Adventures in autographing
I told you about
the time I stabbed one-time Cardinals great Lonnie Smith in the eye while trying to get his autograph in 1988. Well, after a long layoff I think I've gotten a little better at hounding.
I went to St. Louis with a pal this weekend to take in a Cardinals' three-game series against the Tampa Bay Rays-- they found the Lord a few seasons back and dropped the "
Devil" from the
Rays' name. The Cardinals lost more of the three games than I would have preferred, but there were highlights a plenty, including Friday's first-ever Pride Night at Busch Stadium. I bought our tickets before the announcement though so we didn't have the special ticket that would get us a rainbow-colored Cardinals cap.
Plenty of other free stuff was parceled out during the weekend, though-- Friday was also Mystery Hall of Fame Manager Bobblehead Night, and I'm happy to say I wound up with a Whitey Herzog model. The other possibilities were bobbling likenesses of Red Schoendienst, Joe Torre, and Tony LaRussa. Whitey was my first choice, with all respect to the other gentlemen, and it came to pass that we would be united. Sunday's freebie for all of us at the park was a Mike Shannon-themed alarm clock. Mike's the Cardinals play-by-play man on the radio, on the air each year since the very early '70s. His most frequent home run call on the radio is "Get up, baby, get up!" So alarm clock.
Other weekends, that alarm clock might have dwarfed all else, but not this one. On Saturday, I woke up at the crack of eight and walked from the Value Inn, a dusty motor lodge almost hilariously located in the literal shadow of the towering, modern, and elegant Four Seasons abutting the Laclede's Landing neighborhood. The lady's voice inside our car mapping system got all excited as we approached our lodging destination for the first time on Friday afternoon and then she started to cry. So I hit the pavement in the morning with my coffee and milk drink that costs six dollars and I'm going to stand in line to get a free autograph from former Cardinals great Jim Edmonds at the team's Hall of Fame and Museum. This is where our real story begins. You can line up beginning at 9:30, somebody has said, but at 8:45, I'm about the 330th person in line. I find out that number later. It seems they will give out 320 autograph tickets at 10, then it comes down to time after that-- how fast will Jimmy be able to sign, and will I be willing to stick it out in line with no guarantees that it won't all be for nought at noon.
It's team Hall of Fame Weekend for 2017 and superstars Mark McGwire and Tim McCarver are going to be inducted, along with the late Pepper Martin, who will be represented in the proceedings by his daughter Jenny Weathersby. I'm going to guess that Jenny is in her 70s, and there's something that I find eternally charming about an older lady when she starts talking about "daddy." The big annual event is why the autograph line is so long. The ceremony itself begins at 2pm. A game tonight at 6. While standing in line, I make fast friends with the surrounding people. Great people, great Cardinals fans. Jim Edmonds fans.The time goes by swiftly because of the company, but it does go by. It's now 11:30, there's been a lot of standing, and I have progressed in the line into the museum itself and up a staircase, but not yet reached the admission desk. And my cluster of associates and I have still not earned the tickets that guarantee and foreshadow an Edmonds signature.
Then who should come up the steps behind my group but another familiar face, one of today's honorees, Tim McCarver, the starting catcher for the Cardinals in 21 World Series games during the 1960s and a television broadcaster for so long after that that he retired from the national work having broadcast more World Series on television than any man or woman that ever lived. He has come into the museum, along with a videographer and a Cardinals P.R. representative to see his Hall of Fame plaque for the first time just prior to the ceremony. And
this guy here-- me--
has an ace in his pocket-- in a plastic shopping bag, to be more precise. About seven years ago, in a moment of almost-sickening foresight, I saw fit to spend some money online for a compact disc that featured Tim McCarver
singing. You never knew this, but Tim put this collection out into the world and it's called "Tim McCarver Sings Selections from the Great American Songbook," and upon its many grooves, Tim interprets such chestnuts as "On a Clear Day," "Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You," and "I'll Remember April." Well, it seems that within any given-- moderately-sized-- group of Cardinals fans, I'm the only one that owns one of these-- and,
and... just happens to have it on his person. Since I've already bragged about this item to the people standing around me, they practically push me over to where he's standing. "But I don't have a Sharpie," I object, which was true. "Here, use mine," cries out the greatest saint in this region since Louis.
