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I was looking through a box of stuff, I’d squirreled away in a closet. It was filled with old notebooks and loose notebook pages filled with my juvenile handwriting. At the very bottom of the box, there was this manila folder that was old and stained by time and God knows what.

I opened it and emptied the contents on the floor. Out poured memories. It contained some of my work from first and second grade. I sat there, staring at some of my old tests, drawings and homework and this overwhelming feeling of nostalgia overcame me.

Was I ever this young?

Then, as I studied the papers, something occurred to me: I didn’t have very supportive teachers.   At least, not during the all important “formative” years.

For example, the drawing below is one I submitted in art class back in first grade. I thought it was rather progressive considering it was 1967 and I was just shy of my seventh birthday. But my teacher, mean old Miss Calder didn’t think so.

She was tough on her pupils and never let our naivete or youth stand in the way of her projecting her absolute rage on us.

And boy, was she angry!!! She never held back. Kind of weird too, since she didn’t have kids of her own. We thought not being encumbered by motherhood would’ve made her nicer.

It didn’t.

Years later, I used to hear my mother refer to as being “frank”.

I thought that meant “brutally honest”.

Nope.

Turns out, that’s the name she used after her her sex change operation in 1970.

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And then, my tender, fragile juvenile self-esteem was further stunted by my second grade reading comprehension teacher, Mrs. Roberts.

In retrospect, she sure was a bitch!!

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Then, I found an old classmate’s drawing that somehow got mixed in with my stuff. I vaguely remember Laura Lee Hobbs.  Her family moved in third grade, but we were never very close friends. My rather elitist mother didn’t want me playing with her because as she put it (and all you Southerners will know what this means) her mother and father were “no account”.  Her dad performed odd jobs arond town and her mother…well, in this drawing, Laura Lee paid tribute to her mother’s night job.

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Our teacher, Mr. Peterson gave her an A-plus.

Gee, wonder why?

If memory serves, Laura Lee shared a desk with Junior Salzberry, whose father was a fireman. I remember thinking what were the odds that I’d have two classmates with parents that both worked with poles.

Of course, this excluded Jimmy Ray McCaskill whose father was a janitor at the Polish embassy.

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I strongly dislike overkill.   And not only that, I don’t like early kill.  

A week and a half before Halloween,  several Houston strip centers began decorating their exteriors for Christmas, almost a full two months before December 25th.    I don’t remember Christmas decor ever rearing it’s head this early!   But at the risk of sounding like my mother, “My stars!!   The holiday decorations seem to come earlier and earlier each year.  Before you know it, it’ll be looking like Christmas year round!!”

This early infusion must be due to our neediness as a society, considering we’re currently living in such tough fiscal times.  

Nothing like Christmas to make us keenly aware of our financial problems!!   If that’s the case, I don’t understand the logic or the psychology behind it.

Now, don’t get me wrong–I’m not Scrooge.  I love Christmas.   The season itself can transport me back to a wonderful time gone by as fast if not faster than music from the era.   

I will admit that for a myriad of reasons, there hasn’t been a lot of joy in many of  my Christmasses past, but I intend to change that this year.    I’m starting to practice what I preach in my belief that we can’t change other people; nor can we control what they say and do, but we can choose how we react to their words and deeds.    How we perceive things is incredibly important.   That can make or break our moods,  especially if what the ubiquitous “they” say is true:  that happiness IS more often than not, a conscious decision.

So, I am consciously determined to make this Christmas a good one…even if that means there’ll be a body count in its wake.

But I refuse to celebrate the season without performing at least one mizvah (that means a good deed for the Goyim in audience) before the season is upon us.  Yes, I know it’s early and that’s contra to my comfort level,  but I want to give it to you now, regardless of how I feel about pre-mature elation for the holidays.   

Perhaps, I’m wrong then.   Maybe we all need a little Christmas right now.

