Author: John D Reinhart

Publisher John D Reinhart is an avid historian and video producer with a penchant for seeking out and telling great stories. His motto: every great adventure begins with the phrase "what could possibly go wrong?"

Forget About Me…No, Wait…

Recently, I’ve been dealing with my actor past, trying to figure out why my face isn’t on billboards, and why I get notes from my bank that begin with “ahem…”

And then I remembered, like waking up from some dream all of a sudden, that I’m NOT AN ACTOR!

The memory reminded that, once upon a time I was cast in the stage version of It’s a Wonderful Life. It was community theater, which is why you can’t quite find it on Netflix.

Oh, it was a glorious role, filled with all the stuff that makes an actor want to be an actor. Got to kiss a pretty girl night after night. Packed the house playing a role pioneered by Jimmy Stewart. OMG, that was a blast.

Except on opening night. It’s a community theater, the house is absolutely packed to the rafters. It’s Christmastime, rain pattering on the roof.

If you know the story, you know it’s about George Bailey, a talented architect who gives up on his future to help his home town by standing by the tiny, family-owned savings and loan against the evil tyrant Potter, who wants to take it over.

Things go awry and it looks like he’s going to lose the savings and loan, and he wishes he was dead. Enter a heavenly angel who shows George what the world would be like if he wasn’t in it.

It’s such a horrifying vision, that, at the end of it, George drops on his knees and pleads with the angel to make things different.

“Forget about me, just save my wife and children,” he wails.

Except for my opening night.

The house is packed. The rain is pattering. The scene is so moving, so well directed, all you can hear is the rain. The audience is emotionally overwhelmed, completely caught up in the moment.

I drop to my knees in supplication.

“Please, Clarence, please forget about my wife and kids…”

Wait. What?

The audience shifts uncomfortably. We’re now all in uncharted territory. I just totally, totally got it waaaaay wrong. There’s no way out it. I seriously got it wrong.

“Is that what you really want?” the genius actor playing the angel asks with a surprised look on his face.

“No! No,” I recover, thanking the theater gods that this man has thought of a way out. “No! No! Forget about me… save my wife and kids! Yeah, that’s it!”

You could feel the whole house breathe this big sigh of relief. The emotional scenes that followed were certainly a lot more emotional for me!

That’s live theater, and it came much later in my life, when I’d learned how to act. When acting was a potential career choice, I knew how to act like an actor, but not how to act. Trying to make a career out of it back then would have been brutal.

So, there’s a writer’s story for all of us in there, isn’t there?

How many of us are acting like writers, writing what we think a writer would write? Telling ourselves that we’re being authentic, but knowing down inside that we’re just faking it until we make it?

What is real writing? What is real acting?

Here’s what I do know: I ain’t no actor!

Waiting for Permission

My wife and I have sorta gotten hooked on reality TV shows – not Desperate Housewives, but…

So, it started with 100 Foot Wave, on HBO. We were totally stressed out over some now-tiny-but-in-the-moment-seemingly-huge crisis, and just wanted to watch the pretty pictures of the ocean.

If you haven’t seen that show, be prepared to be blown away. These tiny little humans throw themselves off the top of these 60-, 70-, eventually even 100-foot waves. Oh, they prepare, of course, and they work out, you know, and they’re all, like buff and stuff.

But, still 100 feet is way, like WAY up there!

The surfers all have sponsors, of course, and that’s who pays for the show. Garrett McNamara, kind of the focal point of the show, is never on camera unless he’s surfing, or he’s wearing his hat with the Mercedes Benz logo on it.

But he does it – he and a small team of die-hard big-wave tow-surfing fanatics go at the huuuuuuge waves at Nazare, Portugal, year after year. It’s pretty awesome to watch.

So, there’s another show on HBO called Edge of the Earth. There are only four episodes, and each features a different extreme sports fanatic doing something crazy, like skiing down a granite spire in Kazakhstan, or rafting the headwaters of a river in South America that’s never been rafted.

The last episode features these two guys who set off to surf their own 100-foot wave.

They drive their Land Rover up the west coast of South Africa and find themselves a beach with epic waves. And they set up camp, and they surf these waves.

Sounds like a snorefest, but the photography is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

And one of the guys casually says he didn’t know you could quit your career to do something like that. He always thought you need, like, permission or something.

For me, that was a huge revelation.

OMG, what have we missed because nobody told us it was okay to go do something? What adventurous roads did we not travel because we didn’t have permission?

Now that my hair is less brown (and his band renown) than it used to be, I find myself more addicted to security and financial safety, so my adventure roads tend to lead to places from which I can rapidly retreat.

But you? You’re younger, right?

If you want to quit the daily grind and go surf mondo huge waves, it’s totally and perfectly up to you!

It turns out NO ONE GIVES YOU PERMISSION to go on an adventure.

Because you don’t need it.

