Tawny Kitaen, 1980s sex kitten, has passed away. She was just 59 years old.

Not even my closest friends know about the long term relationship Tawny and I shared. But now that she has passed on to that Great Music Video in the Sky, it’s time for the truth to come out.

But first, let’s pause for 4 minutes and 31 seconds to remember what critics universally acknowledge as her greatest performance: “Hot Babe With Giant ‘80s Hair Rolling Around On A Jaguar Sedan” in White Snake’s “Here I Go Again” video.

Tawny and I first met back in 2001. Fate brought us together at about 11:30 a.m. on a misty Saturday morning at Starbuck’s at Fashion Island in Newport Beach. Our relationship quickly blossomed into something truly beautiful and lasted until 11:45. Maybe even 11:47. Longer, sadly, than many of my other relationships.

I love to take my iPad to coffee shops to watch people as I work, but I hate sitting in hard wooden chairs. This particular Starbucks had two plush, comfy chairs just inside the front window. I was seated in one and the other was empty when a beautiful, auburn-haired young woman approached me. She looked deep into my eyes — nay, my soul — and began a conversation that is etched into my memory.

Tawny: Excuse me.

Jim: Yes?

Tawny: I’m meeting a friend here in a few minutes and we haven’t seen each other in a while and I was just wondering if you would be willing to let us sit here.

Jim: Here in these two chairs?

Tawny: Well, yes, if that’s ok with you.

Jim: Sure. Have a seat. If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here until your friend arrives.

Tawny: (sitting down in the opposite chair) That would be great. Thank you so much. What’s your name.

Jim: I’m Jim. And you are?

Tawny: Tawny.

Jim: (Still so stupid that I do not recognize Tawny Kitaen) Tawny. How do you spell that?

Tawny: T-A-W-N-Y.

Jim: Interesting. Is that your given name or a nickname?

Tawny: It’s a professional name. My real name is Julie.

Jim: Do you mind if I call you Julie?

Tawny: (laughing) No. It’ll just be you and my mom who call me that.

Jim: Well, I’m in good company then.

Tawny: (laughing and pointing to my laptop) What are you working on?

Jim: I’m just checking last night’s baseball scores.

Tawny: You’re a baseball fan?

Jim: Yes. I love baseball.

Tawny: My husband is a baseball player.

Jim: Anyone I would have heard of? What’s your last name?

Tawny: Finley.

Jim: Are you married to Steve Finley (a player for the Arizona Diamondbacks)?

Tawny: (almost insulted) No. Chuck Finley.

Jim: (sits silently for a moment, dumbfounded because I know Chuck Finley, a darn fine pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, is married to Tawny Kitaen and suddenly realizing who I’ve been sitting there talking to).

Jim: Tawny? As in Tawny Kitaen?

Tawny: Yes.

At that moment another attractive young woman, obviously the one Tawny was waiting for, approached us. Tawny introduced us. I graciously offered her my prized plush chair, then walked away and found myself a cold, hard wooden chair on the other side of the store. I finished looking at the previous night’s baseball box scores, re-watched Tawny’s infamous White Snake video (a couple times), checked my email, and then packed up to go home. My car was parked outside the front door, so I had to pass the two friends on my way out. I walked over to them.

Jim: Just wanted to say good-bye. It was a pleasure meeting you, Julie.

Tawny: (laughing) You and my mom.

She jumped up and gave me a big, lingering hug. Well, truth be told I may have lingered a little longer than she did. Perhaps I even lingered into that hazy ok-we’re-strangers-and-this-is-getting-a-little-uncomfortable zone. And with that, our relationship ended. Although I must admit that I went back to that same Starbucks at about 11:30 a.m. every Saturday morning for the next couple months, just hoping that she would be there again. She wasn’t.

About two years later Tawny was arrested for using her stiletto heels to turn her baseball player husband into a piece of Swiss cheese. This is merely an assumption on my part, but I’m convinced the poor woman did it out of frustration caused by the sudden end of our relationship.

Rest in peace, Julie.

Bill Gates announced yesterday that he and his wife of 27 years are divorcing. We’ll get back to that a little later. Right after I seemingly go waaaaaay off subject.

Back in the early 1980s the small ad agency in which I was a partner landed a major software account located somewhere in Texas. Dallas, as I recall.

Sometimes client-agency relationships just don’t work out. It’s kind of like a marriage. Sometimes all the assembled guests watch the bride and groom exchanging vows and think, “This is a big mistake.” Sure, both sides go through the ceremony with the best of intentions, but then he finds out she only pretended to like baseball and she finds out he has an unnatural attraction to teenage boys. Or something like that. Nobody’s fault. Sometimes it’s just better that you get a divorce and move on with your lives.

