Through this board I made a wonderful new friend around the time QAF was coming out, and we've remained close ever since. While I don't have a fan encounter of my own to recount, Muriel has given permission for me to share the story of how she spent a recent Saturday evening. Faced with turning the big 4-0 in a few weeks time, I can only hope my senior years will be so eventful!
It's not enough that last year she received a 70th birthday card signed by CP (along with a photo taken of him as he was writing), compliments of another very generous Fu-fan. Now, at 71 years young, she's hobnobbing with David Carradine, the actor who played CP's father in KF:TLC. Since she's too shy to tell you herself, I'm sharing parts of her evening through excerpts from e-mails she sent to me. My apologies for being long-winded. My words are blue, Muriel's follow in green:
[font color=green]Last night I spent a couple of unbelievable hours with David at the Vulcan Con at a Holiday Inn in Strongsville, a suburb of Cleveland. It started out that I requested to be seated at table 5, which was David's table and I was saving the seat next to mine for him.
Then I saw him standing all perplexed in the center of the room, so I went over to him and said that I would take him to his table and I seated him in the place I had saved for him. So that is how I was able to arrange sitting right next to David....
David was looking very thin, but seemed to be well and had a good appetite. He was especially enthusiastic about the dessert table. We were seated close together at tables of 10. The rest of the people at our table were long-time fans of his from the original 'Kung Fu' series. None of them had ever met him before and they all appeared to have hit that notorious dead zone. The same thing happened to me the first time I met David, I think it was in l995.
[font color=blue]That would be similar to what CP fans call the PSZ, I think.
Of course, being a faithful Chris Potter fan, Muriel didn't forget to mention our man:
[font color=green]Then I asked if he is staying in touch with Chris. His face lit up when I mentioned Chris' name and he said, 'I sure am, he's a great guy.' I said that I was very pleased about Chris' participation in a "A Wrinkle in Time" because it was a Disney classic and so should probably be shown more that once.
[font color=blue]The topic then turned to CP's role in QAF. (Muriel and I used to have gab fests following every episode, but we won't tell her grandkids that she tuned in every week to watch such an adult oriented show. ;-) ) She did mention it to Mr. Carradine, though, and wondered if he watched as well.
[font color=green]David said that Chris wanted to try something different in signing up for QAF, but that now he was done with that so David said that it was good that Chris did not sign their new contract. Then David said that he couldn't watch QAF. That he tried 8 minutes of it and that was enough.
[font color=blue]As the evening went on Muriel and DC talked about a variety of subjects, mostly his current and past projects. While she had his ear she mentioned reading an article in Variety about his new movie, Kill Bill:
[font color=green]He said that he was playing Bill, who was the evil head of an all female assassin squad. The article said that there would be more flying in Kill Bill than in the Hidden Dragon Crouching Tiger and I asked if he was going to be flying around. He said, yes he would be wired and that he hadn't been flying around since he was in the play Peter Pan with Veronica Lake, back when he was 14 years old. So I asked him if it
hurt, and he said a little bit.
He went on to say that he was recently with Rob Moses who is his
personal trainer and said that Rob is also involved in Kill Bill and even has a part in it. I said that Rob is a great favorite with Fu fans.
[font color=blue]Hitting it off like a couple of old friends, Muriel even promised to send David some tapes (through a third party) of his old series, 'Shane', which he'd expressed a wish for. They both discussed how they were thinning out their piled up fan-like possessions, to which David coined the term "uncollecting". She was quite happy to be able to "uncollect" some of her tapes to the very man who starred in them. (Stop watching and mail them, Muriel. The man's waiting.)
I think her favorite part of the night, besides DC getting on stage to perform, was prodding him into stories of his movie making experiences. He was so happy to oblige her that I can't even fit them all here, but one involved a famous director with whom Mr. Carradine didn't quite see eye to eye:
[font color=green]David got to thinking about the terrible dog fight scene in his movie "Americana" and that somehow brought to his mind the horrible horse scene in another one of his movies, "The Serpents Egg". He said that there was no shooting a horse scene in the script he read before agreeing to do this movie. That is why David had his terrible falling out with Ingmar Bergman, which he was telling me about by taking both sides in this argument,and going through it verbatim and even with an accent.
I asked him if he thought that this incident had a serious impact on his career, and he said, "No". By the way, this director also forced David to smoke in this movie. He said, "If you don't smoke, it won't look like the 20's". So he smoked in the film and got hooked on nicotine.
(Talking about smoking, I just realized that David did not smoke the whole two hours that we were together.) I also have proof positive captured in pictures of my being hugged and having not one but two sweet little David kisses on my hand.
[font color=blue]Muriel said that while she knows from David's book, "Endless Highways" that he has had his wild moments, she will always think of him as being not only friendly and considerate, but also as being an absolutely overwhelming and unforgettable presence.
I can't say I'm jealous of Muriel's encounter with David, but I wouldn't mind having an encounter of my own someday. Although, I'll take CP over DC if given the choice. He's more of my generation. :-)
Thanks, Muriel, for allowing me to tell your tale.
Lisa J.