I"M DANCING MY ASS OFF...AGAIN!

DANCING MY ASS OFF…AGAIN
What four more months of shaking it like a Polaroid has done for me
BY CARL KOZLOWSKI


I can remember the moment when I decided to really get serious about losing weight. I had already been in a training program for about six weeks and had lost eight pounds – a drop in the bucket compared to my mammoth 6-foot, 3-inch, 320-pound frame. Because of my other career as a comedian, I thought I only wanted to lose about 40 more, leaving me at around 270 and able to stay hiding behind the mask of being the big lovable lug.
I figured that at least I wouldn't be morbidly obese like Chris Farley anymore, and in the relatively svelte range of Drew Carey. After all, Americans always seem to think fat is funny.

But then I looked myself in the mirror. I'd done it for years but must have been what I jokingly consider "reverse anorexic": instead of never looking thin enough, I never looked big enough. But this time I was sitting on the floor of a ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Pasadena dance studio known as the Athletic Garage, staring at myself in wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirrors as my T-shirt rode up and exposed my basketball-sized belly while I attempted to maintain a yoga position ("attempted" being the key word here).

It was then, finally, that I realized there was no purpose to being so fat, nothing happy or funny about what I was doing to myself and my health. I had always been a little bit bigger than most guys throughout my adulthood, but my weight had really soared an additional 50 pounds during the summer of 2000 and wound up playing havoc with all aspects of my existence: causing a nasty sleep disorder that resulted in lost jobs, failed opportunities, a wrecked relationship and ultimately, a totaled car.

Yet it was only when a guy named Joey Dowdy came into the PW offices early this past spring and offered to coach me in his holistic Bodytude program – an approach that forces participants to dig deep and get real about the reasons behind their self-destructive eating and exercise habits, while also having fun learning to dance – that I decided to really try and do something about it. I first wrote about the program and Dowdy – who was the original choreographer for the Backstreet Boys and now teaches at the Athletic Garage – in another Web-based article in April (http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/article.php?id=4594&IssueNum=69), when I had lost my first five pounds.

Now, four months later, I'm happy to report I've lost at least 25 more. This is another episode in my story.

"So much of being overweight is rooted in the psychological and spiritual parts of the self, and not just in the poor physical choices or circumstances someone finds themselves in," says Dowdy, who admits to having been overweight as a child himself before embarking on fitness as his life's vocation. "You have to give yourself a cut off point to let everything go. If you're holding onto job, stress, other things, you'll bring weight with you. But this approach [dance as exercise] is supposed to release that and work through it. It's about showing people that 'This is about me and having a good time and just enjoying myself.'"

Because of my gargantuan size at the start of this endeavor, Joey worked with me one-on-one for the first eight weeks of his program. Meeting at the Athletic Garage each Thursday morning for an hour, he led me through a program of stretches and dance moves that progressively enabled me to improve my cardio and pulmonary stamina while also being a lot of fun.
According to Elinor Peters, family nurse practitioner and certified diabetic educator at the Arroyo Seco Medical Group in Pasadena, people with serious weight issues have to realize that their problems are actually similar to those of alcoholics and drug addicts. They have to hit a rock-bottom point if they ever want to change – a point like my truly seeing myself in the mirror.

"I think that obesity depends on a person's readiness to make a change, so you have to figure out whether somebody really wants to make a change and give them an education on the benefits loosing this weight will do for them," explains Peters, who has teamed up with Dowdy in developing Bodytude to work with individuals like myself. "I'll often see great success stories with patients who have great stick-to-it-iveness. It took months and months to gain all the weight they did, so it's going to take months to take it off. You have to have patience to go through the whole process. Someone who thinks they can take care of it all in a couple weeks, they're not realistic."

Peters utilizes her background as a diabetic educator to coach people in proper meal planning, formally giving patients a meal plan. She also explains the food groups, pitfalls of dieting and things one must eliminate like regular Coca-Cola and high-fat foods at fast-food restaurants.

The idea is that this is a lifestyle change and that it's going to affect all aspects of their health — and she then continues to see participants on a monthly basis to discuss any problems they're having with the process. The core part of the meetings is showing her a "food diary" listing the types of meals one has in a month, allowing both the patient writing the entries and Peters herself to see where any progress or slip-ups occur in eating habits.

"I think people think they can intermix their old eating habits with the new ones and continue to lose weight," says Peters. "I find that a lot of people don't want to be on the meal plan for a week and they don't have the consistency and commitment to stay on it on a regular basis. That's the greatest pitfall in losing weight."

