An Incident at Madame Wu's - 1988

It was a twenty-sixth birthday bash for an agent I was friends with. His wife put together a shindig at Madame Wu’s Garden, the most famous Chinese restaurant in all of America. It was a Santa Monica hang out to the stars; a block-long Wilshire Boulevard palace of Mandarin-Cantonese fusion with a 1950s Googies meets traditional Chinese architecture that made it look like a Chinese-themed Best Western Inn.
I had come to the party alone, ostensibly because I hadn’t been invited with a guest, but in reality because the girl I thought I was dating had just a week earlier put a temporary hold on our relationship. Well the truth be told, she hadn’t actually said that in so many words… what she really said was, “Chuck, this is my boyfriend, Trevor.”
Unfortunately, I was not Trevor.
Now, it was one Saturday later. Rick Astley was singing Caucasian-Motown-fusion over the speakers, letting everyone know he was “Never Going To Give You Up,” while I nibbled Madame Wu’s Chinese Chicken Salad, Madame Wu’s Barbecued Spare Ribs, and Madame Wu’s Sweet And Sour Shrimp from a row of surface-of-the-Sun-hot chafing dishes. I plopped a sour shrimp into my mouth hoping to get my mind off the verbal bayonetting I had taken the previous weekend.
I looked around the restaurant to see if there was any possibility to find a replacement girlfriend, but while it was a nice crowd (maybe a hundred people); it consisted of couples. (Note to self – when invited to a party by someone who is an active member of a couple, expect his friends to be couples).
Still, it was a good party. The men were in suits while most of the women wore floral cotton print wrap dresses. With the chances of meeting a single female seeming low, I walked around the restaurant making conversation with acquaintances I saw here and there. I downed a glass of wine every time I lucked out to have another wine tray pass by within reach.
During all of this, I was noticing one couple standing in the back, near a wall. The boyfriend, or husband looked extremely familiar to me… and every time he spoke, he broke into a big smile that I knew that I knew from somewhere… but no matter how much a tried, I just couldn’t place him.
Bobby McFerrin sang over the speakers, "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
I didn’t want to say hello until I remembered who he was and how I knew him. Egos get bruised when you don’t recall where you know someone from. So I just kept sneaking peaks, thinking ,William Morris desk? No. CBS Research? No. KCBS-TV? No. CBS Radio Sales? No. I took a breath and plumbed deeper into my memory, USC? No. GW? No. Paramus High? Wait a minute… that seemed like it might be right – Eastbrook Junior High for sure.
I knew it. I knew that smile from my childhood. I just couldn’t think of his name, but it was right there on the tip of my tongue.
I walked over with purpose assuming he would break into that huge smile again and either give me the heartiest of hearty handshakes or a big Madame Wu’s hug. I wondered what he was doing in the Chinese restaurant to the stars, let alone at my agent friend's birthday party. He must have been in television and movies just like us. He must have been another young Turk.
He looked up as I approached.
“We know each other,” I said. He smiled with uncertainty.
“We do?”
“High school,” I said smugly.
He cocked his head slightly. That wasn’t ringing a bell for him.
“I don’t think so,” he responded.
“Sure… I’m Chuck Freericks.”
“Sorry… no…” he said, still smiling.
“Wait… wait… wait…” I said, desperate to prove to him that we went to high school together.
“Your name is on the tip of my tongue… It’s Peter right? You’re Peter Brady…”
And as his name tumbled from my lips, I realized the depth of my stupidity. He continued to smile; even nodding to let me off the hook with a tacit “It’s okay. It happens.”
I smiled back like the idiot that I was and walked away to leave him and his wife alone. I tried to find some wine while UB40 sang above me “Red, Red Wine.” The parade of wine trays though had come to an end.
When I looked back, Christopher Knight still stood there, in the same spot he had been standing when I first laid eyes on him. He still smiled at everyone who spoke to him. He still looked like the character he had played in The Brady Bunch, the character I watched every day in junior high and even sometimes in high school. The character I grew up thinking was my friend, even though he had never known I existed… until now.

Bay Time Stories

My story, Flying Home, is now available in the wonderful anthology of Aberdeen Bay stories