Therefore, my mizvah for you is a TV program that I saw at age 10 and I’ve not laid eyes on it since 1969, that is, not until this afternoon.  It is a CBS Children’s Film Festival holiday presentation entitled,  “J.T.”

Like me at the time,  it features a shy, lonely ten-year-old child on the brink of self discovery, who is forced to learn about life and growing up the hard way.

Unlike me at the time, the child is a young African-American boy (played by Kevin Hooks) being raised by a single mother (Janet Du’boise).  Both are trying to survive the best way they know how in the mean streets of 1960’s Harlem.

SYNOPSIS:  In the days preceding Christmas, young J.T. finds a one-eyed, badly injured cat in a delapidated warehouse while hiding from some neighborhood hoodlums who want his transistor radio.   

That’s all I’ll tell you.  That’s all you need to know.  The rest you simply have to see for yourself.

The film is an extremely poignant essay about growing up and the painful life llessons that often accompany this bittersweet processs.

“For some reason, “J.T.” was shelved after only one broadcast around Christmas time in 1969.  Odd too, because it won a prestigious Peabody award and was lauded by critics and educational groups across the country, but for some reason, it was never shown  on network TV again.  Nor is it available on DVD (at least, I haven’t seen it listed anywhere), but I found it in it’s entirety parceled out in five separate segments on YOU TUBE.  It’s a gem of a story written by Jane Wagner and an even more delightful film directed by Robert M. Young.    

I should tell you that I cried juvenile tears for a week after seeing it for the first and only time when I was ten.   Forty-years later,  I reviewed a few scenes this afternoon  and to be honest, it’s been difficult to type through adult ones.

So, here you go.   Enjoy “J.T.”,  but I warn you:  snag a Kleenex first or at least make sure you’ve got a clean spot or two on your sleeve.

Trust me, you’ll need it.

And Merry Christmas…..all year long.  

Considering the sweet sentiment of the season and the current fiscal clime, I suppose that really wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

♦

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There’s been a death in my immediate family.   

The ultimate omega to its alpha happened within the last few hours.  While  not entirely expected,  it didn’t completely surprise me, either.  

I didn’t want it, but I needed it.

I didn’t know that initially.  I do now.

Death comes in many forms.   There’s the end of one’s corporeal life, of course, but more often than not, it’s also representative of the end of something; a relationship, a habit, a mindset.   Stuff we can’t put in a casket and bury.  Well, we could, but that would be a hell of an expense to incur.   I’d do it if I thought the symbolic representation would help, but it wouldn’t.

Why? 

Well, because I just spent the past two months finally growing up and when you’ve attained that sacred status of adulthood, metaphors just don’t cut it any more.   

Or so I thought.

For a great portion of my life, I loved a man from a far.  No matter what happened in my life, through my successes and through my failures, I loved him.  I saw his face when I met and fell for other men.  I heard his words, when I was told “I love you”.   I saw his face when I should have seen the beauty that life offered.  But I didn’t.  I allowed what I thought I felt for him to color everything.  But sadly, heartache only represents half the spectrum.  I missed out on so much.

In addition, I let opportunity after opportunity slip through my fingers like so much sand.  Therefore, it’s quite fitting then to come to the conclusion that I’ve spent past 38 years with my head completely lodged in the stuff.

I often claimed I had first hand knowledge of a great love when in reality, I was in a state of abject denial.   

So, this morning I answered the phone and in doing so, I pulled my head out of  a billion gritty granuals and looked around me, as if for the very first time.  I saw my reality and it wasn’t pretty.    I realized that  I lived, loved, cried, and remembered a million things and somehow managed to compress those things with a brilliant overview of the past 38 years in one very brief eight minute phone call.     What took years to create, ended in eight minutes.

Eight minutes.  That’s all.  It’s said that God created the world in less time.

But in those scant eight minutes, I lived a lifetime.   My life and times flashed before my eyes.  It was like I was sitting in an arena theater, watching a video of 3-D dioramas, all representing these pertinent times in my life.  It was shown above my head at different locations on the ceiling.  Extremely fleeting glimpses they were, but lasting long enough for me to recognize each one.

