Tour Diary 29 - 20.5.11. The Magic Castle – Dark movies - Visiting with Toni – Hollywood – and a meeting with Dave
Steve has four talks to do in a week and in between times we have our lovely friend Toni come to see us, all the way from Dallas. She is so brilliant to be with.. very funny, full of life and the most ardent PR marketing person for Steve’s book. She feels so passionately about how important the book is that every time I am with her (and no matter what the place we visit), we come away with those people knowing that I am married to a ‘celebrity’ who is doing this amazing book tour here and whose message is so important for humanity!! So I get my hand shaken and I get asked to come back soon.
The last two venues where this happened were a cup cake shop and the ticket booth at the cinema!
Don’t ask me how she manages to get the plug in, but she does…. every time. It was Toni who spoke with our waiter Tyson about Steve and we ended up giving him a book, which, by the way, he has emailed to say he is so enjoying!
Toni loves all the same things as me and is a Multi/Faceted therapist too who has followed a very similar path. At the moment she is studying some really advanced nutrition so we have lots to talk about with my passion for nutrition for children, and my anti-vaccines stance..
She also loves the movies so we went to one of the most famous Hollywood cinemas with her daughter and then she and I went on our own to see a 3D movie – ‘Priest’ – a vampire movie. Toni, like me, is not affected by ‘dark films’ as we seem to be able to keep a separation between fiction and reality.
We were given a new type of really heavy 3D glasses, which were also very dark. I have to wear them over my own glasses otherwise I can’t see properly. But I found the whole film.. the story as well as the actual shooting of the film very dark.. as did Toni and a few times I lifted both my glasses and could see that some of the film was not in 3D. We were told afterwards that they filmed it as a normal film and then they transferred it to 3D. So every now and again when the darkness overwhelmed me, I lifted both glasses to watch the normal parts and then put them both back on for the 3D parts.
It wasn’t until the end of the film and I took off both pairs of glasses that I found out why it had been so dark. I was wearing my prescription sunglasses, which are very brown in lens, to say the least!!
Toni has a very gleeful giggle, which she employed for quite a while once I explained to her!
Toni’s lovely daughter who had managed to get us into the Magic Castle in L.A. Our big night in Hollywood. Entry to this amazing place is by invitation and membership only. It is a beautiful house with very elegant and extraordinary exterior and an even more unusual interior. The whole theme of the night is Magic and after having an amazing meal, (one of the best we have had since we have been here, saving the lovely food in Austin).. you then just wander all over the house and find Magicians and Magic Shows going on all over the place. We sat down with an older man, who was just shuffling a deck of cards. He was tucked away in a little corner.
He showed us quite a few cards tricks which we could not fathom at all how he was doing it, they really were so extraordinary and when he asked for someone to shuffle the cards Steve said that I should do it as I had been a croupier at the London Playboy club for many years. The Magician then very quietly pulled from his wallet his London Playboy Club Gold Membership key which he has had in his wallet since the club opened in 1965 I think it was… Amazing… He has carried it around with him for nearly 50 years.
But what was more amazing was when we asked how he did some of the tricks he spoke about having been a gambler for many years and making his money from gambling because he had a photographic memory.
He asked if we would like to this demonstrated and of course we did.
He spread the cards …talking all the while and then picked them up immediately. He then asked each one of us to say a card… 10 of diamonds for example and then within a few seconds he said… 30 cards in from the left. He counted out 30 cards and there it was.
He did it for each one of us and then he did the whole thing again. 8 cards pulled out of a remembered pack,. …remembered whilst he was having a conversation and hardly glancing at them. We shared a few memories of the old days at Playboy and he let me shuffle the cards a few times..
We could have sat with him all night but we had to let others have a sit with him and see how he worked so we moved on.
At our dinner table – Toni who chats with everyone and is so kind and friendly - asked our waiter how long he had been working at the Castle and he replied that he was a ‘Newbie’ most of the other people had been there much longer than him…. He said he had been there for 21 years!! I suppose that was indicative of what a wonderful atmosphere it was to work in and what fun everyone was having…
We were there for about 4 hours in all and it was truly a ‘magical’ evening. We wouldn’t have even known about it without Toni. I feel on a trip like this it is so important to try to get people who know about the places you visit, to give you inside information of places to go see.
Toni’s daughter is at University in Hollywood and lives in an apartment, which used to belong to Clark Gable and Elizabeth Taylor used to live next door. But I expect having a house that a star once lived in, must be quite a normal thing for Hollywood.
Steve took a bit of time to himself to try to catch up with bookings and so we 3 gals went up into the Hollywood hills so that I could see the Hollywood sign. What is so tragic is that it is in one of the tallest hills and yet the phone companies have chosen to put all their antennae just above it. There are so many hills in L.A as there are so many ravines!! So couldn’t they have put their masts up on another one and left this iconic hill to itself I ask! There is such a blight on the landscape now as all the tallest hills have antennae on them. The price we pay for our mobile phone technology.
We went up through Griffiths Park and to the Observatory at the top and from there it was a spectacular view and the Hollywood sign was off in the distance. Although Toni’s daughter usually walked through the park up to the top of the hill she did not know who Griffiths was. The park was so spectacularly beautiful that I imagined he must have been a wonderful philanthropist.
