Stro

[Greg]

Those have always been my goals.

[The Queen]

I am in total alignment with those goals.

[Greg]

Okay. I'm beginning to have DM Time Displacement. I'm having a hard time figuring out what day it is despite my religious devotion to my scheduling calendar. The only things of value are what is on the calendar. So, I know today I am talking to Sheila Thompson and Buzz Hurst. But I couldn't really tell you what else is supposed to happen normally for this day.

It could be whiplash from the 2 weeks I spent back east. We were on the run for half of it and the other half we spent sitting around the NYAC. Although I didn't sit much. I went out with the cameras and the drone on several days to find spots Michael might have haunted.

The day HK and I landed on two separate flights, huge thunderstorms battered the east coast threatening all air travel. My flight didn't have a problem from start to finish. The sky cap grabbed my six bags at the curb so I didn't even have to rent a cart to get them into the terminal. Although I kept getting threatening text messages about delayed flights, we only took off about 20 minutes late.

I had booked HK to arrive at Newark about an hour after me. When I landed, I had a flood of text messages from him about mechanical problems with his flight. I ended up waiting about 3 hours for him. I had time to get all my bags to the car rental and then the car rental people were nice enough to let me leave the car their while I waited. 

Since I had left the terminal, I was stranded on the opposite side of security from all the restaurants. I dined on a lovely bag of potato chips from a kiosk that didn't take cash.

After getting the rental car, I waited at the curb for HK for an additional twenty minutes while the world's slowest conveyor brought him his bags. Thankfully, they don't hassle you too much waiting at the curb in Newark. I just had to fight with a million cars who also waited for passengers to get away from the curb.

I had a nice dyslexic moment on the way to the hotel. We needed to get to route 287 and of course there was a route 278 along the way that gave me a panic that I had missed our road.

We stayed at the Doubletree by Hilton in Somerset in a spot that would give us equal distances between our New Jersey interviews.

On the first day, we interviewed Paul Levy in the town of Princeton. He had booked us a closet to do the interview at the Princeton library. I did some talking and had us upgraded to a lovely conference room that overlooked the street. We might have done better in the closet because of the noise. At one point, a man with a leaf blower stationed himself on the sidewalk below for fifteen minutes. I'm betting he saw us and decided to help out.

After the interview, we asked Paul Levy where to eat. He said out of town. He mourned the passing of all his favorite restaurants in the town of Princeton. Since, we were a minute away, HK and I strolled the campus for a few minutes. Ah, to be back in college.

On Day 2, we did the double interview. We had Tom Losonczy in the morning and Herb Cohen in the afternoon. Tom lived in a great house on the top of hill overlooking a forest of trees with their leaves changing color. Tom only told us one story off the record. It had to do with Columbian marching powder. Tom also told me I needed to contact Bob Dow.

Since we did our interview fast and had time to kill, we returned to our hotel in between interviews. I emailed Bob Dow to see where he was located and whether he would be up for an interview.

Herb Cohen lived on the bottom of a two level duplex. The kids on the floor above us decided that during the interview would be the perfect time for them to practice their clogging in hobnail boots. Herb also wouldn't shut off his computer so we got a lot of message pings on the sound recording. Herb also assured us he was in contact with Neil Diamond, his High School friend, and that he would forward our message of a request for an interview. Herb's apartment also had a less than pleasing scent that I kept smelling for the rest of the evening.

Bob Dow emailed me back and said he was up for an interview. We went back and forth about the time and where to meet. I eventually realized he was also in New Jersey, south of Princeton. I told him we should just cover over now, Friday, and meet with him. He said okay but not until the afternoon.

Originally, HK and I were to drive in through Redhook in Brooklyn and maybe see some sights on the way to the NYAC. Now, we were going to be an hour further away, pushing us late into rush hour traffic. But it was part of the job.

Seeing how much money Bob Dow has, I probably wouldn't have been as pushy. He's a retired investment manager that bought the house across the street from the school he wanted his daughter to attend. When we sat down, he cracked a bottle of wine from his own vineyard in Bordeaux. That kind of money. Winery in France kind of money.

But he talked to us. And seemed to enjoy killing a bottle of wine with HK while telling stories of Micheal D'Asaro.

So, Friday rush hour traffic in New York. Good times. It was about a 2 and a half hour drive normally from where we started in New Jersey. And the traffic wasn't too horrendous until we got to the Lincoln Turnel. It took us 45 minutes to get through the Lincoln tunnel section. Not knowing the traffic politics, I was also in the wrong lane when I got out of the tunnel for our turn uptown towards the NYAC. Instead, we set in this Lord of the Flies intersection. People kept jockeying for position to eventually get through the lights in front of us. No one paid attention to the rule that you don't enter an intersection unless you can leave the intersection.