I hung up the phone and walked away from that conversation not wringing my hands and collapsing on the couch as I would do normally.   Instead, I was thinking, “My God, I wasted a lot of time!”       

But I forgive myself for not knowing any better. I forgive myself for not having the tools or the bandwidth really, to do anything about it at the time.  And I sit here typing, aware of my altered feelings.  I now know I’m an evolved woman.   Everything  has changed…or my perception of it has and when that happens, there’s no going back.    I would never have thought that before coming to terms with that fact.    Does this make sense to anyone else not inside my head?   

Well, it makes sense to me and it’s all so damn true.  Had I known this, had I not been so afraid to let go, I would’ve done so years ago.  But maybe the time wasn’t right back then.  Maybe for any of this to adhere,  I had to become the woman I’d carved out of life in order to become the woman who’d eventually be carved out of this “death”.

So, wait a minute.  If I put it that way…then, in some ways…hey,  I actually died this morning.   Really?  Oh, I get it now…it was me, not the relationship that had gotten so invasive and sprouted tenticles; enough to form this  noose around my neck.  It was me or rather the old Laurie who allowed the  marauding over growth.    Oh well, if that’s the case,  that woman HAD to go.  She was a liability and obviously, her gardening skills were deplorable!

 I didn’t realize that I was the one that needed to be put down.  I didn’t realize that until a good friend contacted me this morning.  She actually served as my very own personal Dr. Kevorkian for this occasion.  Because she’d been through this before, this life-becomes-death- becomes-a-second-chance kind of scenario, she helped administer the lethal cocktail of reality and it came not in a vile or a pill bottle, but rather, in this missive: 

“After the first death, there is no other,” wrote Dylan Thomas.

That doesn’t mean the ones that come after won’t break your heart, but it’s the first one that punches your soul’s passport.  He was your first love and while, he may have left a long, long time ago, your feelings for him never did.  

So, here you are.  

All I can tell you is “Welcome, fellow human, to a different country than the one you woke up to this morning”.  

The air’s different here; so is the scenery. Your knees don’t work so well; in fact, you may want to fall to them.  If this reality makes you do that, then you do that.

For a precious little while, you are allowed to be stunned into silence, or to shriek, or to talk—recounting stories of who he was, what he meant to you, and how it all came to an end. Tell those stories.   Compose them in your head, then juxtapose it to keyboard. Write about these memories. The love you kept alive is worth it.   It’s your story.   You tell it as you see fit.

Now, there will be those people who’ll try to enforce “The Rules,” to wit: Enough of This Drama Is Enough. Ignore them.  The only rule is that in mourning, there are no rules.  Besides, if you treat yourself gently and take the time you need, someday soon you’ll once again hear the faint but steady voice of your own good sense returning.    When you do, you’ll welcome it.  That will serve as an alarm that it’s time to start living again.

In the meantime, play music you love, that which reminds you of him.   Sit in the sunshine if you can find some, and if anyone offers you a hand, hold it. Let them feed the cat and water the plants, too, because they want to be useful. 

And if in a few weeks,  your good sense doesn’t kick in on its own, help it along: make breakfast.  How about a nice frittata?   It might feel strange at first, but if you pretend that making frittatas  is normal, eventually it will become normal. Soon you can squeeze some orange juice, too.   If you can do that, can squeezing out regular, normal days be far behind?

For some of us, our stay in this new country seems endless. But time passes, seasons change, and, truly, would those we grieve for want us to mope? It doesn’t matter whether they’ve died or they’ve walked out on you, being gone is being gone.   Absence is absence.   Pain doesn’t give a damn about semantics.

So, take some time to feel all you need to feel and process all that you must, but eventually, come back into the real world..the one that doesn’t familiarize itself with daily crying jags.    God knows, at our age, we’ll have to return to this land someday all too soon, but in the meantime , your car needs to be inspected, you have jury duty in late December,  the bills need paying and you still need to find a job to make all of the above possible.  

