I’m doing a brief series that consists of stories of things that have actually happened to me. I have no idea how long I’m going to go on with this, but here’s why I started it.
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Mila Kunis. I KNOW, huh?
Today we hearken back to the 1980s, a time that was much simpler, mainly because we didn’t have Facebook, Google Plus, Foresquare and Perez Hilton drawing penises on celebrities like Mila Kunis.
Speaking of Mila Kunis, I used to date a girl who looked a lot like her. It wasn’t her because this was 1987 and Mila was four-years-old, but seriously, this girl named cindy looked a lot like Mila does now.
I know, right?
But things didn’t turn out with Cindy because I’m a dork and she had class, or something, so we lasted about three months.
But one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me involved her, and I just know some long-time readers of this blog are going to accuse me of phoning it in today because I’ve posted this story before.
I think I’ve posted it twice, actually.
But whatever. I’ve posted a lot of my stories before so there you have it.
NOTE – Mrs. Rhodester and I were dining one evening at Mel’s on Ventura Boulevard in LA and Mila Kunis was in there with several other cast members of That ’70s Show, including Topher Grace and Danny Masterson. This was about 2002-ish, when that show was still in production.
Yes, Mila is really cute in person. I offered the waiter ten bucks for her used napkin.
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Cindy of San Diego – 1987
This entire story takes place in the eighties but the first part is a bit earlier in the decade – 1984.
I’d finished up a four year Navy hitch in San Diego a few years earlier and stuck around, living at various addresses with various roommates, including Andy The Greek. He wasn’t actually from Greece but his parents were, so he was a first generation Greek-American who spoke fluent Greek to his Mama during the weekly telephone calls home to Boston.
His parents lived in the Greek section of Boston, where papa owned a Greek restaurant and had taught Andy how to cook. During my stay with him, I was introduced to Spanakopita, Baklava, Lemon Chicken and other savory salivation-making Greek specialties that Andy whipped up every weekend in our San Diego kitchen.
After all these years I still miss San Diego and Andy's cooking
We rented a duplex that was owned by a Japanese lady named Mrs. Green, who’d been married to an American WW2 veteran, thus the generic American name. Andy and I each had our own room in the right side of the place, while Mrs. Green puttered about in the left side, all by herself.. a lonely, chatty widow who looked out for us boys.
It wasn’t uncommon to answer a knock at the door and find her standing there with a big smile and some kind of Japanese treats she’d made. In turn, Andy would share some of his Greek delicacies with her – it was all very international.
One time she told us of her late husband. Mr. Green had been a Navy flier who was held by the Japanese as a POW until the war was over. It was never clear whether this was for months or years, but the interesting part about it was that’s where they’d met – she was there as a nurse who looked after the well-being of the prisoners.
After the war he’d been released and returned to the states for a few years, but decided he couldn’t live without her, so he went and found her. They married and he returned home with her, settling in San Diego because he’d originally been stationed there. How’s THAT for a romantic story, ladies?
Okay, so back to Andy The Greek..
One day Andy bought a jacked up monster Toyota truck with a chrome roll-bar and four wheel drive because he wanted to go four-wheeling somewhere, but he never did. He just drove this huge truck around the streets and freeways of San Diego for the next year, guzzling hundreds of gallons of gas, which was okay because gas was about a dollar a gallon then and we all weren’t so ‘green’ as we are now.
I don’t think anyone gave Andy a hard time for environmental reasons, but they did give him a hard time for driving a butt-ugly truck. He was still proud of it though, for Lord only knows what reason, and asked me to take a picture of him standing beside it one day while it was parked out in front of the duplex. I did, and I kept a copy after giving him one, and as much as I’d love to post it here I’m afraid I can’t because it was lost long ago.
I still had it in 1987 though.
It was in a photo album, and I was showing that album to Cindy, a petite brunette whom I’d dated a bit after moving to Sacramento. I lived up there for a year, having taken a job at a local radio station, and Cindy came over on one of my days off to hang out.
I’d rented a room from Paul and Pearl, a fabulous couple in their fifties who stayed on as friends of mine for many years after I’d left their house, but I’m afraid things didn’t work out with Cindy. She was fun to look at, bearing a close resemblance to actress Mila Kunis, but we didn’t click much beyond that.
But we did flip through that photo album that day while Paul looked on, and Cindy was particularly interested in my photos from San Diego because she’d lived there for a few years. When we got to the one of Andy The Greek standing in front of the duplex next to his monster truck, her eyes got bigger than they normally were and she said, “OH MY GOD!”
She placed her hand over her chest and said it again, but with TWO exclamation points..
“OH MY GOD!!”
Paul and I looked at each other with the same puzzled expression that you have right now.
“What?” I asked. ”That’s my old roommate Andy.. did you know him or something?”
But it wasn’t about Andy or the truck. It was the duplex..
She’d lived in it.
“I lived in that HOUSE!” she said.
“Oh, Really?”
I wasn’t sure I believed her. She was kind of a drama queen and she loved getting attention. The picture only showed Andy, the truck and most of the duplex, but it didn’t show the address, so this next part cinched it..
“YES!” she said, her excitement building. “It’s on 41st street and there’s a donut shop up on the corner and across from that is a Unitarian church! I’m telling you, I lived there in nineteen seventy eight, with my boyfriend, and we sold drugs out of that house and this is just too fucking WEIRD, dude!”
Paul looked at me and grinned. “Dave, I think she’s got ya.. she lived there!”
She went on to tell us that the reason she and her boyfriend had to move out was that the place had been sold to a Japanese woman and her husband, who had plans to move into it and rent out the other side.
Cindy and her boyfriend had lived in the MRS. GREEN side of it, and she accurately described the interior to me – it’d been built in the fifties and was pretty distinct. She even remembered the day Mr. and Mrs. Green came in and looked around as potential buyers, because she had to tidy up and hide all the weed.
So, out of the thousands of homes, apartments and duplexes in the San Diego area, this girl I dated in Sacramento, which is about 500 miles away, had lived in the same tiny duplex that I had.
She also thought Andy’s truck was butt-ugly. Turns out the girl had some class after all.
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Cindy and I had a great time during our three
months together. Here we are skydiving..
Okay, yeah that’s really MILA KUNIS again, skydiving with an instructor. But are you ready for even more small-world weirdness? I did a post a few weeks ago about DEVON KIDD, who is the girl in Tom Petty’s 1989 video, Free Fallin’. In that post I embedded a video of Devon skydiving with an instructor..
YEP. IT’S THE SAME DUDE.
GAH!
So.. does this guy run a “skydiving service for babes” or what?
