I can be adopted for less than a Dollar a day.

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It counts as traveling if I go to a different city, right? Sure that city is less than a mile away from my house, and my destination within said city is a mere 6 miles from home. But it's a different city. Like road tripping to New Orleans, or New York, or Los Angeles. But without the gas bill, or excitement of seeing something new. I mean I had to cross the Intracoastal Waterway. Intracoastal. Like traveled coast to coast. Technically I did. The East coast of Jacksonville Beach, all the way to the West coast of Jacksonville Beach. There. I have justified my posting of another entry. An entry of a 12 mile round trip to a whole different city and back. A middle of the night so-journ to a mysterious, possibly haunted theater. Where danger lurked around every corner.

How's that for a paragraph of crap?

On the realz though. "Realz", I am pretty sure is a Jacksonville word that means "what had happened was..." Which usually precedes more paragraphs of crap.

I had another ghost hunt with the people I do ghost hunting with last night. I should say this morning. I am sure it was after midnight when we finally got started. We investigated the Alhambra Dinner Theater http://www.alhambrajax.com/. It had claims of blah blah blah blah. You can watch it on youtube eventually, if you're not in the Jacksonville viewing area.

Before the investigation could get started, we had to get the building emptied out. This was major task since law enforcement frowns on me physically removing people from the building. It being the last night performance, the cast and staff were getting their drink on after the audience got the hell out. This cast included star of stage and screen, the immortal Sally Struthers. Don't ask me to name anything she was in. I have no idea. She wasn't in Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Anything produced by Marvel comics, or vivid entertainment. So if I have seen her in something, I don’t remember her. I am sure you are thinking I am crazy and you are thinking to yourself of a half a dozen things that she was great in. But you are clearly older than I am. Sing along.. Happy Days are here again... They're not really.

To your illustrious author, Sally Struthers is best known for making me feel bad about being able to go in the kitchen and make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Grape jelly to be specific, because all other jellys suck. I didn't grow up poor, or in a famine laden village of Africa. So when a Sally Struthers commercial came on my TV in my air conditioned house interrupting a rerun of All in the Family to tell me that for less than a dollar a day, I could feed a helpless, starving black kid I didn't know, I took advantage of the commercial break to go pee out the 6 cans of Dr. Pepper I drank in the past 90 minutes of the All in the Family marathon.

Maybe my reaction was the same as most folks. If people had donated, surely she would have set aside some of that money to feed herself, instead of having to do dinner theater in good ole' Jacksonville, Florida. OK. So I'm not a fan of hers. But I can still take a picture with her, for one, to show I am ballsy enough to walk up to anyone and say "Hey take a picture with me", and 2..To claim she is a huge fan of the show I am on. In all honesty, she did say she would only take a picture with me "because you are adorable". Which conveys in my mind to "Sally Struthers thinks you are hot, and wants all up on this." Nevermind she is ancient, and drunk. If all of that isn't weird enough, she insisted the guy following her around (maybe husband, boyfriend, the help, I don’t know, some old dude.) be the one to take the picture. "He knows how like to have my picture taken" wtf? whatever. He is barely over 5 feet tall. (thats less than 2 meters for you foreigners) Struthers likes her picture to be taken from the sky. Probably something to do with those new fangled soul stealing picture devices being at an up angle directs her soul toward baby jesus more than the person taking the picture, or hell. She knows her soul could be headed out of her anytime now. So 5ft tall guy is holding my phone/camera at a full arm’s length over his head 4 feet away from us, which puts Sally looking almost straight up at baby jesus in heaven. Your 6'3+ writer is now eye level with his own soul stealing contraption, but if my soul leaps out at eye level, it's going right over Old Dude's head. I haven’t taken a lot of pictures with entertainment celebrities. I have taken many with politicians. Mostly Democrats. I can honestly say, not a single politician has ever had a weird angle they needed to take a picture at. Maybe they are not concerned with which direction their soul is going. They already know. When hunting Ghosts, taking a picture with a celebrity should really not be the strangest thing to happen all night long.

The ghost hunt had its moments. Typical EVPs. I never got close enough during our playbacks to hear what was said. We had a reporter from a local magazine with us, and an old friend of mine (AP) that won a contest to join us on an investigation, joined us for this one. If you read my last entry, and remember a friend of mine joining us for that investigation, it isnt the same friend. I just have lots of friends, who have lots of friends, that help them win contests. I have now made it my mission to dominate the contests we have. I cant pick or influence who is chosen as the winner. But I can help people I like rack up the most votes. Back to what I was saying.... I tried to not hog in on camera frame, and instead chose to sit back and let my friend have her day in the sun. By "sun", I mean "night vision" camera time. So they listened to the EVPs we picked up, and hopefully heard something clear enough to realize no one in the room said what they heard. Before the investigation got going, a hat box slid across the stage to the center of the stage. Pretty sure that was cast or staff of the Alahambra fucking about. A roll of paper towels appeared to try to roll out on the stage at one point. We didnt see it happen. But knew they werent there earlier. Again, suspect real people of being the culprets. While investigating the dressing rooms, I was standing in the hallway with show co-host (AG). I had my back to the dressing rooms, and AP crashed into me after dashing out of the room, freaked out that someone caressed her neck. No one was in the room with her. But I walked back in to it, along with her, and the magazine reporter. We stood there in the dark for several minutes and nothing happened. Later in the night when we were wrapping up, I walked back into that hallway and found a strong smell of perfume coming out of that room. No one could have been back there to spray anything, and I searched the hall, room, and adjacent room for any kind of automatic air fresheners. There were none, and the smell was incredible. Like your grandma smelled. You know, she just kept on spraying that funky fake flower smell for 20 minutes after she should have stopped putting it on. It was bad, and it wasn’t there when we were in the room earlier. So I grabbed up the peeps I was in the room with before, and had them check it out. They agreed it wasn’t there before, and no one could find where it may have come from. Had Mrs. Struthers not been all up on this, I might have suspected it being a lingering odor from her. But she WAS all up on this, and only smelled of vodka. So it is a mystery to me. A mystery that went away within 5 minutes of everyone else coming into the room. It was there. Then it went away. It was weird. But weirdness doesn’t really affect any of us, and the girls quickly discovered the multitude of odd hats to try on in the dressing rooms. A couple of staff members even made it easier for the girls by going to other rooms and bringing them more hats to try on and take pictures in. Mom was out on a drinking binge again, and the little girls were playing in her closet. It was amusing. I took pictures.

It was a long night. It was supposed to start at 11:30 and end around 3ish. I got home close to 4 in the morning.
But it was cool to be able to explore the Alhambra. I have seen shows there in the past, and their food was pretty good. So maybe now that they know me, they'll have me come to a show for free sometime.



Because I do love me some free food.

Now I'm hungry.

From Jacksonville Beach
MLB OUT

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