A Lion Greets A New Day

 

 

 

A lion breaks into song... 

Click on play triangle to view video.

This video was created with the software "Crazy Talk," which enables you to take anyone's picture and give it the ability to move, talk, blink eyes, etc. Even a lion....

The Actor Who Couldn't Act

 Every so often, I write a short story. Here's the latest one:

The Actor Who Couldn't Act

Doing business in Los Angeles is always a challenge, although a certain sparkle does come in your eye when your boss tells you he needs you to fly to LA to get some contracts signed. There are people in the world who still want to do business with you face to face, who don't trust the internet, and who, basically, don't mind making you spend a thousand dollars for plane tickets, a rental car and maybe a lunch or two just to spend ten minutes with them signing documents.

But there I was, exiting the West Coast office of  Fortner Provisions Unlimited, with next year's contracts signed, notarized and secure in the folder tucked under my arm.

I used to carry a briefcase, but they are obsolete now. Who needs a briefcase when there are only a few pages to carry, and besides, when you lug along a briefcase, you tend to put things in it you really don't need. And if it is stolen, as well it might be, you've lost the papers, the things you didn't really need to bring, and a relatively expensive box with a handle.

So I was hurrying down the sidewalk, heading for where I parked my rental car, and I saw a guy sitting in a doorway with a cardboard sign propped up next to him. The sign said, "Can't Act."

He looked a little down and out, not completely down and out, not a bum, but someone who was definitely having a bad day.

If you came to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming an actor, not being able to act is somewhat a downer. Los Angeles is, after all, the place where people go when they want to become actors and make it big in the movies. Hundreds of people, thousands of people go there, finding an overwhelming infrastructure of agents, acting schools, scriptwriters, publicity shot photographers, and all the rest of the support system for aspiring actors.

I stopped for a moment to read the sign, look at him and consider giving him a buck or two to buy a meal. "Can't act, huh?" I said, motioning towards the sign. "At least you admit it." I tried to sound humorous.

He raised his head and smiled weakly. "Didn't take me long to figure it out. One or two movies, and it becomes pretty obvious," he said.

"So you did get a couple of movies under your belt?"

He nodded. "Yes. Then I decided that acting required skills that I didn't have."

"Well, I hear they have acting schools out here," I responded.

He laughed a small laugh.

"As it turns out, I'm not bad at acting, I'm not good at acting,  I just cannot act."

I knew I was going to regret this, but I saw a diner next door and nodded at the stranger on the doorstep. "Come on, I'll buy you lunch, you can tell me what happened."

He tilted his head slightly. "I'm not a bum asking for a handout. I just put the sign out to let people know I can't act. Don't ask me to act, don't offer me money to act, I'm just not capable of doing it."

"Come on, I'm flying out of here in four hours, and instead of waiting at the airport, I'd be interested in hearing how you came to that conclusion."

He shrugged and stood up. He walked towards the diner door, not with the hunched-over resignation of a man with broken dreams, but with a certain air of authority. He  joined me at the door of the diner, and we went inside.

We took a seat near the window and the waitress brought us the lunch menu, single sheets laminated in plastic. He looked at the menu and laughed. "What's so funny?" I asked.

"Oh, I was once offered a script to read in which a super spy took a laminated plastic restaurant menu and cut a man's throat wide open." He chuckled and started reading the special for the day.

I sat in stunned silence for a couple of seconds and really began regretting inviting him to lunch.

He noticed my concern. "No really, I'm not trying to scare you. I really did read a script where this super agent fought off a whole bunch of bad guys armed with a laminated menu. It was so ridiculous I just tossed it aside."

I did manage a nervous laugh at that point, and went back to reading the menu. He ordered a chicken fried steak, and I chose the hamburger.

"So, what made you get into acting?" I asked, launching the conversation.

He pondered for a second, looking in the air. "Well, I guess almost everybody wonders at one time or another if they would be good at acting," he began. "You see a movie and you think, 'I could do that.' You know there are stuntmen for the action scenes and body doubles for the nude scenes, so you think, yeah, I did a play in high school, I could go to Hollywood and do movies, become a big star..."

