Saturday, April 24th, 1976

Despite minor setbacks and disappointments, today I accomplished everything I set out to do! I hit the shopping center a little later than my planned schedule. Called three cabs before I could even get one to answer and then I had to wait a half hour. Then he nearly wrecked just as we arrived at the Holiday Inn and I found out later the police came and he was arrested! I saw Steve and a lot of other people I knew at least by sight from the comics stores and other conventions.

I got three undergrounds even though I had to lie about my age but I promise I won't do it again. I finished my FF and Spidey collections! Also got all the new comics and a lot more. So much fun!

Stayed only about an hour, though. Got back to the shopping center with a lot less trouble. Was way early in fact. Had to wait quite a while on the bus back downtown. The rise back seemed to go pretty quickly since I read a lot. Didn't even get too motion sick! Got back downtown by 4, back home by 4:30. Ate a little, read a lot.

About 7 or a little after, Terry, his mother and father showed up and we all went over th river in the rain to see Tony Orlando and Dawn! In spite of a somewhat hostile audience and an admittedly bad day for Tony, I thought the whole experience was out of this world! My first concert! They did all my favorites of theirs! Terry liked it so much that now he says he may see Wings with me. Since the tickets don't have any specific seats, all he needs is to get one but I doubt he can at this point.

I was so tired in a good way by the time we got back but i managed to stay awake to watch Raquel Welch on SATURDAY NIGHT. It was the sexiest I'd seen her in ages in a strange sort of way. What a day! Whew! Good night now.

NOTES: Ah, why don't I have days that go that smoothly anymore? Some travel, a comic book convention, some good reading, a greta concert and some good old, red-blooded fantasy of another kind just before bed. A good day, indeed.

In spite of what I wrote, I did NOT actually finish my SPIDER-MAN AND FANTASTIC FOUR collections that day. In fact, it would be another 15 years before I finished the FF and I never did finish Spidey. I think, at this time, i was rationalizing the reprints as counting. Thus, I never had FF # 5 then but I had the STORY from FF # 5 and I was counting that.

My first concert. Wow! We had considered going to see Sammy Davis, Jr with Freddie Prinze a month earlier but had decided to wait. Tony Orlando and Dawn may be a trivia question from the seventies today but Tony was one of THE best ever at working a crowd. Oddly, I don't recall a lot of the details. Just that I enjoyed the whole event immensely and suddenly wanted to go to a million more concerts...which I never did. Very few, actually. I would see Wings in a month, CSN a couple of years later, Yes after that, the Moody Blues twice, Paul McCartney three times more and the eighties one hit wonders, Loverboy in 1982. I think that was about it. Too expensive and seriously, too loud!

Raquel Welch was THE big sex symbol of the late sixties and early seventies and Terry and I had been collecting photos of her for about six years at that point. Her acting career was on the wane and she was no longer the attraction she had once been. He would see her at the ill-fated Beverly Hills Supper Club a couple of years later but for some reason I wasn't able to attend.