The Sunday Memory Drawer - The Home Office

I just spent a week in New York and, for some mystical reason, I was calling up memories in my apartment there on the Hastings-Yonkers border.  I got to stand on my balcony and shoot some video of a powerful storm blowing through last Saturday.  Nature's fury was grand.  As I looked out at the nature preserve my apartment building is nestled in, I could hear the sound of trees snapping all around.  I lamented that I never really used that terrace while I was living there full time.  Memories made and memories never realized.

That said, my very favorite room of my apartment is quite small.  Right off the galley kitchen, it was serving as a baby's room when I bought it.  Those sellers were a bit deceitful at the time.

"This is really a second bedroom."

Umm, no, it's not.  There's no closet and, as soon as the kid is over six months old, the room is way too crowded.  It really makes the adjoining living room smaller and it is essentially created with a fake wall.  But, when I bought the unit, I opted to utilize it as an office temporarily.

Almost twenty years later, it's still an office.  And the place I spend the most time in whenever I am there.  That's where my laptop gets parked on the desk I bought in 1990.  On the walls of the rather claustrophobic enclosure are memories of my pre-Los Angeles life.  College diploma.  Family photos.  A painting of a White Castle, gifted to me by my writing partner after I mentioned that my last good memory of my father was eating lunch with him at a White Castle.  A terrific Lucy poster of the Vitameatavegamin episode and an artist rendering of the opening credits to "The Honeymooners."

There's a bookcase loaded with works that I read perhaps twenty or thirty years ago.  White pages that are now brown and a little dusty.  There's a floor fan that certainly comes in handy during the summer when the heat of the laptop makes it toasty in there.  In another corner is a cabinet full of laser discs.  What the hell are they?  Well, back when, I was one of the original collectors of this once-pristine way to show a movie on home video.  It was that brief period in between VHS and DVD.  Yes, the letters were LD and I have a bunch of them.  In my New York abode, the original laser disc player has been disconnected in favor of a Sony Blu-Ray player.  Life, technology and time moves on.

Meanwhile, in the corner you see above, there stands a file cabinet.  Unfortunately, there is no way to romanticize this hunk of steel.  It's a file cabinet.  Clunky and certainly no work of art.  And it's jammed full of Pendaflex folders.  

An alphabetized edition of my life.

A few of the drawers hold personal artifacts and papers.  Death certificates of both parents and my paternal grandparents.  Tax returns of my dad and myself back in the day when there was a Reagan in the White House.  Head shots of a past love.  A copy of my will which is being rewritten shortly.  And all the papers from the US War Department regarding the death of my dad's brother, the guy I was named after, who was killed in World War II action.

On the aforementioned weatherful Saturday afternoon, I was looking for an old baseball scorebook.  I was searching for a notation I made during the 1988 National League Championship between the Mets and the Dodgers.  A friend is writing a book about the 1988 World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers and he might want to use a photo of that notation in his work.  Well, I found that pretty quickly.  A five minute hunt.

But I then opened the drawer above it.  And sat there poring through its contents for the next four hours.  Poring while it was pouring. Thunder, lightning, and wind were outside.  I was inside, remembering a part of a life. 

Mine.

Indeed, this time around, I was dealing with a Saturday Memory Drawer.

This one particular drawer is filled with writing.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of writing. 

Careers once pursued.  Careers never abandoned.  Trying and trying and trying.  And writing and writing and writing.  Authoring with partners past and partners current.  I couldn't help myself.  I had to look.

I found the original contractual agreement with my former writing partner, the erstwhile Djinn from the Bronx.  I dug up the original contractual agreement with my more recent writing partner.  I noticed that the language was identical.  Obviously the former had acted as the prototype for the current.

This cabinet was full of spec scripts, which fledgling writers do in order to gain the attention of anybody.  These files offered a virtual potpourri of television history.  Yes, I was doing it for that long.

Our very first spec script for "Rhoda."  Remember that old chesthut?  Loaded with typos but that was usually what happened when the Correct-O-Type ran out on my old Smith Corona electric typewriter.

A very engaging letter from my writing friend "Joe" who I profiled here several months ago.  He really loved the "Rhoda" and thought our prospects were good.

Yeah, right.

