Mornin Bitches
A cursing, foul mouth old ladies take on the present world!!! Filled with her opinions, views on current events, and special guest appearances!
Mornin Bitches
Exploring the Fascinating Life of Tom Gregory: From Hollywood to the Hamptons and Beyond
Journey with us through the captivating life of Tom Gregory, as we traverse from Hollywood to the Hamptons. We'll explore his early days at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset, and his time at the iconic Joe Allen restaurant in LA. Time stands still as Tom recounts navigating the treacherous waters of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a reunion organized for the former employees of Joe Allen restaurant, and his showdown with COVID-19.
Dig into the intriguing tales of Tom picking up litter, and the fascinating finds. Follow his big move from LA to Southampton, the sale of his LA house, and his fortuitous purchase of a house overlooking the beautiful Shinnecock Bay. Listen to Tom's riveting tales - buying a house from Barbara Streisand, developing a TV show, and more. Discover his unique branding style, his reality show matchmaker series, and gain insight into his philosophy of taking life-changing risks. Get ready for an episode brimming with enthralling stories, life lessons, and a whole lot more with Tom Gregory!
MORNIN BITCHES PODCAST
Morning bitches and dolls, and no one told you they love you today. Then I love you because you are you, that's right. You, tom Gregory, I love you.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, it's about time someone did this.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm so glad. Thank you for coming into my podcast this morning. I'm an old lady with a lot of opinions, so I met, I met you. Well, I just didn't meet you. Now I'm meeting you, but up through my friend, Michael Hollingsworth, who has his book coming out now.
Speaker 2:Right, I got it on Amazon last night actually.
Speaker 1:You did. I'm waiting for the Kindle to come.
Speaker 2:You know to come, and You're more technologically advanced than I am I am.
Speaker 1:I'm more the technology I am than a lot of people our age, anyway. So let's talk about you and your story and what they called you before you moved to the Hamptons Lottie. Okay, talk about yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, you know it's funny. You said the Hamptons when I first time when you move one thing, when you move out of state, because I moved from California to New York, you've got to change everything your health insurance and also I had to go to a new doctor and my doctor's office and I was referring to where I live and I said the Hamptons. The woman looked at me. She said you don't call it the Hamptons, it's called the East End. I said oh, I didn't know, I'll correct you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is true, because I'm on the local radio out here and I've learned that as well. It's like kind of like just something that you learn. I don't know the East End, so I live on the East End and, more specifically, the South Fork of Long Island, which, yes, is the Hamptons. I actually live in South Hampton. But, yeah, I lived in California, I lived in Los Angeles for since 1984 and then I left there the very, very end of 2021 and I also have a place in Manhattan and I was living there with all my stuff in storage for a couple months and I said wait a minute, I can't just live in an apartment with my dog forever and have my stuff in storage. I started looking for a house and things were crazy out here then and they're always crazy real estate watch but I found this house and I moved out here in March of 2022 and I feel pretty settled now and tell me about your history in La La Land, because what?
Speaker 2:was it? What was I? What?
Speaker 1:Known as in La La Land.
Speaker 2:Well, depends on what stage you're talking about.
Speaker 1:You're the actor. I know you're an actor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually, quickly to that point. When I moved to LA in 84, I was a young kid from South Jersey. What did I know from anything? I got in my 72 Chevrolet and Pal and drove out. It was a wonderful experience I did with my mother. She wanted to ride shotgun. It was a great time. Now that my mother's gone I think I should have had a lot of great conversations with her in that car, but I don't remember talking about anything but me. But so I came to LA and you know what my first job was? Working at the Mondrian Hotel up on Sunset. I don't know if you remember, but there was a guy, a gom, and how beautifully painted that was. Do you remember?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, beautiful by the way.
