WHAT DANGER LURKS IN THE DARK?

One of my favorite scary short stories is actually a chapter from Ray Bradbury's semi-autographical book Dandelion Wine. It's the 1920's, small town Illinois, a hot summer night, and three young single women are walking home from the movies, knowing full well that a murderer, dubbed "The Lonely One," is on the loose, and he's targeting, who else, young single women. You blog readers who are former high school students of mine might remember the story because it was in your sophomore lit. book.

Lavinia Nebbs escorts her two friends to their homes and is now heading to her own home--but to get there she must walk down into a park's dark ravine, something like 122 steps, and then back up. The once-brave Lavinia suddenly becomes rubber-legged, as her imagination starts to get the better of her. Are those footsteps behind her? Is someone following her? Hello!? Shadows in the trees dance about her. Is someone hiding in them, ready to leap out at her? What is that she hears? Her heart pounding? And just when Lavinia finally arrives home safely, quickly locks the door behind her, and turns on a light, she realizes that "The Lonely One" has been waiting for her all this time in her living room. Someone clears his throat.

The story is best read in the dark with a flashlight, but I eventually decided not to trust lusty 15 year olds to keep their hands to themselves, so it was lights back on for the sophomores. Even though Ray Bradbury is a master at descriptive writing and builds suspense with every paragraph, the behavior of teenagers in the dark is scarier than anything he could imagine.

JUMPING JEHOSAPHAT!!!

Have you ever been so "Holy Moses!" scared by a movie scene that you literally jumped out of your theatre seat? Man, I have, and I bet you have, too. Your heart experiences a sudden jumpstart, and your knee-jerk reflex reaction is to flip upward. Then, you realize you've been had by a "Gotcha!" moment, you take a deep breath to regain your composure and giggle in embarassment. Oh, I have been there more than a few times, but I'll just tell you about three.

1. Carrie. At the very end of the movie, the mean, cute girl played by Nancy Allen, goes to the cemetery to put flowers on Carrie's grave--sort of a gesture of atonement for being such a bitch to the pathetic psycho psychic girl when she was alive. It's a lovely, sunny day. Soft, sweet music is playing in the background. Nancy slowly bends down to gently place the flowers--AND UP COMES CARRIE'S BLOODY ARM FROM THE GRAVE TO GRAB THEM!! Sonofa-----!! What made this experience even worse was that I had been edgy since the beginning of the movie because I was one of only four people in the entire theatre. The other three were men who each arrived alone for the afternoon matinee and were seated randomly behind me. I was certain they were ax murderers or, at the very best, perverts out to get me.

2. Jurassic Park. Dark, rainy night. Electric cars disabled. Driver gets freaked out by a raging T-Rex and runs for safety (?) in a nearby outhouse. He's seated on a toilet, saying a prayer in his fear, yet also somewhat relieved that he's no longer eye candy for the growling dinosaur. Whew! Thank god he's safe. Then, BAM!!! Leaping Lizards!! He just thought he'd escaped from that hungry, green reptile. Remember that scene? Did you not jump right off the toilet seat with him? I about peed my pants.

3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers-1978 version starring the husky-throated, sleepy-eyed Donald Sutherland as a San Francisco health examiner. Evil aliens have arrived on earth in the form of giant pods that, in their quest to destroy the human race, assume the identities of the earthlings. Donald spends the entire movie breathlessly fighting the pods' powers, dodging them at every corner, and trying to keep his gal pal colleague safe. What a hero! At the end, just when you think the two have endured against all odds, Donald turns to the chick friend, his face becomes distorted, and he lets out the signature screech of a pod person. Oh, no!! He's been "podded" after all! What's she gonna do now? I get all creeped out just writing about it, so I'm going to stop this blog right now and go stick my head under a blanket.

Happy movie watching.

CHEW ON THIS AWHILE

One of my favorite Halloween Scary Movie Week features is the delicious Motel Hell, starring Rory Calhoun, who, when much younger, played in a lot of class B cowboy flicks. As Farmer Vincent, he is the mellow proprietor of Motel Hello, a quaint country stopover that takes in extra money by selling the delicious Farmer Vincent's Fritters, the best darned meat this side of insanity. He is assisted in this tasty enterprise by his maniacal pig-tailed sister Ida.

Their basic modus operandi is to stop nighttime traffic with wooden animal barriers set up on the road, then jump the unsuspecting travellers, who are planted up to their heads in a hidden garden, their vocal chords removed so they can't call for help, and then they are fattened up to become the Fritters' secret ingredient. Got all that? Yummy!

All starts to go wrong, however, when Farmer Vincent falls for one of his would-be victims. Uh-oh! The climax ends up in the smoke room with a chainsaw fight to the death. Vincent very dramatically sucks in his final gasps, chainsaw vibrating in his side, and confesses that his one regret in life was he "used preservatives" in his fritters. Then the last neon O in Motel Hello blows out. By this time, the audience is in tears--not from fear or sorrow but from laughing so much.

If you haven't seen Motel Hell, it's worth checking into. Cook up some beef fritters and stay awhile.