It is indeed a struggle to always keep making progress in the battle, for as the cliché goes, old habits do die hard. Any time you have a really bad or a truly great day, it's shockingly easy to want to turn to food to either lift your spirits or take them even higher.
It's also easy to neglect the good habits like increased exercise – for example, on a near-daily basis I've alternated working out to Dowdy's "World Dance Groove" DVD and hitting the gym – when schedules get tight. As a result, I've found that I've lost five pounds the first month, 10 more the second, then leveled off with no weight lost the third month and then shed 10 again in the fourth.

But in working with Bodytude, a big key to success comes not only from recognizing discussing the emotional and psychological issues that lead to emotional eating – and finding healthier ways to deal with them. As I adopted the mantra "I can do what I think I cannot," it carried over into positive breakthroughs in the rest of my life: transforming my standup act to a style that I'm finally truly happy about, managing to meet more people and prospective relationships, and just this week optioning a screenplay for the first time after years of trying.

Yet another bonus came in finally learning how to do the M.C. Hammer dance — the one where he placed his knees akimbo and shuffled rapidly side-to-side. I had wanted to learn it since I first saw it in 1990, and the day it became part of a class routine I was so happy I kept laughing for the entire hour. But the other key component comes from sharing the struggle with other participants.

Carla Flagg is one of the others that Dowdy is working with presently. A 37-year-old project manager for an architectural firm, Flagg has dealt with weight issues her entire life, recalling "I even gained 20 pounds quickly back when I was two years old." Yet she always loved to dance, even as she went "from being 40 pounds overweight to 60, 80, and 100 over."

The breaking point for her came in November 2005, when she survived a serious car accident and re-evaluated the way her life was going. She was 294 pounds at the time, and when she started working in Bodytude this past January, she was still 287 pounds. By the end of July, she was proud to be down to 261 pounds but hoped to eventually hit 160.

"This is the first time I've really been serious about losing weight, and talking with Joey, writing what you eat, thinking about your past and what I was doing wrong before but thinking correctly now has all helped," says Flagg, who came to Bodytude after knowing Dowdy for years in other dance classes. "This little plateau I've been at, it helps me see where I've been slipping – not doing enough exercise here, or eating too much here. It's like connecting puzzle pieces. Before I'd do one or another and it wouldn't really work and I'd give up. Not this time."

For more information on Joey Dowdy and the Bodytude program, visit www.worlddancegroove.com.

HOW MY FAMILY ALMOST GOT THROWN OUT OF DISNEYWORLD - ON CHRISTMAS DAY!!!

