FROM SOUP TO NUTS: THOUGHTS OF A VICE - SHEIK.

 by Vice-Shiek Steve O'Connor

 On the found(er)ing of the 'Jitterbugs' tent, Liam,(our exhausted ruler) was kind or misguided enough to offer me the post of Vice-Sheikh. In charge of vice I thought?…can't be bad to that. Also, to be a vice anything is usually a cushy number - all the advantages of high office and none of the hassle. Anyway, the honeymoon period is over and now he wants me to write a feature for the digest with no mention of any payment. Exhausted ruler indeed…so here goes.

Another year of Laurel & Hardy fandom stretches before us and already my resolution not to fritter away money on the Boys has come to naught. I came across the 'special' sales list of the U.K. tent and was soon getting the cheque book out for a kit car and dancing figurines (from Way Out West). Next year I will be good.

Further advertising has netted a number of new victims (sorry, members), and we hope for a good turn out for the Dublin and Comber meetings. These meetings are the life and soul of the tent and a great deal of work goes into the planning and running of them. A tent can only thrive when members get together not only to enjoy the films but to get to know each other and to socialise. So, please turn up if you can and ideas have been put forward to make each meeting more of an 'event'.

In previous digests I wrote on the marriages of Oliver Hardy. As a character he seems a hard man to pin down, but I came across an interesting reference in Willie McIntyre's 'Laurel and Hardy Digest' :The picture most people have of Oliver Hardy is the sweet, lovable "Ollie" of the Laurel and Hardy films. But, according to Leo Brooks, "Nothing could be further from the truth. Oliver Norvell Hardy was a very complex, often angry and driven individual. Not even his third wife, Lucille, realised until the final months of her life just how complex the man she thought she knew so well was. I have spent over fifteen years on research in getting to know the real Oliver Hardy. I met him in person in 1953 in London and shall treasure that meeting as long as I live. I love and admire his film work, but do not think I would have cared to have had him as a friend." A complicated individual it would seem… Stan and Babe certainly had tempestuous marriages and perhaps that helps to explain the generally

negative portrayal of their screen wives. Of course for Laurel and Hardy any 'authority' figure was automatically a problem, but is there a link between low points in their marriages and on-screen attitudes? - a future project perhaps.

It was good to see a short L&H season on BBC2 over the Xmas period. It is further proof of their continuing appeal and reminded me of my own childhood introduction to the Boys as my Dad and me laughed at their antics on the tellie. As kids we laugh at the slapstick and as adults we laugh as we recognise the reflection of some of lifes unavoidable absurdities. No matter how professional or sophisticated we may try to be there will always be a Laurel and Hardy moment to keep us in our place. On that note I would like to introduce a regular feature of particularly outstanding Laurel and Hardy moments: this beauty is taken from Wendy Northcutt's 'The Darwin Awards', a collection focusing on how some people heroically improve the gene pool by inadvertently removing themselves from it! In this case our hero survived but earned an honourable mention…

LAWNCHAIR LARRY, 2 July 1982, California.

Larry Walters of Los Angeles is one of the few to contend for a Darwin Award and live to tell the tale. "I have fulfilled my twenty-year dream," said Walters, a former truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground. I've proved the thing works."

Larry's boyhood dream was to fly. But fates conspired to keep him from his dream. He joined the Air Force, but his poor eyesight disqualified him from pilot status. After he was discharged from the armed services, he sat in his backyard watching jets fly overhead.

He hatched his weather-balloon scheme while sitting outdoors in his "extremely comfortable" Sears lawnchair. He purchased forty-five weather balloons from an Army-Navy surplus store, tied them to his tethered lawnchair, dubbed the Inspiration 1, and filled the four-foot-diameter balloons with helium. Then he strapped himself into his lawnchair with some sandwiches, Miller Lite beer and a pellet gun.

Larry's plan was to sever the anchor and lazily float up to a height of about thirty feet above his backyard, where he would enjoy a few hours of flight before coming back down. He figured he would pop a few brews, then pop a few of the forty-five balloons when it was time to descend, and gradually lose altitude. But things didn't work out quite as Larry planned.

When his friends cut the cord anchoring the lawnchair to his Jeep, he did not float lazily up to thirty feet. Instead, he streaked into the LA sky as if shot from a cannon, pulled by a lift of forty-five helium balloons holding thirty-three cubic feet of helium each. He didn't level off at a hundred feet, nor did he level off at a thousand feet. After climbing and climbing, he levelled off at sixteen thousand feet.

At that height he felt he couldn't risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he unbalance the load and really find himself in trouble. So he stayed there, drifting with his beer and sandwiches for several hours while he considered his options. At one point he crossed the primary approach corridor of Los Angeles' LAX airspace, and Delta and Trans-World airline pilots radioed in incredulous reports of the strange sight.

Eventually he gathered the nerve to shoot a few balloons, and slowly descended through the night sky. The hanging tethers tangled and caught in a power line, blacking out a Long Beach neighbourhood for twenty minutes. Larry climbed to safety, where he was arrested by waiting members of the LAPD. As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the daring rescue asked him why he had done it. Larry replied nonchalantly, "A man can't just sit around".

The Federal Aviation Administration was not amused. Safety Inspector Neal Savoy said, "We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, a charge will be filed".

Let this be a lesson to us all! Till next time - be careful out there.