Drew Barrymore, The Room, Fan Mail and Fake Teeth

I think Drew Barrymore is fantastic.  Earlier today I was flipping through the pages of my new Vogue and her Cover Girl ad was front and center, she's beautiful, talented, smart and really a survivor.

My mind got to thinking about Drew and of course I started to piece together a ton of stories starting in high school.

Growing up in LA in the 1980s the place to go dancing was Black Market, which was located on Santa Monica Blvd before Fairfax next to the French Market.  I think it was called Black Market, it changed names depending on the night of the week, they let people under 18 in and of course I had a fake ID and they served minors alcohol, perfect!  I started seeing Drew there when I was in high school, I was always drunk and mad she was at my club,  also frequent famous visitor to this club was Josh Brolin, who was a total jerk and always really rude and picking a fight with me outside.  But I digress...

When I was about 20 years old I started a company that read fan mail, ran fan clubs and did mail order merchandise for mostly musicians (my client list was vast Motorhead, Tom Petty, Stone Temple Pilots and more), I had been doing similar work for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and other bands sought me out looking for these services, this is before the internet, lol.  So with the RHCP blessing I left to venture out on my own and start this company.  Drew's assistant Kim was a friend of my friend Pilar and I was hired to handle her fan mail.  I think I read and responded to Drew's fan mail for about a year.  She was really sweet about everything, at the time she was estranged from her Mom, which was weird because her Mom would show up at my house and talk to me for hours about Drew not speaking to her, it was really sad and of course none of my business, I was sad for both of them, trying to be polite to her Mom who just needed someone to listen and of course respect Drew's privacy. I vaguely remember a stalker situation as well, this was so long ago.

After I closed the fan club business and got a real job, I started hanging out at a very hot bar called The Room.  It was in the heart of Hollywood, you had to enter through the alley, oohh, danger!  It was super dark, always played cool music and had a pretty good looking crowd.  Around the same time I had really gotten into these fake teeth, called "Dr Bukks" they were like $40 a pair and you molded them to your own teeth, they were gross and looked decayed.  But man, these were hours of fun, I developed a whole persona around these teeth and used to go out at night looking for innocent people to drop "Pookie" on.  All of my friends loved the theatrics and of course encouraged my hideous behavior where ever we went.

One night while playing the Pookie character I met a very handsome Welshman at The Room, turns out he was the owner Jeremy Thomas.  He and some friends had control of the booth I wanted to be sitting at so I finagled my way into the booth and entertained them as Pookie, they fell hook, line and sinker.  The great thing about being Pookie is people think they are secretly making fun of you being nice and listening to this hillbilly with bad teeth, poor girl, if she just got to the dentist she'd be pretty, little did they know the joke was on them...

Once I let Jeremy in on the joke he insisted that we continue to fool more of his friends, and so the night went on and our friendship began.

Jeremy and I were friends for a while before I realized he had been married to Drew Barrymore for a month not too long before we met. He never mentioned the marriage except once and he seemed very sad, he liked her a lot.

I really liked hanging out at The Room, that bar brings back great memories, like the time that Sunghi got her car towed on St Patrick's Day, we had it out of the tow yard and we were at Pinks within an hour flat!  Damn drunk girls with a mission will get to Pinks!!  Those were fun times the mid-90s.

But this blog was about Ms Drew Barrymore.  She really is fantastic, I have oodles of respect for her and Drew is absolutely one of the most beautiful women on the planet.  So good to see her life turning out so positive.