So i wrote last week about how my Mom used to make my sibs and I stay in the world's cheapest motels when we'd go on vacation, and how that all finally ended when I was 20 and she nearly got me killed by having me run to a pay phone to report a drug deal in the next room over.
The funny thing is, now I'm planning to get away for a couple days with some buddies and what do we do? Surf the internet to find the cheapest possible hotel rooms. I swear to God, I need to break this cycle.
Anyway, my mom broke her need for putting us through cheap hotels for no reason in that summer of '90. A couple years later i finished college and moved to Chicago to study at Second City. So, by the time Christmas of '97 rolled around, my dad called and offered me a trip it seemed I couldn't refuse.
First of all, he wanted to have me come with him, mom, and by brothers Lud and Nick to Disneyworld, and he was actually gonna join us on that vacation, something that almost never happened. I always had the impression that Dad was happy to send us off on trips without him because getting away from US, even if it meant staying home without us, was the perfect vacation for him.
But this time he was going, and we were going to the Happiest Place on Earth. I should have known there'd be a problem though: We were going to all load up in a rented white van and drive out to Florida and back from Little Rock. This meant TWO days each way, with five grown adults stuck into one van.
"The van will be big. It's better than the station wagon," dad said, trying to calm my flashbacks from summer after summer in my childhood, in which my mom, two brothers, me and my sister wound up wanting to kill each other while trapped in a three-day trip from Little Rock to Cali.
So I said sure, I'm in. How often do you get a chance to see Disney World?
So I flew down to Little Rock, we loaded up in the van, hit the road, yada yada yada. You probably get where this is going as far as the road trip is concerned: We were cramped in and MISERABLE within 20 minutes. We couldn't agree on any of the music. My brothers took turns farting (and then hitting each other for farting), and I just endured it all silently in the back. My mom yelled about something nearly every three minutes and my dad silently suffered, which looking back might have been a sign that something was wrong: he had a heart attack and had six bypasses the following October. (He's doing great now by the way and I found my mom yelling to be funny - we're all good. Weird but good, now.)
We get to Disney World and have 3 days to spend there: one in EPCOT (the biggest ripoff in the world), one at Disney World (awesome) and one at DIsney-MGM Studios (Ok, I take it back about EPCOT: Disney-MGM is the crappiest place on earth). I should mention here that my brother Lud had a few interesting quirks that many years later were proven to be a form of autism: chief among them being the fact he'd get a song in his head and then sing or hum it CONSTANTLY.
So he had some dumb song in his head and was humming away all the way through the first two days and then into our final day, Christmas itself, at Disney-MGM. It was bad enough that we were just coming to realize how lame-o that part of the parks was; my brother providing his own bizarre soundtrack to our crushing sense of disappointment started causing my mom to lose it.
"Please stop singing..." "la de da de da, hum hum..." "PLEASE stop humming.." "da da da la de da..." "I really can't take it anymore, please stop..."
This went on for like an hour. On Christmas morning. The Happiest Place on Earth was turning into a powder keg. People were starting to stare at us in line at different rides and shows.
And then it happened, the moment that is seared in my memory forever for producing The Greatest Photo I've Ever Taken (now sadly lost, likely in my move to LA from Chicago). I will describe it to you in vivid detail, though, readers.
My mom's endless nagging finally, like the law of physics about an unstoppable force smacking against an immovable object, crashed hard into my brother's endless singing. One nag too many, and my brother...Finally. Stopped. Singing.
Mom kept walking a few feet ahead, unaware that Lud had finally shut up. My dad and Nick were also obliviously quiet. I was the only one to notice that Lud had frozen in place and looked like he was about to short-circuit.
But even i couldn't imagine what came next.
He ran up on my mom, reared his foot back, and...KICKED HER IN THE BUTT! She let out a shriek as her hands flew to cover her butt, my dad started freaking out in Polish (he's from Poland), and Nick turned around and smacked Lud in the back so hard that he doubled over in his own agony.
So while one brother was smacking the other, my dad was yelling in an unintelligible language and my mom was in shock with her hands over her butt, I pulled out my camera and caught this Hallmark moment while trying not to laugh. It's a glorious photo, or it was: just like Jesus has an anti-Christ, so this photo was the complete antithesis of everything good and holy that Norman Rockwell had to say about the American family.
And while i'm taking that photo, all of a sudden the Disney Secret Police come running from their hideouts and confront all of us.
"Excuse me, is everything OK?" said the goof in charge.
Yeah, terrific. Wanna see my Polaroid?
"We can't have you folks kicking and hitting each other in the middle of the Magic Kingdom. We've received some complaints."
Amazingly, we pulled it together. But how many of YOU have ever been threatened with removal from Disneyland??Needless to say, we never took a family vacation all together again.

MY FAMILY"S VACATIONS WERE LIKE PLAYING "SURVIVOR"

