An old friend of mine from elementary school, Evan Arnold, has been making appearances on The West Wing, which is pretty cool. Evan has been a struggling actor for years. He did some commercials when he was younger. I went with him to a couple of auditions and I can remember seeing all these kids that ended up with the gigs and became somewhat famous. This is a long time ago, mind you, and my memory is shot, but I can vividly recall seeing Jason Hervey at one audition for a Bubblicious ad and then seeing him in that commercial. Evan went for a lot of gigs like that and mostly came up empty.

Then he scored an appearance on The Facts of Life and landed a somewhat recurring role on Growing Pains as Ritchie the garbage boy, which was big. The show spun off into Just The Ten Of Us, Evan joined that cast, but the show bombed after one season.

I would continue to see him here and there in various commercials, which was just so strange. I mean, I was in the fucking cub scouts with this kid and now he's in a beer commercial. That's just too bizarre.

I knew he'd done some things but it was shocking when I saw the list of his credits on IMDB. He's been busy. He was in fucking Spiderman. How did I not know that? It was a small part, but he's in the movie. And I've seen it. And I don't remember seeing him. I'm going to have a take another look.

Evan has always been a wild man. I haven't talked to him a while. He's married now, but I doubt he's calmed down much. My favorite all-time Evan story happened when we were in junior high. My brother Brian, Evan and I had gone to UCLA to play tennis. Evan's brother John picked us up in his old beat-up brown Celica. We were driving off campus when we passed a cyclist on the inside. Evan decided it would be smart to lean out the driver side window, flip the guy off and scream, "HEY FUCK YOU!!!" at the top of his lungs. Remember, this is a 13 year old punk kid. So we make a left and head down towards Sunset Blvd where we inconveniently ran into a red light. The cyclist came up to the driver side window and said something like, if you're going to flip someone off, make sure you have a green light. At which point John, desperately trying to cover for his asinine little brother, said, he wasn't flipping you off, he was flipping me off. Whatever. I don't think the cyclist bought it. We laughed about it all the way home.

It's a silly story, but it still makes me laugh more than 20 years later. That's the genius of Evan. He was always able to make everyone around him laugh.