Besides, you have others that you love and others who love you that are here in the present–those who’ve never left you.

And they still need you.

And as for you, my dear, sweet friend, YOU could use a shower.

♦

And she was right.  

I finished reading that last sentence, then inhaled deeply.  The smell of mourning and loss hit me like bricks.  It was an acrid combination of that tale-tell sign that my deodorant that had just about run it’s course, mixed with a little regret.   

I took a shower.   A nice long one…one that’ll probably make Houston water purveyors think I’ve started growing crops in here hydroponically.  

But that doesn’t matter.   I emerged an hour later, pink and wrinkled like a newborn and in some ways,  I was.   You see, I was wrong about not needing metaphors.   They’re vital.   Like my shower was vital.   I was baptized anew in a font and basin designed to cleanse.   So, two pivotal things were accomplished in my bathroom today.  I couldn’t have done either without metaphor. 

And I most assuredly, could not have done it without the restorative powers of hot water and a bar of Caress.

Oh yeah….clarity helps, too. 

It’s really all about closure, my friends.  It’s a wonderfully glorious thing to finally attain, especially in a life lived without it.

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This day has lasted forever.   Nothing “bad” has happened; but nothing good has transpired either.   I guess there is some reward to status quo, but when your life feels like it’s stagnating, you’d really like to nip that in the bud.  Somtimes it has to run its course.   And often times, surviving that is, as they say…a bitch.

My friend Steve can relate.  He called me this morning and we commiserated on how blah this particular Friday the 13th feels.  His life is also going nowhere and he’s feels powerless to affect any change.  He worries me.  He’s sensitive and feels things so strongly.

In fact, he told me that he was feeling put upon by life.  He had way too much on his plate.  It was as if God should be flagged and fouled for “piling on”.   I asked if he was having suicidal thoughts.

He said he might be, so I did what any friend would, I gave him the number to the Live Lifeline.   There are experts there who can counsel him on how to fix all that’s wrong.   Or talk him off the ledge for the time being anyway.

Thirty minutes went by and Steve called me back.  I answered and heard him breathing heavy; as if agitated.   I asked if he was OK and he said “Yeah, I’ll live another day, but I have to tell you what happened”.

I was all ears.

He said sadly, the Live Lifeline has gone the way of so many other operations in these tough economic times.  Apparently, its services are now being farmed out to cheaper, foreign call centers.   He was rerouted to some guy with a very thick Middle Eastern  accent in Afghanistan.

They talked briefly about things, thend the “counselor” asked if Steve was suicidal.   He replied, “Yeah, I think I might be”.

Then, the guy paused for a second and asked Steve if he knew how to drive a truck through a barricade.

Asshole…. 

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It is Friday the 13th.

And it has felt like it all year long.    You see, Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish and I have something in common:  2009 will go down as a rebuilding year.  But unlike the that storied college football program, the rotund Charlie Weiss isn’t in my life and all things considered, I think that’s the one positive I have going for me.

The reality is, I’m in the midst of several sizeable changes and I hate it.  I don’t work well in an inconstant environment.  Still, I forge ahead because it’s not like I can refuse.  Well, I guess I could, but I’m already fighting the urge to go completely anti-social on most days.

I guess it would be easy just to say ’screw it’ and go to Costco and get a butt load of provisions and traverse far into the outback and  live in a Ted Kaczynski-esque log cabin, built by delusion and pyschotic grandiosity.

But I can’t.  I have this thing about electricity.

And Burger King.

♦

Speaking of fast food, NEVER go to a Popeye’s or a Church’s Fried Chicken location and look into the kitchen while sitting in the drive-through waiting on your yard bird.    You will be sorely sickened.  Clean–they ain’t.    You can practically see the Cholera floating through the air.

So, go for the chicken.  Eat it for the dysentary.  