Remember when you were a kid and summer seemed to stretch on forever?
You had three whole straight months off from school. 90 days without a required thing to do. And each day seemed to have 58 hours in it, because the possibilities were endless.
ANd it was always cool to go visit your grandma in some faraway state where she'd spoil you rotten.
Yep, it was all great, and we'd go see Grandma each summer, with my mom driving cross-country in our family station wagon from Little Rock, AR to El Cajon, CA with myself and my three siblings scurrying around in the back. Mom was an amazing driver who could put truckers to shame. That's because she drove just LIKE a trucker with a meth habit, speeding every stretch of highway that she could and trying to stop as little as possible and even driving through the night when she could.
But yet despite the fact that she'd married well - my dad is a retired VA doctor - she always drove as cheaply as possible. That was one big reason she tried to avoid stopping to sleep - to save money from hotel costs. But when she DID stop, she'd pull into divey places that made the Bates Motel look like the Ritz-Carlton - and furthermore, would have my brothers and I duck down amid the luggage while taking my sister into the office and pretending that she was the only child traveling with her. Just to save ten bucks on the extra-kid fee. The whole rest of our stay, only one of us could be seen outside at a time, so that she could always tell the onwer that any of us were THE one kid she had - a claim that the owners found hard to dispute because Mom always asked for hotel rooms on the furthest side of the parking lot, away from the door - making us look like drug smugglers.
Funnily enough, it was drug smugglers who impacted our ability to travel cheaply.
See, it was the summer of '90 when my mom was driving us through the northern Cali town of Santa Maria (where Michael Jackson is put on trial whenever he diddles a kid, since Neverland is technically there). She decided it was late at night and time to stop. We pulled into (surprise) another $25 dive, did our duck and cover routine and wound up in a room just in time to watch the final episode ever of "Newhart."
Ah, what a rich source of laughter that was. But that was hardly the most exciting thing to happen that night. Nope, at about 2 a.m. my mom woke us all up by shaking us and loudly whispering, "I hear voices next door."
Unfortunately, it wasn't the sound of love - or, ok, loveMAKING - that my mom was pointing out to us. Face it, that would be weird.
No, she was hearing angry voices. ANd now we were hearing them too.
"I think there's a drug deal going on in there," she whispered.
Now, before I go further, I need to explain that my mom was and to this day remains the ultimate conspiracy theorist. Not about big things like 9-eleven or that Bush is really a lizard man, but about little things like "hey, i think the lady next door to us is running a whorehouse out of her home." And more amazingly, her hunches - including about the whorehouse - had proven right over the years. She was the true Jessica Fletcher, leaving the amateur sleuth played by Angela Lansbury on "Murder She Wrote" in the dust each week, both in her own real-life investigations of our neighbors and in solving the crimes on every show she watched within the first ten minutes.
So I knew mom was probably right about the drug dealing. But then she wanted ME to be the one to do something about it.
"Carl, you're the man of the family on this trip. You're my oldest son. Call 911."
WHAT?
"Um, YOU"RE near the phone mom...YOU call." I whispered back.
But she was afraid if any of us used the in-room phone we'd be heard and all wind up killed. So, like an Inuit Eskimo mother sending her son off to be a man via a solo trek through the Arctic tundra, I was ordered to get my jammies on and hotfoot it to the phone booth across the gigantic parking lot.
It's funny how, when your life's in danger, everything can seem bigger and scarier than it probably really is. So when i cracked open the door and spotted the booth, the parking lot suddenly looked like the football-stadium-size lots at Costco or a 24 hour Wal Mart. And I was gonna have to run across it in PAJAMAS without being noticed.
OK, i thought. Here goes nothing.
I pulled the door quietly shut behind me and made a mad dash, feeling like Nicolas Cage when he's chased through the town in the middle of the night in "Raising Arizona." I mean, this was just as crazy as anything Cage did in that movie.
I ran like hell, and finally made it. Sure enough, it was an old-school, glass-encased booth wiht a door, and I shut it behind me so i couldn't be heard. Like I'd be heard anyway, at 3 in the morning. If someone got that close to me, I'd have more to worry about than being HEARD, that's for sure.
I dialed 911 and tried to convey the gravity of the situation.
"Um, yeah, I'm staying with my family in this shitty motel on the main drag of town..."
"Which one, sir?"
"WHICH shitty motel?" I didn't know. This place sucked so bad it didn't even have a visible sign with its name on it. KNowing my mom, i knew it had to be the worst one.
"The shittiest one. Trust me. Just send cops to the shittiest motel in town, 'cause there's a drug deal and..."
Right then, i heard the sound of squealing tires and a loud BANG. I shrieked like the chick in the shower from "Psycho" and yelled "Oh my God, they're shooting at me. They're gonna kill me.." as I slammed the phone down in sheer terror...only to find that the BANG had come from a carload of teenagers who just had some balloons with them and decided to pop one. BANG.
But i ran for it, nonetheless. I didn't want the cops to see who i was and be visible to the jerks doing the deal. I ran all the way back to my room, only to find it locked. My brothers were laughing at me on the other side, purposely not unlocking it while watching me have a meltdown outside. Well, the world's quietest meltdown, because I didn't want to get heard.
I finally made it in by convincing them with my powers of persuasion.
"I swear to f***, if you don't open this door I'll tell them ot shoot you first." Funny how everyone's a tough guy when their life's in danger. I'm normally a puss, and have never been in a fight in my life, and here i was threatening my brothers like i was Brad Pitt in "Fight Club."
They threw open the door, i dove under a bed - i mean, i SLID like Pete Rose stealing home - and in a quivering mess, gave my family the update.
"Oh my God i called the cops, but i didn't know the name to this place..."
"WHAT?" my mom said. She was ready to send me back out there.
"This place is a dump. I told them to send police to the shittiest dump in town. It cant' be THAT hard here."
Sure enough, within five minutes, five cop cars showed up and raided the room next door. POUNDS of coke were found, guns piled up like the set of "The Sopranos," and a group of five sweaty Mexican guys who all got arrested.
We were secretly thrilled by it all, peeking thorugh the curtains and giggling. I was now the family's hero.
THe next morning, my mom went to the front office and argued with the Chinese guy who owned the place. He could barely pronounce "refund,' so he wasn't giving one. Of course, leave it to my mom to haggle for a refund on a $25 room.
But we drove out of town with an important lesson learned: no more divey motels. My mom never took us to less than a Holiday Inn again.

