My Beautiful Car Passes a Milestone

             On my way to work at the Capitol last night, my beautiful 2006 HHR passed a milestone.

             I bet if you tried to take a picture in the dark while looking at the road, you’d be blurry too!  Yes, my car went to 100,000 miles.

             I bought it used on February 21, 2009, from a now-defunct dealership, City Chevrolet.  We made a friend of our salesman, a great guy named John Brown, when we bought two cars from him (for Joyce and Julie) one day and then I came back the next week and found this jewel on the Certified lot.
  

            It’s just my perfectly comfortable size.  And our son Matthew, who’s 6’4”, says it’s too small for him to drive comfortably.  BONUS!

            Of course, I’ve done a few additions.  Zip-tied and glued to my antenna is a Superman Returns figure (it seemed the appropriate pose).

 
             Now, hanging from the rear-view mirror is Beppo the Super-Monkey.  He came as part of a pack with a “Superman Robot” from DC Direct in 2006.

 

            Speaking of monkeys …. this brass guy is double-sticky taped to my dash above my steering wheel.  As you can see, he is regarding himself in a mirror.  This is a reference to a joke wherein you hand somebody a mirror and say, “Wanna see a monkey?”  Of course, when they see themselves, you can say, “There it is!”

            Here’s somebody’s blog post about a duplicate critter: http://www.cowart.info/blog/?p=3094

             A great design feature of the HHR is the top-dashboard stowaway compartment.  What makes it great is that the lid opening is the perfect size to hold a CD vertically.  I like to stand up the “now playing” CD so I can easily read the back of the CD case and see what song is playing.

            A few years ago, Joyce bought this license plate frame for me.

            Barring a terrible calamity, I hope my old friend shares many more adventures with me!

  

Leonard Nimoy in “Vincent” -- April 1980

          Leonard Nimoy, recently of STAR TREK: The Motion Picture, toured in a one-man show called Vincent.

          This was big news for Trekkers!  A chance to see one of the Big Three in person!

          These are the ads and promo articles before the show in various newspapers.

          Well, Joyce and I went with our friends Ed and Kathy Porter.  Ed decided to get sneaky and try to track down Nimoy’s hotel.  So he called every OKC hotel in the downtown area and said he was with Nimoy’s advance team, calling to confirm Nimoy’s reservation.

          Pretty tricky, eh?  Sure enough, ONE hotel responded.  I don’t recall the name of the place back then, but nowadays it’s the downtown OKC Sheraton hotel.  Mr. Nimoy’s nomme-de-guerre was, if I recall correctly, “Mr Cutlip.”  It was pronounced just that way.

          Kids, don’t try this at home!  I may observe that this “phone spoof” was a lot easier in 1980, when caller ID did not exist in the everyday world.

          We attended the Wednesday night show, the four of us.  This was April 30, 1980.

          This is what a Kodak 110 camera caught of the set.

          It was a great time.  The only thing I recall specifically about the performance was that in the act break between the two parts, the PA system played music from one of Bizet’s L'Arlésienne  suites, while various Vincent van Gogh paintings were projected on a scrim above the set.

          And, after the show, we conducted a sneak attack.  The four of us went to the (now-) Sheraton hotel and waited in the lobby.  Eventually Nimoy and a few other folks came in.

          Mr Nimoy was very gracious to the starstruck fans that invaded his off-duty time and signed a few autographs, in our programs and a couple of books.

           I’m kind of embarrassed nowadays to observe the bleed-through at the upper left of this scan.  This book was from The Book Rack, bought used.  In other words, Nimoy didn’t even get a commission from it!

          I hope he didn’t notice that part.

          After only bothering “Mr Cutlip” for a few minutes -- less than five, I promise! -- we let him alone and went back to Ed & Kathy’s whereupon we JUST HAD to document everything.

          So here we are holding up the show program he autographed.  Ed put the pen in a plastic bag.  For fingerprints?  Who knows?  (I’m the doofus on the right.)

          And the Oklahoman spake thus.  Below is the entire program from the show.

Note the autograph across the bottom of his bio!

 

          And that is how two fanboys stalked Leonard Nimoy.

          Evidently, Amazon sells a DVD of a performance.  I don’t know if this is a video of a live show, or something specially staged for video release.

See ya!