Bay Time Stories

The Story That Might Get Me Sued - 1988

I was working at Lightyear on the Vice President of Development’s desk when my grad school advisor invited me to come back to USC to see Steven Bochco speak to the Masters of Professional Writing students. I couldn’t have been more psyched. You see, I loved the cheese.
No, I’m not making a comment on Bochco’s writing. I literally mean the cheese. Back when I had been a grad student at USC I had discovered that every MPW department event included trays of cheese cubes that I could easily make a full dinner out of, with cubes of Swiss as my protein, cubes of Munster as my dairy, cubes of Monterey Jack as my vegetable, cubes of Pepper Jack as my starch, and cubes of Cheddar as my dessert. I ate so much cheese that the “Cheese, Glorious Cheese” commercial jingle become stuck in my head.
“Cheese, Glorious Cheese, Cheese mighty inviting, Cheese, Glorious Cheese, it’s so tantalizing…”
As psyched as I was about the cheese, I was also pretty stoked about the ego recharge that going back to the USC would give me. Even though I was just an administrative assistant at Lightyear answering phones and making Xerox copies – when I was among the SC grad students, I was the guy who was making it big in the Industry.
And… I was also very into seeing Bochco. He created Hill Street Blues, Bay City Blues (yes, I was the one who watched it), and L.A. Law. He had just signed an unprecedented deal to produce 10 new shows for ABC for $10 million (which was real money in those days). But what was just amazing about the deal was that Bochco would own all the shows he produced. Networks never, ever, ever gave away ownership. ABC had made this incredible concession in order to lure Bochco away from a competing offer to become the president of CBS. At that moment in time there was no man more powerful in the world of TV and I was going to share a room with him and about fifty or so grad students.
But if I’m going to be honest the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t going there to hear Bochco speak as much as I was going there to have Bochco hear me speak. My plan was to wait for Q&A and then hit him with a question so poignant and thought provoking and insightful that it would cause him to run out into the audience, grab me in a hug, and make me his apprentice on the spot.
I was a little late getting out of work as I had been busy looking through old trades to prepare my question for Bochco. I had come up with one on writing to the demographics of NBC versus writing to the demographics of ABC and how he planned to deal with the subtle but important differences.
Suddenly late, I headed east from Beverly Hills to downtown, which is essentially impossible during rush hour. When I finally got to campus I parked and ran to the seminar, which had started already. My intent was to sneak into the room unnoticed, but as I opened the door, Bochco stopped speaking and looked directly at me. Most of the audience turned and looked at me too. After a moment that seemed like an hour, Bochco went back to talking and audience all turned back to him noisily.
I took a deep breath to regroup and listened for another few moments at the door. Now this may sound odd, but I was taken aback by how much Bochco looked like… well, Steven Bochco. After all, up until that moment, I’d only seen him in the pages of Daily Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and TV Guide. Somehow I had thought that the real Steven Bochco would be different, sort of the way Clark Kent looked different that Superman. But no, this was him exactly, wire rim glasses, long oval face, white hair, dimples, and penetrating stare.
The few remaining empty seats that I could see were in the middle of the middle rows. Crap. I gave some tacit looks of excuse me and pardon me as folks who really needed to get up to let me pass swung their knees to the left or right instead. Finally, while Bochco spoke about his early experiences studying play writing, I managed to get into a very uncomfortable chair next to a heavy-set person to the right of me and a heavier-set person to the left of me.
The talk was fascinating and Bochco regaled us with tales from the front lines of television. He told us about the importance of a unique character, the value of a unique idea, and the how we needed to pull from ourselves to write. Then he joked that if we did that, we should contact him because, and I quote, “I’ve got to come up with 10 new shows for ABC.”
Then he spoke more about the deal and how it was really a burden. “Poor guy,” I thought. He said that coming up with shows that were unique and contained characters that you would want to stay with was brutal.
"Realistically, I can't come up with 10 shows on my own," he went on. "I would like to create some of them, but even then I don’t want to be stuck sitting in rooms writing scripts, writing stories, reworking stories, having story meetings any more. It’s time for me to make some time for myself."
Finally, he was done speaking and I got ready for Q&A, but instead of opening the room up for questions, he said. “I’m here to help you guys. Why don’t you tell me about the characters that you are working on?” Okay, my well researched question about writing to the demographics of NBC versus writing to the demographics of ABC and how he planned to deal with the subtle but important differences was toast. I had to come up with a character that I was working on instead.
As the overly eager in the audience raised their hands, I thought deeply about all Bochco had told us. I thought about reaching inside of myself and revealing something about me that would make for a great character… a great and unique character. But what?
I’d just finished my first full-length play, The Fourth Chair, a comedic look at stillbirth, suicide, and mortification. I could have used this opportunity to tell Bochco about the play, but I’d already used the same play to try and impress previous USC speakers Edward Albee, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Philip DeGuere, and the axe-throwing Ames Brother, Ed Ames, and I thought it was time to come up with something else. But what?
As one grad student after another described yet one character after another who was a struggling writer in grad school (I know we’re supposed to write about ourselves people, but seriously?), I looked into myself for a character that would thrill Steven Bochco.
Ah, I thought of one… but no… I didn’t want to say that out loud. There were girls in the room I might want to ask on a date one day. There were guys in the room who were jealous of me having made it big in Hollywood, answering phones and making Xerox copies at Lightyear Entertainment.
Then I thought about an incident just a couple days earlier, when I’d told some friends a previously secret story about peeing my pants in kindergarten. They’d laughed and told me I had to write it down. If I could admit that to them, I could admit this even bigger secret to a room of graduate students spending thousands of dollars that they didn't have to get their Master’s in writing. I raised my hand.
Bochco looked directly at me and nodded. I took a deep breath, but the words stuck in my throat. I was trying to admit something to him that only my college girlfriend knew (although others suspected), something that had plagued me for six years and for which I still had no solution, something that would make me a lesser human being in the eyes of everyone in that room, and yet hopefully make me a real writer in the eyes of Steven Bochco. But with Bochco looking at me and the words not coming out, a sense of dread and panic washed over me.
