To the Me of 1985: You're Welcome
A Monday afternoon hello.
Sometimes dreams really do come true.
Sometimes when you’re 10 years old you develop a crush on a celebrity and dream about one day meeting him. But there’s no way it could actually happen, you think. He’s in L.A. and famous and I’m in Boston and so not famous.
What your tiny child brain could not imagine is that in 40 years, something called a laptop would exist and within it would be a magical tool called Zoom that would enable you to have a face-to-face (er, screen-to-screen?), one-on-one conversation with your crush, which you will publish in a thing called Creative Reverberations, which you made up using a site called Substack.
Granted, you and the celebrity will both be middle aged and married and he will no longer be your crush, but whatever. You’ll still get to live out a childhood fantasy.
All this is a long way of saying that last week, I booked an interview with Mackenzie Astin, whose face was plastered all over my bedroom walls in the mid-80s. (Alongside Alyssa Milano, who I thought was super cool and pretty and I wanted as a best friend.) (That dream has not come to fruition yet.) (Gotta tackle one childhood dream at a time.)
Anyway, if you weren’t glued to the TV the way I was in 1985 and you’re unfamiliar with Mackenzie Astin, he played Andy on The Facts of Life. This was during the show’s latter years, around the time that Mrs. Garrett hightailed it out of Peekskill and Beverly Ann Sickle (played by the legendary Cloris Leachman) took over to look after Jo, Blair, Tootie, and Natalie, even though they were like 25 and should have been out on their own already. It was a weird show.
So, Mackenzie was on the series for a few seasons and has continued working steadily ever since. These days, he can be seen in HBO’s The Pitt and AppleTV+’s Stick. And soon he’ll be seen on my laptop because I will be Zooming with him. Which sounds like a euphemism of some kind, but I promise it’ll just be an interview.
Needless to say, that was the big news of my week. And it leads me to a question: What celebrity, living or dead, would you love to have a conversation with and why? Put your answer in the comment section!
Off Substack, I had two interviews published last week in Next Avenue: one with Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts about her fantastic new book Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age, and another with Norman Greenbaum about the remaster and reissue of his 55-year-old album Spirit in the Sky. They were both great. Norman in particular is very, very happy that people still want to talk to him about his work. He was overjoyed to be doing interviews.
And here on Creative Reverberations, I published my interview with the lovely Tiff Randol last week.
We discussed her music, her thoughts on AI, her recent autism and ADHD diagnosis, and Mamas in Music, a global non-profit she founded after the birth of her son.
I won’t have an interview for you this week. I’m taking Friday off for the July 4th holiday, but you’ll get a little something delivered to your In Box that day. Interviews will return next week. Lots of good stuff coming your way in July.
Finally…if you’re not yet a paying subscriber, or you want to switch from a monthly subscription to annual, today is the last day to get half off a new annual subscription. Today only, you can get a year’s subscription for $25—just over $2/month.
Thanks, as always for reading! Hope you have a wonderfully creative week!
Hunter S. Thompson...the reason is obvious :-)