The drive up Ninth avenue was equally horrible. Lots of stopping and staring at the flickering billboards.

Fortunately, the New York Athletic Club they had valet parking to take the car away and a bell hop to take our bags up to our rooms. We got to stay at the NYAC courtesy of Soren Thompson, who is president of the Fencing Inter-league at the club. 

There is also a dress code for the main area of the club, so I had spent the majority of the day in dress shoes, slacks, and a collared shirt just so I wouldn't be booted out of the club.

More to come.

[Greg]

I'm skipping ahead to Friday November 17th. Some day I'll return to the New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts saga.

It's been a cranky week for me. I was in San Diego on Monday and Tuesday. I was driving in a lot of Los Angeles traffic on Wednesday and Thursday. I'm out of practice with dealing with it so it was bugging me.

On Thursday evening, we interviewed Nilo Otero, one of Michael's students from Halberstadt and also the man who took the last lesson ever from Stro at the Westside Fencing Club in Los Angeles. It was a pretty good interview. He had lots of good profanity laced stories about the Halberstadt days. But in the end he screwed me.

We had all the gear packed up. We were saying our goodbyes at the door to Nilo's apartment and HK hands Nilo his business card, the one with the 'Stro' logo on it. Nilo looks at the card and says "Oh, do you want to know how Stro got his nickname?" Oh, fuck you. All the gear is packed and you are going to solve one of the key stories in our narrative off camera? Fuck you.

I told him I would come back. He thought I was joking. He doesn't know me well.

And I was getting grumpy with HK. I was getting really tired of HK telling stories about himself during the interviews. Or even worse sharing his opinions about D'Asaro in long winded discourses. I almost wish he knew nothing about D'Asaro so he would spend the time learning about Michael from these people we were talking to. The problem stems from the fact that HK loves this interview show on the Audition network with Sam Jones. In it, Sam Jones interviews famous people and Jones shares his insights, too. It's a two camera show shot in Black and White. Very artistic. 

But our interviews aren't two cameras. There is no point in hearing what HK has to say. The point of the exercise is to get auditory pictures of Michael. Anything beyond that is is self indulgent naval gazing.

So, Friday morning as I'm on my walk, I spend the majority of the walk trying to figure out a way to get HK to focus on the task at hand in the most diplomatic of ways. I couldn't find one.

Our first interview of the day was with Michael's sister, Barbara. She lived on the other end of a freeway full of traffic. She confessed on the phone she didn't know much about Michael except she was angry at him for being their mother's favorite. I was worried she wasn't going to be there when HK and I arrived. I had sent two emails and called her to no response. I thought she might be scared and was going to blow us off.

I said as much to HK after I had rung the door bell on Barbara's front porch.

But surprise. She opened the door and was sort of happy to see us. She again confessed that she didn't have much to say about Michael because of the five year difference in their ages.

We sat down at her living room table and she started talking. And she talked for about an hour straight. She talked about everything in sort of a shotgun stream of conscious fashion. We heard about her favorite show Four Weddings. We heard about her bowling league. We heard about the immigrant problem. She talked about her son.

At one point, I managed to ask if she had read the questions I had sent her. She said no. I handed her the list for her to go over. She did but she then started to answer the questions to us. I tried to get her to stop and maybe just answer them once I had the cameras set up. That lasted about a minute before she continued down the list, answering the questions as she went.

And her answers weren't all that great or authoritative. She really didn't know much about Michael's life except for a few almost worthwhile snippets.

I was starting to think I would just let her ramble on and then find a graceful way to make my exit. HK started to pick up my hints that we weren't going to be filming Barbara.

So, HK asked if he could set up his scanner to scan the four pictures she had showed us when we walked in. Barbara said sure.

I continued to talk while HK scanned. 

And then Barbara said she had a picture of her son at Michael and Gay's wedding where her son wore Michael's hat while her son was getting him some punch. Me, being the crack journalist that I am, asked if I could see that picture. She went to the hallway and brought out one of those frames that has multiple pictures in it behind mattes. As she pointed to her son, I noticed a small black and white picture as well. Barbara said that was her and Michael when Michael appeared to be ten. Then she pointed to a picture of Michael, Gay, and Michael's father.

My immediate terrible thought was how to get these photos out of the frame so we could scan them. I couldn't photograph them through the glass because the glass was dirty.

Then Barbara mentioned she had pictures of Michael, I think, at his prom with his first wife, Leonora Federico. Wait! What? 


