From the cradle to the grave, life is a mass of contradictions, buddy boy. Whattaya expect?, cruising yer way to the Hollywood Hills Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland Drive. You think you’re the real Cream Cheese Bandit from Booty Junior High near Coney Island, where he kissed up to Charlie Chan’s wife, getting the George Washington role, in the 8th6th grade Senior play.
He bullied, bluffed his way, a subsequent riveter “bsing” his riveting caper, pretending to be one of the boys. On and off the scaffold riveters on the Douglas Bombers, during WW2.
The boardwalk where Archie Leach before he metamorphosedinto Cary Grant, Mae West’s leading contender for the inevitable…recognition by his peers and an convincing like acclaim for the roles he played out over his lifetime..
II
But with all the cyber space social media sound and fury, “Allthe world’s a stage. All the men and women merely players.They have their entrances and their exits” playing out their roles.
The incarnation of O J Simpson in that Brentwood, California murder of his divorced wife and Ron Goldman, was reincarnated by the L.A. police, recovering a knife, buried for some twenty years since O.J ‘s trial of 1994, acquitting him of the slaughter of the two victims, in the surroundings of his Brentwood manor, befitting a Mandrake the Magician hippedity wiggling halfback at USC and the NFL.
Mandrake the Magician…”now you see him….now you don’t.”
III
But for our interview with Phyllis Diller, the comedienne and Bob Hope regular (after Jerry Colonna and Vera Vague), Phyllisbecame a Brentwood lifer.
She described her notoriety, honing her comedic intelligence into guffaws of absurdity…Living in Greenwich Village, disciplining her art and comic timing. “You see those bubbles in that glass. I like to think of myself, as those bubbles rising to the top” , resounding Norman Vincent Peale’s creed of positive thinking.
“Your character is your fate,” she said, her eyes resting on thechampagne bubbles, rising to the top.
March 4, 2016 The City that never sleeps.
