Lasagna with LaSorda

(With all the World series excitement and the jitters about next Tuesday's Election -- possibly our last -- I dug into  the R17 vault. There, I found a post from March 2020, just as the pandemic was hitting. Here then is my tale of working with the LA Dodgers, who I hope have just been crowned the World Series champs of 2024)

With little to do these days but watch my life savings dwindle and ration every dried pinto bean we have in the pantry, I decided to clean out my desk.

There, I discovered an ancient artifact -- a film slide. If I'm doing the math in my mind correctly and if I take proper gauge of the high waisted pants and already thinning hairline, I'd guess the photo was taken in 1992.

Let's see I'm 44 years old now, this is 2020, carry the 1, subtract the remainder, well, it doesn't matter how old I was then.

More importantly, the question you may asking is why am I standing next to longtime Dodger Head Coach Tommy La Sorda? The answer begins, like so many of my life adventures, "we were shooting this commercial..."

That's the thing about us grizzled ad guys and it explains why we do so much pining for the old days. It's because we had fun. Not the same kind of fun one has when writing an email blast or crafting the perfect micro-targeted banner ad. We travelled. We hung out on film sets. We got treated like royalty. And we rubbed elbows with A-listers.

You could argue that La Sorda was never an A-lister, particularly after the dry spell following the '89 World Championship. Though it would be wise not to mention that to Tommy's face. He could be quite testy.

Because the year was 1992 and YouTube had not been invented yet, nor had the internet, the only record of this commercial is locked in a musty vault, somewhere on the backlots off Gower Ave. And the 3/4 inch videotape it was recorded on, is being gnawed on by some crafty cockroaches and dust mites.

Fortunately the script is engraved on my cranial hard drive.

We were doing a sales event for Nissan (when weren't we?) My partner and I decided to enlist the help of rookie Eric Karros, who was starting as a first baseman with the Dodgers. Eric was signed at MLB minimum wage, which at the time was $109,000. Not a lot of money, even in those days.

So we had him power walk through a faux dealership showroom and point out the magnificent savings on Sentras, Altimas and Maximas.

"$1500 cash back on an Altima? Hey, those Hall of Fame guys don't need to save money, but I do." 

Embarrassing? Yes. But it put food on the table and it staved off a pink slip from the legendary hard taskmasters at Chiat/Day.

To be honest, I can't remember why La Sorda was in the spot. I believe it was part of the deal Nissan had arranged with the Dodger organization. And so we wrote some lame joke about Tommy making a cameo appearance at the end of the commercial.

He tosses a baseball to Eric, who naturally drops the ball. Tommy responds with the predictable eye roll and the even more predictable...

"Rookies!"

I told you it was embarrassing.