OK, back to the serious shit here.
The next day after school got out, I hopped in my '39 Chevy with the vacumn shift (that vacumn shift gets important in a future story involving bodybuilders racing cars down some huge San Francisco hills -that Steve McQueen movie scene was based on some of our shinanigans, so I've been told) and head off to Coit Tower.
They started without me and the whole area is mobbed with people wanting to see a movie with Kim and Frank being made, but we had to be content with mere glimpses of the stars from at least 30 - 40 yards away.
But I really wanted to meet Kim much closer up and talk to her if the opportunity arose.
So I schemed up a plan and hitched my belt and followed through. There was a stack of electrical wires off to the side by one of the studio vehicles so I went over and picked up one of the rolls and swung it over my shoulder and walked through the crowds as well as the police barrier by simply saying, "Make a hole! Coming through!". And like Moses I passed through a wide opening of willing movie fans and the "copper" whose duty it was to keep 'little people" like me from interferring with the stars even lifted the barrier as a courtesy to a hard working, movie making, electrical wire person assistant. (I forget the official working title for such a person, but there actually is one and he gets screen credits and residuals now and a damn good salary).
SO now I'm 17 with an electrical cord hung over my shoulder and heading towards all those lights and the camera and another bunch of "hanger on-ers" who always travel with the stars (Mark Wahlberg and Eddie Murphy have carried on with that tradition tremendously> Just ask them and see who has the most. And all these "hanger oners" are even fed on the set.).
And there in the center with San Francisco Bay as the background stands Kim and Frank doing a scene all by their lonesomes. And some director says, "Cut! Wrap!" and Sinatra turns and says someting like "Adios" and heads off for his limosine. And Kim simply stands there looking like an angel all dressed up with no place to go while all the rest of the production crew go about doing whatever production crews are supposed to do.
So I see my chance and drop the electrical cord and walk up to Kim and say, "Great job, Miss Novak! We're gonna love this movie!". And she looks up and looks me in the eye and says, "Thank you. I think it's going to be a great movie too!" And then she smiled and ........
Her makeup starts to crack around every smile-line that a face can make during the smiling process.
And she says, "Oh dear! I'll falling apart!". And that is when one of the crew members decides to interrupt our Picnic and invite himself to ruin our day. He must have been the production tissue paper guy because he offered Kim (I called her Kim now that we were this far in our relationship) a tissue from a big box of tissues and she wiped some makeup off the corners of her mouth and asked what job I had on the set and I told here I didn't have any job on the set but I was her biggest high school fan in the whole damn city of San Francisco. And then I told her how commited I was to meet her and how I pulled it off and she started laughing and grabbed my arm to keep from falling over and congratulated me for a job well done because it was really difficult to pull such a stunt on a movie set.
And as she laughed and held on to my arm more makeup fell off and with an "Oh,dear!" she shook my hand and said goodbye to excuse herself to get cleaned up as the sun slowly set beyond the Golden Gate. And then she was gone. She was "outta here".
Cut! Wrap! Print! And i faded to black.
And that was the extent of my Picnic with Kim. Sad to say but we never met again because most of us only get 15 minutes and I think I owe someone five.
(Slowly fade to black with Moonglow in the background).
How's that, Keith!? Only part of this that may be in error is - '39 vacumn shift Chevy'. My uncle had a car dealership so I had a good number of old cars when I was a kid and actually forget most of them. If he couldn't sell it, I got to use it. It could have been the cherry "41 Ford.