I asked if we could see those, too. Barbara got up and went into her den. I followed. She pulled out a plastic drawer that was full of pictures. Holy crap. It turns out her father took lots of pictures. LOTS OF PICTURES. Yeah. The day got better.

I stood by Barbara at the dining room table as she hunted through the drawer looking for the prom pictures. And she would find pictures from Michael's confirmation and set them aside, since they weren't the prom pictures she was looking for. I kept grabbing them from her and handing them to HK to scan. She kept telling me I didn't want this picture or that picture. I kept contradicting her. At one point, all I wanted to do was push her out of the way and sort through the photos myself. Because she would look at the top photo in a batch and decide not to look at any more of them. I was desperate to sort through each of them. I also asked if I could pull the photos out of the frame. Bless you, Barbara, for saying 'Sure".

HK had quite the stack of photos to scan.

You would think that would be the big win for the day. No. Not even close.

Written on several of the books, were the descriptions as well as the dates of when the photos were taken. Barbara read one of the descriptions and laughed. She asked if we wanted to know Michael's nickname as a kid.

The silent dog whistle brought both HK and I to immediate attention.

His childhood nickname? Please oh please oh please oh please.

She told us. It was unbelievable. It was the least flattering nickname ever. And that's what the family called him. Barbara would answer the phone from Michael's friends and she would yell out "Hey, ___________, your friend is on the phone" with the impression that Michael's friends would hear it and know it.

The nickname is priceless, especially since it is in stark contrast to the image of Michael in later years. Best of all it's in the description on the photo books. I made HK scan the description so we could have it.

Now, the cameras had to come out. Here was a story that needed to be recorded. HK and I dragged the gear out of the car and set up. Barbara told the story perfectly. 

It was like the clouds parted and the sun warmed us all. All my bad thoughts drifted off. And for one shining moment, I was really happy.

All because I knew Stro's first nickname.

[Drunk Monk]

Cool turnaround with Stro's sis. I luv it when an interview goes from crap to gems like that.

As for the HK commentary, I had the same issue working with Gigi for the last 18 years. At least HK is a fencer and knew Stro. Gigi went off in horrid tape-wasting tangents, and often in Mandarin without bothering to translate. Eventually I stopped recording Mandarin interviews because it was such a waste of my time. Now I just scribble notes. Keep in mind, Gigi is NOT a martial artist, so often her tangents revealed her naïveté. I don't know how many times I've had interviewees look at me after some thoughtless question with that expression of 'srsly?'

Alas, creative partners. I feel your frustrations.

[Greg]

Okay, Sure. DM pretends to be on the prestigious business trip to Ireland where he gets to hang out with beautiful actresses and pound Guinnesses, but I'm the one really going places.

Today I head out to the middle of Florida. And as we all know the middle of Florida is the best part of Florida because there is nothing there. Nothing. And I get to interview two old men with questionable memories and a woman who accused me of writing questions that would better fit in the District Attorney's office. So, I have that going for me.

But that doesn't end the trip. No sirree, Bob. I then get to fly to Texas. Or as the DM prefers TEXASS . It's going to be great because on one of the days in Texas, I'm driving to Louisiana. 

I really need to talk to my travel planner.

Suck it, Dublin.

[Drunk Monk]

I don't pound Guinness.  I savor every drop.  Every.  Single.  Drop.  

As for the beautiful actress hanging out, well, yeah, guilty as charged.  There's even a new beautiful actress, but I can't tell you about her because of my NDA.

What part of TexASS?

[Greg]

We will be in lovely Terrell, Texas. It's sort of equidistant between our two meeting points of Fort Worth and Shreveport, LA

Spent time on a lovely couch last night and will be there for the next three nights.

[Greg]

Okay, I think I am seeing the bottom of joy for traveling for this picture. I'm currently in Terrell, Texas. It's just after midnight as I write this so it could almost go in the 4:20 section but it will be mostly Stro movie related. I snapped awake with thoughts of how the production is going and what I have left to do filming wise. I also have been thinking it was time for a recap. Although, I still owe for the East Coast swing. It doesn't help that I can hear the trucks roaring by on Interstate 20 just outside my window. When we we checked in, HK did ask if it was quieter on the side away from the freeway. The girl at the desk said yes. HK asked for rooms on that side of the hotel. Naturally, when we got to our rooms they were were on the freeway side of the hotel.

But let us go back. On Tuesday, HK and I flew to Florida. WE had three interviews in central Florida, two on the west coast and one on the east coast. Smack dab in the middle was The Queen's parent's home. Rita and Gene Jones were gracious enough to let us stay with them as we burned up and down Highway 4 in central Florida.

