Interesting Night

Interesting Night

by Mark Alfred

August 3, 2014

Well I was playin' strip poker with Frankenstein

And I had about all that I could stand

'Cause he was down to his union suit

And I didn't want to win another hand, Lawd Lawd

     I didn't want to win another hand

     What a night, oh what an interesting night

     What a sight, what an uncomfortable sight

Well, I went skinny-dippin' with Dracula

Divin' off an old rowboat

I kept showin' off different strokes

But he only did the Dead Man Float, that's all

     He'd only do the Dead Man Float

     What a night, what an interesting night

     What a sight, he was fish-belly white

Well, I was playin' tag with the Wolf Man

By a river that rushed like a flood

It was fun but I kept flinching

Every time I was "it," he drew blood, that's right

     When I was tagged, he would always draw blood

     What a night, what an interesting night

     I couldn't hide, 'cause the moon was so bright

And the mummy and I saw a sad movie

I wasn't too happy because

When the story would get too weepy

He would cry 'til it gummed up his gauze

     It was such a night, oh what an interesting night

     Up came the lights, and he was stuck in his seat so tight

Oh such a night, was it real or a dream?

I'm gonna lay off the pepperoni pizza next Halloween

 

A Scary Note from a King-Sized Sweetheart

While riffling through some old magazines out of the attic, I had come to my stack of Scary Monsters. Now online.  When I came to the December 1994 issue, I smiled and hurriedly showed darling Joyce what I’d found -- a fan letter to the mag from my dear and departed friend, Mark Barragar!

You can find my original memorial farewell salute here, with scans of some photos and from his memorial service.

You can find a re-post, with a current link to his “King-Size King” Elvis CD, here.

I don’t think that I paid attention to this letter at the time.  But here it is!

BTW if you don’t know about the Count, his Facebook page is here.  The theme from his TV show, “Nightmare,” is the last cut on this year’s Hallowe’en music compilation, posted on the second of this month.

Farewell, big guy!

Food Pills: Nutrition of the Future!

I admire any man with such will power.

In my experience, the success to dieting lies not in will power, but in WON'T power.  Unfortunately, I never met a candy bar or bag of potato chips that I didn't like!

See you tomorrow with an extra-special memory!

  

Color Eddie Munster

I do not know if it was true in 1964, but nowadays Forest Lawn -- "The World-Famous Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles" -- DOES include cremation as one of their services.

So, who knows WHAT is in those Forest Lawn Flakes Eddie's pouring into that big bowl?

Hee-hee-hee, kiddies!
 

"Why?" -- Because I Was Thirteen

Why?

That’s a quotation from these continued musings of the mad narrator of E A Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

It’s also my thought when I peruse this bit from my thirteenth year, 1970.  This is nothing but a useless tag-along to the last bit of Poe’s vignette.

I suppose it’s a pretty good imitation (for an eighth-grader) of Poe’s style.  Instead of hearing the heartbeat exclusively, the narrator’s guilty conscience has increased the audio hallucinations to include the voice of the old man he murdered, his benefactor, asking “Why?” a lot.

I assume that this was considered a brilliant idea by the juvenile writer:  Lure the reader with stream-of-consciousness narration, then cut it off PAST THE POINT at which the narrator could be communicating with us.  (Unless he merely broke a leg and is continuing his monotonous rambling while high on morphine from a jail hospital bed.)

Looking back now, I assume that this idea was kyped from elsewhere (a familiar pattern, yes?).  About this time I read a library book, a novel of strange happenings that the reader wasn’t sure were happening or not (in that way, similar to John Fowles’ The Magus).  It was a first-person narrative (not The Magus but my barely-remembered library book).  This vaguely-recalled tome ended with the narrator being tied into a chair next to a booby-trapped telephone.  When the phone rang, a robotic arm would lift the receiver.  The only problem was, when the receiver was lifted, that action would detonate a room full of dynamite.

As I said, the narrator tells how he was tied in the chair.  PARAPHRASE:  “I was tied fast and could not escape.  Then the phone rang, and the mechanism lifted the receiver.”

THE END!  So -- if the guy is telling something that happened to him, how could he be telling us this, if he was going to be blown to smithereens?

In the same way, you, Dear Reader, are left to imagine how it’s possible that the narrator of my little wart-on-the-face-of-a-classic is able to end his tale thus.  I’m sure it’s more trouble than it’s worth to you.

But it was worthy of a one-day BLOG-O-WEEN entry!  see you tomorrow!

 

Completing the USPS Universal Mosnters Postcard Set

This week's images could have a subtitle:  A tribute to Jack Pierce.  We fascinated kids learned from  Famous Monsters of Filmland about the many pounds of Fuller's Earth caked onto Karloff for the first few minutes of The Mummy.

It's too bad that they simply repeated the text from the Frankenstein postcard for this second of Karloff''s appearances in the set.  The caption could read, "Boris Karloff was again teamed with makeup artist Jack Pierce for 1932's The Mummy.  The story was an intentional echo of Dracula concerning an immortal, evil character desiring to possess a human woman, and the attempts of her fiance and others to save her."

And we cringed as we learned how long it took to film the Wolf Man's transformation scenes ... a few frames, more makeup, a few more frames.

Boy, did we wish we could be like them!