Ditching the 9-to-5 and throwing yourself off cliffs of water is not safe, of course, and your insurance agent might have a word or two about that. But, it it’s what you wanna do, splish-splash, amigo!

The revelation for me was that, although no one tells you can’t do these things, no one tells you that you can, either. Nobody says “yes, if you would like to do that, please go right ahead.”

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’m telling you: if you would like to do that, please go right ahead!

There, now you have permission to go be wild.

For my adventure, my wife and I visited the Santa Maria Museum of Flight. Yes, it’s off the beaten path, and we got caught in the rain and mud and dark.

But, hey, it was an adventure, and we didn’t have to ask anyone if we should do it.

Wow. Big adventure…

Searching for Los Alamos

Over the weekend my wife and I drove up to the Central Coast town of Santa Maria to shoot another California Air Museums episode.

The day was blustery, with rain squalls rattling the roof of the old hangers that house the Santa Maria Air Museum. It’s a fascinating little museum, more displays than airplanes, but, if you’re a movie buff, it’s one to not miss.

We got there late in the afternoon, just an hour before they closed at four. Once done, we weren’t quite ready to rush back to Ventura, and decided to visit a little burg called Los Alamos.

Now, here’s a story: back in California’s stagecoach days, a bandito named Solomon Pico stored his loot in a bunch of caves near Santa Maria. Of course, the loot’s never been found, and now the caves are buried under the Main Street of Los Alamos – oh, to have a sinkhole!

We got lost trying to find that little town and found ourselves in the even littler town of Casmalia.

A town so small that it literally has more letters in its name than it does buildings on its main street.

A post office, a boarded-up feed and grain store, and a big building that used to be a hotel back in the stagecoach days, rather swank from what we could discover. Now it’s a high-end steak house.

Having postponed our search for Los Alamos and Solomon Pico’s gold, we decided to find Point Sal Beach, and Point Sal Road turns out to be the main drag in Casmalia. In fact, it’s the only drag.

Jutting off from Highway 1, Point Sal Road quickly becomes one-and-a-half lanes, and takes you straight through Casmalia’s sleepy downtown, and, just about half a mile later, dumps you out in front of a Dead-End sign.  

It has nothing to do with Point Sal.

We dove into the steakhouse to answer the call of nature and spotted a lady sawing away on a steak that was easily the size of a baseball catcher’s mitt, except much thicker.  We tried not to stare, but, shoot, lady. What part of the cow was that thing?

And, here’s a stunner, there was no cell service in Casmalia! Like a scene from the Twilight Zone – we could get in, but couldn’t find our way out. Picture, if you will…

Eventually, after we figured out that Point Sal Road had nothing to do with Point Sal Beach, we retraced our steps back out of Casmalia, found the real Point Sal, and followed the looooong road to get to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill.

A hill? I thought Point Sal was a beach. Yes, yes it is. But you have to hike 5 miles over the hills to get there! Well, now it’s six o’clock, and the wind and rain and setting sun, and the… still, we gave it a go.

And got a mile and a half into the hills before the rain came and the clock hit seven and we realized that it would be dark before we got back to the truck.

Cold, wet, windblown, and muddy, we dragged ourselves into the truck in the moonlight that squeaked out between the rapidly moving clouds.

Trying to find our way home, we found Los Alamos, and had a lovely and elegant dinner at the only place open, a place simply called Pico, in the lobby of what was the rather swank Los Alamos Hotel. You know, back in the stagecoach days.

Is there point to this ramble about our ramble?

Yes, and the point is this: no matter where you are, you are always just minutes away from some far flung, wacky adventure.

Our jobs, yours and mine, as writers, is to seek out this crazy moment and use them to illuminate the worlds of our characters.

You know, like they did back in the stagecoach days!

On Being Who We are Not

I find it funny that we spend most of our lives figuring out who we are. Like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh – “that’s what Tiggers like best!” Only to find that we’ve generated what could be a rather longish list of things we are not.

My house reminds me every day of things that I am not.  It looks at me and whispers things like “you sure ain’t no plumber!”

Who made that patch in the wallboard, there? How come the orange-peel texture doesn’t look right? Did you replace the glass in that window? ‘Cause it kinda looks like it…

I noticed over the weekend the scars on my right arm, left over from when I had to replace the spark plugs every month in my Ford van. Because I am surely no mechanic!

Okay, be fair, now.

It was the heart of the Great Recession, and the company I owned had gone belly up. And that van had almost two hundred thousand miles on it, and needed serious work that just wasn’t in the budget. And that van, that thing was a Freestar, and had that transverse-mounted V-6, and you couldn’t even see the plugs on the rear side to get them in or out.

And you couldn’t reach ‘em from underneath, so you had to sort of hug the engine and stretch waaaaay down there into the dark first with your right hand to probe for the spark plug with your fingers, and then again with a wrench to get it out. Torque? Forget about it! And there were, like, the sharp ends of a hundred or so bolts sticking out of the firewall – oh it was tough, and it was bloody. And then you had to do the same thing again to put the new plug in!

