Twenty-Five years ago today was a day I’d been looking forward to for a long time and was the most exciting day (even though I knew exactly what was going to happen) of my life.  It was the day I traded the sour, hot air and bug spray smell of my family’s south Miami Beach apartment for that of hot dust and hardwood floors; and freedom: in Brooklyn, New York.

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The mid 90’s found my friend James and I with very different living situations.  We’d both dropped out of college a few years earlier and took divergent paths that had finally led us again to the same place, the same situation.  He’d served a couple of hitches in the Marine Corps and ended up at a hostel on Miami Beach called The Tropics.  I was back in Miami too, drying out at my Mom’s place in a strangely resurgent South Beach.

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My time in Hollywood wasn’t one Celebrity encounter after another.  Although I went to school then and later with a couple of people who turned out to be famous, my personal experiences were of a more “jejune” variety…  that is, except for getting to see a hirsute (hairsuit?) Ed Asner  anchor one end of a tug-of-war for ABC at “The Battle of the Network Stars;” IN PERSON!

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