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.
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.
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!