I nodded. "Yes, that's the dream. Even I thought about it once..."

"When you were eighteen, right?"

"Yes, that's about when it hits you. Why work for a living when I can be rich and famous just being in the movies," I said.

He became a little more at ease and leaned back. "Yes, that's the dream. And I thought sure, why not try? So I came out here, did all the grovelling I could stand, got a few parts, even got second billing in some major productions..."

"So you did get some real acting gigs?" I asked.

He said," Sure. I was on screen with some pretty big names. I didn't have a title panel all to myself, like the big stars do, but my name was up there on the screen for a couple of seconds, so I was known, for a while."

"So what happened," I asked.

"You read the sign," he answered. "I can't act."

I must have looked puzzled.

"Those first two movies I was playing characters who were exactly like me, I was playing myself," he explained. "It takes absolutely no acting skills to play yourself."
I had to agree with that.

"Now there are some pretty big names in Hollywood, successful beyond belief, who got to where they are by playing themselves. They could sell tickets just being themselves, so nobody offered them a script where it required any real acting skills. The only movie characters they were tapped for were movies that fit them like a glove. And that's okay. Money was made, and bills were paid."

"But along came my third movie and there it was, a character that didn't really fit me, a starring role that I couldn't pull off because it required me to act. And, like I said, I can't act."

"But anyone can act, all of us act from time to time, surely you could take some acting lessons or something," I said.

He cringed a little. "Acting lessons work when you are bad at acting and want to become better. Me, I can't act, and you can't make better what doesn't exist in the first place."

"But you were good in the first two movies," I replied.

"Playing myself..." he reminded me.

"And acting isn't always what people think it is," he went on. "You not only have to pretend to be someone else, reciting lines from a script that someone else wrote, but you have to pretend that they are your own words, coming out of your own mind."

I thought about that for a moment.

"It's not easy," he said. "Here you have read a script, all hundred pages of it, everything you do and say are all laid out from beginning to end. Your emotions are all spelled out, how you are supposed to say the words, what feelings you are to convey. You not only have to memorize the words, but you have to say them like they just popped into your head. Not only say them like you mean them, but also say them like they are coming out of your mouth for the first time. Like a real person, a real person who doesn't think about what he's saying, he just blurts it out."

"Then there's the director and his take. How HE wants you to say the words. And if you don't get them right the first time, the director keeps shooting one take after another, each time a slightly different version of saying the same line. "

"A friend of mine once had to do a shot, a shot that was three seconds long, where he said 'well howdy.' You would think: how many different kinds of ways are there to say 'well howdy'? Well, it turns out there were 46 takes on that one shot, 46 different ways of saying 'well howdy."

I started to laugh, but he continued.

"The script didn't offer any hints whatsoever. It just said "Tex looks up and says 'well howdy.' So the director had free rein to decide what kind of 'well howdy' he wanted. They shot enough film to jam a projector, but they did 46 kinds of 'well howdy' and even then the director wasn't fully satisfied."

"Three seconds of screen time, but it took 46 takes, an hour and a half of saying 'well howdy' over and over again. Enough to make you puke. "

I stifled a laugh, because I could see this was a serious concern on his part. "But I'm sure the one 'well howdy' that got into the movie was the best 'well howdy' that's ever been seen," I said.

He shook his head no. "Naw, it didn't make it into the movie. My friend's entire part got cut. Nature of the beast."

He then recalled one script where he was supposed to look at a computer screen with 'alarmed indecisiveness.' "How in the hell does somebody look at something with 'alarmed indecisiveness?" he asked.

The waitress brought us our meal, and we set about eating in silence for a moment.
"Anyway, that's the real work in making a movie," he began again. "Not just memorizing and saying the lines, not just showing the right emotions, but saying the lines and portraying the emotions over and over again, for multiple takes, in minute variations each time according to the whims of the director. He's the boss, and when he wants a line said a certain way, then everything stops and the same shot gets done over and over and over until the actor gets it just the right way, according to the director's vision."

