The Day I Met The Family Show About Family

When I was writing for magazines, I would stop to watch television shows and movies being shot whenever I saw production trucks. It wasn’t that I was a fan; it was a business thing. Since I never knew who I might be interviewing from one day to the next, I looked upon these moments as research for future articles.

The best way to get to know people is by not letting them know that you are getting to know them. Let me explain. When I was assigned to do an interview, I pretty much knew everything about that person before I got there. Most of the time, I knew what they were going to say Before I asked the questions. My job was to get them to say more.

So, when I saw production trucks about a quarter mile from my apartment, I approached the crew. Being that I was on crutches, a crew member almost immediately got me a chair. After that happened, no one bothered me. The cast rarely knows Everyone on the crew. Some crew members change from day-to-day. It was the perfect place to observe the cast. More importantly, it was a way to talk with the crew during their off moments about what it was like to work with the cast. If you want to know what a celebrity is like as a person, ask the people who have to work with that person on a day-to-day basis. Some production companies are more open and friendly than others. On this particular day, I got lucky.

The show was a hit family show about a family. They were on location to shoot the exterior scenes of the family home. What you saw on television was only a small part of the entire location. It was actually at the end of a private cul-de-sac and the house was right next to a stable. You never saw the stable. Across the street from the house was nothing but trees, shrubs, and grass. There were no other houses, but television gave the illusion that this was just an average middle-class Street. Actually, the house belonged to a retired dentist who was renting out the television home facade for $500 a day. When there are a lot of exterior scenes to shoot in the same area, production companies will shoot all the scenes within a few days. Those scenes are then diced and spiced into the show during post-production. This turned out to be a bonus for me as it was only day one of a multi-day shoot.

The ages of the cast ranged from 7 or 8 to the late-forties. As I’ve said, I was only there to observe. But then, something happened that destroyed my anonymity. One of the crew members was a young guy about my age. He was a stand-in, literally a body standing in for cast members when they’re on a break. This allows the lighting technicians to set up lights and shades for when the cast returns to do the next scene. These jobs usually go to family and friends of the cast. Paul, as it turned out, was related to one of the cast members. He had grown up in New York, and that was only one of the things we had in common. We quickly became, what would turn out to be, lifelong friends.

Because of this impromptu friendship, after the exterior shooting ended, I was invited back to the soundstage. It was a more intimate setting, and I began to lose my status as just an observer. Over time, I found myself being “adopted” by this television family. They would include me in group conversations that would sometimes verge on being group confessionals. During one of those moments, I half-jokingly reminded them that I wrote for magazines. One of the cast members turned to me and said, “We know that. If we didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be here.”

Aside from Paul, I found myself growing closer to one of the cast members. She came from a show business family. Her mother was a casting agent for child actors. Her brother had been one of the stars of another family show about families a few decades earlier. She was smart, beautiful, and a little bit of what I like to call good crazy.

Because it was a large cast, unless that particular episode focused on her, it was a few days on set and a few days off. We started spending her days off together. She lived in Santa Monica pretty close to the beach. Believe it or not, she could get me to do things I would have never consider doing. One time in particular, I found myself sitting on the back of a motor scooter, crutches across my lap, while we went in search of sushi bars and sake.

It was a Crazy but deeply satisfying period of my life. I had recently completed four years of experimental orthopedic surgeries. During that time, my life had become a repeating cycle of surgery, recuperation, and literally learning how to walk again from Step One. I had repeated the cycle seven times. I had also put my career and my social life on hold. It was an all-consuming event in my life. It had to be because it was all or nothing. I will be talking about this time of my life in later podcasts. 

Needless to say, I needed to spend time with someone who just wanted to be with me. I was too naïve to understand that she did as well. She had been married twice before she met me. They were brief. The first was for two years. The second only lasted about a year. Her celebrity didn’t intimidate me. Her previous marriages did. At the time, I didn’t understand why she had rushed into marriages and why they had failed. I now realize that she was looking for something real and secure. I think her ex-husbands had wanted to live in the glow of fame and fortune. Aside from being 2020, hindsight always has a way of coming too late.

There came a time when she wanted more than just a causal relationship. I was trying to get my career back on track. At the time, that was the most important thing to me . Looking back, I may have missed what was really important. I remember discussing it with Paul. He knew us both and imparted His own brand of wisdom when I told him that our relationship had ended. Bud, he said, you’re an idiot. He was right.

We drifted apart and I eventually moved to Vegas, but I never really forgot her. I heard she tried marriage a third time, but it only lasted a few months. I like to think that it would have been different for us. I took a job with a PR firm and remember the moment I was researching a client when I came across a newspaper article that she had died, suddenly, Six months earlier. I picked up the phone and called Paul. I asked him why he had never told me. There was a pause before he said, I didn’t know how. I understood because I knew he understood.

I think what really separates us humans from the thousands of other species on this planet is not the roads we travel or the ways in which we travel them. I think what separates us is the roads we chose not to travel and, More importantly, the regret we feel for not taking those journeys.

The Day They Beamed Me Down To A Mining Planet

Even in my elementary school years, sitting in a wheelchair, I was always surrounded by friends. During my high school and college years, more was always better. If you weren’t on a date, going out meant going out with the guys. It was always an event that started with the words “We’re all going to….” When I spasmed a muscle in my lower back, then ignored it for about a week, the guys were all there waiting for me when I walked out of University Medical Center after three muscle relaxer injections straight into the misbehaving muscle. They had also been there when the paramedics picked me up off the dorm room floor. It had taken a while, but they finally realized that the tears coming out of my eyes we’re not from laughing at the baudy English Seafarer drinking songs that one of them had dug up at the college library.  It only hurt when I laughed, literally. About an hour or so after being wheeled into the hospital, I was back on my feet, and we went from U-M-C to P-A-R-T-Y!