What the hell?  It’s not like you only have one intestine.

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Since I’m still technically limited in terms of what I can do with my blog (yes, my computer is still in the Sick Ward at Our Lady of  Pentium) I’m going to  repost an older entry; from this past March, actually. 

Fear not.  It is short and sweet and won’t take but a fragment of your time away from vetting future Democratic political appointees. 

Here’s the poop:  One day last spring, I was perusing You Tube as I do when boredom overtakes me and I happened upon a blast from my animated past.  

As my fellow oldsters can attest,  the late 60’s and early 70’s found the Big 3 TV networks doing their damdest to infuse in my generation of Young Impressionables, an adept appreciation of rock and/or roll.  

If you can call this genre of music that.

We’re talking about the bubbliest of Bubble Gum music.  That said, you are about to bear witness to a You Tube video of the Archies’, “Sugar, Sugar”, from 1969.   It’s sweet enough to give you Type 2 Diabetes.

And maybe even Lupus.

Listen with something salty to counter the affects.

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I hate not having home access to one of these infernal contraptions.  I really hate being dependent on the cyber world, but I am. 

I realized how dependent I am on modern conveniences and services  after Hurricane Ike.  When that nasty blow job stormed through Houston last 15 months ago, things were bad, but I was one of the lucky ones.   I was only without power for 16 hours (some of my friends and colleagues endured two weeks in the dark) but my satellite dish  looked like it had a bite taken out of it.   I don’t know what happened, but I could swear I saw teeth marks around the gaping hole in the parabolic dishy thing.

Imagine, if you will, Evander Hollyfield’s ear after Mike Tyson had that nasty jones to sink “bofe of his teethices” into some cartiledge during their fight several years ago.     I was stuck with one channel–Lifetime and not the good Lifetime.  No, I was stuck with the Lifetime Made For TV Movies Which Attempts To Empower Woman By Featuring Singularly Horrific Performances by Hollywood D-List Hacks such as Markie Post, Valerie Bertinelli, Melissa Gilbert and That Brunette Chick On One Of The CSI Shows In Roles That Allows Them To Kill, Prosecute or At The Very Least, Mentally Castrate Their Male Co-Stars. 

That lasted eight of the longest days of my life, but I still had my computer, so things weren’t so bad.

But to be WITHOUT my cyber lover and friend?   As my sainted mother often says as she clutches her choker length strand of pearls, “That’s simply not done!”

This experience of being computer-less is going on a week now.  My situation will soon be rectified and I’ll be back to waxing comedic again soon, but in the meantime, this lapse is forcing me to talk on the phone more and actually leave my house and talk to people.    I don’t mind that, but I have to be in the proper frame of mind and these days, I’m not as sociable as I usually am.

I’m tense…pensive…moody these days.  My life’s paradigm is shifting without my persmission (again) and all I can do is ride the wave.   I’ll be batter once I make landfall, but in the meantime, I feel my attitude has become something akin to Rosie O’Donnel’s after a five day fast, stuck in a tiny room full of arch Conservative homophobes and exercise equipment.

My mood spiked when a friend who I’d lost contact with called me out of the blue a few days ago.  Since I couldn’t lie fast enough, I got conned into going to dinner with her.   She was in town for a few days and is considering moving to Houston with her company when the it tranfers it’s corporate HQ to Houston next year.     Nice girl, but a little shallow and hardly a member of MENSA.    In the past I tolerated her because  she amused me.   That night, I felt as by merely being in her  presence, she was abusing me.  I wasn’t in the mood and I knew the tiniest infraction was going to grate on my nerves.

She picked me up in her rental car and we dined and she laughed; I allowed a perfunctory smile as I heard about her recent break up and an on going battle with various forms of candida.   Hardly fit conversation to hear as I’m eating buttered bread.t

I took her to various neighborhoods to giv e her an idea of what Houston has to offer and she prattled on about how different things were in Denver….which I found odd, since she lived in Tulsa.  