A CATHOLIC GUY'S GUIDE TO DATING

(I wrote this as a tryout to be a humor essayist for MSN.com. They want me to take a different approach, so i'm working on that but figure why have this one go completely to waste? Hope you dig it...)

Dating is stressful enough for anyone searching for Mr. or Ms. Right. But it can be downright maddening when your parents throw the pressure of finding someone of the same religion into the mix.
In this largely secular age, most people don't have to sweat that part of the dating equation anymore. But if you're raised as a member of one of the Western world's two oldest religions - in Judaism or (like me) in Catholicism - the heat is often still on from parents (and even more so from grandparents!) to marry within your own faith and keep the family traditions alive. Thankfully, contrary to general media opinion, there are plenty of perfectly attractive and hip twenty- and thirtysomethings out there who still go to synagogues and church services.

It should be easy for Catholics to find each other. After all, according to the US Census, there's more than 60 million of us in America - making us one of the largest demographics in the nation. But just because you go to the same church as a potential love interest doesn't mean you'll have anything else in common.

That's why I'm here to help my fellow Catholics figure it all out, and maybe other churchgoers might pick up a few tips too.

First, it might seem the obvious thing to do is head to any church and take a look around for the cutest guy or gal. But you have to pick the parish that best suits your personality. I've noticed that there tend to be two distinctly different kinds of parishes.

One is what I call a "party parish," located smack in the middle of one of the hottest yuppie neighborhoods in the city. This church's members have money to burn and, as such, plan wild events like ten-bar pub crawls on Saturday nights that inevitably have participants holding their hair back and begging for God's mercy long before Sunday morning. Their young adults groups are sometimes the largest singles groups in the city, and as at least one buddy of mine noted, "At this church, you're not making an offering. You're paying cover." And receiving the Communion wine also serves as the pre-party beverage of the evening for these party veterans.

On the other extreme are churches run by priests who are so rigid the parish might as well have served as a convent and seminary recruitment station. Their young adult groups actually spent their Friday nights - well, some of them anyway - listening to lectures about the suffering of Christ on the cross and other such cheerful topics.

The strange thing, though, is that the rigid church managed to produce five times the marriages that the party parish did. Then again, they say misery loves company. Or maybe hearing so many discussions of Christ's sufferings actually prepared them for the horrors to come in parenthood and lifelong fidelity.

Either way, if you don't pick a parish that suits your personal style, you won't be able to find the person whio will either.

Of course, just as there are extremes to parishes as a whole, there are also extremes to the different kinds of men and women you'll come across. I have a friend who once was a successful, good-looking engineer who managed to be quite the playboy for years - until one day he felt the urge to become a priest. While some of my women friends swoon upon seeing him and jokingly call him "Father What-A-Waste," he found true fulfillment in giving up booty calls for a Higher Calling.

On the other hand, there's plenty of guys like my buddy "Tony," who treats the Catholic sacrament of Confession (in which any sin is forgiven and kept utterly secret by the priest) like it's a car wash of the soul. "Get out there and do what you want on Friday, hit Confession on Saturday, and you're good to go for church on Sunday," he says. I'm not sure that's really what the Lord intended.

You'll find all types of women as well, but two main types spring to mind in Catholic groups: the wild child former Catholic schoolgirls (who actually exist!) and might as well have stepped out of a Britney Spears video, and the die-hard, old-school types who are so uptight they might as well be wearing burqas. Again it's odd, but it's the burqa ladies who always manage to get married first.

The other big way to meet people is to search Catholic dating Web sites. Unlike EHarmony, which never warns potential users in any of their ads that you better not be gay or an atheist (or both!), Catholic dating sites make it pretty clear about what you're getting into. Aside from writing a description of yourself and mentioning your favorite movies or foods, you're also asked to name your favorite saints, specific favorite prayers, and other things like how often you go to Mass. It's in seeing these answers that you can distinguish between fanatics and people who integrate their faith with modern reality (if that seems like a dis, the fanatics don't want people like me either).

But at least one such site forces everyone who signs on to answer whether they agree or disagree with a list of 7 particular faith questions. These include dry philosophical concepts like papal infallibility (the doctrine that the Pope is never wrong on matters of faith and morals) and whether you believe the Lord is really present in Holy Communion, but more pertinent to those on the prowl are the two biggies: Do you agree or disagree with the church's teachings against premarital sex, and against contraception?

