Saturday 11 April 1998

There's a huge line outside of the Hollywood Theatre this morning—I must find out what it's all about—it's not every day a huge line forms outside of a theater that shows second run movies for $2.50 at 10am. The movies aren't at 10am—they start in the afternoon—and to their credit, they've been showing some old movies, musicals and such. The line I'm talking about is at 10am, which is NOW on Saturday morning. I can't imagine—maybe people are lining up to something else, like a record store next door—trying to get lottery tickets to be eligible for a drawing to be eligible to make advance bids on the new Garth Brooks boxed set that's going to be available soon in a limited edition of one or two million for only like $49.95. When you hear something like that—or when I, specifically, as a struggling country and western artist, hear something like that—I don't know how to react. With numbness—what else? Once in awhile, however, the consumer—the collective, idiotic, misguided mass of them—bites back and says, "Enough is enough—no matter how much you try to sell this crap—no!" Usually it's not right before Christmas—I think they should, to be safe, hold off the Garth Brooks release a few months—but what do I know about "The Industry?" If competing with a similarly bland but even worse "new country" act called Brooks and Dunn hasn't hurt him, I'd say his sales figures are beyond my comprehension. Tammy Wynette recently died. I was not a big Tammy Wynette fan, but that news made me sad—she was very young still. She had a hard life—was married to George Jones, who's one of my all time favorites—but I wouldn't have wanted to be married to him. That Billy Sherrill must be a genius—is he still alive? If I could just get him to produce my new cassette!

The line from the Hollywood Theatre is incredible! It's stretching for like three blocks! One might think it's something Titanic oriented—like outtakes from Titanic? Or one of those Titanic movies made earlier in this century that no one wanted to see, but now everyone wants to see? (Take heart all you failures—you will have tremendous success beyond your wildest imagination—just when it's the right place and the right time!) Maybe it's a movie poster sale—those always draw enormous crowds—which is funny, since I've never been to anyone's house and seen movie posters up.

I must find out what this line is for—I'm obsessed with it now. Whatever it is—I want in. I'll sell whatever it is. I'll get in that business—on the ground floor. Maybe that is how my fortune will be made. Then my bio will say: "Then one day he saw a line from the Hollywood Theatre extending for four blocks at ten in the morning. 'I've got to have a part of that—whatever it is,' he said."

It's a really strange line, too. You can't tell anything from the people—young and old, ethnically diverse—at least for Portland, Maine.

How can you predict something like this? The neighboring businesses must be looking on in envy. Over at Winchell's they're saying, "Why not us? We've got donuts!" Of course not—the owners of Winchell's are far from this scene, and the employees of Winchell's are probably getting worried that all these people are going to get a real hankering for donuts with all this early morning line waiting. That reminds me of when they tried putting a Blimpie's sub shop in Old Town, down by the docks. There's a good example of people not going for it. They made a big deal of their regional compatibility—introduced the "Lobster Blimpie." Whew! "Blimpie—it's a beautiful thing." Not always. It went over like a Led Zeppelin reunion. Hey—maybe I'll look in yesterday's newspaper for a clue to this thing.