APRIL SHOWERS

A rainy day on Florida’s Fisher Island… the first with less than spectacular weather in some time… brings me to this blog. I am home from Seattle and surgery, now slightly bionic. The shoulder replacement went well and was much easier than I feared. The “device” is not a device at all, but rather a large nail-like sort of thing which looks like the spike they used to join the railroads together in the days of the old west. The five inch steel point goes down into the bone of the arm in order to secure the top… highly polished and smooth…which acts as a ball that fits into a plastic receiver replicating the cartilage I no longer had as well as the joint which, without cartilage, was bone on bone and painful as well as inefficient. The Doc (Richard Kirby of Seattle, Washington) says I will be back on the tennis courts by mid-summer and I am looking forward to that while mindful that I didn’t get my request for a replication of the shoulder action that Andy Roddick seems to have come by naturally. Oh well. Sharon, who has always wanted to play Florence Nightingale, got a brief leave of absence from filming Burn Notice and was at my side throughout. She did a great job of helping me back to full health very fast for which I am most grateful.

Back on the Cagney & Lacey front, there will be more news shortly, but it is looking like our initial release date for the entire series package on DVD will be mid-summerish which is even sooner than I had anticipated. There is an old show business adage about “hurry up and wait” and this is now looking like a version of that, only in reverse. We have been dormant for far too long and now suddenly there is a rush to get it all done and (it seems to me) very conscientious concerns on all fronts to get it done right. I am encouraged and on the cusp of thankful that MGM is going to have little or nothing to do with this. Speaking of gratitude: also very pleased at the preliminary responses from you, the fans, who seem so genuinely pleased that this is… at long last… finally going to happen. You have waited close to a quarter of a century for this to become a reality and now all I can ask is that you help me help to make this as great a success as it possibly can be. If we can get one percent of the folks who faithfully watched this series when it was on the air to buy the collection we will have broken all records for this kind of release. At any rate… keep checking this space as more news will be coming out shortly and keep asking your favorite retail outlets if they will be carrying the entire Cagney & Lacey package when it becomes available later this summer. Most store managers weren’t even alive when Cagney & Lacey was in its prime so for them this is just another vintage television show that is going to occupy too much of their shelf space. Our distributor needs all the help he can get educating these people that this show is not merely a vintage classic, but iconic television and that it will be a great item for their customers to purchase for their mothers and grandmothers as well as themselves. You hard core fans will probably want to deal with us direct for special edition autographed copies, but we NEED help spreading the word to those retailers… many of them the nadir of human intelligence… of the very fact of Cagney & Lacey and just how long this event has been in the making.

More news when it comes or if the weather doesn’t clear… meanwhile all the best to all of you.

Barney Rosenzweig

April 28, 2012