Nice to Meet You, Michu
Thursday, May 16th, 2013
I’ll admit that at times some of my celebrity encounters are a little obscure. That is most certainly true in this example, but in this case the operative word is not obscure, but little. Like to the tune of two feet, nine inches tall little. At the Hollywood Show in Los Angeles on April 20, 2013, I met a Hungarian man named Michu (real name: Mihaly Meszaros) who has been billed throughout the years as the ‘shortest man in the world.’ That’s not quite true, but damn, this guy was short! So exactly who is he, you ask? Well, he only seems to tout two things about himself: that he was often the guy who was inside the costume of ALF – the alien life form on the series of the same name – and the fact that he was friends with Michael Jackson. Read the rest of this entry »
It took me a while before I was ready to start collecting the so-called “Bond Girls” – and by Bond girls, I am referring to those actresses who in some way served as a love interest to the fictional character James Bond in the films of 007. The reason it took so long before I’d entertain buying autographs of them is that I hadn’t really seen any James Bond movies. But over the past couple of years, I’ve at least begun to scratch the surface, and have enjoyed them enough to collect them and plan to watch them all in the future. Naturally, there have already been passed-up encounters that I’ve grown to regret – but no sense dwelling on that. Since reconsidering my position, I’ve already amassed more than a dozen encounters and will present them in groups; this is the first of these postings. 
I hadn’t really been ‘into’ professional wrestling since I was a kid in the fifth and sixth grade, moderately enjoying some of it through junior high, and then forgetting about it and moving onto other things. Then inexplicably, at the re-introduction by my Dad, I started to take note again in 1996. While visiting him at his house on Gainsborough Road in Kettering, then nighttime WCW wrestling program Monday Nitro began to capture my attention again. The presence of some of the wrestlers from my youth – namely Ric Flair – initially sparked interest and then the storylines started to get really juicy. The mere flirtation then became a true interest bordering on obsession when the nWo first came to be. 
Who can forget such 1980’s classics as Valley Girl, My Chafufeur, or April Fool’s Day? C’mon…show of hands. OK, so almost no one. I do, because they were on frequent rotation on HBO. And I have a feeling there are a lot of others my age who were inundated by these or other similar low-quality-but-fun movies as youthful, impressionable boys. The common denominator among all of these films is that they all were lead by actress Deborah Foreman. She wasn’t just some bit player, she was the star! 
Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film Raging Bull is a movie that just keeps getting better the more times you watch it. I think it was somewhere around the third when I realized just how much of a masterpiece it was, how the period flavors swirled around the intense action, and how every nuance of every character had been perfected. The movie of course is the story of boxer Jake LaMotta, one of the most determined, but self-destructive, men who ever entered the sport of pugilism. Cathy Moriarty played opposite Robert De Niro as his ever-suffering wife Vikki to absolute perfection. She conveyed the part of a sexy and loyal woman who gradually watches her husband turn into a jealous monster.