Disneyland Magic Kingdom Club Day, June 2, 1968

Begun in 1957, The Magic Kingdom Club was an early Annual Passport program that offered memberships to companies and their employees for free, giving them discounts and other perks. Today’s post centers around a little ginger girl who was “kissed by angels” as the saying goes. Her visit was on Magic Kingdom Club Day, June 2, 1968. Below, she poses with Alice in Wonderland in Town Square; the Mad Hatter photobombs them in the background:



Lisa Allison is the Special Guest (could they have made that paper any bigger?!?):



Here she enjoys a snack in Fantasyland with who I assume is her mother.



A hot dog was the snack of choice.



Elsewhere in the Park (Tomorrowland), The Devlin family was also enjoying Magic Kingdom Club perks on the exact same day:



I wonder if they crossed paths?

See more Disneyland Magic Kingdom Club photos at my main website.

Temple Tuesday: Shirley at Shugie's

This November 1944 image shows Shirley Temple at Sugie’s Tropics in Beverly Hills, with owner Harry Sugarman in the center, sitting next to her good friend, Betty Jean Lail. The soldiers on the ends of the booth are their dates, Bob and Brown (no last names!). Betty Jean’s copy of the photo had this written on the back:

This date was all on the spur of the moment. I had been out with Gertrude [Shirley’s mother] all day long and while I was out Shirley called mother and they made the date. It was fun to go with them, but I couldn’t stand the Lt. I was with. We went to the Pladium [sp] and it was awful. It certainly isn’t my idea of a place to dance. Besides he couldn’t dance.

Shirley and Betty Jean met at the Westlake School for Girls. The photo below shows them circa 1940; Shirley is in the first row, third from right; Betty Jean is next to her, center of the row.



Their meeting was detailed in Shirley’s autobiography, Child Star, where Betty Jean was referred to as “Plump Girl”:

Struggling under an armload of seventh-grade texts, I was assigned an unoccupied seat at a broad wooden desk in the rear row, one already shared by a plump girl with red. hair. Smiling briefly, she slid sideways along our common bench to ake room, then stared fixedly into her book.…Any alien celebrity suddenly plopped into a class of eleven ordinary girls could hardly expect effusive greetings.…It was difficult to see where I fitted, let alone worm my way in.…Sole exception in this isolation was my seatmate, Plump Girl. Enforced proximity probably evoked common ground, a jolly, extroverted view of things. From the outset her companionship saved me from being a complete loner.

Shirley became President of the Camp-Fire Girls and is shown at home in this October 1940 image folding Christmas Seals which would be mailed as part of an annual appeal for funds to fight tuberculosis. Betty Jean is the smiling girl second from right:



The 1942 photo below shows Betty Jean standing above Shirley:



Betty Jean was one of Shirley’s bridesmaids in her 1945 wedding to John Agar. By this time, Betty Jean (far left) had dropped the excess pounds.



The two remained life-long friends, as can be seen in the photo below:



Back to Sugie’s…a little more than three years later after the first photo in this post was taken, Shirley and then husband John Agar were back at Sugie’s “celebrating” their third wedding anniversary, September 1948. 



A vintage Sugie’s menu:



Shirley even had a drink named after her: “Adolescence,” which was described as “Not a kick in a carload.”



The previously posted image below shows the couple a year later, inside the Vine Street location of Sugie’s. At least Shirley is smiling this time, on the occasion of their fourth anniversary!



Over at Tiki Central, I found this image of the exterior of the Vine Street Tropics:



The Beverly Hills location closed on August 21, 1953, as seen in this clipping from The Los Angeles Mirror:



Oh, to have been able to go to this sale, advertised in December of 1952!



See more Shirley Temple photos at my main website.

Mulholland Monday: A David Lynch Tribute

It has taken over two years, but I have finally visited the other film location sites on my bucket list for “Mulholland Drive” (2001), David Lynch’s masterpiece. This post (a follow-up to the one from January 2023) also acts as a tribute to Lynch who passed away on January 16 of this year. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that Winkie’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard plays a pivotal part in numerous scenes. In actuality, the restaurant used was called Caesar’s, on El Segundo Boulevard in Gardena. It closed roughly eight years ago.



Below are Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in a scene filmed outside the restaurant, which is now boarded up.



Another screenshot from the movie showing the steps that the police officers approach as they are looking for the creepy character from one of the detective’s dream.



The steps are still there, but a homeless person and all their possessions were blocking the way. If you’ve seen the movie, you would understand why I took that as a sign to turn around and leave.



An interior shot of the restaurant from the movie with Harring and Watts:



How the interior looks today:



The frame below shows the Paramount Studio gate, as Watts’ character approaches for her screen test:



How the gate looked when I was there in 2019:



Eagle-eyed film buffs will note that the classic car just inside the gate…



is the same one that Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) owned when she drove through the gates in the 1950 classic, “Sunset Boulevard.”



The biggie on my checklist was the vintage complex called the Sierra Bonita Apartments in the film:



How the storybook cottage looks today:





The front of the complex, which has been dubbed the Snow White Cottages, were built in 1931, just around the corner from the original Walt Disney Studio in Los Feliz (torn down, of course).



In the film, Harring and Watts’ characters approach this directory:



Since the complex is a real apartment building, I was a bit hesitant to nose around too much. Not sure if this is the “tunnel” that was used and the sign was added as a bit of movie magic or what.



Love that weather vane, so typical of this style of architecture.



The directory was created for the movie, and done very well, as the style makes it look as if it had been there originally.



Watts and Harring’s characters are looking for the apartment of the mysterious Diane Selwyn, #17. She is on the directory as #12, but her ex-roommate lets the two know that she moved.



How #17 looks today:



I prefer the style of numbering used in the film! Note how the exposed brick near the entrance matches the screenshot:



I may go back at some point to attempt a few more exact matches of screenshots from the movie, but for now, this will suffice.

If you’ve never seen “Mulholland Drive,” you should. It’s the kind of film that will leave you baffled after the first viewing, but entice you to watch it again…and again. Lynch has left the interpretation up to the viewer, and even then, what is a dream and what is reality is hard to tell.

See more Hollywood Movie Locations photos at my main website.