Imagine me sitting in one of the seats in this video, watching this show. Then you can imagine why I don’t do it any more.
And re this imaginary theatre’s bathroom, I’m betting that everyone in Hollywood instantly thought of a place we love… that we don’t want to go any more because it’s so difficult to, well, “go.”
In his autobiography, Joe Simon says that as a boy he got to meet a Civil War veteran and got to “shake the hand of a man who shook hands with Lincoln.” This was part of his inspiration for creating Captain America — the idea of meeting an icon. I completely love this little bit of American history: from Lincoln, to frail old veteran, to schoolboy, to the enduring American icon Captain America.
Just a week after Jerry Robinson’s death, Captain America co-creator Joe Simon has left us for that four-color splash page in the sky. Here’s an interview with him from last summer, courtesy of the Washington Post. I’m glad he got to see the Captain America movie — where, after the bad previous filmic attempts, producers actually got the character right — and I’m glad I got to meet him once, and got his autograph on my hardback reprint of the first Captain America comics from the 1940’s.