But at a certain point in my life, I began to believe that it was better to have quality rather than quantity, when it came to friends. I guess the way you look at relationships changes with age. For me, it happened after moving to Los Angeles. I no longer lived in the friend incubator of the dorm. Although I made many friends, they all had different personalities, likes, and dislikes. Looking back, my college buddies were also distinctly different individuals. But there was no longer the common bond of college life. “Go Cats!” was not a universally understood greeting, and the Friday night ritual of everyone meeting up at Gentle Ben’s or The Bum Steer had become nothing more than a distant memory. A lifetime of group friendships were now scattered across the country.

I always tried to make friends wherever I went. That rule applied even when I attempted a misguided career as a life insurance salesperson. It wasn’t good insurance, but it was great money. My career ended when I walked into a home where they needed food, not our crummy pay forever insurance plan. I couldn’t do the Hard Sell, and still feel good about myself. Besides, I was never going to compete with the best salesperson in the agency. She was a beautiful blond who wore silk shirts open halfway down her chest and sold most of her policies to young men and older men who thought they were younger men. Go figure. But I did come away from the experience of having a strong friendship with another salesperson, Ken.

Realizing that I was never going to be insurance salesperson of the year, I decided to “bear down,” to use a University of Arizona Wildcat expression, and focus on my writing career. I made a lot of friends inside and outside of the Entertainment industry. Some were famous, most were not. It was also a nice balance of male and female. Yes, it is possible to be friends with a woman without secretly wanting to jump into bed every time you get together.

I knew a lot of people I considered friends, but I found that there was a big difference between friends and acquaintances. Acquaintances are just like friends in that you can go out and have fun with them. Friends, on the other hand, are people who you trust implicitly and care deeply about, especially when it’s not so much fun. Still, There are times when the line between the two can get blurred. In those moments, a leap of faith or a twist of fate are the only ways to tell the difference. It took a unique moment in my life for me to realize that one of my acquaintances was actually a true friend.

All of my surgeries were done at Orthopedic Hospital in Downtown Los Angeles. It was a high-tech, acute care facility. Before one of my surgeries, I was informed me that, at some point, I was going to be moved to a recuperation facility before removing the cast. This would be done because all I would be doing was waiting for bones to mend. The board of utilization, a group of doctors that determines the most efficient use of hospital beds, wouldn’t allow me to just lay around the Hospital in a holding pattern. I spent the week before surgery searching for an adequate recuperation facility.

 In those days, there was no such thing as a rehabilitation facility, at least in the current sense of the word. The best you could do was find a place to be warehoused for a few weeks. These places had minimal healthcare and almost non-existent amenities. They almost always looked better from the outside looking in, then from the inside looking out. After a few days, I found what was considered to be one of the best facilities in Los Angeles. I rationalized that it was a just a temporarily less comfortable Means to an end. After all, I was only going to be in a full leg cast. I’d done that before and I could do it again, or so I thought. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

The surgery went according to plan, that is, until I woke up. I found myself in a cast from my chest to my groin, with appropriate openings front and back. The cast extended down my right leg to my foot. I was, for all intents and purposes, a plaster coffee table. Still, I was in the Starship Enterprise of hospitals and they knew how to deal with people furniture. They were also skilled in attending to my need for food and the eventual outcome of that food. They took care of my Personal hygiene, and most important of all, pain management. Those were the days before I trained myself to deal with intense pain without turning to prescription or non-prescription drugs. They had drugs, lots and lots of drugs. In my case, it was mostly morphine and Demerol. In the days that followed, I was pain free and as comfortable as I could possibly be. That is, until the day came when they told me I was about to be beamed down to a mining planet.

I had conveniently forgotten about being warehoused. I Was on my back and couldn’t really move. I also had enough morphine in me to stop a charging rhinoceros. That amount of morphine can play tricks with your mind. In my case, it caused me to go through something I’d never gone through before nor have I gone through since. I had a full-blown, breathing into a brown paper bag, panic attack. Under normal circumstances, I’m the guy who analyzes, evaluates, and, most importantly, stays calm. I never panic. But these were not normal circumstances, and I wasn’t exactly in my right mind.

When the nurses realized that the paper bag wasn’t working and they couldn’t convince me to relax, it was suggested that I call someone who might be able to calm me down. At that moment, I couldn’t remember my own phone number. But for some reason, I remembered Sharon’s phone number. Sharon was an actor in a very popular detective TV series. Since we lived pretty close to each other, I would sometimes go over to her house to chat. Those were the days when chatting was something you did in person. I considered her an acquaintance. That was about to change.

The nurse dialed the number and handed the phone receiver over to me. It only took Sharon’s assistant, Stephanie, about ten seconds to realize that this wasn’t the same person she knew from my visits. Blurting out, “Sharon’s on her way to an important meeting. She’s just getting in the car. Let me see if I can stop her.”’ She dropped the phone. A couple of minutes later, Sharon Picked up the dropped receiver. The anxiety in my voice told her that she wasn’t going to make the meeting. I heard her tell Stephanie to reschedule. She spent the next hour or so talking me down.

As the morphine started wearing off and my panic attack subsided, Sharon felt comfortable enough to end our conversation. I no longer felt anxious about being moved. As it turned out, I had reason to be anxious, but that’s for a different podcast episode. In the end, it wasn’t a group of friends who got me through one of the worst periods of my surgery encompassed life. it was one true friend. Sometimes, that’s all you need.