One can only imagine the mental hoops that many of us are put through in answering those questions. Answer one way and you sound like a candidate for sainthood but also a total bore; answer the other and get labeled a whore. I'm not kidding - check out the message boards and you will find some of the most judgmental people this side of the Republican National Committee. Inevitably, there's at least five balding guys named Larry or Bob lurking about on the threads who are 47 or 53 years old and wondering why they can't find a "pure enough" woman anymore.

But consider answers like that, and you'll find someone who will be your soulmate - whether you're pristine and on an express flight to Heaven, living in a grey area that'll find you doing time in Purgatory, or throwing caution to the wind on an elevator ride straight down to Hell.

KILL 'EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT!!! aka MY THOUGHTS ON THE ELECTIONS

I just have a few thoughts about what I'd like to see happen with our presidential primary process.

First of all, anyone who thinks that what happened in Iowa remotely resembles a democracy is completely deluded. Who came up with the BS idea of hosting an election day that takes place only at night and involves a bunch of people PUBLICLY stating who they support, and then throwing their support away to a candidate in a second voting round just because the person they supposedly have a principled support for wasn't popular enough with others?

Isn't the beauty of the American voting system the fact that no one has to know who our vote is for? But here, Farmer Bob has to tell everyone what he's thinking and then he's expected to compromise that thinking five minutes later just because it's a popularity contest and he guessed wrong.

Only 5 percent of Iowa Republicans took part in the 2004 caucuses and 10 percent of Iowa Democrats. So if the people there don't care to participate, why are THEY first in the nation and being treated like prophets?

It's appropriate the way that "caucus" sounds like a porno term becuase in allowing this format to continue we're all getting screwed. And as fascinating as it was to see Hillary Clinton cry and display what appeared to be a genuine human emotion for the first time in her life (though i still she faked the tears in an effort to get the sympathy vote next), I still say it's a ridiculous way to elect anyone. Almost as ridiculous as those idiots who have the electoral college!!!!!!!! Oh wait a minute...D'oh!

So here's what i propose for reforming the electoral process:

First, shorten the damn election season. Canada only has like a six-month window for campaigning (maybe less) from start to finish and look at them: free universal health care and they hardly ever get involved in a war. Works for them! Why not us? By now, with a full year left, I'm already sick of seeing every last one of these fools on my TV everday.

So if we have to watch them, let's spice it up a little.

Make them all compete on "American Gladiators." Screw the two-person format that's on the air out and let all the candidates run out and try to climb that giant foam pyramid at once, trying to avoid getting thrown down by the Gladiators and trying to get back up again when they do inevitably fall. Now, if THAT" s not a painful metaphor for those running for president, I don't know what is. And wouldn't it be more fun to see Hillary get knocked down into the water during that contest with the big foam jousting sticks than to just see her open her personal waterworks for the cameras?

The other way to weed out the folks running is "Celebrity Apprentice," in which 75 actors - mostly washed-up types from the '80s - have to learn ruthless dealmaking in order to survive the wrath of Donald Trump. They lie and cheat to each other, but what better way to train for Osama?

COMMENT BACK: What would YOU do differently if you could change our primary system?

STAY OR LEAVE? AND I"M NOT TALKING ABOUT IRAQ

I'm a movie addict. I mean, ADDICT. To me, the best days are the rare occasions when i can find the time and dough to sit through three movies. I think that's because my parents hardly let me see anything growing up until the summer I turned 16 and landed a job at a movie theater. That's when my dad finally said, "well i can't stop you now" and i proceeded to gorge on the feast of films at the tail end of that magical decade, the '80s. And I've never looked back.

I can tolerate just about anything, too. My favorite film is "Royal Tenenbaums", but I also appreciate everything from "Lawrence of Arabia" to "Mr. Deeds" (yes, the Sandler one). And so, there is nothing so disappointing and downright distressing to me as when i come across a film so damn bad i have to walk out rather than continue suffering through an abomination, a sacrilege to the shrine i love, the movie theater.

Someone just asked me the other day, have i ever walked out of a film? Why yes, i have, and so I decided to write a little post and share those rare atrocities with you.

Amazingly, two of this very short list of films star my absolute favorite comic, Chris Rock. The first was called "CB4," a movie that came out amid his first taste of fame back in '93 or '94. It was supposed to be a "Spinal Tap" of rap, but instead was just pure crap. SO bad i actively weighed an existentialist quandary: an hour had gone by when i finally couldn't take it anymore, and I finally decided that even with 25 or 30 minutes to go, I needed to escape with what brain cells i had left. I actually felt trapped in the theater and needed to run for the sweet air of freedom outside. I think Chris himself has come to his senses and destroyed all copies of this film.