Speaker 2:I left ever so briefly in the 90s LA for a part I was doing and when I came back they painted the whole thing white. Anyway, when I was working there the painter who was in charge of it I want to say his name was a gom, I think it was a gom himself. We used to come into this restaurant I worked at at the Mondrian for breakfast every day and it was just such an interesting introduction to Los Angeles. Working at that hotel and all these people Peter Max used to come in, it was just interesting. And then from there I didn't last there very long. It was a slightly challenging management there but I got a job at Joe Allen restaurant down on third.
Speaker 1:I remember Joe Allen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that was a great experience. I worked there for four or five years and I just loved it there. I still look at it as one of the high points of my life. It was just a lovely, lovely memory. You know you'd work and you'd work a double and you'd work hard and you might come home with 80 or 100 bucks and you felt like a million dollars, right. You had a great apartment on the long pray and floors, overlooking with a great, with a great roommate, overlooking the whole LA, the whole basin. Really it was just a great time in my life and I love Joe Allen.
Speaker 2:In fact, about three years ago I had a, a reunion for all the employees because they closed it down and open it up as or so, and it was never the same and we all sort of dispersed immediately when they started the renovation and most of us never went back when it came or so. So we had never seen each other. So I had a. You know you figure you not seeing anybody that you were friends with all those times you work with them, but you figure everybody else is, they're just including you out. But the truth was I learned by having that, that reunion, that nobody had really spent, nobody had really spoken to anyone in all those years. And it was a wonderful thing to do and we really recounted our days together and some of our stories and in fact the undercurrent that was going on there, especially at that restaurant, because so many people that worked there were gay and it was, you know, 1985 to 89 was HIV, aids and how many people passed away. And I can remember people coming into that restaurant and on Saturday afternoons or Sunday afternoons are just coming from memorial services etc, etc, and just the whole thing.
Speaker 2:And when COVID came along, I have to be frank with you, I mentally just dismissed the whole thing. I had lifted the damn thing once and you know, with a and either even much worse. Really, hiv was just so deadly and it was really killing young and innocent people, exactly was just a terrible, terrible, terrible time In fact. Even so, when COVID came and I was very dismissive about it, in fact I never did get COVID, but that I know of, but I remember to the gay pride movement became very strong and the praise were much different than they are now Exactly and I stopped doing. I was living in West Hollywood most of my life, or in that area when I lived in LA and I just stopped going because they became something else. You know, when I remember them, they were really supportive and you saw things like Louise Hay with the Hayride and Mary Ann.
Speaker 1:And we say my favorite person to live.
Speaker 2:You know, and I know so many people that that were suffering with that disease and they would come in and they you'd hear. You know, you know my friends, the people I worked with, you know they just passed away. They got sick and I mean I can count six of them that were really good friends. And in fact I'm 63 and I wonder what my life would have been even now, how, what I've lost by all those people that I lost the friendships you know, because the few of us that still are alive and I remember are pretty close, there's just not a lot of men like me. And now, the now.
Speaker 2:I have to say, from my experience being a gay man at my age, the next big plague that I really feel is affecting the gay community is drugs. Oh, really, I mean, methamphetamine is a big, big deal and I'm I see it, you know, I've really backed off from apps and dating and because it's just a sex romp with drugs, so much it just is. It's maybe not, maybe not everywhere, but certainly in Manhattan at certain hours of the night. If you go online, you, you can, you can run into all kinds of all kinds of trouble. So anyway, but yeah, so I lived in LA and experienced my life and I think what you're getting at is what I did.
Speaker 2:I lived at a very public partner for 12 or 13 years and he was very, very, very successful and we had a we have, although not together now very nice life and very lavish life when he and I were together. We had a very lavish life and he has a very lavish life. Dare I just be more pointed and say he was the one with all the big money, but I'm not doing badly at all. He was very kind. If anybody wants to look it up, they can find out who he was. I was lovely man. I never say we had a better I was busy with him.
Speaker 2:He started an internet company. He started 99. It was a famous sale. And then he started a foundation and he's just a really, really top notch guy. I knew him well and people change. We haven't been together for 12 years and so I can't really speak to how he is now, but I see him occasionally, I talk to him often. He's a wonderful guy of high character.