"The director's vision," he repeated in disgust. "Don't get me started on that. Everybody working on a film has a vision of what it should be, but his is the only one that counts. His and the budget office that tells him when he's going over budget."

The other big part of making movies is waiting, he said. "Nothing like saying a ten second line, then waiting an hour while the cameras are re-positioned and the lights are re-aimed. I've had some pretty good poker games while waiting for the director and the crew to get ready for the next shot."

I sighed. "Well what about you and your revelation about acting? When did that hit you?"

"Well, on that third film, the script was asking me to play somebody totally unlike myself. In other words, I was going to have to act, actually act. That was not pretty."

I took a bite of my hamburger and paused. "How long did you last? A day, two days?"

He looked up as if trying to remember. "Well, you have to realize that time is money in the movie-making business. If something isn't working, the director knows it pretty quick. He isn't going to do 46 takes of something that stinks to high heaven the first couple of times he calls Action! So it quickly became apparent that I was not going to be able to pull it off, my character."

"What kind of character was it?" I asked.

"Some slimeball, a jerk. Somebody you would think, well, I can do that. I can pretend to be a slimeball jerk. I know what a slimy grimy ripoff artist looks like and acts like. I can do that."

"And?" I said.

"I couldn't do it, I couldn't pull it off. No matter how much the director coached me, no matter how much he set the scene, made up some background for the character, it only took a few minutes for him (and me) to realize I wasn't carrying through. I am not a slimeball jerk ripoff artist, so I couldn't pretend to be one. "

I sat back and paused. "Because you can't act."

"You got it,"he laughed, taking another bite of his chicken fried steak.

"Well, if you can't act, then you really can't say you're an actor," I pondered.

"Oh, I'm an actor. I've got the movies to prove it, the screen actors guild card to prove it, and my mother tells everyone her son is an actor. There's just this one little problem..."

"Well if your mother thinks you're an actor then it must be so," I said.

He nodded. "Being an actor is not like anything else in the world. If you call yourself a plumber, then you damn well should be able to install and fix plumbing. If you're a lawyer, you're pretty much on the line for knowing the law and getting your client off the hook."

But acting is in a class by itself, he said. "Parents don't want their children to lie, don't want them to grow up play pretending to be someone else or mouth off words that aren't their own. But they are thrilled when those same children decide to become actors."

"What I'm getting at," he stated, "is that if you try hard enough you might be able to become something you're not good at. If I was good at flying a plane, I would have to be a pilot because you don't become good at flying a plane without doing some piloting along the way."

I was getting confused. "So what's your point?"

He carefully framed his words. "Being something and being good at something are two different things. Becoming an artist means you are capable of creating art, but having the skills for creating art doesn't make you an artist."

I disagreed. "An artist is an artist," I said. "Whether or not he produces art is besides the question."

"Or is it," he questioned. "Are you an artist if you don't produce art? Are you a pilot if you don't fly a plane? Are you an actor if you can't act?"

I frowned. I didn't like where this was going, especially since I didn't know where this was going. "Well, speaking of pilots, I have a plane to catch," I interjected, wrapping up the meal and the conversation. "I can let you have some money if you're tapped out," I said, standing up.

"Thanks, but I have some money saved up from the first two jobs I did, plus some other bit parts. I'm doing okay."

"But what about the sign?" I asked.

"You'd be surprised how many people read the sign and offer to buy me lunch because of it."

I laughed.  "Well, you sure got me. So this is some kind of acting exercise?"

"More like an investigation," he answered. "Actors are supposed to study people, but in trying to do so, I have discovered an amazing thing," he said.

"What is that?" I asked.

"In general, people are hard to 'study,' because every one is an individual. You can study an individual," he explained," but that's doesn't do an actor much good as far as learning what people are like and how they think and what they would do in specific situations. Individuals are a wild card. No telling what a real individual will do.

