Robert A. Mills, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Robert A. Mills
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME . . . 3/20/2010 1:51:21 PM
Incredible as it is, modern technology dominates every aspect of our lives. If it were not for the electronic microchip, we would not have, as we know and love it, television, radio, computers, the internet, e-mail, VHS, DVD, CD, TiVo, digital photography, cell phones, iPods, e-books and news journals, pre-programmable coffee makers, runaway Toyotas, air conditioning, automatic heating—even remote controls we can never find. The list goes on and on, ad infinitum.
And what’s most amazing: less than .05% of the world’s population has a definitive clue what, besides electricity, makes a microchip work! I know I certainly don’t—and come to think of it, I’m not even sure electricity is required!
My most memorable exposure to the world of ‘high-tech’ occurred in the early ‘70s when our TV station got its first videotape machine. I stared in wide-eyed wonder at the two Ampex monsters and was handed a hunk of 2” brown plastic tape. “That’s it,” the techie told me. I held the tape up to the light as I would a strip of film, muttering, “I can’t see a damn thing.”
“The picture and sound,” I was informed (when the techie stopped laughing,) “is created by the electronic chip that rearranges the microns on the tape.”
Right. Just what I figured.
A week or two later I came to possess an electronic marvel that superceded any I would ever own: a device I picked up at Radio Shack for $1.49 that allowed me to record phone conversations onto an audio cassette. It was so simple I had it up and running in under an hour!
A length of wire 18” long with a single RCA-type plug on one end and a rubber suction cup on the other—you stuck the plug into an ordinary mini-tape recorder and, after licking the cup with your tongue, affixed the suction device to the outside of the telephone’s hand-held receiver. Voila! Both sides of your conversation was preserved for posterity! As a TV news reporter, I was now prepared for any and all contingencies.
The following Thursday I came into the studio and asked our switchboard operator if I’d had any calls. “Naw, nuthin special. Just some guy said he was Gregory Peck an’ wanted you to call him back. He left his nummer.”
Gregory Peck? A tingling growl started deep in my belly, and I snatched the orange message slip from her delicate hand. The number was alien to me: 212-355 3000—but the area code was New York City. “Call this number,” I said, breathlessly, “and see who answers.”
“It’s long distance,” she admonished.
“I’ll pay.”
“You better.” Meticulously, she dialed the number. Being slightly more perspicacious than I’d suspected, when they answered she said, “Sorry, I dialed wrong,” promptly disconnected and looked up at me. “Lady said it was the Waldorf Astoria. . . .You really know Gregory Peck?”
I sat in my office and gazed intently at the ‘While You Were Out’ message slip. Was it really him? What was he doing in New York? And at the Waldorf-A?
It had begun harmlessly enough a week ago. Our neighborhood in suburbia was made up mostly of doctors, dentists, nuclear physicists, Ph.Ds, judges, lawyers and college professors; we happened to be having dinner at the home of Moshe Riso, the Dean of Middle Eastern Studies at a major New York State university when he showed me a book he’d written on the history of Israel.
“If this were turned into a series,” I told him, “it would be perfect for PBS or HBO. Adapt it into a TV script, and I’ll call Ferdinand J. Smith—he knows everyone at HBO.” Of course, he didn’t but Prof. Riso didn’t know that. Smith had, however, written the HBO theme song and might know a name or two; being a friend and colleague, I felt comfortable bandying his name about.
It was Falashaad—the exotic Mrs. Riso—who said, “But you’ll need a narrator of international status—someone like Omar Sharif. Someone of impeccable repute and diction, someone of masterful skills!”
My wife spoke up and delivered the coup de grace: “If you could only get someone like Gregory Peck!”
“Good lord, he’d be perfect!” they all said, in grand harmony, and looked across the table at me. “You do know him, don’t you?” asked Riso, his eyes bugged out with excitement.
Never one to admit defeat while enjoying someone else’s chateaubriand and Absolut vodka martinis, I said I would contact ‘Greg’ the next day. That night I wondered if spousal mayhem could be adjudicated as justifiable homicide.
A letter outlining the proposition was addressed to Mr. Gregory Peck, c/o MCA Talent Agency, Hollywood, CA, with a cc: to Prof. Riso; it left my office b.c.b. in the afternoon’s mail, and I honestly thought that would be the end of it.
I had no idea who Peck’s agent was—MCA was the only firm that came to mind—and I was certain the letter would be returned undeliverable, and I would eventually inform the academician that “that bastard Peck didn’t even have the courtesy of tell me to go pound sand! Well, what did you expect? Hollywood! What a bunch of losers!”
