Daniel Greene

Category: Entertainment

  • Worth waiting for: Sandra Bernhard

    I’m not a big event-goer, and I don’t like sitting through a lot of awards and speeches, but someone with seats to spare invited me and Andy to the AHRF (now Equality Arizona) benefit dinner starring Sandra Bernhard. Well… there were awards and speeches (most of them brief, thank God!) and it was worth the wait for “La Bernhard” as she jokingly called herself.

    She may have shocked some of the people in the audience (by being a potty mouth and dissing Arizona where she’s from but is glad she left), but I’ve enjoyed her satirical sense of humor ever since I saw her in “Without You, I’m Nothing” in 1990, and nothing she said or did last night came as much of shocker to me. I just enjoyed her, and Andy did too.

  • Paul McCartney and The Police — do you have to be old to understand? ;-)

    Well, here I am in Starbucks at the age of 40, telling the 20-something cashier how excited I am that my partner and I are going to see The Police in concert next Monday night– when I find myself having to explain to the young lady who The Police were. ;-( Nevermind telling her that The Police was the band Sting was in before he went solo; that would be like telling her that Paul McCartney is the guy who used to be the lead singer of The Beatles! (Who’s Sting? Who were The Beatles? Oh dear!)

    Seriously, though, once I told her that The Police brought the world such indelible hits as Roxanne, Every Breath You Take, Message in a Bottle, and Wrapped Around Your Finger, she got it. And if you have the chance to discover — or rediscover — The Police, I highly recommend it! It may be the closest you’ll ever come to a reunion of The Beatles until you go to heaven, if there is such a place. And if there is, I count on attending live concerts of The Beatles and The Police on a regular basis. 😉

  • Singing & Signing “Pure Imagination”

    Here I am singing and signing the song “Pure Imagination” from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (more…)

  • Meeting the Life Cereal kid– my childhood stint in commercial auditions

    When I was eight, I went on about 25 commercial auditions with my maternal grandmother in NYC. I once went up for a peanut butter commercial against the boy who played Mikey in the famous Life Cereal commercial— you know, they one where the brother says, “He likes it! Hey, Mikey!” Well, “Mikey” was about 9 or 10 by that time. Of course, he booked the gig and I saw him on TV a few weeks later. There’s nothing like auditioning in NYC as a child to make your life surreal. I would see the competition in the waiting room and then see them on TV a few weeks later. It was strange and disappointing to audition and never get anything. Eventually, I stopped getting calls from my agent.

    Apparently, none of the exhuberance I had on the train to the city translated to the studio once I got there. I would be an excited little ham on the train, telling anyone around that I was going to an audition, but I would clam up in the audition itself. Of course, I never had any acting training or preparation for commercial television. Oh well.

    Thank God I went to the School of Creative and Performing Arts when I was 11 and got a great performing arts education for 7 years. I’m happy to say that I’ve had many rewarding performance experiences in my life since then. I even finally got to do a local television commercial.

  • Meeting Liza Minelli

    I met Liza when I worked at J.W. Robinson in Beverly Hills in 1987. I walked up to her and gushed! She smiled, shook my hand, and said, “Thank you.”

    I worked at Fred Segal on Melrose for about a week and waited on Liza Minelli. She was looking for a scoop-necked t-shirt. At one point, she was said something silly and then chided herself, saying, “Oh, Liza!” I was able to find her the shirt she wanted.

    I just thought of something very interesting. Liza Minelli: Three Weeks at Carnegie Hall was the first CD I ever bought. And I met Liza only weeks after buying that CD. I sang with ABBA when I was 11, and “Dancing Queen” was the first 45 RPM single I ever bought. I met Toni Tenille at Robinson’s, too, and Love Will Keep Us Together was the first LP vinyl record I ever bought. Basically, I have met all the artists I admired so much that theirs were the first recordings I rushed out to buy. How many people can say that?