I was on the fence about getting an autograph from and photo with Peter Fonda. On one hand, he was the star of the legendary 1969 picture Easy Rider and had secured his spot as an icon of the counterculture of the late 1960’s. He was a prominent member of the Fonda family, son of Henry, brother of Jane, and father of Bridget. And he continues to act in films today, most notable in the recent 3:10 to Yuma. But then on the other hand, most of his performances hadn’t meant all that much to me. Even Easy Rider, I found to be rather a bore. And what’s worse, he was charging $30 for the autograph and an additional $30 to get a picture with him.
I labored over this until my last minutes at the Hollywood Show on Sunday, April 25, 2010. In the end I succumbed to my own internal pressure cooker. The one that concerns itself that on the day that Peter Fonda dies, I’m going to wish that I had gotten a picture with him. The one that haunts me about the likes of David Carridine, Buckwheat Thomas, Steve Allen, James McArthur, Ilene Woods, Adriana Caselotti, and everyone else that the world lost before I ever I got the opportunity to correct my mistake of not getting pictures with them.
So there you have the bare-bones truth of the matter. You call it a waste of money? Yeah, well, I’m just getting my thing together.
Celebrity encounters of the Spring 2010 Hollywood Show will conclude in the next posting…
The way I see it, he owes me at least $60 for that surfing scene he did in Escape from LA.
Eric Hubble
June 14th, 2011