Introduction by Frank Lutz

It was a beautiful Southern California neighborhood, but I had already, at my young age, seen enough beauty around the world to fill a lifetime. I had only arrived in West Hollywood the first week of January. Actually, after all my travels, I was wondering why I had come out to Hollywood, anyway.

But this lousy night in the West Hollywood–Beverly Hills neighborhood where I was staying, that is, renting a room, I was about half a block east of North Doheny Drive and Sunset Boulevard standing on the curbside trying to hitch a ride at rush hour.  It was February 1968, in the dead of winter.  The evening was dark, cold, wet with rain, and miserable.  I was holding my leather jacket over my head, hoping that one of the thousands of passing cars would stop soon to keep me from getting too wet.  Fat chance.

It was 6:15 in the evening and I needed to go east into Hollywood and the Cahuenga Hills to my manager Byron’s home. His old house, once owned by the famous early movie star and heart throb, Rudolph Valentino, was a few miles away.  I needed to be there by 7:00pm on this Monday evening, as that was his weekly meeting time to gather his young talent together to rehearse scenes and learn acting techniques for film work and television. During the week, Byron would send us out on talent calls to local movie and TV studios to get us work.

This introduction, It All Began with Cherry Soup, tells the story of how Linda and I met. I start here because this alone was magical and set up our relationship, which lasted for five and one-half decades, until she passed away on 9/13/2022, leaving us all bereft of a great artist and loving human friend. Linda J. Albertano was a fabulous and much honored artist of poetry, performance art, music, and film from Venice, California. She was a wonderful person who was my companion, partner, and wife.