Just before my sophomore year of high school, I finally got my hair styled and my parents allowed me to get contact lenses. It felt like the whole world was opening up for me. Soon after that, I got the lead in the winter play, proof (I felt at the time) that change indeed was happening. As I was driven back and forth from rehearsals that late fall, Linda Ronstadt was continually, creamily crooning What’s New, the title track from her upcoming album of standards, on the car’s steadfast AM radio. I asked for the LP for Christmas that year.
I lovingly remember playing that recording in my grandparents’ living room as the family sat around listening to it and chatting. In an often turbulent youth, filled with familial misunderstandings and the wisps of angst seemingly floating around the surface of many of my first tentative interactions, this is one of my favorite memories. Ronstadt’s version of I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance was song that probably stood out the most for me then and now. Besides the supernatural element of the title, I always had the sneaking suspicion that romance would be elusive to me, that connecting with someone would perhaps be an awkward, unrealized proposition. It was also one of the tracks included on Jeff Alexander’s creepily arranged Alfred Hitchcock Presents album, Music to Be Murdered By.
While I adore Ronstadt’s moody treatment of the number, one of my favorite versions is a jazzier, breezier take by the incomparable Mildred Bailey. One of Bing Crosby’s favored colleagues, Bailey was a Native American jazz singer who made a stunning impression on the music industry. I wish she was more publicly acknowledged.
Of course, I’ve heard ignoring your first could prove to have disastrous consequences, so…
Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!
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Decades later, Cordova found her biggest fame as a regular on two NBC soap operas. As the matriarchal Rosa Andrade on 
Historically, I was first introduced to this book as a soap opera obsessed 14 year old. At the time, Lana was appearing on 
A mad man was threatening to freeze frame the world. Fair ingénues were being buried alive. And over at 
Of course, time has thankfully brought out kinder reactions to the project. Allen’ score has been favorably reexamined and several of the songs were included in 
Fortunately for fans of grilled cheese, as action orientated as this piece tries to be (with vigorous chase scenes occurring both on major thoroughfares and dusty country lanes), what may be most notable about this stalk and crash epic is the truly inappropriate casting. Lead Casper Van Dien was at least 30 years old at the time of filming – thus way, way too old to play the endangered college student that he portrays here. But he attacks his role with professional enthusiasm and, faint praise resonating, is actually probably the youngest looking of his co-stars. This includes heroine Danielle Brett, whose film career would only last another year or so. Van Dien also does a heroic, if losing, battle with the neon crayola dye job someone gave his professionally pompadoured hair.
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