The other day I woke up humming the Bee Gees song “Wish You Were Here,” which was written about the untimely death of their brother Andy Gibb. I’m sure it was on my mind because I was thinking about my dog Sassie, who has been gone for four months now. Boy, time really flies.
Monday the 17th – PARTY PLANNING! – I hopped in my 1974 Gran Torino and headed off to Mai Tai studios in Burbank to do a piece for the good folks at Old Navy. This is our hiatus week from “The Tonight Show” so I’m counting on doing a lot of errand-type stuff. When I finished at Mai Tai I scurried off to home to switch cars and get in my Mustang. I picked up my assistant Sara and headed over to Regenix for a follow-up visit on my hair. Todd looked at my hair under the high powered microscope and said, “Now THAT’S a healthy scalp!” I’ve been on the program for almost four years now and things are going well. I really love the results. When we finished there we drove over to the Beverly Hills It’s a Wrap store. I found a few really great items. Then we headed back home with a quick stop for some ice cream. I had to be back in time to meet with Adam the tech from Make It Work. Since I had switched my new computer to Windows 7 nothing was working right. My i-Tunes playlists got wiped, my scanner was acting wacky, my graphics program Paintshop Pro wasn’t working right…it was a mess. Adam did some good work and got some of the things working, but I was going to need another visit soon to work out more bugs. I started working on pulling clips from famous monster/horror movies for my upcoming Halloween costume extravaganza. Though the DJ will be playing great tunes from the 70’s and 80’s at the party, the ambiance will be enhanced by a compilation video of memorable scenes. I grabbed a quick nap, then got up do some auditions in my home studio and e-mail them to my agents. When that was finished I started working on more monster clips. Then Sara came over to watch an episode of “Hawaii Five-O” (the classic show, not the new one!).
Tuesday the 18th – CANCELLATION DAY! – I got word in the morning that the usual Tuesday US Airways session at Voice Trax West was canceled because there was no script. But I headed over in the afternoon anyway to meet up with Paul Glaser to do some more work on his audio book. He had just gotten back from Boston 12 hours earlier so he was pretty wiped. But his book tour is going really well and it’s being very well received by the fans! Paul began working with John the engineer on editing the narrative, and I headed out to go to Mai Tai studios again for some pick-up on the Old Navy piece I did Monday. But when I got one block from the studio I got a call from my agent saying that the session had been canceled because the script was undergoing a rewrite. Oh well. That’s life I guess. I got back to Voice Trax West to catch up with Paul and Charlie Schlatter was just coming out of one of the studios after a session. He’s a nice guy and having great success currently as the voice of Kick Buttowski on Disney. Paul finished up his editing session and we headed over to my house so he could sign some of my collectibles. It was fun having him tour Planet Wallywood and seeing my collection. I had a bunch of Starsky & Hutch stuff that I’ve had since I was a kid. Including the Mego Starsky action figure. I said, “It must be kind of cool having an action figure in your likeness.” Paul said, “It’s creepy.” That made me laugh. He loved looking through the old gossip magazine. It must’ve been like looking through an old photo album of memories. He saw a “Starsky & Hutch” photo of himself and he said, “I was such a kid!” He also mentioned that he almost drowned in the water tank doing the Houdini TV movie. Just before he left we went over to where my Torino is stored and he signed the sun visor on the driver’s side. He told me a story about the time Aaron Spelling first showed him the famous red and white Gran Torino they’d be using in the show. Paul’s quote was, “It looks like a striped tomato.” They thought the comment was so funny they wrote it into a few episodes of the show. So I asked him to put that quote on the inscription, so he wrote “Wally — it STILL looks like a striped tomato! Paul Michael Glaser.” It was dream come true and I felt like I was 15 again. He said my car was beautiful and he even helped me cover it back up when we were done. How cool is that? My inner fanboy was screaming “Starsky is helping you cover up your Gran Torino!” Every once in awhile you have to have those fanboy moments to keep life poppin’! I went back inside to check e-mail, get some dinner and get a nap. When I got up I did some auditions and worked on my monster clips again. It was a beautiful foggy night! Perfect atmosphere for looking through monster movies! I’m really getting excited for my upcoming Halloween party!
Wednesday the 19th – I DON’T KNOW WHAT I ATE BEFORE GOING TO BED BUT…! – I woke up after having the most amazing dream. I was an emcee at Universal Studios (I think it was in Florida because there was a lot of beautiful blue/green water around) and I was actually floating above the crowds waiting to get into the attractions with some sort of hover pack. I thought it was based on negative magnetization, but somebody told me in the dream it was based on microwaves. All of a sudden my legs felt hot and I realized that I was in the path of another emcee with a hover pack. It was my pal Stu Shostack! So I got out of his flight path. I could hover in close and talk to people, or hover out and get a bird’s eye view of everything. It was very colorful and vivid! I was even shown the guy who created the hoverpacks and given his name, but when I woke up I had forgotten it. Wild! I headed over to Studiopolis Burbank to do some more voice tracks for “Bleach.” Then I headed down to Premiere Props in El Segundo, but halfway there my GPS stopped talking to me. It was still giving me visual directions, but the voice had stopped. Since I don’t look at visual directions I ended up all the way down in San Pedro! So I had to turn around and head back the other way. What a hassle! Technology was really ticking me off this week! When I was finished I drove into Culver City and ate at one of my favorite Mexican places I used to frequent all the time when I lived on the Westside. But the enchilada I got didn’t seem done. I opened it up and the meat was almost entirely red. So I didn’t eat it and headed home to meet with Scott Sebring to get him the monster DVDs. He’s cutting together the composite video for the party. Since I was still hungry, I went to dinner with Sara and my pal Brittney Powell. We ate at the Counter in Studio City and in walked actor Adam Arkin. Pretty cool. I’ve seen him in a million things. I came home, grabbed a nap and then got up to do auditions. I did some more work on planning the party, and then I set about getting some checks ready for a deposit. But apparently my scanner doesn’t like Windows 7 either. It was scanning half of the image, and then putting the left half of the image on the right half. Strange. Will this nightmare never end? I wanted to throw it out the window!
