VINCENT (1) (OUT&RAPID CITY)

The last performance of Vincent prior to the 1^st stop on the tour, Rapid City ND, was to an audience of local TV station employees. No members of the general public at all. They were celebrating their ceasing to be an Independent that survived over the years with a host of good old sitcoms making up most of their schedule and some excellent coverage of the news.

(This was the station that was the background the Mary Tyler Moore TV sitcom.

Very good until they became the Fox affiliate here.

Have not and will not

watch it now.)

They were celebrating becoming the local station of a major TV network that dropped their previous affiliate to the rank of Independent. Now there programming on the newly restructured station would consist of bad, but new, sitcoms and biased news.

They were also celebrating the free bar provided by the network. Some didn’t bother to return from intermission. Heck, some never bothered to go in for the first act. And the network’s buy- out included a visit by Leonard Nimoy in the lobby. They made sure there was a bottle of Beefeater’s gin to make Leonard his favorite martini.

Leonard made them bring a case of beer backstage for us after the load out was complete.

And while the audience was celebrating in the lobby, and we were working backstage, a somewhat rare snow storm began. No TV station, network or local, had foretold this would happen.

Time to get my show on the road. The plan was that I would take the rental truck with the set inside to my house. I would grab a shower and little nap, grab my touring gear and go to the airport.

I had no problem driving the truck up and out of the loading dock ramp, but the hill leading up to the main street was filled with cars spinning their tires, siding around, and clogging the street up.

I turned and went through the unplowed neighborhood streets with no trouble until I came to large mound of snow that had been put there by someone clearing out his driveway. I didn’t get stuck. It was worse. The truck’s fan blew the wet snow on the engine and the engine died and the battery died when I tried to restart it.

I got to a phone booth, luckily I had some change in my pocket, and called Dennis, who was tour manger. Then I took the long walk in the snow to the Guthrie and used my key to get inside and keep warm.

Dennis got another rental, picked me up at the theater, and we drove back and reloaded the set in the new truck. Dennis then brought me back to the theater and I called home and asked my son to bring my gear to the Guthrie. Dennis got the stalled truck towed and took a cab to the airport. We loaded the set on the plane.

In those days it was cheap to have excess luggage with you. The set broke down into small pieces that fit inside small boxes which qualified for excess baggage even though it was stored in the hold of the planes. Dennis was a genius on planning that tour.

I found my seat and looked out the window at the snow banked against the fence.

The next thing I remember was the stewardess fooling with my set belt. I said I could manage to buckle it and she laughed and told me she was unbuckling it. She told me I had fallen asleep before I buckled it, and she had buckled it And now we are at my stop, Rapid City. I thanked her for her kindness.

Out the window I could see Dennis supervising loading the set boxes on a luggage wagon. One thing I did not see was snow. Just bright sunshine. By the time I got off the plane with my gear, the set was placed in a shed and Dennis said we pick it up early in the morning. He said he had a cab to take us to our hotel. We’d get checked in and have a big meal.

The hotel was the Alex Johnson, the hotel that figured in the movie, North By Northwest, and was where Hitchcock, Cary Grant, and Eva Marie Saint stayed while filming the scenes at Mt. Rushmore. It was the hotel where countless famous people, and four ghosts, stayed. The ghosts never left.

Leonard and Sandi Nimoy met us in the dining room. We ordered and Sandy had been given a tour of the hotel and regaled us with the high points.

(When she got talking about the ghosts, old Alex Johnson himself, a woman in white, and two nameless ghosts, I wanted to mention that I was on speaking terms with a ghost, Richard the Guthrie Ghost, but I didn’t.)

Eric Harrison, Leonard’s dresser and Sandi Nimoy’s ‘babysitter’ on the tour, came and sat down. He had just brought the TV sets in the Alex up to date. Out with the black and white. In with the peacock in all its glorious colors.

‘I told the manager that our eyes were so accustomed to watching color TV, and having to watch TV black and white would be too hard on them.’

He loved watching TV but not on black and white sets. He got color TV’s put in all our rooms and the management of the Alex said within the week every TV would be a colored TV.

‘It will cost them a lot. They have to have them flown in. There’s not that many in Rapid City,’ he laughed, ‘Even if they took the sets out of private homes. And they even thanked me for bring the matter to their attention.’

‘I wonder how many stations they have and what kind of programming,’ I mused.

Eric got a big smile. ‘I didn’t know you liked to watch TV, Don,’ he said. ‘You want to come to my room tonight and we’ll watch it together.’

‘I’ll pass. I was just thinking out loud,’I snapped. Eric was not too subtle in his come-ons, and it was just something I would have to continue to put up with. Just as I had to put up with some of the actors at the Guthrie. Sexual harassment in the work place was not a no-no in those days

I slept in a room right next to Leonard and Sandi’s. This sleeping arrangement continued for the rest of the tour. Even if they slept in a suite, I was in the room next to them. I was often referred to as Leonard’s bodyguard on the tour. I think Leonard liked the idea of having a bodyguard. A celebrity status symbol.

(Only once, and that was in Washington DC did I actually act as a bodyguard. A man jumped down from some stairs and went running after Leonard. I ran into the man and knocked him against our waiting car. He quickly disappeared down the road.

Oh, also there were two women who had front row seats for every performance the entire tour. They were super groupies who had been following him like that for years. Sandi Nimoy detested them and every time she saw them, so told me to chase them away. ‘Oh, oh,’ they’d say, here comes the bodyguard.’)

I wasn’t bothered by any of the ghosts that night in the Alex, and if any of our party was bothered by a ghost, it wasn’t mentioned. Most people look upon ghosts as a figment of an over active imagination, until you get on speaking terms with one of them. If Alex or the woman in white had come into my room to talk, I was sleeping just too sound to converse.

I wasn’t bothered by ghosts in Rapid City

But I was bothered by three bigots

The mayor and is two sons

And they will be a part of the next post on VINCENT