In fact, it might very well be "CB4" that killed off Rock's career initially, requiring the stunning '96 comeback of the greatest standup concert ever, "Bring the Pain." With newfound success, he promised to make better films, even claiming Woody Allen was his idol and he was out to make that rare breed of film: an intelligent African-American comedy. So he came out with a remake of "Heaven Can Wait," a 1978 Best Picture nomineed by Warren Beatty. Sounded promising, but it was even worse than "CB4."

I can't really catalog what went wrong with this movie, but within minutes of its start - perhaps even seconds - i and my brother who endured it with me could tell that something was way off base on a fundamental level. This was so bad that even though we paid 50 cents to see it (you read right! That was the matinee price at our "dollar theater" back in Little Rock, AR) we wanted to leave. But first we faced another philosophical quandary for the ages: Do we STAY because it only cost 50 cents? Or do we LEAVE because it only cost 50 cents?

Well, we left. And then pondered whether to ask for a refund. Of our 50 cents. We finally decided that that was beyond our Shame Threshold and went home.

Another winner i saw for 50 cents (you can't blame anyone for seeing anything that costs that little) was the big-screen version of "The Beverly Hillbillies." Yes, I saw that. In the theater. But for 50 cents. At least i didn't whore myself out as much as the schmuck pseudo-critic whose comment ran in the film's newspaper ads, stating that Jim Varney (the master thespian who reached greater fame as "Ernest") deserved an Oscar nomination for his dead-on portrayal of Jed Clampett. But I admit this was so bad, i wound up getting some exercise as i kept getting up from my seat to walk out, but not wanting to actually leave the theater and experience a blazing hot and humid Arkansas day. So i would walk out backwards, slowly, hoping SOMETHING would happen on screen that would persuade me to stay. And sure enough, each time - about roughly every 20 minutes - I would find an actual laugh, sit back down and then kick myself for being duped again.

The last film i can remember ditching was Jim Carrey's "Fun with Dick and Jane." Now, i used to love Jim Carrey. Still do in his classics like "Dumb and Dumber,' the first "Ace Ventura," "Liar Liar" and "Bruce Almighty." But, like Rock's "Down to Earth," this one was "off" within moments and continuously grew even worse. It might have been that I was fairly buzzed at the time (long story, but it involved being a drunk Santa at an office party about an hour before), but this film was profoundly annoying and had a staggering 45 minutes of ads and trailers before it began. So when i asked for a refund (yes, i finally grew the stones to ask for one!) the manager tried to deny me, saying I'd been watching for over an hour. I proceeded to make a scene in the lobby, giving out the endings to "The Departed" and other films while warning people not to see "Dick and Jane", before the guy finally handed me back my tenspot.

At last justice was served.

COMMENT BACK: What's the worst movie you've ever seen? Most disappointing? Did you get a refund?

MY WEIRDEST CHRISTMAS EVER

This ran in "LA Citybeat" Christmas '03 - but it's damn funny and hope you enjoy it....

