S5E2: One For My Baby (and One More For The Road) | Johnny Carson & Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner and Artie Shaw

For our second dive into the Ocean’s Eleven: 12 Degrees of Frank Sinatra season, Stacie has the Rat Pack-adjacent comedian and original King of Late Night, Johnny Carson. He was a private person who was possibly America’s most beloved and public figure for three decades. His three divorces – and final, apparently happy marriage, reveal the split-screen that was his life.

Then, Alicia has the tragic early years of Ava Gardner: her rural North Carolina upbringing, her discovery by the MGM star machine, and her first marriages, to Mickey Rooney and Artie Shaw. It’s all prelude to her final, tumultuous marriage to Sinatra, which is coming upwhatever reason, did not experience one of their own as they were growing up.

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My childhood years were spent in Connecticut, in a town that was officially a city but held very many rural elements, especially during the time period of the late sixties/ early seventies. Most people owned their homes and houses were large and sprawling with land surrounding them. Fruit and shade trees were part of everyone’s back yard and it was not unusual to see personal gardens and even live chickens. In my early years, there was still a milk man who left bottles of milk at the front door at sunrise, although this was changing and the milk man would soon disappear.