The Mike and Scott Show: No Reruns

Posted by scott on Nov 25, 2025 in Art I Make

Introduction

After 47 years the Mike & Scott Show has come to its close when Michael Frommeyer succumbed to lung cancer on October 24, 2025.

We meet in 1978 when Michael was the projectionist and discussion leader for experimental films entered into the Maryland Film Festival. In the very early days of the festival, it was quite a democratic institution. Anyone could nominate themselves be a judge. I did so and chose to judge the experimental film category. But that’s just how we met. A relationship would not have happened had Rachael, Michael’s best girlfriend, not lived across the street from my rental house in Charles Village in Baltimore. One day I saw him going up her walk and hollared “hello.” Soon we were dating under the mutual declaration that we were both bisexual. This essential lie gave us the space to explore who we could be as a couple. And Rachael did her part early on when the three of us were at her house and I brought up the possibility of renting a cabin on Calvert Cliffs (on the Chesapeake Bay). It was Rachel who nudged Michael with: “Don’t you realize he’s inviting you there for a weekend?” And what a wonderful weekend it was. It really showed use how good we could be together.

This blog post is a compilation of photographs and a very few videos of our life together. Most are from our travels: nine trips overseas, plus one to Canada, and one to Mexico. Then there were domestic trips to the West Coast, the Deep South, and Cape Cod. But we were very infrequent selfie takers. Yet I culled just enough images to take us through the years. Plus I have our 2013 wedding photo, and I’ll end with the Mike & Scott Show legacy: our life in the kitchen, where we cooked almost all of our meals and where we canned tomatoes and made jams, preserves and jellies each year.

(At the end where the videos are located, you’ll need to first click on the “IMG” figure. This will bring you to a link on my computer. Click on that to view the very brief videos, then hit return to go back to this blog post.)

Albums

I found these ID badges in a box I had given to Michael after I traveled solo to Morocco in 1978 soon after the woman I had been dating for nearly two years dropped me. On the left is his freshman year badge to the John Hopkins University. On the right is his ID from the University of Iowa when Michael was enrolled in a Masters program in American Studies.

These are two black-and-white transparent positives that I made of Michael on a trip to Frederick, MD, in the early 1980s.

We made our first overseas trip together in 1984. We arrived in Casablanca, Morocco, traveled by train to Tangiers, crossed the Straits of Gibralta, took trains through southern Spain as far north as Segovia, reversed direction, crossed back in to Africa, explored Meknes and Fes in Morocco, and flew out of Casa. The only phots of either of us were a few Michael took of me in Ronda. (Like the photos of Michael in Frederick these are black-and-white transparent positives. In the development of regular black-and-white film you add a step that changes the negatives into a positives. Then these positives are mounted like color slides.)

I always wondered when Michael moved into the small row house I bought in Waverly (near Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium) in 1983. Then in an antique lap desk on Michael’s dresser I found a letter I sent from London in 1986 to Michael at his mother’s house on White Avenue in northeast Baltimore. It’s very frank and somewhat funny, and the tone suggests that I would, upon returning home, invite Michael to live with me.

 

Fun times sitting on the front steps at my Waverly house.

By late 1992 Michael convinced me that our Waverly neighborhood had become a less comfortable place to call home (and the Orioles had already abandoned Memorial Stadium for Camden Yards). I took the dramatic step of abandoning my part-time status at the Baltimore Sun (and began what turned out as 18 years as a full-timer) in order to qualify for a larger mortgage. Our six-month search ended happily with an intact 1850s townhouse in Mount Vernon and a four-block walk to work.

Missing are photos from two trips: In 1990 wee arrived in Istanbul, immediately rented a car and drove south along the Aegean coast as far south as Bodrum, then drove back up to Istanbul, where we explored for five days. But those five days only whetted our appetite for more Istanbul. So in 1995 we arrived in Athens, explored there for 4 or 5 days, then rented a car and drove up to Thessaloniki (a coastal city at the northern end of the Aegean), then over to Istanbul for a week, then reversed direction to Athens. We had quite an adventure crossing the border over to Turkey, but I’ll save that for another blog.

Michael still looks quite young in the next photos, but my best guess is that they were taken in 1996.

Here is Michael (right) standing in front of one of the giant redwoods in Muir Woods National Monument north of San Francisco. On our way up the coast to Seattle we stopped Portland, where his Aunt Mary lived with her daughter Marlene. Michael told many stories about spending time with Aunt Mary, who had a small farm in Baltimore close to where Michael grew up. They hadn’t seen each other for many years. When they met that day their fondness for each other was broadcast in their smiles.

The photos weren’t dated. But I ascribed the 1996 date based on the invoices of prints bought later that trip in Seattle.

