RANDOM PIC OF THE WEEK
I found this graphic this past week of a color Woolworth’s Halloween ad. MAN this brings back fond memories! If I could just go back for a DAY!
Since it was Halloween week, I had “Monster Mash Party” running through my head. This was the “B Side” on the 45 rpm record of “Monster Mash,” and I loved it as a kid almost as much as “The Monster Mash” itself. It’s really just a jam with vocalizations over it. In fact, they probably didn’t even spend much time recording it, and most of it was probably improvised. But as a kid, I found it mesmerizing. As I listened to it, I imagined a huge monster party in Dr. Frankenstein’s castle with all sorts of amazing creatures, monsters & misfits in attendance. Theatre of the mind, I believe they call it. It was done by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers!
Monday the 26th – MAGGIE ON MONDAY! – To start the day I did some work around the house, and then my puppet seamstress Maggie came over to do some work on some new Muppet replicas we’re making. She attached the nose and ears to Guy Smiley, and then we worked on the pattern for his hair. First, we covered the head with Saran wrap, and then covered that with blue painter’s tape. The Saran wrap was so that the adhesive of the tape wouldn’t mar the fleece on Guy’s face. I drew onto the painter’s tape with a Sharpie to design his hairline. I noticed that the direction of his hair (or the “grain” of the fur) on his head went in different directions. The left side swept back to the side, while the right side and top of his hair swept upwards. So she had to cut the hair pieces out of different sections of the fake fur I had purchased for his hair. Once she removed the Saran wrap/painter’s tape “pattern,” she made cuts where they needed to be so that the hair pieces could lay flat. Then she traced them onto the fake fur, keeping in mind the direction of the fur grain, and then cut them out and stitched them together. She created a perfect hairpiece for the puppet. Then she sewed it on and it looked fabulous! The very last stage of this puppet will include the attachment of his eyebrows and his eye pieces, and fabrication and attachment of his pupils. Then we started making the pattern for the Yip Yip Martians that we’re doing. I gave her a woman’s winter hat that I bought last month that will fit the bill perfectly. The original Muppet Martians were crocheted women’s chenille hats. But the fabric I found has the “bumpy,” uneven texture of a crocheted hat, so I’m thinking this will be a great alternative to having some crocheted. To me, the crocheted versions seem a little “fragile,” especially when you consider that I will probably be traveling with these guys at some point, and the more robust they are the better. If the crochet happens to get snagged or starts to unravel, you’re in trouble. We were getting hungry so I ordered a few pizzas. I hadn’t ordered pizza delivery in a while, and now I remember why. The pizzas were virtually inedible. I ordered mine with extra sauce, but it didn’t seem like there was any sauce on it at all! Needless to say I gave them a scathing review. To make matters worse, the prices they charged for these inedible creations was monumental! I’m done. I should have just made a couple of Tombstone pizzas in the oven and called it good. I don’t know how a major pizza chain like this can send out food like we received and expect glowing reviews! Never again! After Maggie left I napped for a bit, and then I got up to do my nightly WOG (walk/jog). Then I spent some time reconciling my bank account, and wrote out Wally’s Week.
Tuesday the 27th – GOOGLE GOOF-UPS! – It was that time of year again…the time to get my dental cleaning. So I headed to my dentist’s office and he had me in and out in a jiffy. Nice! I got some groceries on the way home, and then headed back to Planet Wallywood to get some work done. Guy Smiley is on a stand in the kitchen and I can’t take my eyes off him. He’s looking GREAT! I pinned on the eye pieces and a few temp eyebrows just to see how he’ll end up looking. I’m VERY happy with him. But I have a LOT more work to do on him. This includes having to make his body out of foam rubber, his arms out of fleece, and his hands out of armature wire and Magic Sculpt. But he’s going to be a real nice little puppet! Later I took my WOG, and then I came inside to do my auditions for the day. But the Gmail account that I use for my Voice Over stuff was acting strange. For some reason when I went to attach the MP3 files to my email, or upload them to my agents’ servers, my Gmail wouldn’t access my audio folder. I just got a “working on it” error message. Bizarre! Apparently my Windows 11 stopped talking to my Gmail, or vice versa. I decided to close Chrome and try a different browser. BINGO! It worked on Edge perfectly! Not sure what the problem is there with Chrome, but I’m going to let my computer guy know about it and see what he says. I edited some videos and then hit the hay.
