Rant 2,297: Steppin' Stone

Well, what a wild week at the Ranting and Raving Blog, eh?

I guess if you cross Raven de la Croix with Fran Drescher, you get ...

Well, I don't know what you get, but I got a lot of laughs, something I haven't had in quite a long time, and I guess something that I desperately needed.

The "Up!" saga appears to be over. I sent the actress the story, and while she has not responded back to me, it is there for her if she wants it.

The Fran Drescher thing has not been resolved. I have not heard anything from her or anyone else about this, so as I said, until I am given a firm "No," she was a member of my first grade class.

This is all fun. It holds no significance other than putting a smile on my, and perhaps others faces.

And that is what we all need today; to stop being so serious, to stop being so ticked off at everything, to stop looking for things to be enraged about, and to simply have a good laugh and to--

RELAX.

The stuff with Raven de la Croix has perplexed me, because I just know that my book of clippings from college is here in this house somewhere. It could not have been disposed of, because anybody that knows me knows that there is plenty of "pack rat" in my veins, something I got from my fraternal grandmother, who would not throw much out.

I remember that when I worked near my grandparents' house in Flushing, Queens, I would go over there after work to see how they were doing. They were both in their late 80s at that time, and my grandmother was starting to really feel the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease.

I would see how they were, and then when I was ready to leave, my grandfather would give me a bag of junk to get rid of.

"Don't let mama know that I am giving this to you to throw out," he would tell me as I took the bag and left to go home.

So I am convinced that that blue looseleaf is here somewhere, and it will probably turn up when I am least expecting it.

So be it. At least I was able to find my scrapbook of articles that I did for the Island Ear newspaper in the 1980s through the mid-1990s.

That was a really fun gig. I wrote a fairly regular column for that free entertainment publication for more than a decade, and I wrote about everything from "The Wonder Years" TV show to doing reviews of various recordings.

Part of the job was interviewing some celebrities, and I did plenty of them from all areas of the entertainment world.

For one column, I interviewed John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful. For another, I interviewed comic Soupy Sales. For yet another, I spoke with ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. For yet another, I talked with then-rising young star Jamie Foxx.

It was a great job. I didn't get paid a thing, but I did get lots of free CDs, some videos, I went to concerts for free, and I met a lot of people that I would have never had a chance to meet if I wasn't doing this job.

What a time that was!

And it all started with Raven de la Croix.

Look, everyone has to start somewhere. The greatest writers, our most famous literary giants, all had to get to the first rung of the ladder before they could get to the second or third rung as they moved to the top.

I am not saying that I am a literary giant by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I can hold my own, and I also had to get on that first rung of the ladder, and it just happened to be with my interview with the actress who starred not just in Russ Meyer films, but who appeared in a whole slew of other films, too, on the level of something called "The Double D Avenger" and the like.

Heck, not everyone can be Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis. Nor would a lot of actresses want or need to be on that level.

We all have to start out somewhere ...

The postscript to the "Up!" story is that if I remember correctly, that interview and story that I did went over pretty well with a lot of people, and a few weeks later, my editor told me that some other people had contacted him, and that they asked if I wanted to do an interview with the star of another X-rated movie that was coming out called "The Erotic Adventures of Pinnocchio."

Yes, that is right, you read it correctly, "The Erotic Adventures of Pinnochio."

Use your imagination what that film was about.

I remember that I thought about it for a moment, but turned the job down flat--I guess I had had enough of interviewing X-rated starlets at the time--and that was the last time in my life that I was offered such a job.

If I remember the story, the film had been shot a few years earlier, had perhaps rested on the shelf for a while with no takers, but with the openness of our society being felt in the mid-1970s--that pre-AIDS feeling that we could do anything we wanted to without repercussions--the film was being re-released in 1976 or early 1977.

It was being paired with "The Erotic Adventures of Cinderella" or something of that ilk, and the idea was to promote this double feature to college-age audiences.

And who would I have interviewed if I agreed to do this?

Well, I believe it would have been someone by the name of Dyanne Thorne, who went on to become something of a huge star in her own right in soft core movies that created a genre in themselves, Nazi sexploitation movies, starting with the extremely notorious "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS," which even to this day is one of the most debauched films ever made. The success of this movie launched numerous "Ilsa" sequels and copycat sexploitation films well into the 1980s, particularly in Europe.

Oh well, it was not meant to be.

Now, I write about military commissaries and exchanges--supermarkets and department stores for service members and their families--and that is a far cry from interviewing X-rated damsels.

Just another rung up the ladder, I guess.

Speak to you again on Monday. Have a great weekend.