I make my way over to Tim, who has now offered to sign for people. Fans were initially hesitant to approach him because he's looking officially at his plaque, but Tim is the one that breaks the ice. "Would you like me to sign that?" he says to someone. He signs a first baseball, one that was probably intended for Jim Edmonds, and I stick my compact disc of his into his purview as he peers down signing his second baseball.
Not too elevated with the disc now, Moeller, don't stab him in the eye. He sees the disc out of the corner of his eye, and he doesn't say anything, but he throws his head back and lets out a big laugh. He's charmed-- and I detect, humbled. After signing the baseball that's in his hand, I'm telling you, he reaches past four or five, maybe six other baseballs, right over them, to grab my CD and sign it. The paper cover is out of its case, but the case is there for physical support, and he puts a fresh
Tim McCarver right on there, just below his name as it already appears in white font on the cover and partially across the cheek on the face that smiles back at us in the photo. Big loops and stuff. The little 'c' in "McCarver" is underlined.
Well, I'm blissed out. I'm back to my spot in line graciously saved for me-- and I'm a hero to boot-- the guy that owns a rare compact disc that has now somehow been lifted from the category of priceless to
more priceless. I hadn't expected to get within 100 feet of Tim McCarver today, especially on what was to be one of the most important days of his baseball life. But still I had it with me. On Thursday night, as I was pulling a framed Jim Edmonds photo off the wall in the bedroom, contemplating this particular weekend to come, something-- or someone-- told me to go to the basement of the condo, dig through the disc collection that had been banished there by my interior decorator wife, and pull that disc
back out and pack it up for its ultimate life's adventure. Be prepared. That's the boy scout motto. Be prepared.
Now the rest falls into place. Not minutes later, a museum door opens and Jim Edmonds autograph tickets appear for me and for all my friends. We move through the gates and very soon I'm doubling my good fortune by being before Mr. Edmonds. As he signs-- and here's a fun fact for you-- Tim McCarver and Jim Edmonds both wore uniform number 15 as members of the Cardinals, each assigned by the clubhouse manager almost 40 years apart... as he signs, I pour out my heart to him in Twitter space or less. "Jim, I love you", I say-- a man should never be afraid to tell one of his favorite baseball players that he loves him-- "But I love that you and your wife appeared on
Real Housewives. My wife is from Kenya and I can't get her interested in baseball at all-- but she knows who Jim Edmonds is!" Jim's been signing autographs for almost two hours at this time so he smiles but his reaction is understated, plus the guy ahead of me has Down syndrome so that sort of overwhelms my thing. But I got another one! Not even two for two today. Two for
one. Then the Cardinals Hall of Fame does an almost incomprehensible thing-- it gives me a free bottle of iced tea on my way out the museum door. This is insane.
Would you even believe it if I told you that I then made my way over to the ceremony and my pal had secured us the perfect balcony view of an extraordinary civic event? And for good measure Tony LaRussa walked right past me and I shook his hand? And he was actually smiling? And McCarver's speech made me laugh? And then Mark McGwire's made me cry like I was a little baby? And McGwire cried too? Just like he used to? And some of those other Hall of Famers sitting up there on stage, looking like-- to steal a line from Jack Buck-- some diamonds in the window of a jewelry store-- looked like they might cry too? And Jim Edmonds sat behind McGwire, his former teammate, on the dais and rallied the standing ovation that would come flooding in for one of the greatest
men that ever played the game? And then the baseball day was capped, about five hours later, at about 9 o'clock Central, when Tommy Pham hit a walk-off home run for the Cards in the bottom of the ninth inning after we had been behind by as many as three runs? And then I ate some hot fudge and pecan custard at a parlor that is also a Route 66 landmark called Ted Drewe's Frozen Custard? I
don't think you would believe it.
