A friend woke me up at a godawful hour of 10am so we could get breakfast on this, my last day of freedom before returning to the soul-destroying experience that is my corporate entertainment design packaging dayjob. Somehow in the nearly 2 years that I’ve been stranded here in L.A. I hadn’t made it out to any of the fine Denny’s establishments in the area. Maybe it’s because at 3am there is still so much great street meat, burrito stands and Fred 62 around. But fuck it, it’s breakfast, let’s hit the Denny’s at Sunset and Gower in the *cough* Gower Gulch. A stripmall which resembles half of the mainstreet in an 1800’s frontier town. Am I back in the midwest? No, I can still see the arclight, it must be some sort of time-space bubble?

So what other old things could I find today? Well sitting down at Denny’s I noticed the guy in front of me wasn’t a mexican girl with 3 kids and for some reason in this area anything but that would stick out like a sore thumb. It was registering in my mind like I was solving a math problem on autopilot and Grand Slam ordering it hit me, “Yeah Hello Doris, I’ll take the Grand Slam with Pancakes, Bacon, Wheat Toast, Eggs Sunny—Was that the dad from the Wonder Years?” Of course it was Dan Lauria the stern but loving Jack Arnold and Fred Savage’s TV Dad. He didn’t look that much older than he did when the show was on the air but he’s only 62. It’s hard to believe it’s been 15+ years since that show’s been on the air but I’m sure he gets bugged about it everyday. We weren’t going to bug him but the people in our spot before us left him a note on the back of their receipt that said, “What would you do if I sang out of tune?” The waitress showed it to us.

Winnie Cooper was nowhere to be found.

So naturally you don’t expect lightning like that to strike twice but not 5 minutes later The Mayor of the Sunset Strip himself Rodney Bingenheimer walked through the door with his AARP card. I think the waitress called him by name, he must be a regular. He was walking really slow and of course his hair was coifed in his classic Annie Witnour’s older brother form. A friend of mine once said he was really creepy in person but in Hollywood there are so many geriatric’s trying to dress and act like kids that I just consider Rodney the Prototype.

Tags: celebustalking, Dan Lauria, Rodney Bingenheimer, The Wonder Years

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