Enterprise

I see over at Section 31 that a high school and Zum Zum (Bavarian fast food) alumnus Doug Drexler is Senior Illustrator on the "Enterprise" sci-fi show based on Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek" series, started by NBC and Desilu. There's a museum in Jamestown, NY, on or near Lake Chautauqua, of Lucy and Desi Arnez, where she was from. The star of one of the Star Trek films ("Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" (1989, written and directed by William Shatner who presented Paris Hilton with her cool phrase award for "that's hot" at the MTV awards the other night). "Sybok" searching for "ShaKaRee" played by Laurence Luckenbill, is married to Lucille Ball's daughter. He was in the soaps too I'm told, and my girlfriend met him at a wedding a number of years ago, not his, (or hers) however. It was a sad day going by on the express bus past the Museum of Television and Motion Picture Arts in NYC (another in L.A.) when all nine screens in the window had Lucy Ball's portrait in them one cold winter day. Doug Drexler also did the makeup with a Brooklyn based make-up artist for the film "Dick Tracy" about which they were given an Academy Award for, at least that's how it looked on TV! Warren Beatty, "Dick Tracy" director and star, and other independant films, was just honored along with others including one of my favorites, Sir Elton John, and my mother's favorite, opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for life-long contributions to the performing arts. I once was a recruitment assistant for a "visual and performing arts" college in Buffalo, NY one summer, and a student there, where once the "Cleveland Quartet" lived in residence. As part of the "residential education" it also had different artists from the greater Buffalo, NY area come into seminars in the dorm to discuss their ideas and careers. One particularly well attended was a historian's research on "Sex and the White House". I'm not sure what happened to the program, part of a larger idea, where people (and students!) with similar interests (history: Vico College, pre-medicine, math, visual and performing arts: College B, women's studies college, radical studies, etc.) were to be in the "colleges" within the University on the new campus then opening in Amherst, NY, said to have been designed for said purposes. Maybe too utopian. The new campus had been built on a marsh and the first New York State Law School (so far the only, one proposed for Stony Brook U. once) opened at the same time in 1974. That famous piano parodist from the Watergate Hotel, PBS mainstay Mark Russell, used to be televised from the then new theater that opened there, ("piano plus politics equals parody" http://www.sptimes.com/2002/12/09/Floridian/Piano_plus_politics_e.shtml). Hope all the kinks worked out, I almost stepped into a five story abyss when an elevator opened with no car, it being above my head. I chased it up to the eighth floor but didn't catch the "hackers" I thought responsible. I say "hackers" because later I was assured that it couldn't possibly have happened (any other way). Strange, these days I remember going to a pet store with Doug Drexler's sister, a twin I think, in the paralegal profession last we talked, and seeing a small white chimpanzee there. That was before "Planet of the Apes" I think. Not completely albino either, maybe an evolving "link"? Or I was set up. Not too long after that Doug and a neighbor Mr. Fredrickson published a "Star Fleet Medical Reference" book, it was pretty good for the time, from Ballantine Books I think. I found it in a flea market in Pennsylvania. It's since disappeared. Live long and prosper!