That’s how it was with this client. Both sides knew pretty quickly that a divorce was in the offing but neither of us wanted to admit we had made a mistake. Luckily, we landed a huge account a few months later which allowed us the luxury of resigning the Texas account before they got around to firing us.

The bright spot in this otherwise mismatched marriage was a young woman named Ann Winblad. She had become part of this conglomerate when it acquired the software company she had founded a few years earlier. She was only in her late twenties, maybe her very early thirties, but that transaction had already made her a very wealthy young woman.

We liked Ann. She seemed to like us. And, personally, the two of us got along famously. She was very smart, had a great sense of humor, and knew good advertising from bad. Far as I was concerned, losing Ann was the only negative part of resigning the account.

Fast forward a couple years. I was attending the National Computer Conference in Las Vegas. Think of it as the nerd Oscars. Thousands of guys with socks that didn’t match, and with plastic pen holders in the pockets of their shortsleeved button down shirts, all scurrying from booth to booth to see the latest floppy disc drive from Shugart or the the new, upgraded Dumb Terminal from Lear Siegler. It was an almost exclusively male event and most of the attendees thought of women as alien creatures from another universe.

I stepped into the immense Las Vegas Convention Center, paused in the middle of the main aisle just long enough to get my bearings, and then surveyed my surroundings. A hundred feet down the aisle, a head of blonde hair caught my attention. A head of blonde female hair. This was something worthy of far more attention than any of the show’s incredible technological innovations.

Although I hadn’t seen her in several years, I immediately recognized that blonde head of hair as Ann Winblad’s. She had not yet spotted me, so I hurriedly weaved my way down the crowded aisle in her direction. By the time I approached her, she had turned in the other direction and was deep in conversation, probably negotiating another multimillion dollar software contract.

I approached her from behind, put a hand on each of her shoulders, then leaned in and kissed her on the neck. I don’t know why I did it. Ann and I had never done anything more physical than shake hands. There was no reason for me to think it was appropriate nor that she would appreciate it. But I did it. Blame it on my OCD. Or maybe call it temporary insanity.

Without missing a beat — and I swear this is 100% true — she blurted out, “Oh, my god. Is that you, Jim?” I have no idea how she knew who was doing the nibbling. I’d like to think she had sensed my raw animal magnetism, but it was probably something far more humdrum. The familiar scent of cheap cologne, perhaps. She spun around and gave me a big hug. We laughed. We talked. She told me she was doing well. I told her the agency was doing well. We both lied and said we’d get together the next time either of us was in the other’s area.

Then she said, “Hey, my new boyfriend is here at the show. We should go to dinner. I think you’d like him.”

“Sorry, can’t do it,” I responded. “I’m just here for the day. I have a five o’clock flight back to Orange County. Next time.” Truth is, much as I liked Ann as a client, I had no real interest in dining with her nerdy new boyfriend.

In 1998 Sean Connolly wrote a best seller called “Bill Gates: An Unauthorized Biography.” Gates had by then become The Richest Man in the World and it sounded like an interesting read, so I picked up a copy. It was revealed not too many pages into the book that Gate’s girlfriend of many years was none other than Ann.

Yes, I had turned down dinner with Bill Gates. What a moron. Me, not him.

Every article about Bill Gates’ newly-announced divorce mentions the fact that he negotiated a very unusual pre-nup agreement with his wife. Despite the fact that The Richest Man in the World was already a billionaire when he married Melinda, the pre-nup didn’t mention money. But it did spell out that he was allowed to spend one weekend per year in a North Carolina beach cottage with former flame Ann Winblad.

Now I’m pretty sure that if today you asked Ann about the time I nibbled on her neck at the National Computer Conference, her response would be, “Jim who?” I guarantee you that she would not remember me. Why should she? Very few of the women I’ve kissed in my life remember me.

I, however, would like to believe that I am now the answer to a cool trivia question in Ann’s life:

“Name someone not named Bill Gates who has nibbled on my neck.”

COMING SOME OTHER TIME: MY OTHER ONE-DEGREE-OF-SEPARATION-FROM-BILL-GATES STORY.

We miss Australia. We talk about it every day. I’m homesick for a place that isn’t actually my home. It’s getting so bad that I saw Australia in my purple potato chips today. Qantas is hinting around that it may start flying internationally again in late October. ‘Bout time.

This is Sydney, our cross-eyed little old lady cat. Her twentieth birthday is somewhere here in the middle of February. We don’t know an accurate date — her mother was a feral cat who lived on the docks of Newport Beach and we adopted Sydney as a kitten — but that was the vet’s best guess.

She’s the last of her litter. Friends adopted her two sisters and they are both long gone.

