“Squeezed and Pulled and Hurt My Neck” - Lunch at Pompilios
October 19th, 2008
One of my very favorite films is the 1988 Academy Award winner for Best Picture Rainman starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. My friend Garry from work had clued me in that a restaurant that appeared in the film was located in the greater Cincinnati area. So when I drew up the plans for my day-long Cincinnati tour a full ten months or so before actually embarking on it, I made sure that a stop to this restaurant - Pompilios - was included in the itinerary. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t think that anybody would argue that despite Barry Bostick’s one-hundred or so roles in films and television, his most notorious appearance came early in his career when he portrayed Brad Majors - a hero - in the 1975 ultra-cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His second most notable role was as Mayor Weston in the popular Michael J. Fox sitcom Spin City. Of course, I am not the average fan - so I naturally have chosen a completely obsure role to call my very favorite. 
When I first began to plan my October 2008 trip to California nearly a year before it took place, there were four goals that I had in mind which I hoped to accomplish while there - and I had no idea if any of the four would even be possible to arrange. Soon things began to really take shape and not long before I left, I had made arrangements to make three of them actually happen - and these all will be covered in this series of postings. I will go ahead and tell you the fourth since it didn’t happen: an old high school friend is employed by NBC in the publicity department and I had hoped to set up a private tour of the facility and sets. She didn’t seem to think that there was anything of interest that she could show me (or perhaps she just didn’t want to), so that prospect was quickly nixed. Turns out her job took her to New York before I even arrived in California, so it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. 
The Sons of the Desert convention was now over on the morning of Sunday, July 13, 2008 - but there were even bigger fish to fry in Europe. We had spent a wonderful week in Holland, preceded by a day in Germany, and stops in Belgium and Luxembourg - all of which were fabulous (with the sole sore spot being that I never found a magnet in Belgium). We had arranged for a cab to pick us up at 11am that Sunday morning from the Hotel Avifauna. Originally we were going to leave from the train station in Alphen ann den Rijn, but due to some maintenance going on, the station was closed that morning. 
I love the TV series That 70’s Show, and really enjoy the performance of Kurtwood Smith as the eternally-angry and insulting father Red Foreman - but it was one year prior to the show’s debut that I sent an autograph request to Kurtwood Smith on October 14, 1997. My primary reason for writing him was because of his appearance of the quirky psycho killer Barry Jenkins in my all-time favorite episode of my all-time favorite drama Picket Fences - perhaps the most appropriately cast role in the history of television. That guy really scared me.