Thursday the 20th – CARPETS CLEAN! – The crew from Chem Dry came over to clean all the carpet in my house. It was kind of sad because in a few small spots I could see evidence of Sassie. But when they were done all that evidence was gone. Time marches on I guess. After they left I started working on getting special music for the party and sending the songs over to my DJ. I was still having scanner issues. ARGH! So I went to take a nap. I got up and reconciled all my bank statements and got all that stuff settled. Then I went to Little Toni’s with Edi for a bite. YUM! It really hit the spot. I went back home and continued working on music and then I did my auditions and e-mailed them to my agent.
Friday the 21st – LAST DAY OF HIATUS! – It was great to sleep in, and not have my hotline ring. But like an idiot, I forgot to shut off my alarm from the day before and it woke me up anyway. Oh well. I got up and ran errands with Sara. I got some cards printed for my party, then I hit the bank to deposit some checks. I got a call from the gal who runs the place where my former mailbox is, and she had a few straggler pieces of mail for me. One was a very nice postcard from Carroll Spinney, the Muppeteer who performs Big Bird. He thanked me for a photo I sent him of he and Stan Freberg from a recent collector show. I also got a signed copy of “Chrystallia and the Source of Light” from Paul Glaser. Whew! I’m glad the lady saved my mail for me. That was nice of her! Next door to my former mailbox place is Rusty’s Discount Pets, where I used to have Sassie groomed. Rusty’s mascot is a beautiful male collie named Rusty, who always fancied Sassie when she came into the store to get groomed. Rusty’s a good guy and he remembers me when I call his name. He came over and I got to get some good collie pets and hugs in. Then I drove over to my new mailbox and got a bunch of packages. Stuff I bought on eBay, and stuff for my party from Windy City Novelties in Chicago. My pal Mike there really outdid himself. There are TONS of great items there! Sara and I got a late lunch at Paty’s, and then I sped home to meet up with the Make It Work guy. Adam was unavailable, and Alex tried to get my scanner and programs to work, but we ascertained that I need to get new stuff to be compatible with Windows 7. Oh well. Guess it’s time to go shopping. I unpacked my eBay purchases; a bunch of old Halloween masks for my collection. I got busy and put them up in their appropriate places. They look great! I also took a good look at Paul’s book and it’s VERY classy and amazing. If you take the dust cover off, there are full color illustrations of all the characters on the inside! I also got some of the DVDs I ordered on-line. It was like Christmas! I spent the rest of the evening party planning.
Saturday the 22nd – THE SAGA IS FINISHED! – I slept really late and it felt awesome! I started cleaning up Planet Wallywood for movie night and getting things ready for guests. I also spent some time on the computer to get rid of all the i-tunes redundancies that my new Windows 7 had populated my file with. What a chore! We watched the final two films in the “Star Wars” saga…”The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.” It’s been a lot of fun watching all 6 films over the course of the past three weekends. I had forgotten how much I love Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine! What a great actor! Just before I went to bed I watched a classic episode of “Hawaii Five-O” called “A Touch of Guilt.” One of the guest stars was a young Adam Arkin, who I had just seen two nights previous at dinner! What a weird coincidence!
Sunday the 23rd – MORE MASK MANIA! – I got up to try to win a few more masks on eBay. Last Sunday I won Space Ghost, the Flash, Green Lantern, Captain America and The Thing. Now I was trying to win Bat Fink (I got outbid in the last 3 seconds) and I won So-Hi, a former mascot for a cereal called Rice Krinkles. I used to love those, but they retired So-Hi after complaints that the character wasn’t exactly “PC”. But the fact that they made a mask and costume of the character was awesome. So I just HAD to have it! I did a phone interview with a guy for a podcast about videogames (talking about the newly released “Arkham City” game) and then went back to bed for a few hours. I got up for evening church, and then Amanda and I went to Panera for a bite. We got finished eating and headed back home to do more work on my i-Tunes. I had to have Amanda read off all the songs on my i-Pod so I could check that list against the list I had in my computer so they would be consistent. It took us forever! Just as we were finishing I got a call from Chuck McCann. He was back in town and wanted to meet for pie at DuPar’s to catch up. So Amanda and I headed over there for a nice visit. He told me that he heard on the news that President Obama was going to be on “The Tonight Show” this week. I said that made sense because our schedule for Tuesday and Wednesday was all screwy. We are taping two shows on Tuesday and we have Wednesday off. No doubt to accommodate the President’s schedule. Amanda and I got back and did more i-Tunes work, but it was getting late and Amanda had to get on the road. So I decided to finish up the work on my playlists another time. Later, Sara came over with food from Denny’s and we watched another “Hawaii Five-O” episode.