The poor old gal made it to twenty, but we know she doesn’t have much time left. Although she’s never had a sick day in her life, she’s now skin and bones. Her hearing is completely gone. She has cataracts in her right eye. She’s hunched over from arthritis. She no longer seems to understand what the litter box is for. She sleeps about twenty hours a day. She hasn’t left our spare bedroom in years. And she’s pretty much stopped eating, so we know her days are numbered.

I just looked up a chart that says twenty cat years is equal to about ninety six human years.

Happy birthday, Syd. It’s been a pleasure having you around for the last ninety six years.

We have some very, very odd neighbors. Someone built this in their front yard about two blocks from our house.

Ten points if you recognize the pop culture reference in the headline.

As I said in a previous post, I’d never seen an icicle until the other day. Seventy-two years on this earth including two years of college in the frigid northern climes of Oregon, yet I’d never seen an actual icicle.

That situation has now been rectified.

I jokingly told Jamie that the icicles hanging outside our kitchen door are “big as a Louisville Slugger.” Then I got to wondering if that was true. So I went upstairs, grabbed my Louisville Slugger baseball bat, and took it outside to compare.

This is not just any Louisville Slugger. This particular Louisville Slugger is more valuable than gold. It has an interesting back story. Which means, of course, that I feel absolutely compelled to tell it.

The Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 despite the fact that the city had no baseball stadium adequate for baseball at the major league level. Wrigley Field, the only real ballpark, was in a bad part of town and, even worse, it only seated about 25,000. So the new Los Angeles Dodgers opted to play in an oddly-reconfigured Los Angeles Coliseum, a converted football stadium, until they completed construction of the sparkling new Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers drew immense crowds, so it was difficult to get good seats. In 1960 my dad gave me the assignment of sending a letter to the Dodgers’ ticket department to order our seats. Oh, how times have changed. Unlike today, when you go online and pick the specific seats you want, it was the luck of the draw back in 1960. But because tickets were so difficult to get, we were very happy to receive seats down the right field line near the Dodgers bullpen.

Another odd thing about the Coliseum, originally built for the 1928 Summer Olympics, was that it had bench seating, not individual seats. So there were the deYongs, sitting just behind the Dodgers’ bullpen, when a very attractive young woman walked up to us and very politely said, “Excuse me. I am Sandy Koufax’ girlfriend and I was wondering if I could squeeze in here with your family so I can be near the bullpen.”

Sandy Koufax is now known as the greatest pitcher of his generation. Maybe the greatest ever. But back in those days he was a marginal pitcher who was barely clinging to his place on the team. His pitching was so erratic that he rarely got into a game. He could throw about a million miles an hour, but no one ever knew where the ball was going to end up. He’d been in the big leagues for six years and had a losing record.

A couple innings later Sandy’s girlfriend walked down to the edge of the railing, called Sandy over and whispered into his ear. He walked away but came back moments later with a baseball bat in his hand, a Louisville Slugger. He handed it to her and she returned to her seat and handed it to me.

“I want to thank you for making room for me,” she said. “So I asked Sandy to get this for you.”

Of course, as baseball fans know, Sandy Koufax finally figured out how to be a major league pitcher the next season. He put together six absolutely incredible seasons in a row, a stretch unmatched in baseball history, retired at age thirty, and became the youngest player ever elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. He’s a legend, a living god who demands nothing of the world except privacy. He’s baseball’s answer to J.D. Salinger.

Here we are sixty years later and I still treasure that baseball bat simply because he once touched it.

I don’t care how big the damn icicles are, they’ll never measure up to this Louisville Slugger.

“A Christmas Story” is the funniest damn movie ever made. It was written and narrated by Jean Shepard, one of my radio heroes, who also wrote “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories,” my favorite short story. (If you’ve never read it, do. I guarantee it’s laugh out loud funny.) One network or another airs a “Christmas Story“ marathon every year and despite the fact that Jamie and I have both seen it about fifty times, we always watch it one more time.

Throughout “A Christmas Story,” little Ralphie repeats that he wants just one thing for Christmas: “I want an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle.” Everyone — parents, teacher, even the department store Santa Claus — tells him it’s a bad idea because, “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

On Christmas morning his parents surprised him with the BB-gun. He ran outside and took his first shot, the BB ricocheted back, broke his glasses, and damn near put his eye out.

Thinking quickly, little Ralphie told his mother that his wound was caused by a falling icicle.

Hey, I was born and raised in California. I knew nothing about icicles. I’d never seen one until today.

Now I can’t go outside because I’m afraid one of those things will put my eye out.

Global warming, my ass. Texas is suffering from the lowest temperatures in thirty years. Our heating system can’t keep up with the cold and it’s currently 56 degrees Fahrenheit in our living room. Luckily, upstairs is nice and toasty. All the pipes in the house are frozen, so we have no water.

