When I first arrived in Seattle around September of 1977, after driving cross-country from Newport, Rhode Island, I immediately fell in love with the city.
Seattle was sooo different from my childhood Brooklyn, and so artsy, and green, and wet, and everyone and everything was so beautiful.
My favorite movie of all time is Casablanca.
And in Seattle there was a bar at the time, that played Casablanca 24 hours a day!
I can't recall the name, but it was on Lake City Way, and the movie played 24 hours a day... I think! Or at least whenever the bar was open, on a screen behind the bar.
Casablanca geeks lived it, and there were always nerds mouthing out all the lines from the movie.
Somehow at some point I showed the barmeisters a drawing of Humphrey Bogart that I had done as an art assignment at the UW.
They loved it!
There was at the same time a poster and records shop in the U-District called Innervisions or something like that, and the Casablancans from the bar knew them.
Result? A poster from this drawing was made ... hundreds of them, and given out as prizes to the the Casablancanerds as they won the various contests centered around the film that the bar used to run all the time.
Here's the original drawing, which I re-found while looking for something else.
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| Bogey 1978 pen and ink drawing by Florencio Lennox Campello |
