February 9, 2011

Coronado, CA. January, 1990


I was going to be in Los Angeles anyway for the tenth-anniversary party of Mystery! (for which host Diana Rigg called in sick from London, replaced at the last minute by a somewhat tipsy and rambling Jeremy Brett), and so I took the train south to San Diego to visit Eldon whom I hadn’t seen in years (and whom, sadly, I would not see again.) My one request: a visit to the Hotel del Coronado, location for the film, Some Like It Hot. After a short drive through the swanky Republican and military Coronado neighborhoods, we arrived at the “Hotel Del,” and before long were taking jumping pictures and screaming “Wait for Sugar!” just like Marilyn Monroe had done in the Wilder film. Eldon, weak as he was even then, humored me. Then my first fish tacos for lunch on the patio and a walk through the lobby, peppered with photos of the cast and crew during the fabled picture’s filming in the late 1950s. Another silly memory that remains and continues to make me smile: the name of the local San Diego gay bowling league -- “Spare Me.”

3 comments:

  1. Whenever I open the oven to check something and my glasses steam up I always think of Tony Curtis as the faux playboy in SLIH...

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  2. Thought I saw Christopher Reeve in the background but remembered Somewhere In Time was not shot at the Coronado but the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

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  3. I went there in 1979.. I was completely gobsmacked that there was nobody there.. Nobody at all apart from a Veitnam vet on the beach who insisted I can't go in the water "as not enough people have pissed in it.." Apparently, something to do with sharks.. I observed his request, not so much because I was concerned with sharks, but more so he had that look in his eye that if I was teacher, would make me think.. "No I don't think I let him hand out the scissors at the start of the class..."

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