By Cathy Maestri
InstantRiverside.com
We were chatting with a natty gentleman in a Riverside antiques store on Sunday, as is our wont, and when he said he was looking for 35mm slides, we suddenly realized who he was — “histo-tainer” extraordinaire Charles Phoenix.
Phoenix has parlayed his legendary slide shows — chock with wacky vintage slides of other people’s vacations, birthday parties and the like — into a kitsch mini-industry of slide shows (some complete with roller-skate extravaganzas), tours (downtown LA a la Disneyland), books (including one the Ontario native wrote on the Pomona Valley) and guest spots on “The Martha Stewart Show.”
We high-tailed it out to my car to sift through the bag of vintage photos I had picked up at a yard sale an hour earlier (we’re friends with “Photobooth” and “Love Letters, Lost” author Babette Hines, who runs thefoundphoto gallery in LA). Alas, the bag contained lots of negatives, but no slides.
We told Phoenix how long it would take to get to the giant orange stand at the California Citrus State Historic Park and, since it was Sunday and his companion was hungry, our friend recommended Mariscos El Tío’s on Mission Inn Avenue, with its funky decor, for lunch — despite the fact that we couldn’t remember its name. (Sorry, Charles.) We also recommended the newly-restored neon sign at the Thunderbird Lodge on University Avenue.
That got us thinking about other places we should have sent Phoenix. There is, of course, the parent navel orange tree at the intersection of Magnolia and Arlington avenues, which earned its kitschy cred back when fruit was wired on for a photo shoot; the animatronic figures in the Mission Inn’s holiday displays; and the old IHOP mural at Mr. T’s on 13th Street. (Let us know what we missed at info@instantriverside.com. We’d love to coax Phoenix back to town, maybe even for a show…)
Here’s highlights of Phoenix’s tour of LA:
We also got to thinking about our own family slides. I suppose the embarrassing has indeed mellowed into the hilariously kitschy — Mom wore those cat glasses all the way up until they became fashionable again. Then there’s the time we were at King’s Island while they were filming “The Brady Bunch” (Mr. Brady’s blueprints get swapped with Jan’s Yogi Bear poster); every time we went on a ride, cast members would walk past Mom, who snapped pictures to prove it.
We suppose we should make a few slide donations to Phoenix’s extensive collection.
He’s got two events coming up — another six-hour LA-as-Disneyland tour on Nov. 23 ($75) and the Moonlight Rollerway Holiday Jubilee, including an all-holiday slide show as well as an extravagant roller-skate show followed by an all-skate party on Dec. 13-14 in Glendale. For details on the tours, books, e-mail list for the Slide of the Week and all things Phoenix, click here.
Just to help you get your holiday entertaining started, here is Phoenix’s instructional video on how to re-create the Astro-Weenie Christmas Tree seen in his holiday slide show.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2008
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