle of the summer).

Hollywood is a tough business for anyone to enter and achieve success, but this male directing domination doesn't extend to the equally important tasks of editing or producing or writing.  Women editors have won the Oscar™ six times in the past 30 years; a woman has been nominated virtually every year during that time.  (By the way, the best way to win an Oscar™ for editing is to work with Martin Scorcese.) 

The figures are about the same for female producer and writer nominees as editors.  The director position stands alone as the final bastion of male dominance in Hollywood.  Studio executives just prefer to have a man in charge of the set.  Even female studio executives.

Kathryn Bigelow directs The Hurt Locker on location in Amman, Jordan.

The Academy Awards are certainly not the definitive judgement in film excellence in a given year (such legendary directors as Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Ernest Lubitsch, David Lynch, Sidney Lumet and Orson Welles never won an Oscar™ for Best Director; Tim Burton and Spike Lee have never even been nominated).  They merely honor what's considered to be, usually, the best big budget/studio pictures made in English, mostly by Americans, for any given year.  But I think it's still an excellent barometer of trends in the industry as a whole, something that the recent DGA report certainly backs up for women directors in television.

So if you're raising a young daughter or daughters, and they seem to show an interest in working in film or television; you may want to steer them away from directing, and into editing, producing or writing.

Because if you want to be the one who yells "Action!" or "Cut!" on a set in Hollywood, it's still a Man's world.

Getting Tagged and Hacked

A local artiste makes their mark on the fence in our front yard.

I knew it was coming.  Our neighborhood isn't bad, but it's most definitely urban and mixed use.  We live just a mile north of downtown San Jose.  There is a Liquor Store (spelled Kuik Mart on one side and Qwik Mart on the other) and a Salvation Army store up the street to the north.  There's a bus company and a pita bakery across the street.  Two blocks to the east is a Starbucks and a Jamba Juice - just across the street from our neighborhood gay bar.  Amidst all that commerce, there's also a house at the end of our block for sale for $899,000 (recently reduced from $949,000!).  It's definitely a diverse neighborhood.

The commuter train station near our house.

Homeless people are a regular fixture of the neighborhood - the boys like to boast that their school is the only one in San Jose with its own train station and hobos - and some of the locals are kind enough to leave empty shopping carts on our front lawn on a weekly basis.  Need an empty soda bottle or a worthless lottery ticket?  How about an empty coffee cup or an empty pack of cigarettes?  They're all free for the taking in the nearest gutter on a daily basis right on our street.  Everything you'd ever want or need right out your front door! 

So it wasn't really a surprise when I walked out of the house on a recent Sunday morning, headed out to the car, stopped and looked to my right, only to realize a little white fence on the corner of our front yard had been "tagged" with some graffiti overnight.  I didn't even feel that angry or violated, mostly just resigned.  If you live in any urban area in America like San Jose, the odds are at some point you're going to get tagged with some graffiti.

I'm blaming it on Banksy.  Every punk with a spray can is now an urban Picasso (if they only had any idea who Picasso was) thanks to Banksy and the documentary film (or was it?) Exit through the Gift Shop.  Netflix and Hulu are the gateway drugs to urban vandalism and street crime.

San Jose isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, a crime-ridden or lawless city.  Sure, we have plenty of your garden variety gang and drug activity, but the crime rate here is actually pretty low for a city of this size.  Still, I've lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Dublin, Ireland, and this was the first time my residence has been tagged.  But I still knew it was coming.

We had the fence painted over and the graffiti has yet (fingers crossed) to reappear.

Then a couple of days later, one of my e-mail accounts was hacked.  You may remember the friendly e-mail you received from me informing you about the great online deals for Viagra from a pharmacy in the Great White North.  Or something like that.

I have no idea how it was done; I never check my e-mail on a public computer or give my password out to anyone, but I basically sat there and watched it happen.  I was on my laptop with my e-mail account open when all of these bad e-mail address notices started popping up in my "in box" - about 15 of them.  I took a look at one and immediately realized I had been hacked.

Quickly moving into my e-mail account settings, I changed my password from 6 characters (mixed letters and numbers) to more than 12 characters (mixed letters and numbers and mixed upper and lower case letters).  I would give you the password if I could, but it's now so long and convoluted that I have no idea what it is anymore.