Solar eclipse
Cinemaphiles in France famously believe Jerry Lewis to have been a genius upon the screen, a second-coming of Charlie Chaplin. I don't know if they're right. I haven't seen several of the critical movies on his resume, but take a look only at
The Bellboy and you're liable to believe that the frogs are on to something.
Like those of Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the French auteur Jacques Tati (
Mon Oncle),
The Bellboy is a pantomime comedy. It's Lewis' first as a director and it was famously shot in less than a month at the Fontainebleau Hotel on the beach in Miami in 1960, where the movie's story also takes place. Lewis' character, whom he has named Stanley after Stan Laurel, is mute almost for the entire film. The movie is a series of vignettes, and stars of the era and the location, Milton Berle and Walter Winchell, have cameos. As ridiculous as it may be to believe, Lewis shot the movie in only 28 days at the hotel, without a script-- while also performing every night on stage in the hotel's main theater. He put nearly a million dollars of his own money into the movie after Paramount said it didn't want to fund a silent movie. This is the stuff of legend.
Of course Jerry was also great when Scorsese directed him in
The King of Comedy in 1982. That movie is in my top 50. Along with
Hugo, it's an underrated Marty masterpiece. Lewis plays the role that was offered to Johnny Carson that would have essentially had Carson playing himself, and Robert DeNiro plays Rupert Pupkin, the would-be comedian that
takes his big break on a nationally-televised late night talk show, and whose name now represents a certain type of person in the larger culture. Jerry's character is understated and played to perfection. He's also called "Jerry" (Langford, in this case) because, during a scene in which Jerry is filmed actually walking the streets of New York, real Big Apple residents can be reasonably expected to call out his name, and several of them do in the final cut of the movie-- "Hey, Jerry!"
Jerry Lewis may have raised more money for charity than any entertainer in American history, and of course, I'm about to skip quickly over facts about him and periods of his life, which are individually, enough to have made him famous if any of them were all he had ever done-- the Colgate Comedy Hour and his nightclub partnership with Dean Martin, which some consider to be the greatest stage act in show business history, the extraordinary run of comedy films he directed, wrote, and starred in during the 1960s, his revolutionary invention of a video playback machine for film directors, and his several decades as host of the Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon. He is as synonymous to the Labor Day holiday in America as George Washington is to President's Day.
I saw Jerry Lewis on stage in Ames, Iowa in 1993, and holy Jesus, I'm glad I did that. I was in college and I went by myself because I had not met any Jerry Lewis fans during my first two months on campus. (I can't confirm that I
ever did.) I don't remember much about the night except that he chatted with us, he did some bits, he sang in front of a large orchestra, and at one point, he brought his infant daughter, Danielle, out on stage with him. For comedic purposes, he handed the girl back to her caretaker using only one hand and making us all fearful, on purpose, that he was going to drop her. That was part of the show. Funny what a guy remembers. Jerry is one of six Oscar hosts (in 1956, 1957, 1959) that I've seen perform on stage. The others are Frank Sinatra (1963, 1975), Diana Ross (1974), David Letterman (1995), Steve Martin (2001, 2010), and Chris Rock (2005, 2016). I consider Jerry my greatest "get." I still have the ticket stub. It's a pretty great boast to own for the rest of my life for the price of only $12.50.
Lewis died at the age of 91 yesterday at his home in Las Vegas. The cause, they're saying, was ischemic cardiomyopathy. This heart-related death took place 57 years after the comedian's first heart attack in 1960 during the filming of
Cinderfella. He had previously survived prostate cancer, diabetes, pulmonary fibrosis, viral meningitis, and a prescription drug addiction. That list adds to the disbelief that he has died.
The hack that wasn't?