I didn't really think it through, this whole staying with the Jones's. They only have one guest bed. I'm not sleeping in the full size Murphy bed with HK. This meant I was sleeping on the couch. That was the part I didn't think through. It's been a while since I slept on the couch. It turns out, I no longer like that place to sleep. It would have helped if the couch was about four or five inches longer so I didn't have to sleep with my feet hanging off the arm rest. The couch also generates really freaky dreams. In one, I had to shakes hands with George Clooney, Danny Devito and Al Pacino. I'm also sleeping in the common area, so I didn't get to go to bed until everyone went to bed.

I almost eating at an outrageous pace and my weight is ballooning which is making me sad. I see in my future a lot of self discipline and lack of food. My blood sugar numbers for the Diabetes division of the Brotherhood are on the uptick. I do not want to have to go back on the drugs, but if this keeps up I will probably have to do that.

On the plus side, I'm near one of the really nice features of being in Lakeland. I get to walk around Lake Hollingsworth every morning. It's a short drive from the Jones's place and is quite a pleasant 3 mile stroll. It's a very popular place, even at 6 in the morning. The only problem are the joggers who keep lapping me.

Another plus, was that when we got to the rental car place, they didn't have the mid level SUV in stock so they upgraded me to the full size SUV. I got to spend the week with a giant Toyota 4Runner which reminded me of my old Toyota 4Runner. The rental was sleek and black and had lots of bells and whistles. It was sweet.

Our first interview of the week was with one of the three dominant women of the Stro era, Stacey Johnson. Or more appropriately, Dr. Stacey Johnson. She's the president of Valencia college near Orlando. When I sent her my question list, she shot back that it sounded more like an interrogation from the DA than a quick chat about her coach. I sent her back a message saying that when Vinnie Bradford got the questions she told me she would have to kill me after telling me the answers to all my questions. 'Indeed' replied Dr. Johnson.

The interview went great despite the reservations of HK, who saw her in  a movie by Carl Borak in which she appeared very stiff. She had great answers to a lot of our questions and some really insights into what made Michael a great coach and how he helped her to be champion.

HK continues to need to interject stories about himself which is annoying me to no end. I sigh very loudly every time he launches into one of them. I am leaning heavily to making the film of people staring into the camera while HK talks off screen about he and Stro. I think it could be 3 to 4 hours long.

After the interview, Dr. Johnson let us scan photos and gave us a tour of her new Film Building. All I can say is, I want to go to school there. They had everything you could ever want to make to a movie. I could go into excruciating detail about their great facility and how I want to live there. We also bumped into the head of the sound recording department. He offered to help us with the sound on our films, Stro and The Last Captain. I'm going to take him up on his offer. (We screened The Last Captain for Rita and Gene. The sound on it is horrible)

Did I mention eating? Too much eating? Yeah. The food is really good in Lakeland. We had a massive breakfast at Cozy Oaks before heading out to Orlando. We picked up pizzas on the way back to eat with Gene and Rita. After dinner, Rita said she wasn't eating with us anymore because she was gaining too much weight. For breakfast Saturday, we went to the Rib House and a had another massive breakfast that includes one of the best sausages on the planet. I'm beginning to be permanently full. It's not a good feeling. 

Saturday was also the day we interviewed Al Peredo, who's name I've been spelling wrong in all my communications for the last month. Al, (Don't call me Mr. Peredo) fenced with Stro at NYU and was an assistant coach over Stro as well.  I was told by Herb Cohen that Al had all the best stories. Herb Cohen lied.

Al might have had the stories at one time, but they aren't there now. As has been pointed out to me by the Yeti, fencers favorite thing to talk about is themselves. Then you couple that with an inability to stay focused on one subject and you get a lot of rambling monologues about a tenure at Baruch College and how you got that job. There weren't a lot of gems in Al's interview. But he had pictures and articles and HK scanned away. Al's wife, Eileen was bemused presence in the room and had a lot of tolerance for the chatty but unfocused Al. He misremembered a lot of time frames. Damn you old man for not having clear recollections from 60 years ago. He did have have one bad story of Stro's indiscretions from the 1977 World University games in Sofia but he wouldn't tell us. It had something to do with marijuana, was all he would cop to.


And then it was back to the Rib House for dinner. The Rib House morphs into a Thai and Sushi restaurant after breakfast, but they still included a full complement of American burgers and ribs in amongst the California Rolls and Pad Thai. It was very eclectic. It was also slow and noisy as the family of twelve at the table next to us had children running rampant through the restaurant. It was slow because our waitresses forgot to put in our food order. The thai food, though, was a fine break from the onslaught of BBQ.

