In the early days of the film industry, it was hard to find a good scream. Before the invention of sound bites, directors who needed a blood-curdling shriek from actors often got rather paltry sounding yelps. That is, until Private Wilhelm entered the scene. In the 1951 war classic Distant Drums, a soldier is dragged under water by an alligator as he wades through a treacherous Florida swamp. After the filming was completed, sound engineers recorded a series of screams that were added during post-production. Two years later, in The Charge at Feather River, a soldier named Private Wilhelm (played by Ralph Brooke) takes an arrow in the leg. Similar…
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You Can’t Compete with a Serial Killer How I lost to a ringer in The Dating Game
Barbara Tedesco was easily the hottest girl in my Poli Sci class. She was so hot, her aura screamed, “Don’t even bother to hit on me until you get your nose fixed, lose those ridiculous glasses and buy a new car.” So, when I ran into her several years later, I was surprised she remembered my name, let alone that she took the time to strike up a conversation. I should have known she was up to something. “How would you like to be a contestant on ‘The Dating Game?” she asked. After graduation, Barbara took a job as a production assistant with the ABC Television Network in Los Angeles.…
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The $84 Windpipe Never order anything you can't spell
“Never eat at a restaurant where the waiters wear spoons around their necks.” That was the cost-conscious advice my rabbi proffered as I was trying to decide where to celebrate the first day of my girlfriend’s Rumspringa. I met Abhilasha Maddox online through Hotamishsingles.com and wanted to mask my stinginess by treating her to an upscale dinner at Reynaldo’s. My hope was that she would abandon her religious way of life to come live with me in the room I rented from my parents. As it turns out, my rabbi wasn’t referring to a waiter – the correct term is sommelier – and Reynaldo’s was crawling with them. Plus, those…
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Golf Course Thugs The subtlties of contact golf, pilfering balls and napalming fairways
I love sports. And, considering there isn’t an athletic gene in my entire family, I manage to do pretty well at anything I decide to try – except golf. Looking back, I’m not really sure why I took up golf in the first place. It’s the one sport that, the harder I tried, the worse I got. I was in high school at the time and started hanging around a tough bunch of thugs. Well, not really thugs as you know them. We weren’t covered with tattoos, didn’t wear smelly leather jackets, take drugs or hang around street corners fleecing old ladies of their social security checks. None of us…
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Disneyland… The Happiest Summit on Earth Greetings and salutations from the highest peak in Anaheim, California
By the time the kids were let out for summer vacation, the climbing window for summiting Mt. Everest had already come and gone. I promised Shimmel that I would take him and his 8-year-old sister Toiba to the top of Mt. Everest to celebrate his circumcision, but none of the guide companies would have anything to do with a middle-aged, sedentary writer and his two irascible children. So, we shifted gears and made plans to climb The Happiest Peak on Earth – the Matterhorn. Not the legendary mountain in Zermatt, but the steel and cement behemoth located in the center of Disneyland. At 147 feet, the Matterhorn towers high over…
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