Suddenly my entire dating life began to flash before my eyes. And what I saw was not pretty. In fact, it was gross. I saw vomit. My secret was that I got so nervous on dates that I puked in the middle of them. Every single time that I went out with a girl I liked, I would have to run to the bushes and empty my digestive system orally. It was not only not pleasant, it was downright horrific. It was hard enough asking a girl out, getting my hair to look good, figuring out a nice place to go that wouldn’t bankrupt me, and finding enough interesting things to talk about while on the date. Adding to that the roll of Rolaids and little spray Binaca that I had to carry with me at all times and then the horror of feeling it happening anyway, excusing myself, and running, running, running to someplace hidden almost made dating seem to be not worth it.
I remembered the first time I got nauseous when I was near a girl I liked. I was riding an elevator with a friend of said girl, going up to see the object of my affection when I sensed that I was about to toss my cookies on the friend.
I jumped ahead a year and saw my first date with the girl whom I would see most of my senior year of college. I ran to the bushes near the Madison Bank on G Street and expelled my lunch and breakfast. And yet, inexplicably, we went on to have a wonderful and magical date, at the conclusion of which, she told me that she couldn’t kiss me because I smelled, but would have had I not gotten sick.
I saw myself a couple of year after that, taking a pretty Armenian girl from UCLA out on our first date and hiding in the men’s room for nearly twenty minutes, getting to know the toilet a bit too well. I saw myself one more year later with a young actress I had a massive crush on. I asked her to come with me to a friend’s party, but had to pull over on the drive to pick her up in order to lose about a week’s worth of nutrition at the corner of Fourth and Colorado in downtown Santa Monica.
This personal failing only abated when I dated a girl enough times to no longer be absolutely terrified of her (and finding a girl who was willing to go on a fourth date when I had puked on the first three often proved difficult). It got to the point that I wouldn’t eat for twelve hours before a date. But even then, I would get so nervous that I would dry-heave. The one silver-lining to all of this was that I did manage to keep my weight down during that time.
As the flashback continued, I remembered going on dates with girls I wasn’t interested in so that I could have dinner and see a movie like a normal person without getting sick. I saw myself still getting sick anyway when the date somehow started to turn out well.
My recollection of all this must have only lasted a nanosecond because when I became aware again, Bochco was still looking at me and waiting. Somehow my voice began to work and I said, “I’m writing about a character who gets nervous… so nervous in fact that when he’s with a girl he likes, he vomits. He’s tried to control it for year, but nothing has helped. He picks up a girl for a date and within a few minutes he has to excuse himself and throw up.”
Bochco sized me up as I spoke and it seemed like he was deciding how to deal with my special needs situation. “That was a good try, Charles… here’s your trophy…”
But when I finished speaking he said, “Now that’s a great character. That’s a character I would want to know more about. This is what I am telling all of you. You need to find the unique and interesting character like, what’s your name?”
“Charles.”
“…like Charles did.”
I was Yertle the Turtle. I couldn’t believe it. The heavy-set person on side of me and the heavier-set person on the other both turned and looked at me with jealous contempt. Students in the front rows looked back at me with envy. I soaked it all in. I was the one person in that room who was going to be a writer. And Steven Bochco knew it, and the other students knew it, and my advisor, standing against a side wall up front, knew it.
Bochco was polite and went on to discuss other people’s characters instead of immediately running out in the audience to hug me and hire me. In fact, as it turned out, he left without ever running out into the audience and hugging me and hiring me. Still, I was aglow with my brief moment of glory. I drove home that night basking in my brilliance… with a napkin full of cheese cubes sitting beside me on my passenger seat.
A year later, the first show out of Bochco’s deal premiered. It was called Doogie Howser, MD and was a really nice program about a teenage prodigy who was a practicing surgeon, but with teenage angst and teenage friends. I watched the show fairly religiously for the first year and remained blown away by Bochco’s talent.
The second show that came out of Bochco’s deal was called Cop Rock. It was a gritty cop show with musical numbers, sort of like NYPD Blue met Glee. It didn’t make it half a season before being cancelled. There were stories that Bochco was devastated, but I have zero first-hand information to back that up.
Meanwhile, I kept watching Doogie Howser, which as I said, was really nicely done. Imagine my surprise, when one night, Doogie’s best friend, Vinnie Delpino, went on a date and so nervous that he had to run from the car to vomit in a bush. This new “character trait” for Vinnie lasted at least a couple episodes. I’m not really sure how many though because I stopped watching the show at that point in time.
I felt funny… I was angry, but I also actually wondered “Who am I to question Steven Bochco?” I tried to alleviate what it seemed he had done, thinking, a couple years have passed. He probably didn’t remember our conversation… maybe it was like when George Harrison didn’t realize he was stealing from The Chiffons, turning “He’s So Fine” into “My Sweet Lord.” I’d even done the same sort of innocent plagiarism once myself, when I added a couple lines to the Fourth Chair only to later realize that I had lifted them straight out of a friend’s poem. So, I know from firsthand experience that these things do happen and aren’t always intentional. We forget where we heard something and in a moment of creative need, we think we probably came up with it ourselves.
Besides that, there may and probably are, many other facets to this story that I don’t know. I mean who knows if he was even the one who wrote those scenes for Vinnie? He had a staff of writers. He had told us up front he was going to be sitting around writing scripts anymore. It’s possible he didn’t even know about Vinnie puking on dates. As it turns out the same character trait had already been used in Roxanne. Years later it would show up in South Park too.
The thing that stung me the most however was that my moment of being singled-out by Steven Bochco, which I thought I would have as a special memory for the rest of my life, was suddenly sullied and ruined. “Yertle, the King of all Sala-ma-Sond, fell off his high throne and fell Plunk!”
I still don’t know if my character was stolen. Honesty, I really don’t. Why in the world would Steven Bochco take an idea from a schmoe like Charles Freericks? I only know that I told him it and then it appeared in his show. If my putting these memories down on paper make Mr. Bochco feel the need to sue me for libel, let me just add that I have nothing for him to win. I don’t even have a script to put a date vomiting character into. I just have my memories of how the real guy survived being a date vomiter and eventually beat it. And in the end, for me, that was a lot more important than doing a story on that character.

