RICK MORANIS AND THE EIGHT-FINGERED CRIMINAL'S SON BOOK SIGNING AND DISCUSSION AT THE BOOK FROG - Bryan Frank's Photographs - Part 1

 Was it Tom Petty who said the waiting is the hardest part?

It was 2:00 sharp and just two guests were on hand. But they were pretty cool guests, my old Saint Joe's Catholic School pal Mark Zembruski and the L.A. Groundling and TV commercial actress formerly known as Kerri Anderson.

Here is superstar L.A. photographer Bryan C. Frank with his beautiful daughter Camia. Bryan took all of the photos on this post.

Pretty cool to see a whole mess of my books on display at the finest indy bookstore in SoCal.

Adam Rodriguez was kind enough to help me clear the jitters with a solid smack to the side of of the face. It helped.

The book store  owner, stand-up comic and writer formerly known as Pete the Pelvis Ledesma provided a smooth introduction.

I got out there and started talking. And then I started reading.

My old educational tv colleagues Val and Kerri were kind enough to laugh at the parts that were supposed to be funny.

Dellis and Camia were nice enough to act interested.

This is Pete's right hand Book Frog man Jackie.

"Who's the wise guy that just asked me to read from 50Shades of Gray?"

Now that's what I call an audience!

Here are Lynell Resnick, Kieth Boyd and my wife Gail.  I hadn't seen Lynell for 25 years. We were ushers at the Fabulous Forum during the Show Time Laker days.

 Kieth is a stand-up comic turned rocket scientist. No kidding. My old comedy pal is a proud member of the Space X team that recently docked the Dragon rocket ship with the space station. I had lunch Kieth at Space X headquarters across the street from my boyhood home in Hawthorne. I had the opportunity to meet Space X owner Elon Musk and sign a copy of my book for him. To my knowledge Elon is the only billionaire who owns a copy of THE EIGHT-FINGERED CRIMINAL'S SON. Maybe I can get the space X guys to send a copy of the book into space or something.

That's my gorgeous wife Gail to Kieth's right. I prompted Kieth to ask what my wife thought of the book during the question and answer session. It was a heckuva a lot of fun to watch her him and haw for an answer when I directed Kieth to ask her himself. You see my wife hasn't read my book...

Scout

Below is Clif the Lawyer of Cactus Surf Books. Clif inspired me to move forward with The Eight-Fingered Criminal's Son 18 months ago. He was involved with every aspect of the making of this book.

Notice the guy to the right peeking from behind the book shelf. That's Jay Resnick. We were Forum ushers together about 100 years ago. I was reading from the book when he walked in wearing his old Forum usher uniform, causing me to stop reading and laugh my tail off. When I asked Jay how he got to keep his uniform he said when they finally fired him, he just walked out to the parking lot leaving his street clothes in his locker. Jay was part of the Santa Monica/Venice Skateboarding scene and can be seen in the film "The Lords of Dogtown."