OH, DANNY BOY

The name Danny Lloyd may not exactly jump out at you like a goblin in a haunted house. He's better known as the child actor who portrayed Danny Torrance, the cute little mop-top who possessed a spooky form of ESP in The Shining, a creepy movie based on the even creepier Stephen King novel by the same title. It's especially creepy when you're reading it while holed up in the Colorado mountains at night, as I was last year.

Watching the movie for the umpeenth time the other night on TV, I wondered if the real Danny, who was just six years old at the time the movie was made in 1980, turned out okay--or had he ended up crazed from his acting experience? It's such a scary movie. Did he end up with a Hot Wheels phobia? Might he be haunted by visions of Jack Nicholson chasing him with a knife? Would encountering twin sisters with long brown hair and British accents cause him to flip out? Did he go into hibernation every time it snowed? Was he only having conversations with his index finger and no one else? Poor, poor Danny. How was he?

Well, thanks to the Internet, I learned that the adult Danny Lloyd became a middle school science teacher in Illinois. Yikes! Facing 13-year-old terrorists every day has got to be scarier than anything Stephen King could ever imagine. His life had turned out worse than I thought!

Now, something even stranger happened as soon as I got off the Danny website. All sorts of scary messages popped up on my #$%@ computer!!! Messages with words like: virus, infections, and the like. In spite of all its techno protection, the computer is in critical condition and about to be hospitalized. It's back to the library computers until further notice. Obviously, Danny still has some sort of horrendous power, and he didn't take a shining to me.

COUNT ME IN

I have long been a fan of movies featuring the dashing bloodsucker, Count Dracula, so I was thrilled to once again view the 1979 version over the weekend. This one stars the mesmerizing Frank Langella, be still my throbbing heart (or neck, whatever the case might be). The first time I saw this movie, I was with amateur film critic The Library Lady. Not only did we swoon over Frank’s intense eyes and low sexy voice, but we also got all goosey about the length of his fingers.

During commercials of Saturday’s Dracula presentation, I enjoyed practicing my fake British accent, a la Miss Lucy, Drac’s bloody love interest in the flick. Sir Geoffrey, aka: Big Bore, eventually became weary of me gleefully repeating the same lines in the script over and over again, with different inflections each time, as in:

“Oh, FAH-thuh! Don’t be so ab-SUHD! I SAW the woooooooo-nds!”

“I’m going to pull my hair out if you keep saying that!” moaned Big Bore.

“OH, Sir GEOFF-rey! Quit BE-ing such a BOOOOOOOOOR!” I said back to him.

I think Halloween Movie Week on TV is quite a MAH-velous treat, but Big Bore thinks he could do without all my drama. He says it SUUUUUUUH-cks.

SNIFFLE

Woe is us. Yesterday we pulled up the last of the green beans. We’ve already ripped away one area of tangled morning glory and dug up the caladium bulbs, hopeful that they will hibernate in the basement over the winter and be ready to grow again next spring. The leggy impatiens are ready to go, but I’m not ready to part with them quite yet, and the coleus are thinning out. The mums have lost their luster.

Watching the gardens die out with the approaching colder weather makes me sad. It’s like losing grand old friends who I’ve become attached to over the past six months. I don’t want to part with their cheer, and I feel so crummy when I yank up the annuals, cut back the perennials, and toss them in the compost pile like yesterday’s garbage.

Yes, the fall colors are beautiful but so fleeting. Probably by next week most of the red and golden and yellow leaves will be gone from the trees--on the ground, waiting to be heart achingly (and back achingly) raked away into crispy brown piles. If you know how to treat my autumn blues, short of electroshock garden therapy, please plant some ideas on my calendar to make the next four or five months zip by.

　

OH, FUUUUUUUUUDGE

No, I’m not blogging about the naughty verbal blunder Ralphie makes in the movie A Christmas Story when trying to help his dad do surgery on a flat tire. No, this blog is actually about fudge. You see, the past few days I’ve relentlessly been consuming mass quantities of the sweet stuff.

Whenever Big Bore I head down to southeast Kansas together, which we did on Tuesday, we often take a side trip to Oswego, if the time and extra gasoline allow. Oswego is a quaint little burg where people are still allowed to park in the middle of Main Street. It rests on the crest of a hill above the Neosho River plain---a very windy hill, I might add.

Anyway, the best thing about Oswego is its drugstore, because inside that drugstore is The Fudge Factory!! Oh, yeah! Now, I really don’t have that much of a sweet tooth most of the time, but when I step one foot into that fabulous factory, I’m a goner.

After sampling the specialty flavor of the day, pumpkin, of course, we declared it fine but not purchase-worthy, so we ended up getting two square chunks each of vanilla praline, vanilla pecan, and chocolate peanut butter. Ten dollars. Our absolute favorites were not available when we made our stop, boo-hoo. That’s chocolate orange for BB and chocolate raspberry swirl for The Flaming Bore. Still, we were happy and toted our six yummy, fudgey fudge pieces off to the park, along with two little plastic knifes, where we blew in the wind and sliced away at our heavenly fudge for a while before getting back to our road trip to Pittsburg.

I lost count of how many times I sneaked into the fudge box yesterday and cut off a little piece. Let’s just say we’re down to only 2+ pieces being left and I’m not getting anywhere near the scales today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day--or the day after that--until ol’ Sugar Lips here has worked off the calories. Oh, fudge!