Some days I wondered if I was cut out for movies, considering background work was hardly challenging. Though, for me, it often seemed to be. One of those questionable moments happened while working on a television movie of the week called When the Bough Breaks, starring Ted Danson. During a scene filmed in a Studio City bar called Residuals, the director yelled to me, “Hey, you. What’s your name?”
“Michele.”
“Okay, Melissa.”
Actor Richard Masur was sitting at the bar, and in a slow, calm manner, corrected the director. “Her name is Michele, not Melissa.”
“Whatever!” The director continued pointing at me. “I want you to play a cocktail waitress.”
Someone handed me a tray of highball glasses filled with amber-colored drinks and ice.
“Okay,” the director continued. “Ted is going to storm out in a rage, and while he’s leaving, he’ll bump into you.”
I nodded and didn’t move until I heard, “Background! And action!”
Ted Danson stormed my way. Trying to be helpful, I threw a bit of my shoulder in as he swiped me, causing the entire tray of drinks I held to tip and spill all over the front of his shirt.
Dripping wet, Ted apologized to me—not once, but twice. “Oh wow, I’m sorry. So sorry,” he said, patting me on the back.
But why? It was my fault. My shoulder move caused the accident.
I didn’t say a thing because the director wasn’t pleased. I knew he wouldn’t yell at Ted Danson, but I was sure he would yell at a lowly extra named Melissa.
That damned Melissa. What a klutz!
***
Turns out, Ted Danson is truly a good guy. In retrospect, considering Ted’s drink-handling skills, he must’ve pitied me.
While Googling the Director, Waris Hussein, of “When the Bough Breaks,” (the one who yelled at me, constantly calling me Melissa rather than Michele) I found this photo of him fixing actor Richard Burton’s tie. I guess if you’re Richard Burton the director won’t yell at you and call you by the wrong name. Photo from this link.
One night in 2010, time-warped and the earth tilted the second our old friend Marv didn’t heed my husband Ian’s advice. It was the point of no return when Rod Serling should’ve stepped in to warn us:
“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”
As Marv drove from the Valley on the 101, Ian said, “Whatever you do, Marv, don’t take the Highland exit.” Everyone knows the evening Hollywood Bowl traffic will suck you in, keep you trapped until it spits you out into Hollywood, forever altered – and not in a good way. But Marv didn’t listen. He ignored Ian’s sage advice, drove onto the Highland exit, and plunged us into the hellish pit of metal, glaring headlights, and helpless drivers who sat in a mass stupor.
But we didn’t realize things are askew just yet.
“Doe a deer, a female deer…” Marv’s girlfriend, Lisa, and I, both sitting in the back seat, began singing (after seeing the Hollywood Bowl billboard’s announcement of a Sound of Music sing-a-long), completely unaware we were hurtling into another dimension, we naively continued singing more songs from Sound of Music, “High on a hill was a lonely goat herd… Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo…”
After an inconceivable amount of time–minutes? Hours? A few decades? Marv’s car was spit from Highland out onto Sunset Boulevard. We drove toward El Compadre, craving Mexican food and thirsting for margaritas. We passed the purple neon and blinking lights of the Seventh Veil and its “Live Nude Girls,” and The Saharan Motel, where I stayed my first night in LA.
Our starving foursome entered El Compadre. Musicians were playing mariachi music. People were smiling, laughing, dipping crispy tortilla chips into chunky red salsa, and swigging margaritas into their happy faces. We pushed through the joyous crowd. They all looked so happy with their chip-eating and margarita-swigging, we wanted to join them. But we learned the wait could be an hour, so we drove somewhere else.
That’s when we fell deeper into a dimension I never imagined would be possible to re-visit.
Like zombies, we drove down Melrose toward our destination. As if we didn’t live in a city with a wide array of Mexican restaurants, as if we didn’t have the power to make choices, we drove on. Nearing Paramount Studios, Marv, a drummer, told stories of recording at Studio 55.
We parked across from where Studio 55 once existed. Closed for years, Studio 55 was the reason we drove to Lucy’s El Adobe. It was where Marv, Ian, and many recording artists would go to grab meals on breaks from recording.
But that was back in the ‘70s.
“This is where Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt would have their tryst,” Marv said, opening the door to Lucy’s.
We walked into a room with gloppy amber-colored lights stuck to dingy walls, walls littered with bad Mexican motifs. Every other inch of the dingy walls was covered with photos of celebrities in frames. I did a double-take. Is that Suzanne Sommers, as Chrissy Snow from Three’s Company, smiling down at me with a ponytail stuck to one side of her head?
While none of us seemed impressed with the dated and slightly decrepit atmosphere, we tried to find a table. One side of the room was too dark. The other side had glaring light in one corner and was dim in another. Unlike El Compadre, there was no music and no laughter. Some people were seated, but they didn’t seem all that happy about it.
Yet we stayed.
We were seated in a room with a too-bright TV in the corner and a very long table of people who seemed to have nowhere better to go. So we joined them in their misery and took our place at a faux-wood, Formica-topped table.
To my right, over Marv’s shoulder, I couldn’t take my eyes off the bad painting of former California Governor Jerry Brown, circa 1978. He was in profile and seemed to have an eagle flying out of his nose. But I was starving and thirsty, so I did my best to ignore it.
