Play while the Blog's Away

              The sky is blue, the sun is warm and the blog is off for the weekend. 

              But wait, wait, there's more.

             This was a good week with Bobby Kennedy singing in Harlem, Dinner in a Diner with Ashley Judd, boozing on the beach with the Mad Men of London,   playing tennis with a Bernie Madoff wannabe in Paradise ,

              If you missed any of the above, now would be a good time. 

                 There's almost a year of goodies here. Like Frank Lloyd Wright's last private house and his big mistake. 
       

                     New York had another deluge of snow and still nobody seemed to notice the beautify of a blizzard in New York City You'll find a fine snort and a giggle in the wacky wonderful Coneheads at Silverstone. Or the flip side of that madness to the days of dope and meditation in The Volvo Years.
    

                  if you missed the all-time-record-breaking-hit- monster blog, The Real Allard Story:give it a click.  No, I lied; the tribute to the women who are as"sweet as honey and smile at you like you're made of money," attracted even more hits. And If you missed the 1979 Polish Grand Prix now's your chance.

Or, click on bob judd on the top of this page or slip down the right hand column to click on such gems as  my favorite, How You Look at the Sky.   Or The Kythera Chronicles to shake hands with Barbarossa.

Or just cruise through the links on the lower right hand side of this page, maybe come upon some unexpected little gem like  an excerpt from The Candle,  In Praise of the Belleville Midgets,  The Midgets of Belleville. Part II,  Truth in Grass: a Kansas adventure, The Story of the Larned Eagle Optic, Hollywood Calls, You Pick up the Phone, Hollywood Calls, you pick up the phone part 2 maybe my favorite My Short Happy War in Afghanistan or no, wait, wait, Fangio and the Maserati 250 F for the priceless video of Fangio in a polo shirt and helmet, absolutely relaxed driving a Maserati 250F around a beat up old race track with no run off, no barriers, no safety nothing.  My lunch with Rob Walker is a good one even though it leaves out the Betty Grable stories. 

 

       You don't want to miss My Short Happy War in Afghanistan

 

             Then there's Erno Goldfingers house-and-mine, which throws in Ian Flemming, no extra charge. Riding around Laguna Seca with Jackie Stewart was picked up by Jalopnik.com.

             Read  Uncle John's Prayer for guidance through these difficult days.

 

              Then there was the time my Dad,  Clarence Judd Head-Butts a Truck.  Truck dies. That's a good one. 

             And, of course, the one that started it all, Truck Story.

 

               Then Virgin calls, and Forrest goes to Hollywood to star with an Electric car. And Forrest does a shoot in bed with Virgin. That one is a lot of fun. 

                Although, you might want to take a look at Pheromone Dreams to see what they are doing in bed in front of a film crew. While you're there it's just a short hop to Nurse Pelvis. 

            Or take a dip in the world's largest concrete freshwater free municipal swimming pool.

           And for heat on a frosty afternoon, click on my dance with a prima ballerina.

 

              For a tasty bite with bon mots check out my friend, Gerry Freeman's foodie blog as  Hungry Gerald globe trots from spa to Paris and beyond.

             Or go skip over to the column on the right and click on any date or title from last year.  These blogs are evergreen as we say in the trade.

            

Dinner with Dario Franchitti and Ashley Judd

         The hotel lobby was crowded so I took my time looking around the room.  Nope, she wasn't there. 

            I thought, being both stunningly beautiful and famous for her roles in Kiss the Girls, The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, Norma Jean & Marilyn (she played Marilyn Monroe) that Ashley Judd would  stand out like a Bird of Paradise in a barnyard. 

            She didn't stand out.  She was there but I didn’t see her until she detached  herself from the hotel lobby wall.  It was a kind of yoga trick, of going very quiet and blending into the woodwork so nobody noticed a world famous movie star.  It was self defense, because if anybody had noticed Ashley Judd, she’d have been mobbed.

              This is the time of year when the Indy Cars head south for Spring Training to test the cars and drum up a little PR for the new season.  I'd called up Dario Franchitti and asked if I could take him to dinner for an interview and he said, “Sure.  Would it be OK, if I brought along my fiancé.”
 

              “Sure,” I said. Thinking YIPPPPEEEEE.  Wondering if she might be a cousin.

             We left the hotel quickly.  They were so cute together.  Dario in the front seat, reaching awkwardly around his neck to hold her hand in back.

 At the Sebring Diner, (much less chance of being recognized in a diner than some fancy place. Plus there are no fancy restaurants in Sebring) Dario was his usual self.    Ask him a question or two and he’s off, funny, open, insightful.  Here’s a couple of samples:   “Soft tires, a thousand horsepower, as far as the road courses were concerned the cars were perfect.  But they had to slow them down for the ovals because they were just out of control.   I mean 242 average at Fontana with a big wing on the back. 

                Least favorite words: Do you know why I’ve stopped you?

                 Favorite words: God says, “there’s a bunch of your buddies in the back room.”