Speaker 1:But I remember you.
Speaker 2:You is who I'm interviewing, ok, OK, but I will tell you, though, that through him, I learned a lot of great lessons of life about public service, et cetera, and one of the things was I went to, I moved after he and I parted ways, in about 2012, I bought a house up in Hollywood, up above Mahallah, near Outpost Street, called Makapa, a wonderful little cul-de-sac, and I renovated this house. I made it my dream house, a lovely, lovely home, and I was a runner. It was one of the things I started, actually, when we did break up, just to kind of clear my mind, and I discovered I really loved running and I would run along Mahallah Drive. I would run from Outpost to Laurel Canyon in back, and I remember one day I stopped to take a picture of something because I was painting as well, and I thought, oh, this would make a great little painting, and I took a picture of it and I said, oh wait, there's all these cans. All these beer cans are in this picture, and I grabbed a bag that was on the road. I found a bag. It was right there. There's a lot of trash on the road, and I cleaned up the little road there. So I got a nice clean picture without any beer cans in it. Because that was always my role when I painted I only painted what I saw and I took the picture and then I continued my run and all the way down to Laurel and I came back and by the time I came back I knew there was a real problem.
Speaker 2:There was a great deal of trash along that stretch and in fact, everywhere I go. Now I see it and what I started to do was I would run every other day. It's just three miles west, three miles east and I started picking up trash and I would pick a bag and I dump it in people's trash cans along the way, even if I had to go in their side yard or something, and I would haul tires. And if someone had dumped a refrigerator, I would go to the app LA 311 and report it and they were very good. I would report graffiti.
Speaker 2:I became this guy who really you see these rows and it says adopted by blah, blah, blah the next 10 miles. Well, I actually really adopted that stretch from outpost to Laurel Canyon and I did it. I started it thinking I only needed to do it. It took me six months to clean up the existing trash. Let me put it down. I was running every other day. I'm not really running at this point. I'm doing this whole trudge and every time I see anything I was picking up cigarette butts, everything I would stop and I would oh, I almost had to blast the gloves with you.
Speaker 2:No, I didn't do any of that. No, no, gloves, no, nothing. So I carried a towel over my shoulder and I would wipe my hand on one side of it. That was my dirty side, and if I need to wipe my face I flip it over, but I never get sick. I never got sick, wow, and I think I got my immune system probably got stronger. So I would.
Speaker 2:Plus all that stuff had been sitting in this sign and stuff it sits in that really hot sun up there. I remember picking up a beer bottle once. It was full of beer it's just a little warning and it had been sitting in the sun for a long time. The thing as soon as I picked it up I must have tapped it on something it blew up. It blew up like all that little brown shards of glass. Oh my god. Yeah, it was really. I mean the pressure, and it was probably going to blow up on its own, but just as I picked it up it was just enough force against it that it broke.
Speaker 2:But getting back to my point, so I was running and it took me, let me say, six months to really get it, so that a lot of the really embedded trash was gone and then I just continued to pick up because I found I had to. I had to take a bag with me and I would feel it multiple times every other day just from people coming through. You know it had been clean but they saw it okay to throw garbage out their window and so I did that. And I mean I remember one time it was slightly heroic. I remember one time I found a passport, a Taiwanese, not Taiwanese Bank of Thailand, a Thai thank you, a Thai passport. And it was just and I thought some guy was probably drunk and threw this out his window and I almost thought I'd just throw it away and I thought no, I threw it in my pocket.
Speaker 2:I got on Facebook, I found the guy. He was just, he said, told me he had had his car broken into and he was so grateful because he had just lost like two nights before and he was trying to get renewed because he had to go home to Thailand. He was a tourist. So it was fun. I mean it wasn't. It wasn't happy, joy is fun, but it certainly was rewarding and it was so fun to clean it up and and see the fruits of my labor, you know, and I always hoped it would stay that way, but I always took a bag every time I ran because, it never did.