Eternal Flame - 1988

One of the coolest things about moving to Los Angeles and becoming one of the young up-and-comers in the industry was that if I saw someone in a film or on television and wanted to meet them, there was actually a chance, no matter how slim it may be, that I could. Suddenly, movies were like the halls of my high school or the quiet rooms at my college library – a place to scout chicks. Sure, the majority of the pretty girls I saw in those movies would have zero interest in meeting me, but the simple possibility of perhaps meeting them in person was an incredible thrill for me. Actually, if we’re going to be honest, the vast majority of the girls in the high school halls and college library quiet rooms also would have had zero interest in meeting me, but that’s another story.
In August of 1985, I went with some friends to see Weird Science at the University Village Theatre across from USC. Now, I can’t say I enjoyed the movie all that much. I never really bought into the premise that two nerds could make a woman with their computer. And in the rare moments when I feel I have time to sit down and judge and rank the John Hughes oeuvre, Weird Science never rose to the level of Trains, Planes, and Automobiles or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Home Alone. But then again, I don’t really spend all that much time judging and ranking John Hughes movies.
I’ve heard from others that Hughes wrote most of his scripts in less than a week’s time, some being started and finished in a single day. He was to Hollywood what Minute Rice is to starchy side dishes – and while there are times that a bowl of Minute Rice is absolutely lovely, much like a John Hughes movie, one doesn’t walk away from a bowl of Minute Rice thinking, “Now that belongs on the menu at Spago.”
But, let me step back. I don’t mean to be overly critical here. There was certainly a major redeeming characteristic to Weird Science that makes it, even to this day, a film I enjoy watching. That redeeming quality was the character of Hilly. She was a stuck-up popular girl from the boy’s high school who eventually saw the light and started dating one of the boys. From the first moment I saw her on screen I thought, “I have to meet her.”
Now, let’s take a quick pause here, because obsession with an actress is dangerous ground and not something that is cool in any way, shape, or form… but that’s not what happened to me. I’m really talking much more about something like a high-school crush or infatuation
When the credits rolled, I saw that Hilly had been played by Judie Aronson. I thought “Ohmygod, she’s Jewish too.”
I told the guys I was with, “I’m going to meet her. I can do that now.”
“What would you do if you met her?” my roommate asked.
“Get to know her… Take her to see a movie.”
I honestly don’t think my “movie-star-crush” on Judie had any plan to it. I was just kind of enamored with the possibility that I had a legitimate chance to meet her one day – exactly the same as going to a party at school hoping a cute girl from fifth period would be there so I could talk to her – nothing more, nothing less.
A year passed, and despite all the Hollywood parties I went to, and despite all the Young Artists United events I attended, I hadn’t met Judie. I hadn’t even met anyone who knew Judie.
As an aside, Young Artists United was a wonderful charity that anyone and everyone who was young in Hollywood belonged to in the late 80s. They held meetings in huge screening rooms, like on the then Lorimar lot in Culver City, which would be packed with every young sitcom actor and young agent I had ever heard of. Now, Young Artists United had some tacit rules of coolness, rules that would help me career wise later on. The most important of these tacit rules was that if you were at one of these meetings and happened to be sitting next to someone famous, or waiting at the water fountain behind someone famous, or standing at the urinal next to someone famous, you did not acknowledge who they were. If they spoke to you or you spoke to them, you did so as you would with any other stranger. They were just another young Hollywood person, like you and if you told them who they were, that would degrade you in their eyes, as well as they eyes of anyone else in earshot, instantly changing you from a young Hollywood artist to a nerd from Paramus, New Jersey.
Meanwhile, besides being careful not acknowledge artists, I was also watching lots and lots of MTV, which played a popular and long since forgotten media of the 80s known as the music video. These were short (song-length) videos of performers performing their songs, with a little bit of shtick and fantasy thrown in. People in my generation would actually sit down in front of the television and watch these videos, one after another, for hours on end, sort of the same way today’s generation checks their updates on Facebook. At the time, we could even say we were working, because every music video was directed by another potential David Fincher or Michael Bay, neither of whom were David Fincher or Michael Bay yet, but were simply waiting to be discovered by their music videos.