We drove through an area near downtown and I pointed out a few things to her.   Namely, the famed Galleria, one of the foremost shopping malls in the country.   She nodded and ooh’d and ahhd.  But for some reason, the nearby YMCA caught her eye…this, as we had just passed Neiman Marcus, Lord and Taylor and several smaller designer boutiques. 

She shook her head and announced emphatically that she didn’t think Houston was the place for her.  I asked why and she said she didn’t think she could live in a city that couldn’t spell Macy’s.

I got out at the light and walked home. 

The 12.9 mile trek in the rain did me some good, I think.

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I’m here, just indisposed due to a computer that has seen its last days.

My PC is ill;  very, very ill.  It’s currently in the Computer Hospital in grave conditi0n.  I was  called earlier by Dr.  Hop Sing to make it in as soon as possible.    He wants me to be there for the administration of last rites.    Things are THAT bad.

I’m writing this post courtesy of the Community IT Center in my building, where every keyboard is like  Petri dish of contagion.   I’m wearing latex gloves, but I’m typing with my feet just to play it safe.    This building houses a myriad of people’ all of them extremely diverse…a few are one generation away from dirt floored yurts and ritualistic baths of Yak urine, know what I mean?  The guy on this particular computer was one such example.   He smells like a Dino di Laurentis film and  his fingernails looked like he’d been digging in a pit of Milk Duds.

Gross.

I’m finishing here, then running back up to my abode where I will spend the next two hours applying a good Silkwood scrubbin’ to my entire body.

I’ll be back as soon as my computer woes are handled.

Or once my Leprosy and Kuru are cured…whichever comes first.

Thanks for your patience and continued support.

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I’ll say it again:  I didn’t think “Paranormal Activity” was scary when I saw it two weeks ago.   

It will however, rake in millions this Halloween weekend.  And while the movie–IN MY OPINION– stunk up the theater like sweaty feet and ass, this year’s Oscar for “Best Marketed Film” will to Paramount.   Or rather, the Publicity Brain Trust at Paramount, which has skillfully hyped this movie,  is the real winner here.

I will begin by saying that the quality and entertainment quotient of  movies, books,  plays and music are all very subjective.  The genre that is the horror flick is no exception.  As I’ve stated before, one man’s Freddy Krueger is someone else’s Jason.    And while I love ghost stories and supernatural tales, nothing really scares me more than the gold standard of literary conflict:   man against man.

Ghost stories intrigue me, but movies about maniacal serial murderers relentlessly seeking hapless teens and that one stray who strays away from the flock because she has, decided to take shower for no damn good reason in an abandoned house in the midst of a psychopaths killing spree.   If done right  and I mean really done right, these kinds of movies can scare the hell out of me.

But if they’re you basic slasher flick, with gratuitous stabbings, flayings and what have you, I won’t bother.  This kind of movie has the propensity to be very formulaic and hackneyed.    I was never a fan of the Jason movies.  I saw parts one and two.  “Nightmare on Elmstreet” did nothing for me either. But Truman Capote?  Well, as a child, his work scared me. 

My parents must have been out of their minds when they took me (at the tender age of seven) to “In Cold Blood” when the film was released in 1967.   It focuses on the real life story behind the murder of the Clutter family at their farm house, somewhere in rural Kansas.    This took place back in the more halcyon period that was the 1950’s.  People didn’t lock their doors.   The Clutters didn’t on that fateful night and they were all shot to death by two intruders hell bent on robbing the place.

We lived in a small town in South Texas.  In the 60’s, we rarely locked our doors either.

I was scared out of my wits.   

I shared a bedroom with my sister during my formative years.  Because I was younger, Karol got to choose which twin bed she wanted.   I was left with the one closest to the door and because of “In Cold Blood”, I was convinced that was the “Getcha Side”…the bed a murderer would go to first because it was closest to the door.  Murderers I jejunely assumed, were lazy.   Even so, I don’t remember sleeping much as a child.  Every sound, creak and crack was an armed William Blake rummaging around in our house, making his way to our bedroom.

