Excuse me Mr. Sinatra! My Dad’s encounter with the famous crooner…
Filed Under (Stories from Life) by gemalynn on 18-08-2008
Tagged Under : celebrity, dad, sinatra, zappos
Sinatra '68 via Sinatra.com
My Dad has a lot of stories, one of which he recounted over dinner at Studio Diner tonight. He was born in Jalisco, Mexico in 1940, one of the youngest of 12, yes 12 kids. Son of Mexican war hero. He worked and played on the family ranch til they all decided to come back to the U.S. (family went back to Mexico during the depression). So while they spent 3 years in Tijuana getting their legal passage, my Dad shined shoes for a dime a pair…
Let’s try to make the great story of his life a little shorter and catch you up to our Sinatra moment:
Wing tips via Zappos.com
So it’s the late 60s and he’s busing tables in San Francisco. He works at a restaurant where celebrities would stop in late at night after local performances. Now if you don’t already know, Frank Sinatra was notorious for being pretty harsh. The Rat Pack didn’t mess around. On this particular night “Old blue eyes” is in the house and everyone’s on their toes. Unfortunately my Dad ended up on the wrong toes - Sinatra’s toe!!! He had approached the table, probably to gather a plate or refill a glass when he accidently stepped on Frankie’s foot. As my Dad tells it - “I immediately started apologizing, Oh excuse me Mr. Sinatra! excuse me! But Sinatra was cool about it, he just said ‘Oh no problem, it was my fault, no problem’, His foot was actually sticking out from under the table, and he had some nice, what do call them? wing-tip shoes on, so it probably didn’t hurt.”
Ha ha! I love my Dad stories and I really need to start writing them down more. I’ll probably turn this into a series of posts. Though I could probably fill a book. I’ll at least start with blog posts. So there’s more stories to come. Like when he was a kid and his brother threw a rock in his eye for knocking down an ant hill, or when he feel out of a tree and no one found him til hours later, or getting out of the army just before his company went to Vietnam…
I was going to write about web apps tonight, but I’m glad I got this down to share with you instead.