Monday, July 13, 2020

Happy Birthday to Me


On my seventy-second birthday, I resist all anger as I have tried to do for the past eleven years. The other day Renato commented how a child born when the “barbaric opposition” began against us, would now be finishing primary school.

I resist anger because as much as Tracy Terhune and David Bret accuse me of being a hateful person, I am not. Being angry and being hateful are two very different things in my opinion.

The biggest challenge throughout this horror which they continue to inflict.... is to resist matching their wicked states of mind. The hate runs deep in those two, i.e. Terhune and Bret are still writhing over a photograph I took eleven years ago of my cat headed towards her litter box...and stepping delicately I might add on Bret's biography of Valentino. 

Well my cat was not incontinent and was able to take that last step to do her business in the proper place. But the hateful duo Terhune and Bret are still at pitch level outrage saying she shat on the book and then peed on it. Nope she did not because she could not read. 

With that absurd level of hate being dished our way, it takes a really zen state of mind not to match that and hand back more. 

Some time ago a fine author, Thomas McNulty, who wrote a biography of Errol Flynn... took a copy of Bret's Errol Flynn biography out into the woods with a loaded shot gun and shot it to smithereens on camera. I am not alone. I share the link to his shooting. Enjoy. And his review is articulate and worth a read.


So I try to keep turning towards the positive to stay productive in the face of Tracy Terhune's continuing to steal my web traffic and guide them over to his murky world of make believe. Where he "makes" my genuinely interested traffic online "believe" I am a monster and our books "not worth a dime", despite his bragging he keeps his copies in mint condition in plastic cases.

He runs through the streets waving his fistfuls of papers screaming for the villagers to see how horrible I am. Tracy Terhune make-believe I say. Those papers are my manifesto of surviving him; my anger, my rebuttal, my years of responding to his lies about me, Renato and all of our books. And I give him a few more pages here today.

So he can extinguish his torch, close that designated hate blog and get on with his own life.

For me it is my birthday and I am so happy that despite all of Tracy Terhune's attempts to convince the Valentino world we are senile old fools (Terhune's nickname for me is “Fool Zumaya”) .. we are doing well and this past week Renato opened his Italian Rudy Facebook group. And thanks to the modern miracle of online translators, we can all read it. It has been a lively first week in the group with Renato posting his great “finds” and Aurelio Miccoli sharing his outstanding  research!

And this past week I received an e-mail with notice there is a Rudy mention in the book on Max Steiner. Steiner was actually in the Masked Model touring show in 1917. And I know readers remember this show as Rudy's vehicle out of New York. 

It has always been thought the show ran out of money and that is why Valentino was not in such a show on the west coast. This week we learned what really happened. We learn from Max Steiner that Rudy was fired along the way for a disagreement with the director. Rudy made it to the west coast only because a few of his cast mates made sure he had a place to stay in their hotels and brought him food. It could not have been a very easy trip for him.

But how exciting to add even that little detail to the story.

So it is a happy birthday. Stay safe all! 

Check out (and join) the Venerable Renato's group and I love the title... which he borrowed from the Venerable Lokanatha.