After changing my e-mail password, I went through all my other online accounts just to make sure I didn't use that e-mail and the same password on anything else.  I didn't.  I changed and strengthened a few anyway, just for good measure.

But now I have so many different "handles" and "passwords" for all my various e-mail and online accounts that I can't remember anything anymore.  I'm so secure that half the time I have locked myself out of my own account.  Some young Russian teenage hacker can probably check my Netflix queue easier than I can.

I have noticed in the couple of weeks since it happened that several other friends of mine have also had their e-mail accounts hacked.  A few have made sheepish apologies on Facebook, but I don't think that's even necessary at this point.  If you haven't been hacked yet, it's just luck, and at some point it's coming.

When you live in San Jose and get hacked, the nice thing is that a few of your friends who really know a LOT about computers and servers and network security, etc. send you a little note letting you know what happened.  I had a little chat with one friend of ours who specializes in computer security (he was shocked it happened to a Mac user) and he basically said there isn't much you can do about it.  C'est la vie.

Welcome to America in the 21st Century.  In all those Sci-Fi books, films and TV shows of my youth that tried to predict life in the future, I don't recall Captain Kirk or Spock having to change their passwords after getting hacked.  You want Sci-Fi authenticity?  How about "Spock Sucks" painted in spray paint along the side of the Enterprise?  That's really where men are boldly going to go.  Where many have gone before, and many will go again.

(Post-Script:  After I finished and posted this piece this morning, I noticed this article in today's San Jose Mercury News, stating that graffiti/tagging is way up in San Jose and throughout California.)

The Answer Man

Men today have been turned into Namby-Pamby weaklings.  They're so pathetic that they don't even know how ridiculously weak they are.  Well-groomed, physically fit, light beer swilling, arugula munching, nincompoops.  Men are the superior of the sexes.  We hunt and forage for food, spit, kill, and grunt.  The ANSWER MAN looks on at the role of Men in today's society with disgust.  That's why he's here to answer all your manly questions.

Dear Answer Man:

I love to sit on my couch on Sunday afternoons and drink beer and eat chips and dip.  Some Sundays, I sleep in and don't even shower or shave, I just sit in my robe on the couch and watch football.  My wife tells me every week that football looks kind of gay.  How do you suggest I respond to her baseless accusation?  Football is the manliest sport in existence, isn't it?

No Football Loser in Oakland

Dear N.F.L.:

Damn right it is.  Everyone knows there isn't anything more manly than one man wearing clean, white tight pants crouching down and putting his outstretched hands under the buttocks of another man wearing clean, white tight pants.  The relationship between the Center - the cornerstone of every offensive line - and the Quarterback - also known as the Field General - is one of the most sacrosanct in all of sports.

Those taps that football players are constantly making on each others butts are merely part of the bonding experience required to build a winning team.  Something that only Real Men could possibly understand.  And if these masculine men must engage in this activity in the rain, snow or mud, all the better.

Tell your wife to go back to cleaning the house and leave you alone during your manly, weekly football viewing activity.  If God didn't intend for men to sit on the couch all afternoon, getting drunk and ingesting large amounts of sodium, while watching men in tight pants, he wouldn't have invented HDTV.  By the way, size DOES matter.  Bigger screens are better.

The Answer Man

D.A.M.:  

I was driving to work last week and my Prius had a flat tire.  The Auto Club doesn't have an app for the iPhone and it took me 10 minutes to find their number, and get a driver to come out and change my tire.  I was twenty minutes late for work.  When do you think AAA will finally get a decent iPhone app?

Tireless in Tiburon

Dear T.I.T.:

It's going to take a few minutes to reply to your question, Tireless.  I will first have to remove my hairy fist from my shatterted computer screen.  There.  That's better.  I'll apply some direct pressure and the bleeding should stop in a few minutes.

When did every man in this country lose the ability to change a flat tire?  Have we really gone this soft?  Believe it or not, there are some tasks which can not be accomplished with an iPhone app.

Put the phone down.  Walk to the back of your car and open the trunk/hatch.  Remove the spare from the back.  Remove the jack and raise the side of the car nearest the defective tire.  Raise the car, replace the tire and return the old tire to the hatch.  It's not that difficult.  Our fathers and their fathers accomplished this simple task for decades - without the benefit of an iPhone.  Be...a...Man.  Change your own tire.  And dump the Prius.  A man should never drive a vehicle that gets more miles per gallon than his age.  Ever.

