Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

MY SHOW BIZ LUNCH
IN CLEVELAND

by Bert Stratton

I had a show biz lunch at Corky & Lenny’s.  The lunch was Hollywood-style, not Hollywood.  Bert Dragin, the owner of a furniture store chain, was looking for a movie script.  (This was in 1980. C&L’s was still at Cedar Center.)  Dragin said to me, “I’ve got money.  Everybody will talk to me in L.A.  Right now I have something in the Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival.” He suggested I write a screenplay about a fire at a gay nightclub in Atlanta.  Not my thing, sorry.

Dragin sold his Name Brand Furniture stores and moved to Hollywood to make movies.  He produced Suburbia (1983), and directed Summer Camp Nightmare (1987) and Twice Dead (1988).

I wrote a screenplay, The Flamer, about a bar mitzvah party where several kids got burned to death by playing with sterno.  [This paragraph is fiction.  The rest is true.]

Dragin ran a tab at Corky & Lenny’s, which he probably paid monthly. He acted in his TV ads for the furniture store.  “You heard of Erotic Salad?” he said. “It’s got a soft-X rating.”

“No.”  That’s as close as I got to Hollywood.

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6 comments

1 Mark Schilling { 03.04.15 at 11:09 am }

A gay nightclub in Atlanta? He was going to pay you to do the research? BTW Bert Dragin’s last IMDB credit is dated 1988. He’s probably back selling furniture or sleeping in his car or…who knows?

2 don friedman { 03.04.15 at 12:28 pm }

You, write a script about a fire in a gay nightclub………for a guy whose last name backwards is ‘in drag’!

3 Ken Goldberg { 03.04.15 at 1:22 pm }

We expect more text, Bert. What – did you write that while tying your shoes? Busy with like 50 gigs last week?

4 Bert Stratton { 03.04.15 at 1:58 pm }

To Ken Goldberg:

You’re killing me. Re-read some of my earlier posts, like from ’09. You won’t remember them. They’ll seem new.

5 Ken Goldberg { 03.04.15 at 4:12 pm }

Can hardly wait!

6 Ted { 03.05.15 at 11:05 am }

I’m not sure if any of this needed to be revealed.

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