               The interview didn’t take long and then we just talked.  Ashley was incandescent.  Actors often have a public, glittering, utterly charming public persona.  Ashley was just herself.  Which is to say very, very bright. 

          “Sure, girls from New York are tough. And girls from Georgia are sweet. But those feisty Kentucky girls, they are the ones you have to look out for. We have sugar and fire in our blood. We can ride a horse, be a débutante, throw a left hook and tell you the entire UK football line up all while making sweet tea. And if we have an opinion, you get to know it."

           After a bit we talked about family. 

           She knew more of the Judd genealogy than I did.  “Right, right, Thomas Judd and his family were on the Griffen, landed in Boston in 1633,.  Don’t you wish we still had that farm he had in Cambridge?  We’d own half of Harvard?”

Dario wins the Indy 500

                 The next morning Dario was outside his race car, twisted into some strange yoga stretch.  “Where’d you learn that?” I asked.

                   “Where do you think?”

We Drove Across Spain Before Lunch

Casa de Something, Estoril. We stayed in under $125 a night hotels. 

        For a while I had a wonderful job.

        For example I said to Tom Bryant, the editor-in-chief of Road & Track, “remember the days when there really was grand touring and you drove across Europe from one Formula One race to another in a fast, luxurious car?  How about I go to the Portuguese Grand Prix for a weekend, then drive across Europe to go to the European Grand Prix in Nurmburg, Germany the next weekend. Stay in nifty places and Road & Track will pay for everything."
      
    And Tom said, "Great."

                 I'd cover the races and we would stay in under $125 a night hotels so my piece would be a practical guide to great places to stay without spending a fortune as well as an up close look at the movers and shakers at the top of Formula One.  Here's some snapshots taken at the track.

World Champion Damon Hill finished 2nd

World Champion Alain Prost would later buy Ligier

World Champion Mikka Hakkinen

In the paddock.  Ron Dennis in the Middle

  

 

           After the race we drove up the coast of Portugal and stayed in a small hotel on the beach. In the morning we watched the fisherman push their boats into the sea as fisherman have done in boats like this for over a thousand years. Under the beauty of the old boats and the spectacle of challenging the ocean, there was the grit of brutally hard work, small catches, and almost no money at all.

           We drove up to Oporto, and out along the Douro Valley.

  My companion wearied of sliding around hairpin after hairpin turn.  So we drove across Spain before lunch.  At a steady 155 mph the M3 was at ease and so were we.

 

We stayed in San Sebastian, next to France. In several ways, I believe, San Sebastian is the most delicious city in Europe.

 And the next day drove to the Nurburgring in the Eiffel mountains.

The M3 and the Blaue Ecke in Nurmburg

Where Dario Franchitti demo'd Juan Manuel Fangio's 1955 Mercedes W196, the one that won the world championship. The next day Michael Schumacher won the European Grand Prix in front of his home crowd.

It was a good week to go to work.

Here's to Those Racing PR Girls; They're Sweet as Honey and Smile at You Like You're Made of Money

        Just a note to say thanks to Tamy Valkosky, Susan Bradshaw, Annie Bradshaw, Kathi Lauterbach,Carol Wilkins, Katie Brannan, Tara Ragan, Chris Mears, and all of the men and women who toil in the fields of racing PR.


         The folks I mention above are all superb professionals, and many of them have their own company now. They were the ones who could get you an interview when you needed one and tell you who knew stories you hadn't heard before.


         Racing PR is an especially tough job.  Plenty of jobs pay badly, make you work  weekends, put in 14 hour days back to back for weeks, and keep you away from home for a month at a time. Motor racing journalists for example.  But there are very few that also require you to be sweet and fun to be around.  The PR folks do it because they really love racing.


           Here’s one example of how hard this is.  One racing journalist who was unable to write an interesting sentence and never, to my knowledge, ever got off his butt to get an original story was sitting along side me in the press room at Twin Ring Motegi.  Susan Bradshaw was passing out the race summary she’d just written up for Marlboro Team Penske.  It was the end of a long week in rural Japan.  (“I thought they were taking us out in the woods to shoot us,” Dario Franchitti quipped when he saw the track on top of a sawed off mountain.)

           The “journalist” irritated me because he was lazy. My Dad was a journalist and I respect the craft. You have to get up, go out there and dig it up.

          He found out that he could sit on his butt and collect pr pieces, watch the broadcast of the race, and patch together a few PR bits for his “stories.”   Didn't matter,  he still got to go to the parties and dinners the teams were always throwing for sponsors and journalists (organized by the team’s PR person) and rub shoulders with racing drivers.


             Anyway, Susan is passing out her last sheet of paper for the weekend.  She’s organized the team’s transportation to Tokyo, their various hotels, and seen to a zillion details for her team’s sponsors, drivers, management and her team’s owner, Roger Penske. She’s not had much sleep for a week, and she’s exhausted.

Susan Bradshaw Crowther

            And this reptile says, “I just want you to know, I’m available for dinner in Tokyo tomorrow night.”


             And Susan smiles at the toad and says, “Oh great. Where would you like to go?”