When Toni and I were in the cinema it had a fantastic collection of film books in the foyer and the first one I picked up fell open at a page all about Griffith Park and Griffiths himself. He was a mining millionaire who ended up taking !a dislike to his wife and shot her in her left eye to try to kill her! He booked himself a good lawyer and spent loads of money and got off with only one year in prison. So there went my lovely thoughts about this man who had created such a wonderful space for people to enjoy!! It shows what you can get away with if you have enough money.. I think his wife survived somehow and I wondered how she felt about such a paltry sentence.
Three of the talks that Steve did in L.A. went really well (as can be seen by the organisers comments which I have added at the end)… the last one to do was in Ventura. We did not like Ventura very much, our Hotel was by the fishing harbour and there was a terrible smell from the fishing boats at night. Also it was really quiet.
However, the talk had been really well publicised and Steve was looking forward to doing it. The organiser was a lady who was also was a multi-faceted Therapist… mainly Yoga and Healing and was now using Tuning Forks to add a different element to her work, - Sound Vibration - so we had a lot to talk about and the venue was lovely.. Painted with all the colours of our home on the walls and lots of interesting artifacts all around the place.
But… only 5 people turned up!
Zan the organizer said that the meeting she had tried to hold the month before, the speaker had made a mistake in his diary and did not turn up, so she thought this might have impacted on her meeting for Steve.
She was very disappointed as was Steve of course but he went ahead and gave a good talk and was able to ask each person why they were there. One man was a UFO reporter, whose name was well known to me so I thought maybe the reason for us being there was for an article from him. But there was an old man also, who was there with his grandson and he spoke to Steve when he bought a book and he told him that members of his family had been in contact with the Greys since the end of the NINETEENTH century.. 1895. And the contact continues in his family today. So this was the oldest case we had ever heard about. So I was thinking maybe this meeting was so that we could meet this old man….
Steve was very low after the session and wondered what on earth we were there for if it was so badly turned out. I made him drive to the coast and we took a lovely walk along an original old wooden pier and were able to watch the wonderful pelicans diving a few feet from our heads into a shoal of fish, which was either side of the pier. Steve always picks up when he is in nature for a little while…
When we got to the hotel I said I wanted a drink and although Steve wanted to just get up into the room he got me one and got talking with an older man at the bar.
The man told Steve that he had a wonderful old English sports car.. an Austin Healey which I think is 60 odd years old this year and he took Steve outside to have a look at it.
He then came and sat down at our sofa and continued to talk to us. I felt that there was something strange happening here, but was not sure what it was.. as the talk was all of old vintage English cars, (of which I am a bit of an expert having lived with a fanatical car man in my first marriage)
The he spoke about the death of his beloved wife the year before from cancer, and got out photos of her and she was beautiful and also a good few years younger than him and it was five years she had left after her diagnosis. He said that as soon as she was diagnosed he quit his company and said to her that whatever she wanted to do, he was at her disposal. So I was thinking.. ‘Is this what this is about? ..bereavement or choosing to live the life you want to?’ He then said that he was a writer and here Steve nudged me in the ribs, which meant he did not want me to say that so was Steve and I could feel that he really wanted to get away and up to the room. Dave, the man continued to say that one of his passions for life was with flowers and plants and so he took me outside to look at some spectacular plants, which I had been admiring but whose names I did not know. We shared a lovely few minutes talking about our passion for plants and the planet.
When we came back in, Steve was up and ready to go and then Dave said…”Do you like poetry?
Because I have this little site… here let me give you a card… it’s only a little site, but what I do is I read books and poetry and ones that I really like, or ones that I feel my readers would like I post on this site.. Take a look at it when you get time… I feel it’s all about the Dance… the dance of life….’
These are Steve’s closing words at the end of his talks.
I asked Dave how many people were there on his site?…
“Oh, not many really, I think at the last count, it had over 35,000 hits… It’s just a little thing I do, I want to spread the word of how connected we all are and how special the planet and all its people are…..Anyway, it has been so lovely talking to you and thank you for making my evening by being kind and patient with an old man, the world can be a lonely place…”
He walked away and I frantically said to Steve that he had to go get a book for him out of the car and give it to him to read and include on his site.
I caught up with Dave at the lift and he was going to our floor so I asked him what number room he was in…
Steve went out and got a book and took it to his door and said… “You might like to read this”.. Dave was really pleased and thanked him.
And I believe that was what we were doing in Ventura.
We were supposed to meet up with Dave. I could have sat talking with him all night…
There are some very unusual twists in this tour….
Moving on to Vegas Baby!!
(I don’t know why you have to say Vegas Baby but he-who-knows-everything- says that’s what you have to say… another nice little rest and a catch up with the world of the neon lights… frantic music and the best shows in the world)
Lots of love
Annie
Magic Castle Website and You Tube…
I just love the names out here.. Here’s two great ones….
Wookook the Makoli
Ghenghis Cohen – Pawn brokers
More Feedback…
Steven,
What a spectacular evening! Your presentation was over the top in brilliance and you really connected with the audience. All in all, the evening was a tremendous success, thanks to you and Annie. Best of luck to you tonight and in your travels. I will see you out there soon. Thanks again!
LA Mufon
Steven and Annie,
Thanks for coming to speak to our So-Cal MUFON groups. We had a great time during your visit. I was impressed that you were able to keep our audience enthralled with your voice alone-without the use ofpictures & music in your presentation. You are both enjoyable to talk with and have a lot to share. I think you are doing great work sharing a positive message about the ET presence, in a sea of not-so-positivevoices out there.
I hope the rest of your trip goes well.
Travel safe and keep in touch,
MUFON OC
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