You wouldn’t know it from reading the center-right papers, but The Nation, a politically-liberal periodical that serves as the oldest continuously-published weekly magazine in the U.S. (1865), has set forth a report that stands to debunk the entire narrative of Russian election hacking. The Clinton-bots were wrong, and this blog was right in its skepticism of the Commie plot that now seems to have been orchestrated instead by CIA spooks.
According to The Nation, a group of former U.S. intelligence officials have presented forensic evidence that the so-called “hack” of the Democratic National Committee in July of last year was not a hack at all, but an insider leak, one conducted in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, by somebody with physical access to the DNC computer.
The group is called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and was founded in 2003, when they quickly debunked the theory that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons. The new report contradicts the unsubstantiated “intelligence” we've been told about, but not shown, that the hacker Guccifer 2.0 did any hacking of the DNC or turned over documents to WikiLeaks. Further-- and this part is crucial-- investigators found that some of the “Guccifer” files had been deliberately altered by copying and pasting their text into a word-processing document that had Russian-language settings.
It seems that the FBI never even investigated the DNC servers after John Podesta's email was hacked, and Vladimir Putin has been set up. His fingerprints were manufactured, and we can only assume that these Cold War-era war games were only performed with the purpose of cranking up tension between the Russian Federation and the United States. A substantial number of officials within the Deep State were spoiling for a standoff with Russia over the territory of Crimea and over expanding Russian influence in Eastern Europe, with our Cold Warriors backing a group of anti-Russian neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat in November was a proverbial gut punch to that entire initiative.
This was always the more plausible narrative-- that a DNC official, likely pissed off over Candidate Clinton’s coronation within the DNC power structure in opposition to the upstart, outsider campaign of Independent presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, slipped the embarrassing emails to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has claimed very openly since the beginning that his source was indeed someone from inside the DNC. Track back to June 12, 2016-- Assange announces that he has documents that will deeply damage the Clinton campaign-- and Clinton is not yet nominated by the party. Two days later, with the DNC having been placed on notice, Crowdstrike, a private company that does cybersecurity and is in the employ of the DNC, announces that they have found malware on the committee’s servers and begins claiming immediately that the Russians are responsible for such. The FBI relies entirely upon the reports of Crowdstrike and the media moves to focus its attention on the “hack” that can be pinned to the Russians, rather than on the contents of the emails themselves that are, indeed, deeply embarrassing to the Clintons and her advisory team.
We believe what we’re told to believe though. And we’re most gullible to believe what we want to believe. This is a deeply embarrassing report for the DNC, coming as it does from a news outlet that holds high favorability with the Left. This is also embarrassing for the news media, which again has been caught marching unquestioning in lockstep with the Intelligence State. The media has largely ignored this new information a year later because of course it has to. Not only does its existence reveal yet another failure of the political news media to act as the watchdog it pretends to be, but it shows that the gatekeepers of official information have been duped for the better part of a year over a story that turns out to be as fictitious as that saga of Iraqi WMDs. The president has been labeled a Russian agent. Assange has been labeled a Russian agent. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has been labeled a Russian agent. One of the only news agencies to pick up the story is Breitbart News, so of course this stands to lift the standing of that organization to the exclusion of almost all others-- and again, this is a report published by a highly-respected
left-wing news organization. Notice that the report (linked above) makes no effort to name a culprit, only to debunk a faulty theory, revealing an absence of political motivation.
The damage that has been done by the Russian panic should be obvious. An authoritarian president with racist sympathies gets re-enforced behind his most powerful and substantive rhetoric-- that his enemies are out to get him, and that he is being sabotaged by Washington insiders, which in this critical instance, is the truth. And to what end? To further protect the political career and legacy of Hillary Clinton and the DNC establishment, which has done more to damage the cause of progressive action in this country than any other entity. The misinformation campaign has also ratcheted up the tension between two countries with very powerful military arsenals during a politically-dangerous time, and has served to again distract from real scandals involving the current administration and from truly-impactful electioneering upon the U.S. system by foreign governments the likes of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
