September Newsletter
“Chief Sitting Bull lives by three rules: No red meat, no get feet wet, no put money in show business.” Annie Get Your Gun, The Broadway musical.
In the first newsletter I promised to reveal the origins of Mad Dogs. It was the summer of 1991 and I’m walking down MacDill. Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, right? I spot a For Rent sign on a broken-down restaurant catty-corner to what looks to be a half-way house for vagrants opposite a gas station. There’s nothing too pretty about this stretch of the road. Maybe the place is going for a song.
Let me bring you up to speed on what had preceded this. A couple of years earlier, I was a theatrical producer in Australia who had misjudged his own playing field. Two big mega flops added to a mountain of debt put me two million in the red, which was a lot of dosh in those days.
I had Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert, both past their prime, starring in an expensive comedy called “Aren’t We All” with not nearly enough investors and too big a cast. Sexy Rexy, now nearing eighty and on his sixth wife, couldn’t remember his lines. The critics were less than kind, suggesting it should be called Aren’t We Old? After fifteen years of putting on shows, they considered me past my prime as well. Too many overseas imports, not enough use of Australian stars they said. I could have pointed out there were no Australian stars in those days except a TV kangaroo called Skippy, but you can’t argue with critics and maybe they had a point. Then there was my other show, “Blood Brothers,” a musical about twins separated at birth, ironically using only Australians. Ten days into the run an unknown Russell Crowe punches the lights out of the actor playing his twin brother. Evidently, the culprit was pulling a fast one during Rusty’s big speech. Moving a chair or something. Equity insists Rusty is fired and his understudy is under rehearsed. The million-dollar musical that’s going to get me out of debt, folds. Not enough investors in that one either. You live and learn. Except you don’t.
Two wasted years later, frittering around the world, trying to figure out a second career. Now, I’m on MacDill penniless. I call the number. The joint, and it was a joint, turns out to be owned by an Italian kid weighing four hundred pounds who thinks he’s in in a Godfather movie.
“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” he tells me in that voice. “Give me 500 bucks. I’ll give you the keys and then, once you open, you’ll pay me two grand a month for the rent, goodwill and equipment. If you don’t pay me, the debt gets passed on to some people I know who will collect.”
The equipment was old, the goodwill nonexistent and the rent too much, but I had nothing to lose. Plus, I found out he was no more related to the Mafia than I was.
A few months into 1992 the bills remained unopened. Enter the cavalry, the Colonel. “Hey, I’ve always wanted to own a restaurant should you ever need a partner,” announced this young Marine with a gold Amex peering recklessly out of his shirt pocket. He had stumbled upon us directly from the First Gulf War, victorious and enthusiastic. You never want to offer a Gold American Express card to a struggling restaurateur, but he did. And, rather surprisingly, we are still partners to this day.
Then came Blake’s mother, Bunny, the Grande Dame of South Tampa. She discovered us one rainy Monday night and started bringing in all her posh friends. “Can you give my son a job this summer before he goes off to University?” That’s how I met Blake and forty years on, Boy did he and his sister return that favor! Look around you if you’ve just walked in. For more about all things Mad Dogs, join me for my monthly Monday lunch chats about just how mad you can go in the midday sun.