At the end of our second trip abroad (and our first of four ventures in Italy) in 1999 Michael posed below Orvieto, one of Umbria’s wonderful hill cities.

In 2001 we landed in Rome, took a train to Naples, then rented a car and drove to Sicily then back up to Rome. Here is Michael in Cloistro de Santa Chiara, which features 18th-century majolica tiles, in Naples. Both the church and the cloister were heavily damaged by Allied bombing in World War II. My father was a navigator on a bomber that may have been responsible for some of the damage. Regardless, his plane was shot down near Pompeii. He was captured and handed over to the Germans, becoming a POW for 21 months.

We purchased our first airedale in 1992. We named him Dikili as a testament to the small Turkish town of Dikili on the Aegean coast and the woman who ran a guest house there. (Unfortunately I haven’t found neither a journal nor a photo album of that vacation.) These are photos from around 2002. Dikili, who was a bit oversized for his breed at 90 lbs., played a big part in our househunting. In short we needed a yard, where these photos were taken.

It’s interesting how one measures one’s life by the dogs in one’s life. So Dikili became No. 1 airedale.

In 2003 we traveled Spain, landed in Madrid, took a train to Barcelona, then rented a car, driving north in Catalonia to the small town of Besalú with its 12th-century  bridge over the Fluvià river. Here’s Michael on the bridge.

Airedale No. 2 arrived in 2003 as an 8-week-old and was named Prado, after that marvelous museum in Madrid, which we visited earlier that year.

I had an artist residency in 2005 to Hungary, spending time in Budapest and beside Lake Balaton as a participant in the Hungarian Multicultural Institute, and another in Brittany in 2007 as part of a program provided by Maryland Institute College of Art.

We next traveled overseas together in the spring of 2012. We rented a stone house high up in the hills north of the small Tuscan city of Lucca. This is where we spent our first full day and had lunch. In my journal I wrote: “In the oval piazza of the anfiteatro [former Roman amphitheater] we quickly choose an outside eatery for lunch. Michael has fresh noodles & mushrooms followed by baccala & ceci [a salt cod soup with chickpeas]; I have ravioli with meat sauce then rabbit with olives. Our meals get us in the spirit of Italia.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

That fall we visit my sister Cynthia and her family in Reno and get up one morning at dawn to see the inflating and liftoff of the annual hot-air balloon races.

Then we drove to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and enjoyed one of the spectacular sunsets there.

When Maryland legalized same-sex weddings on Jan. 1, 2013, we weren’t first in line to get our wedding license. But during that summer when we realized that my sisters in Reno and outside Houston and their families were coming for Thanksgiving, we set the date: the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Standing from left: Nephew Ryan Stephens, niece Layla Horeff, Brittney Spurling (then girlfriend of Ian’s), niece Alexa Horeff, nephew Ian Stephens, sister Susan Boyer, sister Sara Horeff, brother-in-law Bill Stephens, sister Cynthia Stephens, niece Brooke Boyer, and Cindy Boyer, wife of nephew Ben Boyer.

It’s official!

For pure color nothing matches springtime at the Keukenhof gardens near Haarlem, the Netherlands. We visited in 2014 with my sister Susan. In my journal I wrote: “Tulips were the natural star; but azaleas were brilliant and orchids had their own pavilion to themselves. But even startling beauty can be fatiguing. Yet it was hard not wishing that one could visit soon after dawn with only petal collectors and mowers at work.”

There were many highlights on our first trip to Canada in 2015. We toured some wonderful historic house museums along the Hudson River inNew York state, house sat for a Montreal couple for a week to tend their cats and house plants. Yet we played hooky in mid-week by driving to Toronto to meet artist George Walker and his wife Michelle. But the photo highlight was a visit to the restaurant La Banquise in Montreal to indulge in poutine, the local junk food. Poutine is essentially whatever you want piled atop a plate-full of fries. The restaurant, I wrote in my journal, “lived up to its billing as the poutine capital of the world. Michael’s Taquise was topped with guacamole, sour cream and tomatoes, while my La Folie had fried jalapeños, sour scream, spicy sausage, corn [and] mushrooms. Both servings of course had a bounty of basic poutine ingredients: fries, cheese curds & gravy.”

Our 2017 trip to Italy began with nine days in Rome accompanied by my sister Susan Boyer. Here are the three of us before the huge bronze doors of Saint John Lateran. The doors were made for the Curia Julia of the Roman Senate and date from the 81-96 BCE reign of Emperor Domitian. At the Villa Borghese in Rome we naturally posed before Caravaggio’s “David with the Head of Goliath” where Goliath is a self portrait. And lastly Michael stands in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, near Tivoli in the hills west of Rome.