"Psychologists love to categorize people, stick labels on people, generalize and compartmentalize people, but everybody is different," he said, "and when a script calls upon you to be a particular type of person, a certain kind of character, you not only have to 'act' like this imaginary character, you have to 'not act' like anyone else. Acting not only requires you to pretend to be someone else, but at the same time you have to pretend to not be yourself," he said.

I began to think that this was getting a little too technical for me to comprehend, but he was obviously interested in his craft. Too bad he couldn't act.

In an effort to wind down the discussion, I said, "Well, you are lucky that most movies nowadays have enough special effects and stunt work to give the actors a break."

"It just makes it harder," he replied. "Fortunately I'm not the action hero type."

I laughed. "Few people are," I commented. "Well thanks for the movie business insights. I've learned a lot, mainly how I don't want to become an actor."

He stood and we shook hands. "Acting is grueling work, emotionally-draining, maybe financially-rewarding, and possibly the best damn job in the world," he smiled. "People are still giving my agent scripts for me to read. Hopefully there will be another one where I can just play myself. Otherwise I may have to find a way to make a living doing something useful."

My Tourism Promotion Gig

 In 1982, I joined the staff at Deep South Communications in Baton Rouge, which included a position with the Louisiana Travel Promotion Association (LTPA). I worked there about two years, editing several magazines and newsletters. 

 

 

I was named Director of Public Relations and Membership Services for the LTPA, which meant taking a lot of pictures and attending a lot of meetings, receptions, and special events around the state.

Some of the publications I edited while at Deep South Communications were the LTPA Newsletter (above), the Louisiana Motor Transport Association monthly magazine, and the This Week in Baton Rouge weekly tourist magazine. The last one required me to visit a Baton Rouge area restaurant every week and write up a "critique" of the food and surroundings. Since my main diet at that time consisted of hamburgers and french fries, that was a real challenge when visiting some of the capital city's more famous culinary destinations. 

 

 

 

Click on the images to make them larger. 

So during the day I worked at a printing company writing up copy for all these magazines, went out and took pictures to put in all these magazines, and often at night I attended all kinds of tourist promotion gatherings, mostly lobbying efforts for state legislators. On many weekends I went to various places throughout the state and set up trade show booths for conventions and what not. 

 

I stood in the booths all day Saturday and Sunday and handed out brochures. At the end of the trade show, I knocked down the booth, put it all back into its carrying bags, and headed home to start the week again on Monday morning. Home at that time was in a one room studio apartment in Baton Rouge.

Being with the La. Travel Promotion Association was a great learning experience and a lot of fun, since I got to go statewide to take pictures of tourist groups, attend Motor Coach Tour Bus association meetings, and do interviews with owners of tourist attractions, like the Mt. Hope Plantation House on Highland Road. I made slide presentations to show at meetings. Sometimes I was called upon to be "in the picture" when out on photoshoots at various locations. 

 

 

I met a lot of interesting people, took a lot of interesting photographs (trucks!), and got to go to a lot of parties. However working all the time,  I started burning out. I eventually got a job editing a newspaper near Shreveport and moved to north Louisiana.

 It turned out that this was not the first time I had done a slide show for the La. Travel Promotion Association. Eight years earlier I had put together a slide  presentation showcasing the tourist attractions of west St. Tammany Parish. That show had been given in 1974 in Slidell for a statewide LTPA meeting. I was representing the St. Tammany Fair Association for that event, and the slide show was a general overview of scenic and family fun destinations throughout the western half of the parish. 

Before the St. Tammany Parish Tourist and Convention Commission was established by the police jury, the St. Tammany Fair Association was doing promotional work on a regular basis spotlighting tourism opportunities. One of those outreaches was the "Discover St. Tammany Tour" for regional media representatives.

See also: 

Construction News Reporting 

Phone Progress

 Here is a chronological listing of improvements in telephones over the years. 

1. The first telephone was a wooden box on the wall with a microphone coming out of the middle of the box and a speaker attached to a wire that you had to hold up to your ear. To make a call you had to stand and speak directly into the microphone attached to the box.

 

 On some of these there was a crank on the other side you had to turn to "ring the operator" so she would answer and find out who you wanted to call. There were no dials or telephone numbers. The operator just knew what switchboard plug went to which phone. 

 2. The second telephone was a single pedestal with a heavy weighted base and the dial on the side of the base. The pedestal went up to a microphone, and attached to the base was a wired earpiece that you had to hold up to your ear to make a phone call. To use this phone you either held the phone up to your mouth so you could speak into the microphone, or you left the phone on a desk and you bent over to speak into the microphone. Either way, you had to hold the earpiece up to your ear. 

 

 

 

About this time, special architectural consideration were being built into homes to accommodate the new telephone. At first there were little alcoves for the device, small indentations actually built into the wall where the phone was placed. You could sit on a chair and speak into the phone.

Then came the telephone chair, a piece of furniture that featured a chair on one end and a small table on the other end for placement of the phone. Underneath the phone was a shelf just for the telephone directory. 

These were the days when there was no "bring the phone to me." If you wanted to receive a call, you had to go where the phone was.

3. The third telephone was a wider base with a dial on front, with a wired phone receiver, with both the microphone and headpiece in one handset, thus enabling you to make phone calls just by holding the handset up to your face, speaking into the microphone on one end and listening through the earpiece on the other end. This was a major innovation in telecommunications. The receiver may have been connected to the phone base by a wire or a coiled cord. The length of the coiled cord was kept short, however, because it had the tendency to pull the phone off the desk if you walked around while on a call.

4. The wall phone was primarily suitable for kitchens, since it required no counter space. The kitchen phone introduced the long coiled cord, which enabled the person making the call to cradle the handset receiver on their shoulder and still carry on conversations while walking around the kitchen. The cords got longer and longer, and as time went on started getting tangled up and knocking things off of tables. Many hours were spent trying to untangle the long coiled cords.

5. The princess phone, with its lighted dial, was suitable for young princesses. It was so light that when you tried to dial a number, the phone jumped around with each turn of the dial.

6. Cordless phones. Battery powered handsets that carried conversations from the base station to the portable  receiver/transmitter. This ended the fight with long coiled cords. There was also a "Find Handset" button the base in case you forgot where you put the phone. That button would make the handset buzz.

 7. Car phones: only the rich and powerful had the first car phones. Early car phones were like two-way radios and you had to connect calls through an operator. Eventually direct dial car phones were available.

8. Answering machines: machines that answered your phone for you, beeped and tape recorded a message. This effectively ended phone answering services. 

 

9. Portable phones: high powered 5 watt battery operated phones that carried conversations from where you were to faraway phone towers, if you were lucky. Some people called them "bag" phones.

10. Cell phones: low powered battery operated phones that carried conversations from where you were to at least three nearby cell towers so the conversation could be "handed off" from one tower to the next as you traveled along.

11. Voice Mail comes along, effectively ending the need for answering machines.

12. Bluetooth earpieces: low-powered transmitter/receivers that you insert into your ear that carry conversations from your cellphone to and from your ear, with the microphone picking up your return voice replies anyway it can. 

13: VoIP phones: desk phones that connect to WiFi to carry phone conversations over the internet using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Festival Fireworks

 The Olde Town Festival premiered in Covington in 1984. It was a week-long series of events, concerts, contests, and  demonstrations of old-fashioned arts and skills. The festival organizers needed a kick-off ceremony to start the week, so I pitched in by building a "time machine," setting the clock hands back 80 years, then having some kind of mishap that prevented the town from coming back to the present time for an entire week. 

Mayor Ernest Cooper played along with the gag, and I proceeded to create a makeshift time machine out of an old television cabinet, line the inside with hundreds of matches head to head, and when the appointed moment came, I lit the first match and the whole time machine/television cabinet disappeared into a cloud of flame and smoke. It worked perfectly. It looked just like the machine had malfunctioned bigtime.

I had a fire extinguisher on hand, of course, and out of an abundance of caution and/or dramatic effect, I hit the time machine with a burst of fire extinguisher. That was the first time I had actually used a fire extinguisher, however, and it spewed out a cloud of powder that not only covered and extinguished any flames, it also covered the mayor, myself, and anyone standing within several feet with a dusting of powder. I supposed it would have been a good idea to test that part of it ahead of time. 

