While in New York last weekend for family stuff I found myself with a little free time on my hands so I met up with Larry Livermore, Chadd Derkins and Carla Monoxide in Central Park. Larry you know as the ex-founder/owner of the once-great Lookout Records. I introduced you to Chadd here. Carla, Chadd's betrothed, is a vivacious girl with a charming Queens accent who embodies what I love about New York; she's tough but good natured - capable of slapping you around both verbally and physically but too sweet to really hurt you too bad unless you're dumb enough to ask for it. Within thirty seconds of talking with her when we met in Baltimore at the Pop-Punk Fest last summer I knew I had a friend for life.
So there we were, hiking around the park, chattering away, when Larry suggests we take a breather on a bench. I'm busy talking to Chadd about one thing or another when Carla casually mentions that the guy who played Danny in Caddyshack just walked by.
Well I shot off that bench like it was on fire and prepared to give chase, as any sane man would, that I might procure a cell phone pic of myself with the guy who played Danny in Caddyshack, only by that point he was a good fifty yards away and I realized it would be prohibitively awkward to run after him, especially since I'd be shouting "Hey Danny, wait up!" because I don't actually know his name. Which I now feel really stupid about.* To make matters worse, my comrades were unimpressed by this sighting and were clearly in no mood to give chase alongside me; in fact I got the distinct feeling that any action on my part would result in laughter and finger pointing.
Dejection set in. Carla insisted that she had muttered several announcements as Danny was walking by but I still say she should've spoken more loudly, or grabbed me and shaken me, or tossed me into Danny's path. I guess she can't be blamed for not knowing that Caddyshack is my favorite movie but she can be blamed for not being sufficiently starstruck; nothing less than a mild hysteria would've been the appropriate reaction (I'm not being facetious). It seems the only reason she recognized him at first is because he played somebody's husband on Roseanne, as if that's on the level of Caddyshack. That, and the revelation that he either is or once was married to Bonnie Raitt, was all I was getting from the peanut gallery. Pitiful. I guarantee you if Danny Vapid had been there I would not have walked away empty handed. Vapid is a real Caddyshack connoisseur. There's a guy who has his priorities straight.
Chadd must've sensed my heartbreak (again, I'm really not being facetious - this whole thing was killing me) so he offered the lame but charmingly upbeat theory that Danny might simply be circling the park and we might just wait it out to see if he passed again. Alas it was not to be, though Chadd did console me with a story about his bizarre and wildly inappropriate behavior upon running into Jerry Stiller (who he only knows as Frank Costanza) one day.
Soon enough we started walking back up to Times Square. Carla took a swing at Larry in retaliation for an incident a couple days prior in which he had given her a shoulder throw (while sitting down, no less), but the spry Livermore jumped back in time for the blow to glance off him before landing squarely on my left cheek. Call it the period at the end of a particularly disappointing sentence. Still and all it was a nice afternoon, and it's a testament to the character of the city, not to mention that of my companions, that walking around Manhattan on the weekend before the anniversary of the terrorist attacks I didn't think about 9/11 once.
*His name is Michael O'Keefe. I think I probably knew that. He has a fine body of work to his credit as evidenced by his IMDB bio; I'd forgotten he was in the excellent Sean Penn film The Pledge, and of course, he was in the outstanding The Great Santini. He also has his own web site, where it is revealed that he is a Zen practitioner. I believe I'll send him a link to this blog entry as a sort of koan.