Naturally no visit to Rome is complete without touring the Coloseum.

Michael and I departed Rome in a rental car, visited Assisi and Ravenna, then made Padua (Padova, as the locals would say) our home base. (Michael grew up attending services at St. Anthony of Padua in Baltimore. So going to the tomb of St. Anthony in Padua was a must.) Among the sites we visited from Padua either by train or car was Verona and its battlements along the river Adige and the villas outside Vicenza. Naturally we toured Andrea Palladio’s La Rotunda. As majestic as it was we were enthralled at the nearby Villa Valmarana ai Nani with its frescos by Giovanni Battiste Tiepolo and his son Domenico. In my journal I wrote: “The one thing the pair knew to do was let their rather spare compositions breathe and give the human images a more human scale.”

The big event in 2019 was the Omaha, NB, wedding of nephew Ian Stephens to Anna Meyer. Here we are wearing our marriage suits posing with Ethan Boyer, son of Cindy and Ben Boyer.

Our only trip to Mexico occurred in the fall of 2019. We stayed in San Miguel de Allende in an apartment run by ex-pat Americas. In fact ex-pat Americans and Canadians were the economic heart of this beautiful colonial-era town. As you can surmise by the skull-face puppets, we timed our visit to November 2, Dia de la Muerte.

The pandemic robbed us of a four-week exploration of Morocco. We had tickets to depart in April, 2020. Fortunately the world closed down before our April departure. Had we actually got to Morocco, we might not have been able to depart for months and months.

We did use the early months of 2020 to go No. 3 airedale hunting. We visited kennels in northern Virginia, interviewing breeders and meeting their dogs. We left a deposit with one breeder. In early June, the litter was old enough to pick one out. There were only two males to choose from. One had a red ribbon around its neck; the other had blue. I don’t remember which one we chose, perhaps the one that chewed on our fingers just right.

The lead photo in this post is of Amos about a year old in 2021.

No explanation needed.

We did get to Italy one last time in the spring of 2022. We began with a week in Venice with our friend David Brown. Then Michael and I took a train to Bologna, where we stayed and dined superbly. Finally we rented a car and made Parma our home base. Throughout this whole trip we did not take a single selfie until our very last full day, in which we toured the elegant Palazzo del Te in Mantua (Mantova, say locals) then motored to Sabbioneta, which Vespasiano Gonzaga planned in 1596 as an ideal fortified city, and (here) visited the Teatro all’Antica.

We made our next to last trip together to Cape Cod on 2023. We were so grateful that the Mashpee house of our friend Karen Klein has always been open to us.

I’m so pleased that we visited Michael’s sister Connie Allred at her and her husband Herb’s house in rural North Carolina in 2024. I just had the feeling how important that trip was, although I hadn’t known it would be the last time they would see each other. Michael would start experiencing tightness in his chess, coughing and much phlegm during the summer. He wouldn’t be diagnosed until after three biopsies. The word cancer was not issued until a pathologist called us during breakfast on Jan. 4, 2025.

We made our final trip to Cape Cod in June 2025 so Karen Klein and I could sign our book “Circularity.” Michael took this photo. (To read about the book’s production, please go to: LINK)

The Kitchen

Outside of the bedroom, the place in our Mount Vernon, Baltimore, 1850s townhouse where we spent the most time together was the kitchen, located in the rear of the ground floor (the kitchen’s original location). Considering that we cooked at least 95% of the meals we ate, I’m trying to image how many meals we cooked together since we moved in in July 1993. And how many loaves of bread Michael made. And how many cookies I made. And how many friends and family members we had over for dinner. Yet very few images record how beloved that room was.

Being a native Baltimorean (or “Baltimoron” as we would say), Michael grew up with the Baltimore peach cake. But Michael’s take on this beloved dessert was far better than what any city bakery offered. He made the pastry dough, prepped the peaches and glazed it after it was baked.

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Here’s Michael adding the finishing touch to a strawberry cream pie. In a division of labor, he made the dough, I rolled it out, baked the crust, made the cream and he prepped the berries and arranged them.

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When it came to Maryland delicacies, I never stepped on Michael’s kitchen toes. (Unfortunately, I never asked I’m or wrote down how to do them.) Crabs, naturally were entirely within his realm. Here he talks (perhaps the only audio I have of Michael) about cooking soft crabs.

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Every year we canned tomatoes and made jams and preserves. Despite his illness this season we made apricot and plum jams, and put up 23 quarts of plum tomatoes.

Closing video

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It’s dark and grainy but here’s Michael and Oscar cat and 1-year-old Amos airedale in the TV room in 2021.

★ ★ ★

 

 

 

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