Hey, @BearsWiin sorry you didn't make it to the Rose Bowl in 1991.
Maybe you can tell us all about your experiences in the Citrus Bowl that year, instead?
Well, I was living in Studio City at the time, working on a little Pauly Shore vehicle called Encino Man. He actually wasn't expected to be the star, since Sean Astin played the main character, but Pauly parlayed the success of his role in Encino Man into a multimovie deal with Hollywood Pictures that brought us such cinematic treats as Son-in-Law and BioDome. Brendan Fraser was an unknown at that time, but you could tell that he was a really talented young actor the way he climbed all over everything. If you had asked me at the time which ingenue in the film would still be around 25 years later, I'd have bet on Megan Ward, Sean Astin's love interest; she was really hot in a girl-next-door way. But, here we are in 2015, and her bitchy friend Robin Tunney is a regular on The Mentalist, and Megan Ward is at least a decade out of the business. Funny how life works.
So we had this big warehouse up off of Roxford in the north end of the San Fernando Valley where we set up shop in September. Hollywood Pictures was a subsidiary of Disney but I guess we didn't rate actually getting stage space on the Disney lot down off of Riverside in Burbank (I worked there several years later, but that's another story), and there seemed to be a shortage of stage space in the area at the time, so we just rented this warehouse and started converting it to a makeshift soundstage. Interestingly enough, as we were setting things up on one side of the street, there was an Adam Ant music video production filming in a warehouse on the other side of the street. It was pretty wild, because this was like five years after he'd done anything of note (don't drink, don't smoke, what do-ya-do) and I was like, "Adam Ant? He's still around? Wow." So the first thing we had to do was convert the upper floor on the west side of the warehouse to production offices so the art department could have a place to put up all its storyboards and whatnot and spread out all its plans for the sets we were going to be building, there at the warehouse and at many local locations. So we had a small skeleton crew doing all this, 60+hrs./week, not throwing bodies at it so we could extend the work out long enough to the point where actual sets needed to be built so that nobody would have to be laid off in the interim. Funny thing is that, even though I'd started work and done everything through regular channels, the film's production manager hadn't yet signed an agreement with the local craft unions, so technically I wasn't supposed to be working on it yet. My boss, as he was hiring me, told me "just don't tell the union you're working, and then in a few weeks when they sign the papers we'll let them know." Well, the union found out that I was working there before the agreement was signed, so I was called in front of the union's disciplinary panel to explain my actions to them. My boss was called in with me and spoke on my behalf to these bullnecked cigarchomping assholes with gaudy oversized rings on every fat finger (it really was a smokefilled back room like in the movies), and in the end we both got off with a warning because, let's face it, the whole idea is to have our guys working, and that's what happened.
So anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, working 60+ hours with the skeleton crew. Long story short, from September through February we were working hot and heavy on the film, so there wasn't much opportunity for me to go up to Berkeley from LA to see the Bears play during their 10-2 season. I listened to many of the games via radio, including the game against Pacific where they ran out of charges for the cannon on the hill because we scored so much (86-24 final score), so the crowd would yell "BOOM!!1!" instead whenever we (WE!) scored. I did get the opportunity to see the Bears at the Rose Bowl in October, I think, when they came down to play UCLA. That was a close game where Cal was down in the 4th quarter and came back to win the game on a Doug Brien field goal. The game against Washington sounded like an awesome game at Strawberry Canyon, but of course the weekend was marred by the Oakland Hills firestorm that burned a shitload of homes a day or two after the game. I had a TA whose apartment was destroyed by the fire, and I donated a few hundred dollars to her to help her replace the library that she'd lost. Anyway, after that game it was all about the Big Game, which was against a tough stanfurd team. Cal was favored to win, and the team was confident - Brian Treggs, Bryce Treggs' father, boasted that he'd move to East Palo Alto if the Bears lost that game. The game itself was a huge letdown, the Bears killed themselves in the foot by committing a huge number of personal foul penalties, and in the end furd beat Cal 38-24, a more convincing win against the Bears than Washington eked out the previous month. So we (WE!) were relegated to the Citrus Bowel.
The film schedule didn't allow any extra time to fly out to Orlando, so I watched it on the television instead. A group of us had flown out to the Copper Bowel the previous year, a rousing 17-15 win over Wyoming, so at least I'd seen a bowel win of some sort (and that one was the first for Cal since, like, the Garden State Bowel in the 1970'ssomething, when I was still in grade school and not yet aware of college football). So my girlfriend drove down from Santa Cruz to visit, driving her "new" 1988 Mustang 5.0GT that she'd received as a graduation present from her father, and we made plans to watch the game with a college friend of mine, Jeff, who lived in San Jose but was down in LA for the holidays visiting his brother Jimmy. We picked them up somewhere in Anaheim and went to some restaurant on Katella just up the street from Anaheim Stadium. I think it was an Acapulco Restaurant, but maybe not, I just know it was Mexican food. They were open New Years Morning for brunch and whatnot, so we ordered food and drink and settled in to watch the game. I think I had a taquito plate, and I know Jeff started with the margaritas pretty quickly. By the end of the game, long after the game had been decided (WE!!! won in a rout, 37-13) he'd moved on to blathering drunkenly about his (HIS!!) Steelers. I tuned him out, having learned during college that when Jeff gets drunk and starts talking about the Steelers, he's liable to go on for a while without saying anything of interest because let's face it, NOGAFATPS, it's California, dude, we got the Niners. So after the game we all piled into the Mustang and I drove, since I was the only one who hadn't been drinking (my mother was the county chapter president of MADD when I was growing up, since we'd had two family friends killed by drunk drivers, so it had been hammered into my head that if you drink you really need to not get behind the wheel). I didn't have that much experience driving the 'Stang, since the GF had only recently gotten it, and I learned the hard way how little rear visibility that POS car had compared to my Volvo 242GT: I ended up backing out of the parking space into another car, which I never saw, even though I was craning my neck looking behind me the whole fucking time. It was just a love tap, fortunately, no damage done, so we hightailed it out of the parking lot and headed back to Jimmy's house to drop off the brothers. Then we drove back to my place in Studio City and had an afternoon of victory coitus. I think the Rose Bowl might have been on, I dunno, I was getting laid. It was just Washington, anyway, so I didn't GAF.
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