Even so, I have to admit that I love to be scared.  Fear–nothing else let’s you know you’re alive more than that particular emotion.   So, it’s for that reason that I would like to share with you, what I think are a few of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen.  

And just in time for Halloween. 

I’ve already mentioned “In  Cold Blood”, which might not have been scary, but think about it:   from an eight year old’s perspective, it certainly was.

Plus a stern personality-less Glenn Ford as a detective, shot in black and white?????? 

Please.     

OK..yeah, sure–I’ll admit it:  the movie, “Halloween” scared me.   The  first one only…not the 2,859,009 remakes.   I saw it over the long Thanksgiving weekend in 1978.  I was 19 at the time and had just moved into my own tiny efficiency apartment I shared with 75 trillion roaches while going to school in Austin.   That was my first time living alone.   Plus, Austin being one of the coed capitals on the planet, there were tons of rapes.    A female had to be careful.    At any given time, any given woman could be in someone’s cross hairs…a target for evil mayhem.   

I saw “Halloween” and was scared to go home.

While scary in most places, the part that blew it for me, was the invincibility of Michael Meyers.   Yeah, I know it’s a movie, but I like at least a little realism in my horror fantasy.  In this flick’s case,  that cat simply wouldn’t die!!!!!   

I’ve often wondered if Writer/Director, John Carpenter was trying for some kind of Rasputin rip off in that particular characterization. Impervious Mike was shot, stabbed, fell, thrown from a car and ate a stray cat (raw) while sleeping in the abandoned home in which he committed mass murder as a child.

Yet he survived it all….with nary a hint of indigestion.

♦

I was 14 on the cusp of turning 15 when “The Exorcist” was released in the early spring of 1974.   As a young impressionable nubile product of  my parents, Nonie and Louis (in other words, I was a “NonieLou production), that movie had its terrifying moments.   Having been raised Catholic helped induce the fear.    After the movie’s release, I remember being bored during Mass and going through one of missiles and actually finding the rite of exorcism in the back.    

Here’s a clip from “The Exorcist”.   Today’s technological advances makes this scene seem incrediblycrude and rudimentary, but at the time, the spinning and spewing were most effective.

And the power of You Tube compels me  to include in this post, Tubular Bells, the theme from “The Exorcist”, which is, in my opinion, certainly one of the scariest scary movie themes EVER.

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TRIVIA: British native son, composer Mike Oldfield was just 17 years old when he conceived the idea to create a symphonic work, similar to the large-scale compositions for full orchestra in several movements found in classical music, using a tape recorder he had borrowed from a friend. By masking the “erase” head with a small piece of cardboard he could record more than one instrument.

Having set to work to create this music, Oldfield decided to play all the instruments himself.   Tubular Bells was recorded in part at Abbey Road Studios, and by mid  1972, he finish a rough demo of his project, which at that time bore the name Opus One. Mike was so content with the result that he sent copies to all major record companies, all of which rejected it as not marketable.

Then came a one Richard Branson.

At the time, Branson ran a chain of record stores in England and had just finished building a recording studio in a manor house near Oxford. One of the first bands to record at that studio was a band led by soul singer Arthur Lee, in which Oldfield played bass at the time. The brief time spent at the recording studios Mike had the chance to play his tape to Branson and others.  They loved it and offered Mike a contract.

Mike spent the next few months at the Manor, recording his masterpiece which by now had been given the name Tubular Bells (after Richard Branson had spent weeks trying to find the “long metallic hanging tubes” Mike had written on his instrument wish-list without knowing the actual name for it). During the sessions he played over 20 instruments and more than 2,000 tape overdubs were made.

After the recording sessions Mike and Richard took the completed Tubular Bells to the Musical Industry Trade Fair, MIDEM in Cannes in 1973. No one showed interest in the tapes,  so there was no other option left than to release the album themselves; on the new Virgin record label.   V2001: Tubular Bells was released on May 25th, 1973.