On the positive side of the ledger, our little guest house is sauna-like, and its pipes are gushing with plenty of hot water. Unfortunately, we moved all the furniture out of the guest house because we’re planning to remodel.

How the hell did pioneers survive this kind of weather? Their houses were drafty. Their clothing wasn’t made of modern miracle fibers. They had fireplaces, but had to go out into the cold to cut fire wood. I, on the other hand, feel like I’m suffering because I have to walk twenty feet from the house to the guest house to take a nice, long hot shower.

Just got an email telling me that Anchorage, Alaska is 10 degrees warmer than McKinney.

Pass the whale blubber.

I never realized until this week that I could find stats that tell me all sorts of interesting information about visitors to JimandJamie.com and their reading habits on the site. Here’s what I found out:

Despite the availability of hundreds of stories about our travels, Google searches lead the most people to two specific stories day after day after day. Let’s be clear here. I’m not saying they were the most searched, most read stories yesterday. Nor last week. Nor last month. I’m saying that these two stories are the most searched and most read every single day of the year. They’re not, as you might reasonably assume, stories that show beautiful scenery from around the world. They are not stories about the interesting people we’ve encountered on our journeys. And they are not stories about unusual or exciting experiences. No. Not at all.

The all-time most popular story is something I posted from South Africa five years ago. The title of that article is “They will bite you on the balls.”

The second most popular is something from Tahiti almost eighteen months ago titled, “Quinn’s Bar and the Trans-Pacific transvestites.”

In the words of Joe Biden, “C’mon, man.” Are there really that many people around the world interested in South African honey badgers? Or long-gone bars in Tahiti?

Or is the internet just crawling with folks who are inordinately interested in transvestites and being bitten on the balls? And is there some kinky connection between the two?

I don’t know what key words these people are searching, but I’m willing to bet that neither “honey badger” nor “Tahiti” was among them.

We got up early this morning and drove over to Texarkana, Arkansas. Put a check in that box because we have now visited our 43rd state.

The twin cities of Texarkana stretch across both sides of the Texas-Arkansas border. Texarkana, Texas has a population of 36,688 and Texarkana, Arkansas is called home by 29,901. As you might expect from its name, State Line Avenue delineates the border between the two cities and two states. Stand on the eastern side of the street, you’re in Arkansas. Toss a rock across the street, it lands in Texas. Apparently thousands of people cross back and forth to live in one state and work in the other.

Each city has its own mayor and its own city council and, undoubtedly, its own unfunded municipal retirement benefits. But they share a federal building, courthouse, jail, post office, Chamber of Commerce, water utility, and some of the shabbiest streets on which I’ve ever had the honor of driving.

I learned a new word while we were there: portmanteau. A portmanteau is a word that combines the sounds and meanings of other words, such as motel (half “motor” and half “hotel”) or brunch (half “breakfast” and half “lunch”). In this case, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana were combined to create Texarkana. Whoever created the name Texarkana was fudging a bit because it’s thirty miles down the road to the Louisiana border.

Turns out some famous people hail from Texarkana: Dan Blocker, who played Hoss on the old Bonanza TV show. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and one-time presidential candidate. Parnelli Jones, the Indy race driver. Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime music. Eddie Matthews, former slugging third baseman for the Braves. Legendary golfer Byron Nelson. Ross Perot, another former presidential candidate and legendary businessman.

Unfortunately, I can understand why they left. Texarkana is the one of the most depressing places we’ve ever visited. Its downtown is filled with beautiful old buildings, but many of them are boarded up and abandoned. The streets were empty. It was as if Texarkana was ground zero for the first neutron bomb — the buildings were still standing, but there were no people. It was eerie. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the death of this once vibrant city was probably caused by the construction of the freeway miles away from the downtown. Lots of great American downtowns were unintentionally killed off when new freeways changed the traditional traffic patterns of the cities they bypassed. Texarkana grew up around the intersection of two railroads. It looks like it died when the importance of railroads was supplanted by freeways.

Here’s one of the saddest photos I’ve ever taken. “LWORTH 5&10.” It’s one photo that symbolizes the death of a once great American company in the middle of a once great American city

Here in the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, there are probably pitiful few Americans who even remember the once dominant Woolworths 5&10 and even fewer who ever sat down at one of its lunch counters for a milkshake. I asked our 32-year old next door neighbor if he was familiar with Woolworths and he paused to think about it for a few seconds and then slowly shook his head to say no.

I’m getting old.

Luckily, there’s a lot more to Arkansas than the municipal death rattle that is Texarkana. People tell us the rest of the state is beautiful, especially the Ozarks and the northwestern corner of the state.

We’ll come back, but we’ll stick to the freeway and bypass Texarkana when we do.