COLUMNIST
Editor’s Page %\ $OHMDQGUR *UDWWDQ 'RPLQJXH] Ajijic—The Movie!
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rior to settling here in 1987, I had spent the previous 25 years laboring in the vineyards of the American film industry. Hollywood was then (and still is) famous for its colorful characters. However, as I already knew, Hollyweird (as it is called by some blue-nosed observers) had absolutely nothing on our own little corner of Mexico.
-XGLWK $QGHUVRQ I knew that because of having first briefly visited Lakeside in 1963. Back then it was a haven for beatnics, one reason being that you could buy some of the makings of anything in a local drugstore! The Queen of Lakeside was the famous British actress Judith Anderson, (who had played the malevolent housekeeper in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca) One night, while under the influence (of one thing or another), she had a chair placed on a barge, and as her anxious young Mexican acolytes rowed like the prisoners in the movie Ben Hur, serenely set forth for the south shore of the lake as majestically as Cleopatra must have appeared as she floated down the Nile. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to steer
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El Ojo del Lago / April 2018
the barge and once out on the water it kept making U-turns until the “Queen,” by now totally exasperated, ordered her loyal crew to Abandon Ship! Then there was Ray Rigby, once one of England’s most-illustrious screen-writers. Having squandered his fortune, and now reduced to getting by on a pittance of a pension, he wrote in desperation to the British PM. The letter purported to come from a “third-party,” and spelled out the depths to which Rigby had fallen. To my jaded eye, the note seemed something right out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the only thing missing was an infant abandoned in a snowdrift. The letter ended by imploring the PM to either drastically increase Rigby’s pension or at the least grant him an Order of the British Empire. Ray asked that I personally sign the appeal. Two months later, I received a letter marked “10 Downing Street.” It was from the PM’s personal secretary, advising that the Prime Min-
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