Return to Hollywood

So… I get to go back to Testify next month to tell another story (it’ll be my 4^th time).

This one I’m particularly excited about.  As part of their Brush with Fame theme, I’m going to dredge up a story about the time I spent a week-and-a-half working for the son of a Hollywood legend in his home in the Hollywood Hills.

I gotta look back at the story I wrote back when I was 22 (!) (oh… found it!).  I was just thinking about it today, how I got this job super quickly through my college counselor and how my roommate and his girlfriend just dropped me off at this guy’s house way deep in the hills and told me to give them a call when and if I needed a ride home.  This was before anyone had cell phones and I had no way to get around.  I can’t imagine doing something like that these days.

Anyway, nine days later I definitely needed a ride home.  In between, I’d met Jerry Seinfeld when he upstaged my boss at a comedy club, I spent a night at a seedy hotel I’m pretty sure was run by a crime syndicate (so my boss could have a romantic night at home with his girlfriend) and I got my first (and last!) session with an Austrian-born body-builder/personal trainer (“Push it, push it, push it!!”).

When I finally quit (I say finally because the whole ordeal felt like an eternity), my boss threatened to sue me and actually told me (without irony) that “You’ll never work in this town again.”

The story I wrote about my experiences ended up being the first real close call I ever had with broad success.  It led to a professional relationship with a guy who was VP of a small film production company at the time, and who now heads one of the more acclaimed major cable network channels.

Oy-yoy-yoy, the bizarre course of life, amirght?

Yeah, I’m really looking forward to digging into this one.  See you on March 31^st!