Now, much like the movies, the music videos on MTV (and on Friday Night Videos, which ran on NBC) were chock-full of women who I now figured I might have the chance to meet. In fact, I’d even met one of the MTV VJs, Martha Quinn, so the likelihood of meeting a performer seemed good. The one I wanted to meet most was the lead singer of The Bangles, Susanna Hoffs. After first seeing her in the poppy video of “Manic Monday,” I found myself falling absolutely and totally in love with her in the follow-up video, “Walk Like An Egyptian.” A little more than half-way through, she looked right then left in a way that was so flirtatious that it still gets talked about among men of my age. Her big brown eyes, her huge teased hair, and her Rickenbacker guitar all made her seem like some kind of prized doll that I wanted to protect. And she was Jewish. She soon became the second member of my “I have to meet her” list.
But if Hollywood is known for anything, it is known for crushing the dreams of young nerdy men from New Jersey like me, and another year and a half passed during which, no matter how many Industry bars I weaseled my way into, no matter how many B-list award shows I got tickets to (The People’s Choice Awards was a blast) and no matter how many major exec’s desks I temped on, I never crossed paths with Judie or Susanna. That is until I got a job as an assistant at Lightyear Entertainment in the brand new and nearly empty Maple Plaza (Beverly Hills 90210).
Lightyear was casting The Return of Swamp Thing, and I had been assigned the job of taking the headshots out of their envelopes for director Jim Wynorski and his two assistants (making me essentially the assistants’ assistant). As I tore through the piles and piles of headshots I started to amass a large collection of paper cuts spread painfully over the surface of both my hands. Still, each envelope I opened was a new surprise. The headshots came from a make-believe world where everyone was stunningly beautiful. It was fun at first, but as the piles and piles and piles of envelopes kept coming in, it started to remind me of picking nits out of rugs with tweezers back when I worked at my family’s rug store.
Just when the drudgery of it all began to overwhelm me, I opened an envelope that changed everything. This magic envelope contained Judie Aronson’s headshot. She was utterly perfect. I pondered what the right thing to do was. I wanted to sneak the 8x10 glossy of Judie out of the office and take it home, but I also wanted her to come in to read so I could meet her, and to do that, I had to give the photo to Jim Wynorski. I made a decision and handed the picture to Jim. I asked him to bring her in to read. He looked at it briefly, shook his head, and tossed it in his reject pile.
I was devastated. I waited for Jim and his two assistants to head out for lunch. Then I rescued Judie from the reject pile and put her headshot about three down in the bring-in-to-read pile. Jim and his two assistants came back about an hour later and started culling from the bring-in-to read pile, when Jim saw Judie’s headshot.
“Charles, have you been fucking with my piles?” He asked.
“Only that one picture,” I said. “She’s a great actress. She’s really pretty. It’ll be fifteen minutes of your life if you don’t like her, and I’m telling you, you’ll like her.”
“Do not fuck with my piles… this is not a game. We’re making a movie here.”
“I’m sorry… It won’t happen again. I just wanted you to bring Judie in.”
“Why?”
“She’s a great actress.”
“What have you seen here in?”
“Weird Science.”
“What else?”
“That’s pretty much it… but she has a lot of other credits… look.”
“Friday the 13th…”
“There you go…”
“Part IV.”
“She’s really good.”
“I got a lot to do here… give me one thing that makes her stand out from the rest of these actresses.”
“She’s Jewish,” was all I could come up with on short notice.
“She’s pretty good,” Jim’s assistant, John Terlesky said. “I think she could work.” John was an actor himself and Jim respected John’s opinion, unlike mine. He looked over to his other assistant, Peter, who nodded “yes” he liked her too.
“We’ll call her in for you Charles, but you owe us,” Jim stated flatly, dropping Judie’s 8x10 back on the bring-in-to-read” pile.
“And, you better get this chick’s phone number, or you’ve wasted our time and yours,” Peter added.
Get her phone number? I hadn’t thought that far ahead and if somehow I had found myself faced with asking Judie for it, I probably would have had some kind of severe panic attack that resulted in me hiding in a closet while popping Rolaids like sunflower seeds. No, I just, really, really, really wanted to meet her, if nothing else to fulfill my belief that I could. This was a mission and I was finally seeing a chance to succeed at it.
Still, even though I knew I couldn’t ask her for her number, maybe, Judie would come in and think I was cute and give me her number on her own. Then I could call her and ask her out for pasta and eggs at Hugo’s, work our way up to lunch at Ed Debeveck’s, dinner at Kate Mantilini's and maybe one day, I’d take her for Grand Marnier soufflé at the Mustache Café on Melrose.
I dressed in my best clothes the next day, seersucker pants and very thin knit sweater. I couldn’t eat a thing. In fact, I hadn’t really eaten since I’d first seen Judie’s picture. It was even hard to take in full breaths. Every time Jim or Peter came by my desk, they would smile and ask, “Is your girlfriend here yet?”
I realized with abject horror what would happen if one of them asked that when Judie walked in. I looked up at the clock. It was still forty-five minutes to her appointment, but most of the actresses seemed to show up a good half hour before they were supposed to.