Wednesday the 28th – INSURANCE INSANITY! – After the water main break we endured earlier this month, and the subsequent flooding of my garage, I’ve been on the phone with a large number of insurance adjustors and workers. Our complex will be repaving the driveways (again!) all next week, so we won’t have access to our garages for a week or more while they do the work. My insurance company sent a company over to survey my garage and test for damage and structural issues. One of the guys had a son who’s big into Jim Henson and the Muppets, so we made a quick Kermit the Frog video for him. I even invited them over for a tour of Planet Wallywood someday. Another worker spent about an hour in my garage doing tests with meters and all sorts of gizmos. They suggested tearing out a section of my garage wall and replacing it, because the water may have seeped into the drywall and will possibly cause mold to form. UGH! So that looks like how my November will be going. After they left I did some work around the house, and got on-line to look at my bank accounts. There was a huge discrepancy between what I had in my records for a final amount, and what the bank was telling me I had. I know the bank is all computerized and the mistake most likely wasn’t theirs, but I had to find out why there was such a huge discrepancy. BINGO! I found it! I made a simple placement error of a few credits. I guess I simply don’t have the mind capable of doing this kind of work. My plan is to stop debiting my bank card for about a week, letting the dust settle, and getting an accurate amount on record to start the month of November fresh. I rested for a while, and then did my auditions. Things are loading well now, so Chrome must’ve found the problem and fixed it. I took my WOG under a gorgeous overcast sky. The night was pretty warm because of it. The overcast had locked all the warmth of the day into the atmosphere! During my WOG I saw Baxter the skunk again, and he was looking fat and fluffy. Kinda cute, actually! But the direction he was running to get away from me, and the direction in which I was walking was the same direction. Obviously I was at a safe distance away. He eventually stopped and I passed around him, shined my headlamp on him and wished him a good night. All I saw were two little glowing red eyes watching me pass along. He seemed rather frightened, but I wanted to let him know I wasn’t a threat. It was warm enough out to spend some time outside in the anti-gravity chair after my WOG. In fact, it was warm enough to enjoy a nice cigar. It was Heavenly – sitting there just relaxing in the warm, quiet night. When I came back inside I started working on Guy Smiley’s body. Since I already had a shirt for him to wear, I built the body based on the pattern of the shirt, and it worked out VERY nicely! I was pretty proud of the work I did on it. I will need to glue some pieces of fleece onto different parts of the body to give the seamstress something to sew into when she puts on the arms and attaches the shirt and pants to the body. You can’t really stitch through foam rubber because it will tear out too easily. So I’ll need to glue some fleece around the neck of the body (so she can attach the neck of the head to the neck hole in the body), and I’ll put some fleece patches on the corners of the torso where the arms will be stitched on. I’ll also put a band of fleece around the bottom so she can tack down the shirt and pants. I’ll have to be careful how I glue them on, as you can’t put glue where the needle and thread will go. It’s VERY difficult getting a needle through glued-down fabric! So it will take a bit of pre-thought and design before I do the work. But he’s coming along VERY nicely! I made a Paladin saladin and watched a few episodes of “Have Gun – Will Travel.”
Thursday the 29th – DAY OFF! – Since nothing was scheduled for the day, I made the “executive decision” and took the day off to relax. Later I had dinner with my pal Sara Raftery at Ernie’s. It had been quite a while since I had seen her, so we got caught up on all the happenings in our lives. When I got home I did a little work around the house and rested up some more. I recorded my auditions, sent them in without any internet issues at all, and then took my WOG. It wasn’t quite as nice as the previous night, but I guess fall is upon us! I cleaned up around the house a little in anticipation of the maids arriving on Friday afternoon.
