“30 YEARS IN 30 DAYS”
DAY TWO, YEAR TWO: JANUARY 1, 1994 – December 31, 1994
“FOLLOW THE WHITE RABBIT!”
By Michael Sean McHale
January of 1994 started to shake things up…LITERALLY. On Sunday, January 16th I was so excited because I just gotten a new gym membership and I rearranged my entire bedroom and got super super organized. Bob may not believe this, but there was a time in my life where I was an absolute perfectionist about where everything went and I was incredibly neat. 😊 So I went to bed that night happy as clam (what does that even mean?). Then IT happened!!!!!!
At 4:31 am on January 17th, 1994, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day I had a dream that a GIANT was shaking my apartment. I woke up in complete darkness to the roar of a freaking 6.7 EARTHQUAAAAAAKE!!!! I panicked and yelled out, “THE DOOR!!! GET TO THE DOORWAY!!!” I ran to what I thought was the doorway….”SHIT!!!! It’s the bathroom!” (Remember I had LITERALLY rearranged my entire bedroom just hours before so I was completely confused in complete darkness!)…I ran to the doorway…”SHIT!!! THE WINDOW!!!” The roar and rumbling continued and I ran to the the doorway…”SHIT!!! THE CLOSET!!!!” My heart raced!! Where the FUCK was the doorway???? I found it and ran outside as the movement stopped. Mind you…all of the above took place in about 20 seconds…My landlords and my neighbors were out front. The sidewalk in front of my apartment had split in two. We were all out of breath. I peeked inside to see where my cats were….Nowhere to be found…They showed up 3 days later from wherever they were hiding.
I called my mother immediately, “MOM!!!! There was just a HUGE earthquake!!!” She laughed it off, “No there wasn’t. There’s nothing on the news.” I assured her for a few more moments that there was in fact one. Then we hung up. One minute later she called back SCREAMING!!! “OH MY GOD!!!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!” (I guess she saw the news. LOL! She BEGGED me to come back home that day. I told her no, this is what I signed up for. She was in hysterics and I couldn’t get her off the phone. Obviously I did not move back to Woburn after the 6.7 earthquake. Did I think about it? Nah. I was up for an adventure and believe me the next month was about to change EVERYTHING once again all thanks to, of all things…an Easter Bunny. 😊
In February I received a call from a new client at the party company. She ordered an Easter Bunny for Easter day for her daughter and her friends. I took the order…”Dee Wallace Stone….Hmmmmm….are you any relation to E.T.s mom?” I asked. She laughed, “You could say we’re like sisters.” I shrugged it off…must have been mistaken…Cut to March she called to confirm everything was all set for Easter. I was highly suspicious…”You even SOUND like E.T.s mom….” She laughed again and said, “I hope so or my agent would kill me!” NOW I got the joke! “Wait a minute!!! It IS YOU!!!!” She laughed, “You got me!” We shared a laugh and then she told me that she knew I wasn’t going to be the Easter bunny myself but she would love it if I came to the celebration. She appreciated my sincerity and humor and energy and she wanted to meet me. OMG!!!! This was like a DREAM come true!!!! “YES!!!!! I will be in attendance with your Easter Bunny!” And thank GOD I did…Poor RoseAnn (the actress playing the bunny), the kids couldn’t hear her, they pounded on her head (NOT Dee’s daughter Gabby), so I took over and ran all of the games and then Dee invited me to attend her acting class. At the time I wasn’t an actor at all and I wasn’t pursuing that but I agreed to check out her class. WOW! My life has NEVER been the same since! 😊
Around the same time I had seen an ad in a gay magazine about “Loving God as a gay man” and an invitation to attend a Bible study. Those of you who know me personally know that I am in fact a Gay Born Again Christian. Have been since I was 14 years old and still love Jesus with my entire being so this excited me. HOWEEEEEEVER….Having JUST escaped the cult I was a part of for the 2nd time before moving out west I was VERY suspicious that this might be a TRAP to get me back into the cult so I called multiple times and hung up before I finally connected with a gentleman named Paul Bandy. I was invited to attend a Gay friendly church in Pasadena and I went very reluctantly still thinking “This might be a trap!” Turns out it was not and I met the most wonderful gay and lesbian Christians who were a part of an incredible group called EVANGELICALS CONCERNED, a gay and lesbian group of believers just like me that was founded by a wonderful man named Dr Ralph Blair. This group changed my life in the most beautiful ways and grounded me even more on my spiritual path as a gay Christian man.
I met who would become my best friend at the time, Worthie, and I spent time with the amazing preacher MEL WHITE…who happens to be the father of Mike White, the creator of WHITE LOTUS..small world right? At one point I had put up notices at the gay gym I attended that read “ARE YOU GAY AND LOVE JESUS? GIVE US A CALL AND MEET OTHERS LIKE YOU!” Over the next 5 months I received over 100 calls, I counseled every guy who called and invited them to attend our Bible study. About 70 of these guys did in fact attend and some are actually met their life partners at our little Bible study in West Hollywood. Powerful and wonderful times to say the least.