Speaker 2:You learn a lot about people by picking up litter.
Speaker 1:I know people learn a lot about people, about picking up their garbage honey.
Speaker 2:And what they throw at their window and you know what's going up on in your neighborhood, or you know by people coming through found all kinds of things. You should find money.
Speaker 1:That was always interesting, I'll bet what's the most you ever found in money.
Speaker 2:Oh, one spot $220. Wow People, you know what it was. Bubbie people would get out. I think they'd pull over. In that instance you can tell by the trash someone had pulled overhead sex, probably got out and pulled up his pants and dropped his money. I'm not going to tell you what other stuff I found around the money.
Speaker 1:I want to know Don't tell this poor old.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you one thing people of America, you all drink and drive too much beer bottles, you know, little bottles of whiskey. All that's a pot trash. Oh my God, the pot smokers are so legal here now.
Speaker 2:No, I know, but I just throw the pipes out the window. That's paraphernalia. There's little plastic containers. It's legal here too. So I saw a lot of that and the other scourging things.
Speaker 2:I don't mean to be depressing, but I can remember on the 4th of July I'd always regret I'd let them do their thing on the 4th and 5th of July, but by the 6th or 7th I'd go up there and clean it up and it was atrocious what I would find. People would come up and look at fireworks and they think nothing of just leaving everything behind. There were people that didn't do that, but those people I never had any indication of. But the amount of trash indicated that a great deal of people were just leaving it. And the thing is you think I'll put up a trash can, but a lot of times there were trash cans right there, but they didn't want to walk across the street like the universal overlook up on Mahalo.
Speaker 2:That was my hotspot. I would always run by, but again, I would call the city and that was the one good thing I could get the city to do come up and pick up my stuff. But they knew me well and they'd cover graffiti for me real fast and on every Wednesday I would take a bag with a graffiti removal spray can of solvent and then, if that didn't work, I also had like a greenish spray paint. I would cover it up if it looked like it was like really bad gang Tagging or something, and then this city would come and do it right. You just don't want to leave that stuff there right.
Speaker 1:So what are you doing now that, because I've got like about eight minutes or actually, yeah, about eight minutes, six minutes to just talk about your life today?
Speaker 2:today. So I was so the trash thing and I have to be honest with you, after doing that and this died, been in LA a while, I developed a TV show and written that and sold that, but I, I, I Was picking up trash and just my time there was over. I loved it there, but I'd done everything I wanted to do. I'm, I was from the East Coast, even though it'd been years since I and I was always part-time. I had a house and a place, a midtown man hat, which I still have since about 94, so I also would come back and forth a lot, you know, and I just thought, well, you know, I Just it was time and I sold my house, I was, and I came, I came here, like I said, I moved to Southampton and and it took me about about a lovely, lovely house, very fortunate.
Speaker 2:I mean, god is shined on my life, or whatever you want to call. It is shined on my life so clearly because I remember, as a child, my life Awful, it's terrible, scary, you know, you know, and but it's more than made up for it and I have a lot of faith and I have a lot of courage. I just, I heard somebody one time say it's probably somebody I don't know who was with a friend of mine's yet to step out in the faith. I'm like, what's that mean? Just do it and be. You know, take it, take all the good out of it and don't you know, have some courage, live your life Bolly, take off a big bite.
Speaker 2:So I did that. You know, if I had a real inclination to do something and couldn't see a reason not to, instead of being Pussyfoot about it, I would. I would Jump into it. So I moved here and then I I cleaned up this beautiful house that I can't believe I managed to buy and it's on two and a half acres, overlooking the Shinnecock Bay, if anybody knows this area, and it's on the highest hill in South Hampton. It's a crazy. I got it. It's great to be on the hill, near water. You know you don't want to be Tourists.
Speaker 1:Very good with money.