Sunday our hopes of a rebound were pinned on Coach George Kolombotovich. He had told me a story about 4 joints in a trophy cup over the phone and I hoped there were more similar delightful stories in our future. 

There weren't. Coach K was slightly better than Al, but not much. There were lots of stories how to ref and personal reminisces, but not a lot of great insightful Stro stories. I had to pull Coach K and HK out of the weeds on several occasions. I also had to get HK to stop leading the witness on occasions. HK tends to tell the whole story of what he wants to hear in the question, which gives our interviewee no place to go in answering. For instance, do you know the story about when Michael wouldn't cut his hair in 1967 and wasn't allowed on the Pan Am team? The answer to that question is yes. That doesn't make for a good movie.

After visiting with Coach K, HK needed to fulfill his boyhood dream of going to an actual Florida Key. We were in Sarasota for Coach K and there were a couple of Keys right nearby. What makes a Key different from and island? A Key was originally a coral reef. So, we went to Lido Key and had lunch at a snack bar right on the water. The main excitement during our meal was watching the pelicans dive into the water for fish.

For dinner, it was another big meal at Manny's, my favorite local restaurant. They serve meat in large quantities. We took Rita and Gene as well, to thank them again for letting us stay. For some reason the bar was having a problems filling drink orders so by the time our waitress got the drinks to the tables, she brought doubles for HK and Rita to make up for the delay. It is also where I saw a dog sitting with his owner at the bar. I made them let me take a picture of them.

Too much food. My stomach hurts.

Monday, we arose early for the drive back to the Orlando Airport. I was sad to see my Black Beauty of a 4Runner go. It served me well.

TSA at the airport was a nightmare. i was spoiled from my last several trips with TSA pre, but I don't think it would have helped in this case. As we walked up to TSA, there was sign that gave how long the wait was going to be. It read 22 minutes or so. But then our line stopped. The sign kept changing to read increasingly longer wait times. The problem was there was another equally long line coming from the opposite side of the terminal also feed into our TSA area. The TSA guys kept blocking one side or the other to let the opposite side get people into the x-ray machines. At one point the screening time was 40 minutes. They should have just had one line feeding in. It also didn't help that when we arrived only half of the available x-ray machines had teams to operate them. I think I lost most of my adult life in that line.


So, we flew to Texas. We had to fly to Houston first before continuing on to Dallas. I had done an upgrade for myself for the Houston-Dallas leg of the flight. I actually thought i was doing it for the Orlando-Houston leg, but no. I was in the good seat for the really short leg.  It worked out that the upgrade saved my on some of the baggage fees. I'm traveling with 4 bags and 2 carryons so every bit helps.

I was not so fortunate in car rentals in Houston. This little Kia Sportage I'm now driving can't hold a candle to the Black Beauty. The Sportage barely has the room for all of our luggage. 

As I pointed out, I'm staying in Terrell. This kind of breaks up our trip so I don't have a super massive drive. It's still going to be ugly. The hotel we are in is a dump and the freeway noise penetrates our rooms easily.

I should get to sleep. It's 2:06 and i don't have the massive time change excuse as to why I am awake.

[Greg]

Okay. As I dawdle and look at the mountain of footage, I took time out to make the production scrapbook in the time between Christmas and New Years. I'm having 60 printed for the various interviewees. Thank the heavens for sales. I got half off on the price of the printing and I got free shipping, which would normally have cost me $303. That's good. Now, if I could just arrange free shipping to the people who get the books.

Tomorrow, I start working on the transcription. On 'The Last Captain', the Queen was able to scrounge up a bunch of court reporting students who wanted to audio for practice. Unfortunately, they are all busy doing paying gigs. I'm going to use a product called Speedscriber to do the transcription. It's about 80% effective from the tests I have done. This is the space in the last production where I did all the subtitles.

[Drunk Monk]

Speedscriber.  Yeah, I can't bring myself to pay for that yet.  Still doing it the old fashioned way - on cassette tape even...well sometimes.  My cassette tape recorder crapped out in Dublin so I had to do most of my interviews on my iPhone, which I hate because it's tough to replay when transcribing.  

I should get back to transcribing now...

[Greg]

Well, I'm not paying for it. Well, it's coming out of my budget.

Anyway. One of the things about speedscriber that I hope works really well is that the transcription text is linked backed to the video through keywords. And it is searchable. You can also favorite passages you like. Then you can just paste all the favorite passages together in a rough cut.

[Greg]

Also proud to report, I still don't come across as 'The Man'

Two times in Golden Gate Park while I was shooting Hippie Hill, I was offered a chance to buy some herb.

[Greg]

Speedscriber Stats: 188 clips over 59 hours.

[Drunk Monk]