Friday the 30th – EBAY, EMILY & MORE! – The maids arrived and gave Planet Wallywood a good cleaning. Now that I don’t have pets any longer the house really probably doesn’t need a cleaning every two weeks, but it makes me feel better when they clean and straighten everything up. I worked around the house the rest of the afternoon, and then picked up my assistant Emily to go to dinner. Little Toni’s had a long wait (probably due to the growing popularity of the movie “Obsession,” which filmed a famous scene at the restaurant), so we went over to Paty’s and sat on the patio. We came back to Planet Wallywood and Emily shot some photos of some things I’m listing on eBay. These are things I bought on-line that didn’t end up fitting well, so I’m going to sell them off to somebody for whom the pieces will fit better. I did my WOG, relaxed a little, and called it a week.
Saturday the 31st – A WET, WILD, WIZARD-Y HALLOWEEN! – The day started with a visit to my stylist Andie to get a touch-up on my color. Then I hit the hardware store to buy some supplies for my big garage clean-out that I’ll be doing next week. Since the driveways will be getting repaved, we won’t have in and out access to our garages. So we’ll have to find alternate parking spaces as we are able while the work is being done. Since there won’t be a car in my garage for a week, I’m going to get busy and clean up the dirty residue that the flooding caused. It will also give me the chance to pull things out, assess the damage and loss, and reorganize. It’ll be a huge job, but it’s gotta be done. I went to CVS to get some more supplements, and then I bought some grocery items at the market. I picked up a sandwich at Togo’s but didn’t eat it right away. I remembered that “The Wizard Of Oz” (my favorite film of all time) would be running that night on “Svengoolie” on ME-TV. So I headed home to work a little bit, clean up, and hit my bed in the “Tranquility Zone.” I had my food tray with my sandwich, popcorn, and iced tea ready for the movie! It’s so great seeing this movie on TV again. Even though I have it on many different copies of physical media, there’s a certain magic to seeing it again on broadcast TV. And I don’t know what it is about that movie, but I can never seem to make it through the film with dry eyes. I’m VERY sentimental about that film. About how perfect it is, what a major undertaking and success it turned out to be, and what it meant to me as a child. By the time Dorothy has to say goodbye to her friends in Oz at the end, I’m pretty much a mess. Yup, I guess I’m a real sentimental sap. It started to rain out, and we’d be expecting heavy rain all night. The local Trick Or Treaters went out early to collect up their candy before it got too wet out. After the movie I rested a bit, and got up later to do some work around the house. I wasn’t able to WOG because it was raining very heavily out, but it allowed me to do other stuff that needed to be done. First priority, was the useless exercise of changing my clocks back an hour. I really wish this stupidity would end, and we’d settle on Standard Time once and for all. Scientifically, it’s healthier for the human body than Daylight Saving Time, and is better for our circadian rhythms! But our stupid leaders can’t even agree on that. Why don’t they just listen to the science? Year-round Daylight Saving Time would make the mornings too dark in the winter for kids going to school. Plus, they tried year round Daylight Saving Time in the past and it was a disaster! But, these politicians will never learn from their past mistakes, it seems. I despise every last one of them. After wasting an hour of my life that I’ll never get back again changing the clocks, I did some video editing. I glued the anchor fabric onto the Guy Smiley puppet body, and when I finished around dawn, the rain had stopped. I made a salad and watched an episode of “The Outer Limits,” but it was a bad one. Not as enjoyable as they usually are. Too bad, too. Normally I love that show. But this episode was a real clunker.
Sunday the 1st – PUPPET SKELETONS! – After a relaxing day I did a little work around the house, found a nice parking space for the Gray Ghost in our outside parking spaces, and then went inside to do some work on creating a “puppet skeleton hand” for Guy Smiley. This piece would require armature wire fingers, seated in a piece of Magic Sculpt epoxy putty that would hold it all together. But because I’m making the puppet with removable arm rods, I also have to sculpt in a metal “thread extender.” This will allow me to have a threaded receptacle hidden inside his wrist, so I can screw in an arm rod when needed. Conversely, I’ll be able to unscrew it and take it out when it’s not needed. I’ve only done this with one other puppet that I’ve made, but the design for this one will be a little different given that all the fingers will be poseable. I did my auditions and then headed out to do my WOG. But it was FREEZING outside! All of the rain from the previous day had made the environment VERY chilly! I came back inside and did some work around the house, and got ready for a crazy week of puppet building and garage cleanout. It just never seems to end!
And how was YOUR week?!?!
PIX FROM THE WEEK
America’s Favorite Game Show Host is coming to life!
