Thursday, April 20, 2000
The Day We Met Jim Davis!
It was nineteen years ago that Hoade and I met Jim Davis, creator of Garfield.
Back then, Hoade and I were huge fans of Jim Davis, and we both had asprirations of being cartoonists ourselves. When we found out that Jim Davis was going to be at the local bookstore (at the Lauderdale Lakes Mall in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida. Alas it is no longer, having been transformed over the past nineteen years to a strip mall).
We were elated until we found out that the 20th of April fell on a Monday and that our parents would most likely not let us skip school (let's see … 1981 … that would put us in the 6th grade). But fortunately, Easter that year fell on the 19th which meant we had the following monday, the 20th off and we could go meet our idol—Jim Davis!
My maternal grandfather drove us the few miles to the Lauderdale Lakes Mall, were we promptly got in line with our Garfield books (I think there were only three out by that time) and a few samples of our work.
At 2:32 pm, Eastern we met Jim Davis! He not only signed our books but our sample cartoons as well! Being the two youngest people at the signing brought us to the attention of a Miami Herald reporter and we ended up being profiled. They even printed Hoade's cartoon in the newspaper (I would link to the article, but I think being nineteen years ago it might not be available via the web).
Since then we've gone on to careers other than cartooning.
“Seven Girlfriends”
Normally I have a weekly dinner meeting with Chuck about a small side project we're working on. But this week it was canceled, and my friend Jeff's fiance was given four tickets to see a preview of Seven Girlfriends, a movie about a man who has a breakup with his girlfriend and he goes on a journey to see what went wrong with his past girlfriends.
Okay, so it sounds like High Fidelity and in some ways it is similar. Much like Deep Impact and Armageddon are similar.
But this was interesting not because of the film (which is quite good and rather funny, although at times it's a bit of dark humor) but because both the director of the film, Paul Lazarus and the main star of the film, Timothy Daly, were both at the viewing to help promote the film. Tim Daly is quite funny in person (“This film was the … latest film I've done …”) and Paul Lazarus reminded me of a younger Richard Gere.
