“Hey Mark, It’s Carrie. Where are you? We’re waiting for you… hurry up!”

So, back in 1983 (I believe it was during midsummer), Carrie Fisher mis-dialed a phone number and called the place I was staying at on West 95th Street to leave that message. Everyone I played it back to recognized the voice and through a bit of deductive reasoning it was figured out she may have been ringing up Mark Hamill. At the time it was believed he also lived somewhere on the West Side (I recall he was a frequent West Side Comics customer), so it was entirely possible his phone number started with that popular 864 exchange and Carrie got one or more of the last four numbers scrambled. There were no cellphones back then and I don’t think you could have an operator redial from an answering machine, so this was just another NYC thing to us. Celebrity sightings were commonplace back then with a walk up or down the West Side in any weather often yielding some pleasant surprises (yes, I have stories. No, not now, please).

Anyway, that tape was a hot thing for a while among friends until interest faded and we moved on to whatever life slipped our ways. But every so often I’d want to pop up at one of her book signings and ask my one question or I thought about just writing a quick note (or much later, email) to find out if she recalled mistakenly calling me. Of course I never got around to it, supremely trivial matter that it was in the grand scheme of things. Today’s yet another not good one, particularly as I’d been very much avoiding the internet for its rolling out of crappy real news, really fake news and a Pandora’s Box of all-too predictable downhill results of a rather unbalanced political season.

Here’s a funny – I’m also in the middle of replacing or updating important to lesser bits of my movie collection, so I only have Star Wars episodes 4-6 on VCD. As in Fox’s official overseas box set from VideoVan circa 2000. Ha and ha-ha. Well, I think I can run them on the laptop. Either that or go through a few bins looking for my Magnavox CD-i system. Or, hell… maybe I’ll just watch The Blues Brothers for the what, 30th or so time? Yeah, sure… that’ll do.

(thanks, rumblingthunder!)
 

*Or, that damn Empire. It loses all the time… but always wins over the long run, doesn’t it? Boo.
-GW