Here are some pictures...

 

 

From left, Rick Webb of WARB Radio, Pat Clanton, Ron Barthet and Mayor Ernest Cooper 

 

 

I get ready to turn on the time machine after setting the dial for 1904.

 

 

The time machine starts up and takes us all back 80 years.

 

 

The time machine malfunctions, and we are all stuck in the past. George Boudreaux at left. 

 

 

But don't worry, the dancers are waiting in the wings to come out and save the day. 

Signs By Bart

 My dad Lamar Barthet was a sign painter. He was part-time at first, doing signs after his work hours at his real job. He real job was, at first, a special delivery mailman for the post office. Then he learned drafting and got a certificate from the International Correspondence School. With that he  got a job as a draftsman at American Cyanamid in Ama, Louisiana. 

While there he took another correspondence course by mail, this time in sign painting, to brush up on his skills. Then his part-time job of painting signs became his full time occupation. 

Painting an antiques shop sign

He painted a lot of signs in New Orleans. There were sidewalk signs, overhanging awning signs, and gold-leaf lettering on office doors. There were many truck door signs, a few billboards, and even small placards for indoor settings such as restaurants. He and some friends put up a huge billboard on Gentilly Road, and that turned out to be a major project. 

His sign work became his day job, and he started a part-time night job of selling hot tamales, just to make some extra money. When he started making more money selling hot tamales than painting signs, it taught him (and me) an interesting lesson. People are willing to pay money for something good to eat, but they are not willing to pay money for the artistic design skills and sign painting artistic skills that go into laying out and painting a sign. All he could get for painting a sign was just enough money to pay for the materials (wood, paint, turpentine) and maybe a little more. He was never paid for his artistic talent and design work.

Not Charged by the Hour

When he moved to Talisheek and opened a sign shop in Slidell, he was always busy painting signs, but there again, he could barely make enough to pay for the materials. Often he didn't even charge for his time. If it took him 40 hours to paint a big sign, he charged the same amount for a sign it only took him three hours to paint. To the customer, a sign was judged by how it looks, not its size, not by how long it took to paint, nor by its intricate design.

 

 

The Slidell Sign Shop  on Short Cut Road

The sign shop when it was behind a business on Military Road

That was a lesson for me as well. As I came to know more artists over the years, I heard the same complaint. The design skills, the countless false starts, the hand-in-brush talents (knowing what not to paint as well as what to paint) and the hardware and materials for the artwork structure, whether it be plywood, canvas, or poster board... all of that didn't count for much. All the customer saw was the finished product and its value was judged by that.

 

 

Dad chalking in the lettering on a truck fender
Painting a sign on a curved surface was always a challenge

 So it is the life of an artist, and a sign painter, and a musician, poet, or writer. The countless hours put into the work of art aren't visible in the finished product, and that's what makes art different than, say, building a dog house. 

Anyway, my dad's sign shop in Slidell, Victory Signs, put out some pretty good product: door signs, truck lettering, big billboards, small directional signs and what-not. Good thing dad had a background in drafting, because when the City of Slidell decided to pass a sign ordinance that required engineering calculations for wind load and support structural information, he was able to provide that without hiring someone else to do it. 

 

 

Layout and design sketch

 

 

Dad and one of his larger signboards

Nowadays, most signs are produced by computers cutting out pieces of vinyl that are then peeled off and stuck on the prepared surface. Someone tried to sell dad a computerized sign-making set up in the latter days of his sign-painting career, but he wasn't ready for that and couldn't afford the computer in the first place. 

Computers speed up the process considerably, especially the graphic design and lettering part, but if the surface isn't prepared right, the letters tend to curl up after time. Then there's the continuing problem of sunlight bleaching out the color red.

Dad had always wanted me to join in the sign business, and I tried once or twice to paint a sign, but my hand lettering was not good, and I never met a brush that wanted to do what I wanted it to do. I ran a few silk screen signs, and while that was okay and relatively easy to do, it still required design skills and screen production techniques that I was not familiar with. 