More TV history poured out.  A spec script for "Taxi."  Yes, that "Taxi."  I looked at the title page with the cast list.  Two of those folks are already dead. 

I went through my spec "One Day at a Time" phase primarily because I was going through my Valerie Bertinelli phase.  Oh, wait, that never really ended.  Meanwhile, I read through the first ten pages and started to scream.

"Get to the plot already!!!"

I noticed how much page space I wasted with needless dialogue as characters entered a room.

Hi, Ann.  Hi, Barbara.  Hi, Julie.  Hi, Schneider.

Shut up, Len!

There were some pilot scripts concocted for original ideas back in the day when some goofy mail room clerk from the William Morris Agency wanted to be our agent.  A show about the maintenance staff at a luxury Manhattan condominium.  It was such a rip-off of "Taxi."  What was I thinking???

And then we had tried to adapt the radio situation comedy I had produced for WFUV at Fordham University.  "Diploma City" on TV??  Really, really, really???  I read the first scene and my gag reflex was officially activated.  Again, did I really waste this much screen time with banal banter.

Hi, Allen.  Hi, Steve.  Hi, Milton.

The most interesting spec script I found was one I had done for "Lou Grant."  It was the only time we had ventured out of the three-camera live audience sitcom format.  As I read, this one drew me in.  I haven't seen the show for some time, but the characters came back to me in a heartbeat.  Wow, Len, this was a good one.  What the hell happened?

I know there was a time gap where I didn't write, but you can't tell in my file cabinet.  The folders continue with the only difference being the last name of the writing partner I was working with.  Years later, I started to notice a vast improvement.  No longer did every character feel the compulsion to say "hi" when they entered a scene.

I found our first spec script...or my first with the new partner.  A "Murphy Brown" which had me laughing out loud.  The same was true for a hilarious "Golden Girls."  Boy, were we busy when we first teamed up.  We tried them all.

"Home Improvement."

"Mad About You."

"Frasier."

"Designing Women."

"The Wonder Years."  This one got us into a NYC writing workshop and I was particularly proud because it was all about my grandmother.

I found a folder full of sitcom ideas we had pitched to Suzanne Pleshette.  The concepts were quite good and still could live on.  The actress and star, however, would not.

Several Pendaflex folders are devoted to the kids sitcom we created for and with Linda Ellerbee.  This one kicked around for a few years and got us some decent coin.  It never got on the air, but the characters did live on in some paperback books allegedly authored by Linda.  For that, there would be no coin.

I find the last version of the pilot script for this middle-school variation on "Murphy Brown."  I flashback to the day where we had to fix the last scene
overnight.  Nickelodeon was expecting it the next morning.  It was summer and hot and muggy.  The A/C in the living room didn't exactly cool the home office.  But, there we were.  Me in the cushioned office chair.  My partner lying across the floor next to the fan.  We came up with gold.

But, ultimately, no real nuggets of such.  Yet, to this day, I will tell you that script was very, very good.

In our pre-LA days, we had developed a friendship through correspondence with the "I Love Lucy" co-creator, Madelyn Pugh Davis.  I've written here before of how that began.  I had forgotten, however, how many letters we did exchange.  The file cabinet reminded me of that.  There were almost two dozen letters over a two-year period.  I reread each one of them.  Sometimes, it was advice.  In one, she really had nothing to say, except she felt a need to check in with us.  Who writes letters anymore?  Well, we did.

I find the one letter where we make plans to meet on an upcoming trip to California.  She mentions lunch and that, given there would be food involved, her partner Bob Carroll Jr. would likely join us.  She signed off the letter with the following wish.

"I hope your trip to Hollywood goes a lot better than the one the Ricardos and the Mertzes had."

I read another letter where we get notes on a pilot script that is still, sixteen years later, alive as a viable body of work.

I close the file cabinet as the rain stops. 

Memories then.  And still memories now.  I keep on writing.  What else can I do?

When I recently had my NY apartment renovated, I discussed with my superlative contractor whether it was time to tear down the fake wall and make the living room larger.  His response was surprising.

"These days, a great selling point of an apartment is the presence of a home office."

Indeed.

Dinner last night:  Garlic chicken from Century Dragon.