The Answer Man

D.A.M.:

What's your favorite Barbara Streisand album?  One of my roommates says "People" and another says "Guilty."  I prefer "The Way We Were."  What do you think?

Bay Area Barbara Streisand fan

Dear B.A.B.S.:

How big a fan are you if you can't even spell her name properly?  It's "Barbra," not "Barbara."  What in the hell kind of man are you?  You can't call yourself a true Streisand fan if you can't even spell her name correctly.  Now on to your question.

Some people might think that being a Streisand fan is unmanly.  Not this guy.  She's an anal retentive, bossy,  temperamental, perfectionist who has slept with half of her co-stars.  You can't get any more manly than that.  Although Jon Peters - what was she thinking there?  Talk about a pretty boy.  He was a hair dresser for crying out loud!  I'd love to take him out back behind the salon and show him a thing or two.  A perm?  Really?  What kind of man would sleep with their hair dresser?  Now James Brolin - there's a manly man.  Good choice, Barbra.  We'll chalk up the Peters' fling as a youthful indiscretion.  Because that's the sort of excuse a man would give. 

Actually, this is an excellent question.  Regular manly readers of this column know that I am partial to Streisand's early work.  Her first and second albums, cleverly titled The First Barbra Streisand Album and The Second Barbra Streisand Album, capture her young, raw passion and emotion.  While the albums you mentioned have their merits - I still tear up every time I hear The Way We Were because it makes me think of Robert Redford and then I'm reminded of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Butch and Sundance.  Now those were two manly men.  Inseparable traveling partners who were so committed to each other, that they died together.

By the way, B.A.B.S., those two roomies of yours - they're both broads, right?

The Answer Man

Gentlemen, thanks for all the fine questions.  Keep 'em coming.  Looks like I'll have to punch your Man Cards for another week.  Until next time, get out there and Be A Man.

The Venice Chase

Yours truly, on location in Venice Beach, CA in 1984.

When I studied Film at Cal State, Northridge in the 1980's, every film production major had to take a class entitled Film Editing 101.  And if you took Film Editing 101, your primary project outside of class was to make a five minute, 16 mm film that involved a chase scene.

A chase scene is perfect for learning about film editing.  You can start off slow, build tension and cut more quickly during the chase, reach a resolution or denouement, and then cut slower again.

It's also a good type of scene to practice for marking time and place.  For example, if I set up a scene where two people start to chase each other in the same shot - and they both run out of frame - from then on I don't ever have to show them together in the same scene to give you the impression one character is chasing the other.  All I have to do as a filmmaker is show one character running from one side of the frame to another, past some type of visual landmark, and then I can cut to another angle of the same location, with that same earlier landmark still visible, and show the second character running in the same direction, past the same landmark.

You, the viewer, will assimilate that information and just assume the one character is chasing the other, as long as I keep them moving across the frame in the same direction, and passing visual landmarks you can identify.

It's basic stuff, but I did say it was only Film Editing 101.

Some schools, such as U.C.L.A., required their students to make their film projects individually: one person was responsible for one film.  At Northridge, we normally did our projects in groups of four.  As the writer and primary editor in my group, the first thing I had to do was concoct some exciting chase scenario that we could shoot cheaply in one or two weekends, somewhere visually interesting in Los Angeles.

If anyone ever asks if you want the Chapman dolly, the answer is always "YES!"

Probably influenced by Miami Vice and Touch of Evil, I developed a little story of a young man caught up in a drug deal gone bad - the cops step in just as he's about to make his drop - that would take place along the Strand in Venice Beach.  Orson Welles shot the famous continuous opening crane shot from Touch of Evil in Venice, and at that time I wanted to be Orson Welles, so it all made some sense.  Our film would be titled The Venice Chase.

Everyone in editing class had a schedule we had to adhere to in order to get our production finished by the end of the semester.  You only had the first week or two to work on your story because you needed to start filming in weeks 3-5.  The rest of the time would easily be swallowed up with editing, sound and music.  In other words, what everyone in Hollywood calls POST-PRODUCTION.  Post-Production is everything you do on a movie after principal photography has completed.

There are two notable things about shooting on location in Los Angeles.  The first is that everyone in L.A. is sick of having film crews shooting in their neighborhood, unless there is a little money exchanging hands.  That's part of the reason more and more film production in and around Los Angeles has moved out to the edges of the Thirty-Mile-Zone (T.M.Z.), the thirty mile circular area emanating from the intersection of West Beverly and North La Cienega Boulevards - the area around Los Angeles where a production can shoot with a local cast and crew and still be considered shooting in the city, not on location.  Shoot outside the T.M.Z. and you're now on location, and everyone requires transportation, per diem and lodging, etc. - it's just much more expensive.

The residents of Saugus and Valencia aren't yet as blasé about film crews as Hollywood, Santa Monica and Venice, so a lot more location filming has moved up there in recent years.

The second notable thing is that student films are treated with almost the same legitimacy as big budget studio productions.  If I went to the film permit office in downtown L.A. - and that's about the only reason I ever had to go to downtown L.A. - and paid my $10-20 student discounted rate for a city film permit, I had as much permission to shoot on public city property as anyone else.  So we bought ourselves a permit to shoot in Venice.  Good thing we did.

There were several film equipment rental facilities in Los Angeles.  Some of them liked to deal with film students and some of them didn't.  The ones that didn't probably thought we were flaky - hey, we were students - and the rates they could charge to students were far below market rates to a professional production.  On the other hand, student films normally shot on the weekends, when the big boys were sitting by their pools or dining at Spago's, so at least it was some revenue coming in during what would otherwise be a "dark" day.

Clairmont Camera in Hollywood had an impeccable reputation for being fair and accommodating with student filmmakers.  They would let us check out our rental equipment - camera, lights, dolly, dolly track, light meter, slate, etc. - after five o'clock on Friday night and, as long as we returned it before eight a.m. on Monday, they only charged us one day's rental.  It was still $500 - $1,000 for the day, but it helped us immensely to have that extra day for free.  We reserved our equipment for two weekends of shooting.

I always drove by a Budget Car Rental lot in Marina del Rey that rented "picture cars" - cars used on camera in a film.  They had an interesting selections of taxis, exotic cars and what caught my eye - a late model L.A.P.D. police car.  $50 a day with unlimited mileage.

The rental cop cruiser had a cloth cover that you put over the flashing lights on top while you were driving to and from your location.  They also gave you a couple of large, magnetic police "seals" that you put on each door when you were filming.  If you can't come up with a great story, you might as well have great production values.  We booked a squad car.

We cast a couple of our friends, one an aspiring actor, and my Dad as leads in the film.

We had our story, our actors, our assigned positions on the crew, our police car and uniform, our camera equipment and our film permit from the Film Office of the City of Los Angeles.  As they say in Hollywood, we were a "Greenlight" picture.

Filming on location always requires large hand gestures.

On a clear Saturday morning in September, we all met in Venice Beach.  The crew "call" - the time we had to show up on the "set" - was 6 a.m.  It's the only time of day in Venice you can get a decent parking space.  More importantly, we had a hundred feet of dolly track - it looked like a small railroad - that we needed to set up along the Strand.  We wanted to shoot as much as we could in the morning before things got too busy.

When you're filming on location, especially early in the day, things seem to move incredibly slowly.  Even if you're in charge, you often have no idea why you're waiting around and not shooting.  The dolly track was incredibly time-consuming to set up.  Once the track was properly laid out, and our Chapman dolly was hoisted atop the track, it worked like a charm.  Orson Welles once said that a film location was like a big train set.  This was literally a big train set.

We shot several scenes with actors running along the Strand, followed by the camera and dolly on the track.  We used that track as much as we could.  Then we moved on to a couple of other scenes that took place at a little cafe along the Strand.  With those shots finished, we were now ready to shoot a scene where we needed some of the Saturday afternoon crowds for which Venice was so famous.

The scene called for our hero, carrying a briefcase filled with cash and being chased by the policeman, to be chased into a cul-de-sac next to the beach.  Trapped by the crowds on one side and the police car on the other, he was supposed to open his briefcase, fling the cash up into the air, causing so much chaos in the crowd that he was able to run away scot-free.  We shot it a couple of times - we had invited a few friends to come along as extras to be our crowd chasing the money - and the scene was going well.

Then the L.A.P.D. pulled up.  The REAL L.A.P.D., not our Budget Rental Car version.  At that moment, I was glad I was the Writer and Editor and not the Producer.  And this was also when our Producer was happy we had filed for a film permit.  The cops immediately asked to see our permit and she showed it to them.  They still weren't happy.  They said we were attracting a crowd.  It was Venice Beach on a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon. The crowd would be there even if we weren't.  We just gave them something to watch.  The cops, wilting under the charm of our Producer, finally told us to finish up and move off the street as quickly as possible, and then drove away.

Then Life stepped in and imitated Art.

Getting ready for our third, and what we hoped final, take, we forgot about a prop briefcase, filled with fake dollar bills, that was sitting on the hood of the police car, while several of us in the crew discussed the scene.  In a moment of carelessness, we left the briefcase unguarded on the car and a lurking Venetian, a small, thin man in his mid-30's, presumably thinking the briefcase was filled with real cash, I guess, grabbed the briefcase and started to run.

Someone in the crew noticed him, yelled out, and then we all yelled after him as he ran north, away from the busy Strand, and into the narrow streets and alleys of the surrounding neighborhood.  My first reaction to this moment was not, in retrospect, the safest action to take.

Take note of the light meter, hanging near my waist.

I ran after him.  It didn't occur to me until later that he could have been carrying a knife or gun, and tried to stab or shoot me.  Although by stealing a worthless briefcase filled with fake money, he obviously was not the most sophisticated criminal in Venice Beach.

You also should know that around this time I was running road races for fun and to stay in shape.  I was running a lot.  60-70 miles a week.  I was running enough to know that if he didn't get away in the first 200 yards, that I would catch up with him.   I was right.

Through all the yelling and commotion, all I could think, and this gives you true insight into the mind of a film student, was not that he had stolen my Father's worthless briefcase, but that he had stolen a PROP for our FILM and we needed it to FINISH THE SHOT!  Had we been finished with the briefcase for the shoot, I wouldn't have cared.  We still needed that briefcase for continuity in scenes we were planning to shoot later that day.

So I ran after him.  I ran fast and strong.  If you want to shave a few seconds off your best 5K time, try chasing after a thief who has just stolen something you want back.  Pure adrenalin.  Within seconds, I was away from all the activity along the beach and in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Venice.  I saw our thief, briefcase in hand, running straight ahead and then making a left turn.  I ran up to where he had turned left, and followed behind, gaining on him.  His initial 200 yard sprint was over.  He didn't have nearly the adrenalin, nor distance running training regiment that I had, and was starting to tire.  I felt like a cheetah chasing down a wounded gazelle.  I closed in.

He continued down the street, looking for a way out, and ducked to his right, into an alley.  He jumped a cyclone fence into the backyard of a house.  I jumped right over the fence without breaking stride and faced him in the small backyard, his back up against a six foot wooden fence.

"Give me the briefcase!" I yelled as loud as I could.  He looked side to side and froze.  I realized he was in shock that I had caught up with him.  For the first time since he'd taken the briefcase, I also realized that I still had a light meter - a small, very heavy piece of glass and metal used to calculate the proper camera settings - hanging around my neck.  It was attached to a small, black rope and was now like a sling as I held it in my hand.

Unleashing my inner Indiana Jones - "Throw me the idol!" - I held the rope and threw the light meter at his chest, and yelled at him once again to drop the briefcase.  I believe there were more vulgarities involved the second time.  At this point, I wasn't exactly sure if he spoke English or not, but that was answered when he said "What the f@#k?" as the heavy, metal light meter just grazed his chest.

He immediately dropped the briefcase, turned, and jumped over the fence.  I didn't even look over the fence to watch him run away.  I had my prey.  I just grabbed the briefcase, locked it, and walked back to the location.

Once in a while, you have to take your turn as the Dolly Grip.

I wish I could post a link to our finished film here.  It was transferred over to VHS tape, but I misplaced my copy years ago after one move too many.  It resides hidden somewhere between the Ark of the Covenant and Charles Foster Kane's sled.

The Venice Chase turned out pretty well.  It was my first real editing experience and I was quite happy with it.  We all learned a ton about filming on location, schedules and editing.  Most importantly, we got an "A."  We definitely had the best "on location" story to tell the next week in class. 

And we also learned that sometimes the most interesting scenes happen behind the camera.

(Side note:  I know you're all dying to mock my late '70's/vintage/We Are Family Pirates cap.  We all did and wore many things we weren't proud of in the 1980's.  All I can say in my defense is if it was good enough for Willie "Pops" Stargell, it was good enough for me.)