we called Scott Key. As I tried to explain to the woman in Scott Keyâs office who we were, an orderly came for Daisyâs breakfast tray and as he took it away I noticed the letters
SOS
traced in spilt salt.
Stella
The way you win a dead pool, if youâre not familiar, is you pick a list of people you think are going to drop dead. You pick for the entire year. The one with the most right wins. Like anything. The trick is to have a couple wild cards, people that no one would ever pick. You get those by doing your homework, like reading the
National Enquirer
and those kinds of papers. But also you have to think a little bit, too. You read the regular news and think, Why is so-and-so canceling all of his appointments? How is so-and-so doing now that his wife is gone? Sometimes silence is the biggest clue. If you go a while without hearing anything about so-and-so, thatâs usually a good indicator.
Living in Hollywood helps, too. You hear a million rumors and all it takes is for the wildest one to be true and you move ahead of everyone else (any pick under age forty-five pays double dividends). Different dead pools have different rules; some say the obituary has to appear in at least three national newspapers to count, some prohibit two players from choosing the same celebrity, others are lotteries(names are drawn from a hat for $10 each and when a celebrity dies that ticket holder wins, clearing out the jackpot).
Iâm in all the big pools: The Lee Atwater Invitational ( http://stiffs.com ), Chalk Outlines ( http://pwl.netcom.com.~jluger/chalkout.html ), and the original dead pool, started in the â70s, The Game ( http://members.aol.com/ggghostie/home.html ). I had Kurt Cobain in â94 and two years ago I had Chris Farley (yeah, for a heart attackâbut points are points). But I havenât been able to win it. This year my trump is Bryan Metro, the rock and roller who, my sources tell me, has fallen off the wagon in a big way. Metro canceled two shows in Tokyo last month due to âfatigue.â So far, no other pooler has added Metro to their list.
My boyfriend, Craig, thinks Iâm a sick puppy. Heâs just jaded about Hollywood, though. I met him when we both went to network on a pilot. The show was called
La Brea
and was about these ten friends who all worked at a restaurant calledâyou guessed itâLa Brea, and I was to play Katy, the waitress/photographer and Craig was going to be Blaine, the pool shark/model. Craig had already been cast as Blaine and they brought me in to read opposite him and the scene was one where Blaine asks Katy to take some head shots of him and they end up falling in love. It was sort of romantic, even though the room was full of people, and I was clicking away on an imaginary camera. The audition was my one millionth in the few months Iâd been living in California, and there was a weird sort of connection with me and Craig. Heâs not my usual type; heâs more handsome than the guys I dated back in Phoenix.
I mean heâs toohandsome
. Heâs a dead ringer for Christopher Reeve, which he thinks has hurt his career. People look at me and see Superman, he sighs. But it made him perfect for the role of Blaine on
La Brea
and even though I didnât get the part, I moved in to his apartment at Highland Gardens, a â50s hotel on the corner of Vine and Outpost someone had converted to apartments. The show wasnât picked up though, so Craig had to go back to his old job doing dinner theater at the Starion, an old morgue turned into a restaurant down on Sunset Boulevard.
Since Craig is the star of the Starion, he was able to get me a job there, too. When it opened in the early â90s the dinner theater was primarily based on the works of Agatha Christie. It was my idea to do celebrity deaths (the restaurant was a morgue, after all). Monday night we do the murder of Lana Turnerâs mobster boyfriend, Wednesday is the drowning
SOS
traced in spilt salt.
Stella
The way you win a dead pool, if youâre not familiar, is you pick a list of people you think are going to drop dead. You pick for the entire year. The one with the most right wins. Like anything. The trick is to have a couple wild cards, people that no one would ever pick. You get those by doing your homework, like reading the
National Enquirer
and those kinds of papers. But also you have to think a little bit, too. You read the regular news and think, Why is so-and-so canceling all of his appointments? How is so-and-so doing now that his wife is gone? Sometimes silence is the biggest clue. If you go a while without hearing anything about so-and-so, thatâs usually a good indicator.
Living in Hollywood helps, too. You hear a million rumors and all it takes is for the wildest one to be true and you move ahead of everyone else (any pick under age forty-five pays double dividends). Different dead pools have different rules; some say the obituary has to appear in at least three national newspapers to count, some prohibit two players from choosing the same celebrity, others are lotteries(names are drawn from a hat for $10 each and when a celebrity dies that ticket holder wins, clearing out the jackpot).
Iâm in all the big pools: The Lee Atwater Invitational ( http://stiffs.com ), Chalk Outlines ( http://pwl.netcom.com.~jluger/chalkout.html ), and the original dead pool, started in the â70s, The Game ( http://members.aol.com/ggghostie/home.html ). I had Kurt Cobain in â94 and two years ago I had Chris Farley (yeah, for a heart attackâbut points are points). But I havenât been able to win it. This year my trump is Bryan Metro, the rock and roller who, my sources tell me, has fallen off the wagon in a big way. Metro canceled two shows in Tokyo last month due to âfatigue.â So far, no other pooler has added Metro to their list.
My boyfriend, Craig, thinks Iâm a sick puppy. Heâs just jaded about Hollywood, though. I met him when we both went to network on a pilot. The show was called
La Brea
and was about these ten friends who all worked at a restaurant calledâyou guessed itâLa Brea, and I was to play Katy, the waitress/photographer and Craig was going to be Blaine, the pool shark/model. Craig had already been cast as Blaine and they brought me in to read opposite him and the scene was one where Blaine asks Katy to take some head shots of him and they end up falling in love. It was sort of romantic, even though the room was full of people, and I was clicking away on an imaginary camera. The audition was my one millionth in the few months Iâd been living in California, and there was a weird sort of connection with me and Craig. Heâs not my usual type; heâs more handsome than the guys I dated back in Phoenix.
I mean heâs toohandsome
. Heâs a dead ringer for Christopher Reeve, which he thinks has hurt his career. People look at me and see Superman, he sighs. But it made him perfect for the role of Blaine on
La Brea
and even though I didnât get the part, I moved in to his apartment at Highland Gardens, a â50s hotel on the corner of Vine and Outpost someone had converted to apartments. The show wasnât picked up though, so Craig had to go back to his old job doing dinner theater at the Starion, an old morgue turned into a restaurant down on Sunset Boulevard.
Since Craig is the star of the Starion, he was able to get me a job there, too. When it opened in the early â90s the dinner theater was primarily based on the works of Agatha Christie. It was my idea to do celebrity deaths (the restaurant was a morgue, after all). Monday night we do the murder of Lana Turnerâs mobster boyfriend, Wednesday is the drowning
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