Around Noon, the front door of our office swung open and yet another actress walked through. I didn’t know who she was, but to be honest, the door had been swinging open once every fifteen minutes all day, so I just watched her come in and nodded at her. She had her hair up, only a little bit of makeup on, and was more “grown up” (if that makes sense) than Judie would be. She was just another pretty actress.
She walked up to me and said, “I’m Judie Aronson. I’m here to read for Swamp Thing.”
I almost threw up. I realized I didn’t have the breath support to get full words out.
I know this will sound completely nuts, but the moment I heard her name and realized who she was, she went from being just another actress to becoming angelic… a beauty far beyond any other woman I had ever seen. I was so nervous I thought my sweat was going to dissolve my sweater.
“Sign in here, your sides are here,” I said weakly, while trying desperately to come up with something witty to add. Crap, I’d had all morning to work on this and I hadn’t come up with a single line to show her I was brilliant. About the only thing I knew for sure was I shouldn’t let on that I knew who she was. Whatever I did, I figured I should not mention falling in love with her during Weird Science.
“Okay if I wait here?” she asked, pointing at a chair just across from me.
“Sure,” I responded, wondering if she could tell that my insides were dissolving.
She sat and started to look at her sides and then looked up at me again. I hoped she was noticing how cute I was. I tried to put together any string of words in my head that might make sense and also sound endearing. I had nothing.
“Is the parking lot safe? I have a new car and I don’t want it to get scratched.”
“Yeah… I mean, yeah,” I said. Now that was a brilliant response.
“I can’t spend money now,” she went on, as if this was a logical next thought after car scratches. “I bought a house. I was in a sitcom with Brian Keith and everyone said it was going to be picked up but it was cancelled instead and now I’m 23 with a mortgage.”
“Uh huh,” I replied, truly sorry for her, but unable to even express my sympathy in an interesting or understandable way.
“I better look at my sides if I’m going to get this job.” She looked down and didn’t look up again until Peter called her in for her audition.
When her reading was done, she walked out the front door without looking my way.
Oingo Boingo sang “Weird Science” in my head.
Jim, Peter, and John came over to my desk.
“She wasn’t bad…” Jim said. “She’s still on the list.”
“Did you get her number?” Peter asked.
“Is she your girlfriend yet?” John wondered.
At that exact moment, Judie came storming back through the door and right up to me. This floored all four of us so much, that I think Jim, Peter, and John shared in my utter panic.
“Do you validate?” Judie asked, holding out her parking ticket. Truth is, we didn’t, and there was a sign on my desk that said as much… but I nodded, gave her two parking stickers, and handed her back the ticket. She grabbed it and said, “Bye.”
I was devastated and yet, oddly exhilarated at the same time. I’d actually done it. I’d met Judie. Unfortunately, she didn’t get the role in the end, as it was later determined that they had to have a known star and went for Heather Locklear.
A couple months later, Lightyear’s principle owner, Steve Romero, brought a friend into the office, and said to me, “Charles, say hello to Tammy Hoffs, a wonderful director with some great ideas.” I shook her hand, had some very small chat with her, and then headed out to grab lunch from a roach coach that parked in the back of the building.
When I got back, Tammy was gone. Steve dropped a VHS cassette on my desk.
“Watch this, it’s Tammy’s movie with her daughter Susanna. Do you know her daughter?”
“No… I don’t this so.”
“She’s in a girl band… has a song out now ‘Eternal Flame.’ She’s about your age. She actually brought this by for Tammy while you were on your break. I was going to introduce you.”
“That was Susanna Hoffs’ mother?” I somehow got out through my choked breaths.
“Yeah … Anyway, watch this and tell me what you think.”
I took the movie home and plopped it into the VCR. It was called The Allnighter. Susanna danced in skimpy underwear in front of a mirror in one scene. But that was not the biggest surprise of the movie. Susanna’s boyfriend in the film was… John Turlesky, Jim Wynorski’s assistant. This was it. This was my chance to meet Susanna. I would go into work the next day and suggest a meeting for Tammy and Susanna to discuss a new movie project. I couldn’t believe my luck.
I waited with anticipation to speak to Steve. He was on the phone most of the morning, and every time I walked by his office, he’d just look up at me and then back down in order to concentrate on his call. Finally, when he got up to go to the rest room, I stopped him.
“We have to do a movie with Tammy and Susanna,” I said.
“That would be great,” he responded, “But Susanna isn’t acting any more. I’m going to meet Tammy for dinner next week to discuss ideas though. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
I felt myself deflate and wondered if Steve could see me folding into myself.