When the price of signboard plywood went up significantly, he decided to retire from sign work, still doing one or two when requested as favors to friends or church groups. When he died, I inherited his extension ladders and scaffolding. But picking up and extending an extension ladder and setting it in place is getting too much for me. I can barely climb to the top of a six foot A-frame ladder to fill the bird feeder. 

 

 

Lamar Barthet in his mail carrier job

Riding The Rails

 Between 1963 and 1967 I lived in Bay St. Louis, Miss., but my dentist was in New Orleans. So every few months I would need to go to the dentist to have my braces checked, and I, beginning at the age of thirteen, would get on board the New Orleans Gulf Coast commuter train at the Bay St. Louis train depot and ride the rails down to New Orleans. It was an interesting trip.

The train would arrive, come to a stop, and I would climb up onto the platform between cars, enter the passenger compartment and find a seat among the many business commuters. Looking out the window was a great adventure, because of the wildly different terrain that the trip would provide.

We would roll southwestward past Waveland, Clermont Harbor and Lakeshore, onward into the marshes of Ansley and the hundreds of fishing camps perched on the bayou banks of southwest Hancock County. Then across the Pearl River bridge, through the Honey Island Swamp and across Pearl River Island. 

Another bridge carried us across the Rigolets, and it was an amazing sight to be sitting in the train car looking out over the marshes and suddenly there is nothing but water. You couldn't see the edge of the trestle beneath you, so for all intents and purposes, it just looked like the train had taken flight and was soaring over the waterway. 

Then came more marshes, the eastern shore of Lake Catherine, and eventually Chef Menteur Pass. The fishing camps became closer to each other, and the fishermen heading back from the early morning fishing expeditions would wave at the train passengers. 

Then, as the train entered New Orleans East, things really got interesting. Rolling through the train yards of Gentilly, where dozens of parallel tracks held dozens of stationary freight cars awaiting their sorting out and hitching up. It was the manufacturing and industrial area around the Industrial Canal. The train brought you through the middle of it all, with each half mile another fascinating array of cranes, fork lifts, and shipping containers.

Once over the canal, the train track right of way suddenly rose considerably higher than the surrounding landscape, and you found yourself looking down on the tops of houses, following alongside the newly-built interstate. I don't remember going through City Park, but maps showing the train tracks going to Union Passenger Station hint that part of the journey followed the interstate through the park, then taking a southward turn along the ancient New Orleans Cemeteries and on the way past where the Superdome would be built. 

Finally the train would ease into Union Passenger Station and come to a rest. But my journey wasn't over yet. I would walk from the station to Lee Circle, which is about four blocks, then catch a St. Charles Avenue street car and head over to Canal Street, where my dentist office was located in the Maison Blanche building (tenth floor to be exact). 

After a ten minute exam to see how my braces were doing, I would be released and then I'd go exploring on Canal Street. First, the electronic stores with all the latest radio gadgets, including a crystal radio set (red and white) that looked like a rocket ship.

Then to Katz and Besthoff for a hamburger and/or hot fudge sundae, and finally to Holmes Department Store where I checked out the camera section (where my sister Bonnie worked) and the television department. 

It was there in the television department of D. H. Holmes that one day in 1963 on my visit to the dentist I came across a group of people all crowded around a television set, sad-faced, and staring at the news broadcast.

It was Walter Cronkite, talking about President Kennedy getting shot in Dallas, TX. People were in a state of shock, I was in a state of shock. President Kennedy had guided us through some pretty tough times, particularly with the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, when everyone huddled in their homes thinking that World War III was about to erupt. Now he was dead, shot while riding in his convertible on the streets of Dallas.

 

 

Walter Cronkite, November 22, 1963

 

And I was standing with a group of strangers on the third floor of D.H.Holmes watching the drama unfold. I finally went downstairs, got on the streetcar, and rode to my grandmother's house on Carondelet st., to await my dad getting off work at the Cyanamid Chemical Plant in Luling. 