Nope, not a mechanic.

So, my Honda Ridgeline ran out of windshield washer juice, see. And it seriously needs to be washed. And I can’t even see out of the windshield.

Now, in December we invested in kayaks, see, and put a set of racks on the truck to haul ‘em around.

But you can’t put the truck through the car wash with the racks on.

And now it’s March, see, and our schedules are soooo tight, there’s no chance of the boats seeing any water until at least May.

So, I’m out there with a 17mm ratcheting-box-head wrench, and my wife is looking at me, asking “why don’t we just wash the truck?”

I look at her for a long moment.

Our front lawn looks shaggy because we can mow it ourselves, thank you very much, but can’t find the time. The gate that leads to the side yard has new boards in it, but they aren’t painted yet, because, well, now I fixed the gate – and one of these days I’ll get around to painting it. And we just invested a huge pile of money in reworking our plumbing because, hey, it’s easy – alls ya gotsta do is buy one of them snake things, see?

“Because we never WILL wash the truck,” I reply sadly. “We will EVENTUALLY get to the lawn. SOMEDAY I’ll finish the gate. It turns out, we’re not those kinds of people. It’s not what we are.”

She looked at me thoughtfully, and then smiled.

“Do you need help taking the racks off?”

Just a quick note – the image for this post was generated for free at Craiyon.com. The prompt was “blue ford freestar with hood open and smoke coming out.” Sort of missed on the hood thing, but it’s pretty cool! Just thought I’d give them a shout out because their AI made the image for free.

Oh, uh, One More Thing

You probably remember Columbo’s trademark like “oh, and one more thing…”

It always came right near the end of the Columbo murder mystery series, back in the 1970’s. Peter Falk played this sort of bumbling detective who appeared to be misguided throughout the whole episode. But then, at the last, just as the murderer is about to get away with it, Columbo turns and says something like, “Oh, and one more thing. I thought maybe you could help me understand how, if the bedroom door was locked, your fingerprints are on the bedside lamp.”

Sometimes the murderer would say “Oh, you’re a clever one, Columbo,” or they’d stare at him, or they’d run. Sometimes they did all three. Of course, Columbo had all the exits covered.

So, I’ve been putting together a video review of the Estrella Warbirds Museum in Paso Robles for California Air Museums.

It’s a good video, featuring sections of our interview with author George J. Marrett, and looking at all kinds of stuff.

I got it all done, all buttoned up, and uploaded it to YouTube. If you haven’t done that, you have about four pages of questions to answer about the video, and you have to wait about 20 minutes for it to upload. You have to type in tags, and a description, and all kinds of stuff.

And then my daughter said: “You know, it should have subtitles.”

Ah. Subtitles. 

So, for a five-minute script with lots of voice-over and interview, it takes about an hour to add closed captions. YouTube presents you with a transcript of your video, and the AI is pretty good, although it couldn’t figure out the name Paso Robles. Pasa Rubbles. Pa saw rabbles. So you have to correct it, and you have to manage the timing so that the words show up as they are spoken in the video.

Now we’re in for a buck-and-a-half, timewise, at YouTube.

“I think you should refer to the author’s books,” my wife suggests.

In thinking about it, I realized she was right.

Back to DaVinci Resolve to edit the video. Dug up some graphics, added some voice-over, inserted 30 seconds devoted to the books, reworked the music at the end, rendered the video out again.

Went back to YouTube, downloaded the subtitles file so I could add it to the new video, deleted the video I’d just uploaded (it actually warns you that this video will be deleted forever – I’m kind of surprised it doesn’t go FOREVER-ever-ever-ver-er-r….), uploaded the new video, answered the four pages of questions, and was just about to push the PUBLISH button again, when my wife cleared her throat in that way that she does when she has an idea that she thinks is brilliant but you might not like but you should because it really is a good idea.

“One more thing…”

All right, Columbo, what is it?

“What if we cut the guy’s the clever comment that opens the video and put it at the end instead.”

As she explains it,  I’m nodding thoughtfully, although I’m thinking OMG you want me to shuffle the entire contents of the video ahead by, like, fifteen seconds? But my captions’ll be screwed! Don’t you ever want to get this published?

It took FOREVER to shift everything around in DaVinci. And I had to start all over again with the captions in YouTube.

But, it was a brilliant idea, and the video has a ton of charm that it wouldn’t have if she hadn’t played the role of Peter Falk.

All of this has a writer’s tale in it, as you can imagine. Even though we think of our writing as a closed-loop system: we sit in our cold stone garrets, frantically typing away, knowing they’ll never understand our sacrifice, in truth it can only ever be a system of give and take. Suggestions, comments, ideas come in, grudging changes go out, and the work is always, always better for it.

Oh, and, uh, one more thing… Thanks for reading!