A few months later, I was invited to a party in Malibu. It was at John Lovitz’ and Byron Allen’s house. I was pretty freakin’ psyched. This was like getting invited to a party thrown by the football players in high school, except instead of a pool, we‘d have the Pacific Ocean, and instead of a keg, we’d have Kamikaze shots and Long Island Ice Teas. I have to admit that first moment when Jon Lovitz walked by me and nodded hello the way he did to everyone else at his house, I suddenly felt oddly elevated – like I was important, very important, part of the biz.
The house, deck, and beach were packed with ingénues and young actors, including a couple members of the Brat Pack. There were also young agents, agents’ assistants, and some of the better connected kids from the mailrooms of Triad Artists, ICM, William Morris, and CAA. But in a way, it really was not that different from the high school parties and college parties I had gone to. The popular kids at this party just happened to be Judd Nelson and Rob Lowe. I had a couple Kamikazes to get myself lubricated enough to network and schmooze. After my third shot, I saw a familiar looking girl walking towards me. It was Judie Aronson coming down the deck that ran along the side of the house. But wait, it gets better. Judie Aronson was with a friend of mine, Eric, an agent I knew from poker. The two of them strolled right up to me and Eric put out his hand to shake. “
“Charles, good to see you. This is my neighbor, Judie.”
I shook his hand and then I shook her hand, pretending that I was meeting her for the first time. Truth of the matter is that she didn’t really pay enough attention to remember me anyway. She walked out onto the beach to say hello to some other ingénues and I turned to Eric and said, “Judie Aronson is your neighbor?”
“Yeah, sweet girl… wait a minute, you like her, don’t you?” Eric said. Then he smiled a kind of wicked smile and said, “Actually, you know, she’s not seeing anyone. You should go for it.” For the life of me, I couldn’t tell if Eric was being serious or pulling my leg. He had a wry sense of humor and I knew that there was a real chance that he was sending me into the lion’s den to get a good laugh out of my being slaughtered. I talked to him a bit more, trying to feel him out the best I could to see if he was being serious or setting me up.
“You don’t trust me?” he finally said with a big smile. I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. I went and had three more Kamikaze shots in order to gird myself.
I stared out at where Judie was standing, her bare feet in the sand, and her sandals in her hand.
“Go talk to her,” Eric said, sneaking up on me. But he was smiling way too big. My Spidey senses were telling me not to believe him. I just stood there, staring out at the ocean, feeling the warmth of the Kamikazes, and wondering what I would say to Judie if I did have the nerve to say something. I had failed the first time I met her to say one witty thing that would make me interesting. I hadn’t come up with a single line yet in this, my second meeting. Besides remaining cool by not acknowledging who she was, I was basically without any other weapons in my arsenal.
Truth of the matter is that I was pretty drunk – not quite dead drunk and believing in my infallibility thank God, but instead, at a point that I knew I was slurring and I knew that people could tell I wasn’t sober.
What to do? What to do? What to do? I looked back out again to admire Judie, but she was nowhere to be seen. I felt a tap on my shoulder. Judie and Eric were standing next to me. She still had her sandals in her hands.
“Judie doesn’t feel well. She needs a ride home, but I kind of want to hang out some more,” Eric said. “You don’t live near Encino, do you?”
“No…” I stuttered out. “Playa”
“Too bad,” he said and they started walking away.
“Boot, I’m happy to dwive dere,” I called to them. Eric turned back to me.
“Are you sure it’s okay,” Judie asked.
“Ab-so-woot-wy…”
“But you live all the way down in Playa-del-Rey?” Judie frowned. Why the Hell did I admit that. It was literally the polar opposite direction from where she needed to go.
“I don’t mind. I like driving…” I went on, finally getting a sentence out correctly, but somehow taking on the tone of a beggar.
“That’s okay, I’ll find someone who lives near me,” she said. No dummy, she wasn’t going to accept a ride from an idiot who was slurring and oozing Kamikazes from his pores.
She walked away again, looking for a ride among the strangers. To this day, I have never seen her again.
In the years that followed, I would ask Eric about Judie whenever I ran into him, but he was no longer encouraging (if he had ever actually been encouraging anyway, I still don’t know). I went to Eric’s wedding, hoping that Judie would be there, but when I asked Eric about her, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I invited her, but she couldn’t come.”
Frankly, that’s okay. In the years that followed, I met a girl, fell in love with her, married her, and settled down for ever after and as happily as possible. But somehow, I still felt unfulfilled in never having met Susanna. After all, I had really promised myself that I would, but with my career having turned to Movies-of-the-Week and with the Bangles having broken up, I didn’t really see how it was possible any more.
Eleven years after I last saw Judy, I was invited to a party in Hancock Park. It was a true “be seen or you are nobody” kind of affair with Tiki accessories everywhere in the backyard of a classic Hollywood mansion. The yard was full of a potpourri of television agents, television executives, television producers, television directors, television stars, and here and there, some actual feature talent too.