The critics had difficulties defining the music. They couldn’t, yet the public loved it.  The album topped the UK charts for months and it became a wide success all over the world.

Initally, it wasn’t well recieved in the US.   That was, until William Friedkin used a three-minute excerpt in his shocker movie The Exorcist.  Oldfield and Branson were furious that the music had been used without permission, however the American public wondered what that haunting music at the end of the movie was. Because of the demand the three-minute excerpt was released on single as Tubular Bells: Theme from The  Exorcist which eventually boosted the sales of the album to an impressive 16 million copies.

And the rest is, as they say, history.

Finally, one of scariest movies I’ve ever seen was an independent film shot in Texas in the mid-70’s.  

The year was 1976 to be exact and the movie was entitled, “The Town That Dreaded Sundown”.   It was about the Texarkana Phantom Killer,  an unidentified serial killer believed to have committed a number of murders in  between February 23 and May 4, 1946. The Phantom is also known the Moonlight Murderer, having often killed when the moon was full.

The Phantom first struck on February 23, attacking a young couple parked on a secluded rural road.    A  man, armed with a handgun, forced the man and woman  out of their car and pistol-whipped Hollis before sexually  assaulting the woman with the gun before fleeing when he saw the headlights of an approaching car. N The victims survived the attack and told authorities that their assailant has his head and face were covered by a mask. 

See the poster above.

A month later, another couple was attacked and this time killed, also on a rural road outside Texarkana. . Both had been shot in the back of the head, by a .32 revolver. A bloodstained patch of earth found 20 feet  away suggested that both victims were killed outside the car and put back in it.

Early on April 14,  Paul Martin, 17, and Betty Jo Booker, 15, were killed in Texarkana’s Spring Lake Park. Martin’s body was found a mile and a half from his car (which was in the park) near a rural highway. Booker’s body was found two miles from the car, near a patch of woods. Both had been shot several times. As with Griffin and Moore, the bullets had been fired from a .32 revolver.

By this time, the citizens of Texarkana had entered a state of panic. Many residents bought firearms, barricaded their residences, and stayed in at night. The police, meanwhile, began patrolling Texarkana’s secluded streets and areas that young people turned into lovers’ lanes, apparently prompting the Phantom to change tactics.

This is the part that scared me,.  On May 4, a man attacked a farmhouse in Arkansas,  12 miles from Texarkana. The prowler, standing outside the house, shot Virgil Starks, 36, twice through a parlor window, killing him. Virgil’s wife, Katy (played in the movie by Dawn Welles,  TV’s Mary Ann from “Gilligan’s Island”)  heard breaking glass, left her bedroom and entered the parlor. The assailant, still outside the house, shot her twice, hitting her in the face and mouth, but Mrs. Starks managed to escape from the house and run to a neighbor’s home.

While Mrs. Starks got help, the killer searched the house, leaving muddy footprints on the floor. By the time the police arrived, the killer, believed to be the Phantom,  had gone. 

AND TO THIS DAY, I CANNOT SIT IN FRONT OF AN OPEN WINDOW AFTER SUNDOWN!!!  Give me blinds and black out curtains.  I don’t care if I’m on the 63rd floor!!

Lastly, the movie suggested that the phantom might have been a petty criminal who was well-known by Texarkana law enforcement.  And still others, feel he was  a World War Two veteran who suffered from War Fatigue (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) and mentally snapped  when he returned to civilian life. 

The case of the Phantom has never been solved and remains open and in 2006,  itwas considered a cold case

Well, there you go.  Happy Halloween, be sure you watch what you watch and stay the hell away from open windows!!!!!   Seriously.  Hood Guy could be on the other side, looking in and through a scope, no less.

PS:   Speaking of hoods, anybody see a resemblance between the Texarkana Phantom and the Zodiac Killer that terrorified the  Bay Area back in the late 60’s????? 

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