Marv mentioned again, “Yeah, this is where Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt would have their tryst.”
“Marv, do you have some sort of quota to say the word tryst, tonight?” I asked.
Starving and thirsty, we still all managed to laugh.
Finally, a busboy gave us chips and salsa. The watery red salsa was accompanied by a sorry little wooden bowl, the size of a baby’s palm, with about sixteen chips sitting in it. Not great at math, even I calculated that’s only four chips per person.
We each took turns grabbing our first chip. I bit into mine. “Ewww. It’s cold and stale. And what’s with serving them in such a puny bowl? Haven’t they updated since the ‘70s? Don’t they know we now expect bucket-sized drinks and huge baskets of chips?”
Lisa nodded. Ian rolled his eyes. Marv quoted Woody Allen from Annie Hall: “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, “Yeah, I know–and such small portions.”
With scenes from Annie Hall drifting through my mind, I zoned in on the teeny tortilla chip bowl and realized that the bowl is exactly the same type my mom had back when I was a kid… in the 1970s. I looked up and stared at Jerry Brown and the eagle flying out of his nose. I shook my head. What decade are we in?
Now Lisa looked frustrated as she stared at the tiny wooden bowl. “This isn’t right. The chips are gone, but we still have lots of salsa.”
We all nodded. It was wrong. But I thought our waiter wouldn’t be bringing us chips very soon, because he probably thought, “Hey, why should I give these people decent service? I cater to the hoity-toity elite like Jerry Brown, Chrissy from Three’s Company, the kid from HR Puff-n-Stuff, the Breck Girl, Mr. Whipple from the Charmin toilet paper commercial…”
Finally, we got more stale chips. But we were then out of salsa. It must’ve evaporated since the time the waiter last visited.
Lisa was not happy. “Now we have chips, but no salsa.”
We all nodded. This was wrong. The chip-to-salsa ratio was askew. We were in a bad cycle.
The waiter may have brought us salsa, but then we’d have no chips; then he might have found time to get us some chips, but then we’d have had no salsa. Lisa was right.
That’s when I had an epiphany: Of course the chip-to-salsa ratio was out of whack. The entire night was off-kilter. Couldn’t everyone see what happened? We’d plummeted back into 1978 when Jerry Brown was Governor! That would explain the artwork and dated Hollywood “celebrities” on the walls.
We finally got our puny (which were supposed to be large but only according to a long-gone era’s measurement), strangely perfumey margaritas. The below-average tasting drinks confirmed my discovery of our time travel error. The only way this restaurant could still be opened in the present era of bigger, better, more choices and online restaurant review sites – it was still 1978. There’s no other explanation for how this place could survive.
The waiter never brought the guacamole Marv ordered and my chicken mole enchiladas tasted like they’d been drenched in chocolate syrup.
Who else would accept food and service that bad? The only people who would return again and again to this place are people who’ve sat in gas lines due to the oil crisis, people who’ve worn polyester pantsuits on a hot LA day, people who’ve hustled to disco music, people who laugh at Three’s Company and listen to their eight-track tapes of Abba and Captain and Tennille. Those are the people who don’t complain when served sixteen stale tortilla chips. They don’t know any better. They don’t have online review sites like Yelp. Heck, for them, the personal computer didn’t even exist yet.
I kept this information to myself, that we’d been hurtled deep into the darkness of the disco-era doldrums.
Lisa thought the only thing off-kilter was the chip-to-salsa ratio. I didn’t want to panic her any further. Ian, Lisa, and Marv only knew the night was out of balance, and it all felt wrong as if something was amiss, but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
We couldn’t wait to get out of that place, debated what sort of tip to leave, and scampered out as quickly as possible.
Would we ever return to the year 2010, when people are served large baskets of tortilla chips, where little joyless crap-hole restaurants could never survive on their reputation from over thirty years ago?
I started to worry. Will I go home and find someone’s Ford Pinto parked in my driveway? Will it be my home at all? Or will I have to revisit 8th grade in Northern California, wearing Ditto Jeans, my lips smeared with Bonne Bell strawberry gloss as I hum “Dream Weaver” to myself on my way to school… dreaming about my future? Please, no!
Once we left the restaurant, I surveyed the street outside—as we left it. We were back in 2010. We wouldn’t be driving home in an AMC Pacer. We’d made it back to the future – to the present. Never again would Lisa have to suffer the outrage of chips without salsa, because we, the people of the 2000s, had learned to put chips in large baskets. We were back to where computers have come far beyond Pong! Never again would I take our present day for granted. I was done dabbling in time travel even if there was some great music back then and Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, and John Travolta were all hot.
Maybe I hallucinated the entire time warp thing and got carried away with all the Jerry Brown art and musty Mexican motif.
Once home, I was excited to be back in my very own place, ran to my computer, and went online to post a review of Lucy’s El Adobe: “Just don’t!”
Standing behind me, as I typed my last “!” was Rod Serling:
“If you think it’s possible to return to the past without any consequences, think again. Once it’s done, everything you know will go out of balance. This is the Twilight Zone.”
Dedicated to our much loved and missed friend, Marvin Kanarek, an artist, drummer, architect, and lover of stories. This goofy tale made him giggle.
Here’s an excerpt from my book Craving Normal:
