Re: Andy Hardy's Model A Roadster: Boy, am I going to go off on a tangent here on the last day of this gd-damned horsesh*t year! At your own risk, here goes...
In the mid-1960's as an impressionable and malleable teenager still trying to figure out human nature, I was an avid "Tonight Show with Johnny Carson Show" devotee, owning a black and white TV in my upstairs bedroom. (My parents wanted to remove me from the rest of the down-to-earth family members in my isolation ward, so they gifted me this TV set to help towards that end) I rarely missed a Tonight Show episode. Lots of self-aggrandizing phony-baloney celebrities came and went each night, hawking their latest Hollywood achievement, deservedly or not. Usually not, as I slowly came to realize. Most were NBC plugs for upcoming network shows.
One night, Mickey Rooney was a guest: short, fat, bald, overbearing, interrupting, obnoxious and probably drunk as ever. Every celebrity was his dearest friend who loved him, according to him. Towards the end of the unbearably long conversation, Johnny said he had a surprise for Mickey. The curtain went up and there was the striped Andy Hardy Model A Roadster on stage that had appeared in most of the Andy Hardy film series. The audience applauded and while Mickey bounced up and down in his guest chair like a five year-old child (Who would have expected that???), Johnny off-handedly wondered if the car still ran. Although Mickey Rooney most certainly hadn't seen that car in 20+ years, he said "Sure, it runs!" and ran over to the Roadster and jumped into it, once again bouncing up and down. Just how the HELL did he "know" it still ran??? For all he knew, the engine was seized, the battery was dead and the gas tank was clogged with crud! I lost all respect for a very shallow Mickey Rooney celebrity after that. What a frigging know-it-all he came across as!!! That Tonight Show interview with an agonizing, irritating as Hell Mickey Rooney was tormenting enough without the self-assuredness, smugness and all-knowing attitude he had about that Model A's mechanical condition. He didn't even have the decency to thank Johnny or the Tonight Show staff for making the effort to locate and deliver the car to the show's sound stage. It was typically all about Mickey to the exclusion of other human beings. That night's show was a landmark in my opinion of "celebrities" that REALLY bothered me as a 13 year-old. It has continued to do so all these years later. I STILL get mad thinking about that night. Logical? Heck, no! But such are the life experiences that shape our view of the world. Even as a 75 year-old watching some of Mickey Rooney's "best" movies, I can't shake that evening where I saw how shallow and thoughtless some "celebrities" can be. I can't WAIT for the day that computer-generated movies replace "actors" who last year took your dinner order in a restaurant or scrubbed toilets in the local YMCA, who now tell us how we ought to vote and think. Yeah, these are the people we definitively ought to listen to to direct future action in this country.
'Sorry. *****, *****, *****. That's my personal connection with this striped Andy Hardy Model A Roadster. 'Got a more visceral one than that???
Marshall