When he arrived, we would immediately get ready to go pick up two pots full of hot tamales from Manuel's Hot Tamales on Carrollton Avenue and head on out to dad's corner at Broad and St. Bernard Avenues.

College Collision

 While attending Southeastern Louisiana University back in the early 1970's, I almost made a movie. It was to be a short film, shot on a street intersection west of campus, the intersection of Ned McGehee Drive and North General Pershing St.

The plot was simple: a motorcyclist in his early 20's runs a red light at the intersection and hits a car passing by in front of him. He is injured, and the entire movie consists of the people and the "witnesses" at the scene waiting for the police and ambulance to arrive.

But it is a tense wait, for different people saw different circumstances. The driver of the car was an elderly man who said he had the green light, but the man in the house at the intersection said the motorcyclist had the green light. A car with two young people, also in their early twenties, was approaching the intersection from the south when the accident occurred, and they agreed with the elderly driver, that he had the green light.

The motorcyclist is lying on the side of the road injured, and he insists that he had the green light.

So it is youth against age, but with young witnesses siding with the elderly, and the elderly witness siding with the younger person. The title of the film was to be "Collision," for obvious reasons.

That was the plan, at least.

I had made numerous films on silent 8mm film in my high school days, but this one was going to be done on black and white film with sound, so that right there was a challenge.

I had a couple of meetings with potential actors and crew, spelled out what would have to be done. I contacted the Hammond Police Department and they said they would cooperate with traffic control during the filming. I spoke with the people who lived at the house at the intersection and they said it was okay to use their house. I don't remember if they agreed to be a part of the film and act as the owner of the house. The local ambulance company agreed to supply an ambulance.

This was when I learned that going from silent 8mm movies to sound 16mm movies complicated things exponentially. There was the need for lighting and reflector panels, lighting required lights, extension cords and permission to use a power outlet somewhere in the vicinity.

There were sound requirements, a boom mike perhaps, someone to hold the boom mike. Retakes to get the sound right if extraneous noise interrupts a scene. This was before digital editing so everything had to be done in camera, no post production (maybe some editing) There had to be a script and actors who could learn their lines and act at the same time while repeating those lines.

As the thousands of details and loose ends continued to pile up, I finally came to the realization that I didn't have the time, the money, or the desire to actually go on with the project, and it was dropped in favor of more productive pursuits, such as actually going to college, studying for tests, and working on weekends to pay the bills. 

"Collision" was a good experience, just the same. I appreciate everyone who encouraged me and worked with me on the initial preparations, and I came to appreciate the work and creativity that goes into the making of a major motion picture. Sure, the finished product on the big screen offers some entertainment for an hour and a half to two hours. But the millions of seemingly insignificant creative decisions, personal choices, professional skills, and most of all, a steadfastness and drive to pull it all together and make a few bucks in the process, well.... that's just the gigantic creative effort that the modern movie audience doesn't see (or care about).

Working on "Collision" did teach me one thing, when a project starts getting too big, too complicated, and too expensive in comparison with the rewards it may bring at the end, sometimes it's better for you to quit while you are ahead, learn the lessons it offered, and try something different. 

The film, much like many situations in real life, didn't really have an ending. The motorcyclist is hauled off in an ambulance, the nearby resident goes back into his house, the two car drivers go on their way.  Is a ticket issued, is the traffic light defective, will the debate among witnesses be resolved? Sounds like a perfect set up for a sequel.....

Vehicles I Have Owned

 Here is a list of the vehicles I have owned over the years, some with photographs. 

 

 

1959 Chevy Truck with flat bed

 

 

1972 American Motors Gremlin

 

 Plymouth Arrow 

 

 

Plymouth Satellite

 

 

 

Isuzu diesel pick up truck

 

 

Geo Metro

 

 

Ford 150 pick up truck

 

Nissan Frontier pick up truck

Hyundai Accent

 

 

 

 

Space Camp Out of the Question

 Nothing says that you're getting old quite like wanting to go to Space Camp and realize you're over the age limit.