Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Factoid #13 - Panthergirl's Cult Film Appearance

Yes...it's a retread. But an old one, so hopefully many of you haven't seen it.



As reported in my 100 Factoids, I have a 10-second cameo appearance in the very last segment of the cult film "The Groove Tube" (filmed in 1971 when I was not quite 16 years old.)

Although many people know about the movie, they don't know that it actually originated as a television production that was shown on closed-circuit tv sets in a small upper East Side theater called "Channel One". My friends and I went to see it a couple of times and were huge fans. Most of the segments in the movie were retreads from the Channel One days.

During the summer of 1971, I was working in Manhattan with my aunt at an allergist's office. Most days I wore a nurse's uniform (yeah, yeah...lots of stories about THAT, too) but this was not one of them. As I was on my way out to lunch, my aunt gave me a pack of checks to deposit at the bank. Thousands of dollars. I went to the bank, made the deposit, but on the way back, as I walked down Park Avenue, Ken Shapiro in his pink suit began to sing and dance around me. I saw all the cameras but just assumed they were doing another Channel One thing.

They told me it was for a feature film and asked me to go back to the corner and do several takes. Hundreds of people were inside the lobby of the building, watching the whole scene. The camera guys were cute so I hung out...they asked me to go see the "rushes" the following day. I signed a release (no one ever bothered to see if I was actually 18), they gave me $1, and off I went.

When I excitedly got back to the doctor's office, TWO HOURS later, my glee was quickly extiniguished by my FURIOUS aunt who thought I had been mugged and killed for the deposit money. Needless to say, I didn't get to see the rushes the next day. What you can't see in the clip is that my hair was really, really long which made me pretty recognizable. For the next several weeks people would stop me on the street and say "Weren't you the girl who was in that movie on Park Avenue?"

See my 10 second clip HERE

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