Great Moments with Mr. Gurr

Silent Partner and I went to a lovely party this weekend. It was an animation scene, divided primarily into two rooms in a fabulous (and when I say fabulous, I mean decorated to an inch of its life by a animation-geek gay couple) home in NoHo. Each room held a bit of geekery royalty.

In one corner...

Mona Marshall, voice of Sheila Brovlofski. It would have been supa-sweet to meet her, but the rooms were stuffed to the gills, and one generally stayed put in the room what brung ya.

It worked out for the best for me, because I got to keep court for over an hour with....

Bob Gurr, one of the original Disney Imagineers. Original as in, he designed most of the original ride cars for Disneyland because Walt Disney was in the habit of "giving anything with wheels to Bobby." He keeps the original robot Mr. Lincoln's hip joint on his desk and gave another Lincoln hip joint to Ray Bradbury. He's 76 and goes to Burning Man. He was in the room when Mr. Lincoln's voice was recorded and watched Walt yell at the actor until the recording sounded properly weary and fed-up; he hummed along perplexedly with the crew when Walt led them all in the "The Battle Hymn of the Republic,"and then later realized that he was to be part of the soundtrack. His story about how a performance of Robot Lincoln silenced a group of African-American agitators at the 1964 World's Fair brought Silent Partner to tears. I laughed aloud at the languid "Don't fawn!" which was his standard reply to the people who shoved their way into the room to pay homage.

The party also featured 5 doggies, two of which had been abused but were now luxuriating in freely-dropped deli cuts. AND, three requests from guests for info on my Noel Tiara!

The holiday was never more fabulous!

PS - Silent Partner is about to start working on a second freelance project. Huzzah!