The other woman was wearing little, if any makeup, a baggy shirt, and jeans. And yet, as incognito as she was trying to be, the effect was the exact opposite of the first time I saw Judie Aronson I person. This time, not expecting anything I immediately knew who the woman talking to my wife was. I handed my wife a glass of wine and tried to nose my way into her conversation.
I parked my wife by a Tiki torch and went off to find us some wine. As I returned with two merlots, I saw my wife talking to a woman about her size. They were smiling and pointing at their stomachs.
“This is my husband, Charles, this is Sue,” my wife said.
I reached out and shook Susanna Hoffs hand. I was so stunned by meeting her that I couldn’t quite think of anything to say, so I fell back on my training from the Young Artists United meetings all those years ago, and I simply didn’t acknowledge that I knew who Susanna was. Why I thought this would work (Oh, my god, he’s so cool he’s not telling me my name and my biography) I honestly have no idea. I was frankly impressed that my wife seemed to be doing the same. Susanna and she talked about C-sections and carrying a baby when one is petite.
Suddenly, for the first time in over ten years, I felt the sweat forming, I felt the panic rising, and I sensed that I was melting. I’d played the silent, don’t know who you are and don’t care card long enough. If I was ever going to make an impression on Susanna and have her remember meeting me I had to think of something intelligent to say, something that would win her over instantly. Damn… nothing was coming to mind.
But I think what was killing me the most was here I was finally talking to the girl with the Rickenbacker and the huge eyes in the “Walk Like An Egyptian” video and the conversation was about wrestling with the big pack of diapers at the supermarket and how shoving it under the cart doesn’t really work if you’re buying to packs because you have two kids still wearing them.
I thought back to when I had met Judie all those years before, and how I wanted to impress her with my conversation, only to have the main thrust of our discourse be parking validations and whether or not Encino was on my way home. Now, here I was again, meeting a girl on my must meet list, and the conversation had turned to three-year-olds who throw tantrums when you don’t carry them and the sciatic pain that results when you give in to them.
I looked over to Susanna and I could see her in my mind singing “Manic Monday” on MTV, singing “Eternal Flame” on VH1, and singing “If She Knew What She Wants” on Friday Night Videos. This was it. This was my moment, the chance I had waited for my entire life, to become friends with Susanna Hoffs. I had to think of something to say… anything.
I could sense my wife growing tense, hoping for me that I would come up with something brilliant. Meanwhile, Susanna chatted about how expensive Baby Gap clothes were, and being tired of rewinding Teletubbies tapes.
When the discussion turned to having any more kids, I suddenly thought of a good line and blurted out, “I wanted a third child, but was told my only chance was a second wife.”
Susanna smiled politely and turned back to my wife.
A few moments later, the baby/toddler/sciatica conversation had run its course, and Susanna said, “It was great meeting you.” Then she was off.
“How did you end up talking to her?” I asked my wife.
“She walked up to me.”
“She walked up to you?”
“We’re the same size… she wanted to know if I had kids.”
“But, but… but…” I went on.
“Why are you acting so weird? Is there something wrong?” My wife asked.
“You know who that was, right?”
“Sue,” my wife answered…
“Sue who?”
“I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
“That was Susanna Hoffs…
“Who’s that?”
“The Bangles… ‘Walk Like an Egyptian…’” I sputtered out.
“Really?” my wife asked, looking over to where Susanna was talking with her friends and looking back at us.
“Are you sure…” my wife went on, “I thought she was just some chick named Sue.”
I looked over again, but Susanna and her friends had turned the other way. From where I stood, she was just some chick named Sue and frankly, I was just some dude who had actually fulfilled a decades long mission, but with nothing to show for it.
She never looked our way again.
I am glad I met Judie and Susanna. I’m glad I fulfilled my prophesy. I just don’t quite understand to what purpose I had to meet them if I wasn’t going to acknowledge who they were. Sure, famous people like their anonymity, but artists want to know that they left an impression and that they touched someone emotionally – and they can’t know that if you don’t tell them.
I really don’t know why I needed to meet them. They certainly didn’t need to meet me, and I am guessing that neither of them have any memory that they ever did.

Stories are taken down now sixty days after posting. You can still read FLYING on line, however... and then go ahead and get the great Aberdeen Bay sampler Kindle book, Bay Time Stories... right here

Bay Time Stories

Sorry - taking down stories after sixty days now - so that I may include them in the next book.

Sorry - this and all of the other thirty or so older stories are no longer available on line.

They will be part of a new book.

Stories are now posted for sixty days.

Please contact me if you want to see a story from the past again.