Speaker 2:Yes, we are. Yeah, I know it's always Barbara Streisand a tour. My ex and I bought her house on Carolwood Long story. We did not buy it from. She sold it to someone. We moved into the house adjacent to the old Gary Cooper house in Baroda and then we decided that we wanted to buy. We were so sad that Streisand had sold her house to somebody else before we moved in because he decided. My Ex decided he wanted to buy it and incorporate it all into one big lot. So we ended up buying it from the person she'd sold it to less than a month after he had purchased it from. Anyway, she I knew her well enough and she did not like the fact that we gave somebody so much more money. You know I said well, we were living there when you sold it. You know, waited a month. Maybe you would have been the one but she was fine. But Since we share the same birthday, often I would go for a bike ride.
Speaker 1:Oh, you share the same birthday. Go out her gate.
Speaker 2:So every April 24th my birthday and her birthday I Would go. You know it happened twice. I went out the gate and there'd be a big sign it said happy birthday. And I'm like, oh, of course they thought Barbara still did there. But I took it is and I remember the first time I happened they sit to my partner. I said did you put that banner up there across from the Streisand gate? I said what banner? I said never mind, I know it was for her, but when were we?
Speaker 1:We were talking about this. When I have to end in a few minutes like what are you doing now?
Speaker 2:So now I'm I'm doing a lot of theater. I Did a off-Broadway play last summer but I'm doing a local theater out here. It's the East End and it's full of great artisans out here. It's a lovely, lovely place and there's a lot of great local theater. I'm in a one-act play festival which opened last night, and Well, it's only a two-night only, so last night was opening, tonight's closing. It's a very rewarding little play.
Speaker 2:I'm in the one I'm in is quite, quite fabulous. And then I go right from there on Monday, start rehearsal for the chalk garden here in South Hampton, which we're doing, and then I'm doing, I'm on radio WLNG, radio 92.1. It's available, wlngcom. I'm on Sunday nights from 8 to midnight and I fill in like this coming week I'll be on Tuesday.
Speaker 1:What's the name of your show?
Speaker 2:I used to call it Gregory way I used to brand it. I used to brand it Specific to me, but now I just it's WLNG. You know I should give it a name, it's the Tom Gregory, but I feel it's a challenge. It's one of those other things is a challenge, like today. I got an email. He wants me to do evening drive from two to six. Which is like so different to do it Sunday 8th and midnight. You know it's like, ah, do I want to do that? It's, it's very I am, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna take it upon myself to sit with the guy on Monday Before I go in on Tuesday and just get down to the specific he does, and I guess I'll make it my own and it won't be as good as the guy who's been doing it for 16 years.
Speaker 1:That's it. It'll be you. There'll be Tom Gregory, the Gregory way.
Speaker 2:Well, I did a. I did a video series on YouTube called Gregory way, which is quite interesting if anybody's interested.
Speaker 1:Definitely will grid the Gregory way on YouTube every time Gregory.
Speaker 2:Look up, it was a very weird little. I did many episodes of it. We did very, very well. We were picked up by different portals and stuff, but it's, it's. It's a reality show. But the I'm gonna to give you all a big secret there's nothing reality about reality television. I'm on it.
Speaker 1:No, I'm kidding, I know. You know, it's a reality show which is starting again, called bubby snow bass, where we match people up. Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. I.
Speaker 2:Need. I've gotten to the point in my life where I have a dog. He's 14 and a half year old, dox, and people say, oh, you know you're alone. I said, no, I'm not alone, I have a dog. I will say he doesn't help around the house very much, but Gonna have to cut you off soon, but that's all right, you're not cutting me off at all.
Speaker 2:They used to call me real quick because I the Batman a trash. When I used to run along the hullet and pick up trash, everybody knew me. I used to wear this Batman shirt on backwards to the sygney was on my back. It was I branded myself.
Speaker 1:There you go, brand yourself honey. I branded myself tick tock bubby. And you know what? Tom Gregory, if no one told you they love you today, I love you because you. Thank you for coming on my show. It'll be up in a few minutes, like it about 20. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it.