MY WEIRDEST CHRISTMAS EVER
The car that arrived for Xmas~
By CARL KOZLOWSKI ~
t was the night after Christmas 1991, and my parents had taken off on their first vacation away from me and my siblings in over a decade, when they capped off the ‘70s by shakin’ it with Don Ho in Honolulu. I was 20 and my sister was almost 22 - so my folks felt they could finally trust us to watch our two little brothers and the house for a couple of days as they headed off to the slightly less exotic destination of Branson, Missouri, for a little R&R.
As they prepared to drive off on their own, they issued the immortal cliché uttered by every parent leaving the kids in charge in a movie: "Don’t let the house fall apart!" before chuckling to show us they really trusted us to have it in control.
They had no idea how prophetic their words would be.
For on that night - their FIRST night away from us in 12 years - at about 12:30 in the morning, as I watching David Letterman while writing a note to my college girlfriend about how nothing ever happened in Little Rock...something did.
My youngest brother Nick was 13 and asleep in his room upstairs. My brother Lud was 15 and in his bed downstairs. My sister Krys was passed out on the couch behind me. I was the one who heard it coming - it sounded like a descending jet plane heading straight towards us, and then - our house was rocked with what seemed like a sonic boom.
Krys practically fell off the couch. Lud sprang awake. Nick was still silent upstairs as we quickly tried to rationalize what had just happened, and whether it was safe to go outside. Earthquakes didn’t happen in Arkansas, did they? We scratched that off the list of possibilities. I had grown up eagerly anticipating the possibility of alien life as a young boy - perhaps I had been wrong to grow up and disbelieve, and the little green men were now here!
What remained on our mental list was far more disturbing. I thought we’d been hit by a nuclear weapon. After all, we lived in an area that during the Cold War was among the top 20 targets for the Soviets – 15 miles from an Air Force base and a hop, skip and a jump from Camp Robinson, one of America’s largest national guard training facilities that stretched over 50 miles in length.
I decided that as the oldest male, I would take the hit for the team and go outside to see what had happened. I grabbed a huge flashlight and a baseball bat and gingerly opened the front door, Krys and Lud left behind me, Nick still in his amazing Rip Van Winkle slumber down the hall.
I stepped out just as a teenage guy jumped out of our bushes and ran across the street and to the top of the driveway across from us and started waving frantically as an SUV-type truck came screaming around the corner, screeched to a halt, picked him up and drove away.
I decided I had to look in our bushes and see what he might have left behind. But it was a lot bigger than something he could hide in a bush. As I crept along, I heard the gentle purr of a
rotating engine ... the engine of a car HANGING OUT THE SIDE WALL OF OUR HOUSE IN MID-AIR!!!!
We have the insurance photos to prove it. There was a Dodge car hanging out the side of our garage, looking like Michael J. Fox’s Delorean in "Back to the Future" if, well, if it had not quite made it to the future and just clobbered the town courthouse instead.
And inside the car were three very drunk, very stunned teenage boys who, like me, were trying to figure out what just happened. The driver was apparently the one who had come to his senses and run away, creating the first hit-and-run on a house that I’d personally ever heard of.
The amazing thing was that none of our neighbors seemed to notice a thing. None of them had come outside to help or even stare.
Not really knowing what to do with three guys sitting in a car attached to my house, I called 911. And oh, about 38 minutes later, the lightning-fast North Little Rock Police Dept. showed up to take control of the situation. By this point, the boys had unbuckled their seatbelts, jumped to the ground and used our phone to call their parents - and one of them had even come to realize that we’d played on the same YMCA basketball team seven years before. He saw our team photo on the wall, and soon we were reminiscing. What else could we do? Neither one of us was going anywhere anytime soon.
It was when the police decided to call in a tow truck to yank the car out of our house that two things happened: 1) The neighbors suddenly decided to come out and see how we were doing, and 2) It was time to call our poor parents. What does it take to get the neighbors’ attention? It’s not every day you get to see a tow truck pull a car out of a house, even in a state known for its monster truck rallies. But then it became a real bonding experience, as they tried to "console" us, some even bringing us fruitcake, which we declined, because there was no need to add to the senseless tragedy at hand.
And so the truck heaved, and pulled - and just about knocked over the left side of our house as it took the car out. More than a few neighbors said "I hope they have insurance!’ which both we and the driver thankfully had. The boys’ parents came and picked them up, apologizing sheepishly as if they had just pulled a simple little prank out of an episode of "Leave it to Beaver," and our parents sounded like they jumped right out of their bones when they heard the news and raced home five hours in the dead of night, their vacation cut off before it began.
When the police reconstructed the accident the next day, they estimated that the car was going 110 mph in a 25 mph zone, careening down a backwoods straightaway before hitting a curve as it entered our residential neighborhood. The driver hit the brakes and laid black rubber over 100 feet across pavement, through the neighbor’s lawn, and smacked into the side of
our house. But the most amazing thing was, they had defied the laws of physics to do it – they had actually squeezed impossibly between two trees in the neighbor’s lawn, barely scratching the trees and only putting some dents in their doors, but hitting the trees had rerouted them from hitting our front porch and slowed them down enough to ensure they weren’t flung from the car like projectiles upon impact with our house.
The driver actually came back with his insurance paperwork the next day - while driving a Porsche. Sure, he might have planted his car drunkenly into the side of our house; sure he might have come back the next day in a Porsche, but at least he came back! Can you really say they’d do that here, in L.A.? Or the O.C.? I think not! In Little Rock, we might plow into a person’s house in a drunken stupor - but we pay for it!
And over the next month, my mom used that money to not only rebuild the damage but to make a couple of improvements. We now have a brick wall that blocks access to the actual wall of the house - just in case it happens again.
We also have a set of highway reflector lights that have been put in our front lawn. For the same purpose. Classy, but effective. No one’s driven on our lawn since.
And oh yeah, Nick slept through the whole thing.
Merry Christmas!
12-31-03




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