I also became involved with the amazing group GLAAD at this time. GLAAD stands for THE GAY & LESBIAN ALLIANCE AGAINST DEFAMATION. This organization makes it a point to be sure that there our community is represented in the media, on tv, in film, etc. I attended their meetings weekly and at the award ceremonies I was a celebrity escort many times (more about that later) and the TROPHY boy one year on stage with all the celebrities. (more on that later too). At one of their biggest meetings there was an outcry that the organization was constantly being attacked by Right Wing Fundamentalists and other ‘christian’ groups and they didn’t know what to do. My heart leapt! This is MY wheelhouse!!! I stood up and told the very large crowd that they needed to EDUCATE themselves and arm themselves with the scriptures that these insane people use to condemn our community. My ‘brief’ comments ended up becoming an impromptu ‘sermon’ that went on for 20 to 30 minutes as I shared about the CLOBBER PASSAGES and what they REALLY translated into.
The crowd got excited and asked me questions and everyone felt empowered that evening. At the end of the night I met the very talented Joe Keenan (a writer from Frasier) and Karen Ocamb, a freelance reporter who asked me if she could interview me for GENRE magazine. It wound up being the cover story “Can you be Gay AND Christian?” (paraphrased 😊) It was pretty awesome! But the most wonderful that happened was that I was asked by GLAAD to ‘educate’ them on the clobber passages so they would know what to say to these hypocrites who claim to love or know Jesus and so I filmed a series for them and it was shared with their entire organization. 😊 Mission accomplished! 😊
In August of ’94 I did an Alice in Wonderland party in Brentwood. I played the white rabbit. When I walked in the foyer there was a huge safe with the name “SCHWARZENEGGER” on the front. I didn’t think anything of it until I was outside and thought a woman there may or may not have looked like Maria Shriver. Then at the end of the party as I was standing in the kitchen about to ‘skin’ the rabbit off of my body, I heard a familiar voice behind me say “Hey look! It’s a bunny rabbit!” I turned and yes the Terminator was standing right in front of me. He held out his hand and shook my hand and said “Hello Mr Bunny rabbit!” I tried so hard not to laugh at the surrealism that was happening in the moment. And just now in this moment I realized that TWO bunny rabbits brought me in contact with two pretty awesome celebrities in ’94. When Arnold was leaving with his family, my buddy Scotty Martin handed him one of our business cards and said “You need to hire US for your next party!” And low and behold the next month I played PONGO from 101 Dalmatians for Patrick Schwarzenegger’s 1st birthday at their mansion just off of Sunset Blvd in the Palisades. And it was an afternoon like no other….
I arrived and the assistant took me to what she called the ‘guest house’ next to the mansion….this ‘guest house’ was the former mansion of John Forsythe. She told me that Arnold bought the mansion when John moved out because he didn’t want anyone living next to them. I should mention that there are only two houses on this very private street. They had me chill out in what seemed to be Arnolds gym/rec room. There were photos of him and Jamie Lee Curtis on the table from the film TRUE LIES that had JUST come out a couple of months before.
The assistant fed me and gave me some sodas and then told me “It’s time.” I dressed up as PONGO and they handed me the cake and I walked out onto the tennis court where the party was as everyone sang happy birthday to little Patrick. I ‘worked’ a total of 10 minutes and made a nice paycheck. Arnold slipped me a $200 tip. It was the largest tip I had received and kept the top spot until someone named Idina topped surpassed it years later…but that’s for another time.
I want to also mention that when I left the original party where Arnold and I first met I saw my very first Hummer! Apparently it was a gift for the Terminator. I believe he may have been one of the first ‘civilians’ to own one. (they came out in ’92)
In closing this year, I was at my gym on a thing called a ‘payphone’ talking to my friend about his writing agent. When I got off the phone, a very handsome Latin man approached me and asked if I was a writer. I told him yes I was. He then asked me if I could write something for him. He had just been a show called THE ROUND TABLE with Aaron Spellings company. His name was David L. I created a Latin Dramedy for him called THE BROTHERS THREE and his Manager got me a meeting with Mr. Spellings production company. I went in and pitched the show to a woman named Cheryl. She LOVED it! Told me it was a mixture of Northern Exposure meets Cosby but with a primary Latin cast. She told me that I needed to come back in two months when they would be officially looking at new projects. I was ECSTATIC!!! Sadly, two months later she had been let go and was now in charge of programming at Fox. I contacted her and she told me “I can’t look at it here because I looked at over at Spelling Productions. Arrrgh!!! I contacted Aaron Spellings people and they told me “We can’t touch it because Cheryl already looked at and now she was working somewhere else.” So my beautiful Latin Dramedy about 3 brothers became DOA! I pitched it over at HBO who were now developing new shows geared towards the Latin community. They also loved it but they wanted to make it into a Comedy. I told them that it wasn’t meant to be a comedy and I walked away from the table. I know! I know! Sadly I didn’t know how to play the game back then. So if anyone is interested…I still have this beautiful Latin DRAMEDY that should be in production right now! 😊
By the way, David and I dated off and on. Fun fact about him: he was the handsome young Latin man in the Army commercials back in the day. He told me that he worked one day and the commercial ran ALL the time and he made over $80,000 from that one spot. Those were the days right?
See you all next time when we visit 1995 and you find out about my connection to a guy named OJ! 😊