Projector bulb update

I could have ordered this projector bulb from a number of places on line, but I thought I’d be a mensch and support a local business. So I called up the home theater specialist on the corner and asked them if they had a bulb in stock.

They did not, but said they could get one for me in a week.

That was eight weeks ago. During that time, I have actually gone to New York and shot a feature film and returned.

Now then. Based on my conversations with the knowledgeable, friendly guy on the other end of the line, I formed a mental picture of him in my head. I imagined him, for some reason, as an aging Venice Beach hippie type, I don’t know why, but I imagined him with long, thin blond hair in a pony tail and a perpetual three-day shadow. I imagined him coming to work in a muscle t with a Hawaiian shirt over it, and wearing yellow-tinted sunglasses indoors, and always chewing on a toothpick, and with a gold stud in one of his ears.

Again, I say, I don’t know why I imagined this, at all the other high-end video stores they have a bunch of smooth, well-groomed, oily young men who have no compunctions about selling you a $200 connection cord. Because this place looks more nuts-and-bolts from the outside, I guess, I imagined it was more like an auto-body shop or something.

Today, I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d go in and say hi and ask what the hell happened to my projector bulb. The guy in my imagination was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Instead, there was a guy who bore and uncomfortable similarity to Nice Guy Eddie from Reservoir Dogs. The guy was a little chunky and had short, wavy hair and even walked like Nice Guy Eddie. He also did a little huffing thing when he walked. He didn’t seem that out of shape, but the huffing thing struck me as odd.

Anyway, no bulb. Nice Guy Eddie has to order from a head office, and the head office doesn’t return his phone calls, and anyway now he says it “normally” takes six to eight weeks for a part like that.

Normally, at this point I get angry and say something like “Then why did you tell me it was going to take a week?” But for some reason, because the guy looked like Nice Guy Eddie and I am still saddened by the passing of Chris Penn, I decided “Hey, I live in California now, I’m not supposed to get upset about that kind of thing.”

So there’s an ever-growing stack of DVDs on my “DVDs to watch” pile, and my apologies to my dozen or so readers.

In the meantime, I’ve just discovered that I can post drawings from my own collection on this here blog, so I thought I might start doing that. Here’s one now.  It’s called “The Two Cinemas”

click for readable view