Podcast Tuesday: "TRUE STORY: I'm in a Happy Days Documentary"

Am I an official Cunningham now? No, but I can dream.

I've been putting original content on the internet for over 30 years now, most of it totally for free. I started posting on Usenet newsgroups and AOL forums in the mid-1990s, and I've never stopped creating material (songs, scripts, stories, etc.)  and trying to get it out to the world somehow. It's really just an evolution of what I was doing in junior high and high school. In my pre-internet days, I made little hand-drawn comics and passed them around class. I also wrote for the school newspaper. You'd think the internet would connect me with a much larger audience than I had back then, but so far that's not really been the case. My appeal has always been extremely limited, bordering on nonexistent.

I suppose I hoped that, eventually, something I made would catch on and I'd garner some kind of following. It just never happened for me, though, at least not on any grand scale. Whatever the zeitgeist is, I've never captured it. About a decade ago, I briefly made an attempt at being a professional freelance writer. I got some things published, but again success eluded me. Then, the work dried up altogether and I had to give it up. Still in all, I've been doing this blog since 2009 and These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast since 2018, and I have no plans to stop either one of them any time soon. I'll keep creating and releasing this stuff for as long as I can, even if my only audience is myself.

These days, I'm always surprised and grateful when anyone reads anything I've written, listens to anything I've recorded, or watches anything I've filmed. It's not often that people find my work, but I'm happy when they do. Recently, I was contacted by a production company that was making a documentary about Happy Days for CBS. I'm not exactly sure how they found me, but they did, and they asked me to be a part of their show. This was pretty extraordinary. This week on the podcast, I talk about that experience and what I learned from it. If you're interested in hearing it, just press the play button on the episode below.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 20: The biggest traffic ticket I ever got

"I hope nobody notices my missing door!" is a weird thing to say out loud.

Let me tell you about the most expensive traffic ticket I ever received. 

It was the early 2000s and my sister Catherine had just moved to a small town outside Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I live a few hours away in Illinois, and I decided to make the journey to her house for Christmas by car even though I hate to drive and have zero sense of direction. Sure enough, I got badly lost several times on the way but finally arrived in Indiana, shaken but intact. I stayed (in a motel) for a couple days and tried to enjoy the holiday festivities, but I was dreading the trip back.

My fears were justified. When I got back on the highway and had been driving for maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I suddenly realized that it had been a while since I'd seen a posted speed limit sign. I had no idea what the speed limit was, so I just tried to keep pace with traffic. Well, around that time, I noticed a police car nearby and decided to slow down to 55 just to be on the safe side. The officer who ticketed me later said this was my big mistake, the thing that told him I was up to no good. He tailed me for several miles but then pulled off to the side of the highway. I thought he'd given up on me and was relieved. I should not have been.

I kept driving, still going about 55. A few minutes later, this cop came roaring back into traffic with his lights flashing and (to my memory) siren wailing. In my rearview mirror, I could see he was weaving through the cars trying to catch up to somebody. I assumed there was an emergency somewhere. Turns out, the emergency was me. When I pulled over, the police officer stepped out of his vehicle and approached my car, citation book in hand. He seemed to be in a bad mood. I knew I couldn't have been speeding, so what was my big crime? Expired tags.

Now, here is where my version of the story diverges from the cop's version of the story. According to the cop, I knew perfectly well that my tags were expired, and I had sneakily tried to avoid him so he wouldn't notice. He'd known from the start that I was doing something underhanded, but it had taken him a few minutes to figure out exactly what. That's why he'd pulled over the first time. Eventually, he cracked the case: I was a fiendish criminal mastermind who had knowingly tried to drive though the great state of Indiana with Illinois tags that had expired a few weeks previously.

My version of the story was that I'd recently changed apartments and had forgotten to forward my mail to my new place. Therefore, I hadn't gotten a reminder from the state of Illinois that my tags had expired at the end of November. Besides, it's not like I was hurting the state of Indiana. The officer did not believe my story at all and wrote me a substantial ticket, the largest I'd ever received. I was really strapped for cash in those days, so it stung. For the next decade and a half, I vowed never to drive in the state of Indiana again. When I wanted to visit my sister, I did so by Amtrak.

But that's a whole other story.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 18: Have I posted this before?

I don't hate juice in real life.

I've been blogging for so long now, I have no real recollection of what I have and haven't posted to Dead 2 Rights. It's all a blur. But I was going through my archives recently and found this one that still made me laugh, so I'm posting it now. It's another one based on a tweet by Comics Outta Context. I have a bunch more of these. 

Here's another:

RIP Margaret Thatcher. Unless you didn't like her.

One more:

Okay, now I'm done.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 4: The Adventures of Batman & Robin

What, you think superheroes are oblivious to name-calling?

For the first few years of my life (1975-1981), my family lived in a little ranch-style house in a cozy little neighborhood in Flint, Michigan, right down the street from my rambunctious Uncle John and his family. I've retained quite a few memories from those days, and some of the fondest revolve around Channel 20, a local independent UHF station we used to watch quite a lot. It showed mostly (or all?) reruns back then. Typical offerings included Lost in Space, The Adventures of Superman, The Abbott & Costello Show, and, best of all, Batman.

Thanks to MeTV, I've gotten to revisit Batman in recent years, and the series and its characters have again taken up residence in my imagination. Hence the terribly-drawn comic above. Please forgive me for it.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 202: Kathy Wood gives her side of the story

Kathy Wood, seen here with her dog McGinty in 1988, was married to Ed for over twenty years. 

Bob Blackburn's recently-published book, Kathy Wood & I: How I Fell Down the Ed Wood Jr. Rabbit Hole (Bear Manor Media, 2024), documents the author's decade-plus friendship with Ed Wood's widow, Kathleen O'Hara Everett Wood (1922-2006). Bob approached the publicity-shy Kathy shortly after attending a marathon of Wood's movies in 1992 and, after a few false starts, slowly but surely gained her trust. Bob remained her pal and confidant until Kathy's death in 2006.

Kathy's late husband started becoming more well-known during these years, largely because of Rudolph Grey's oral history, Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood Jr. (1992). That book was adapted into a lavish, star-studded biopic called Ed Wood (1994) by director Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp in the title role and Patricia Arquette playing Kathy. The publicity generated by Burton's movie led to some home video rereleases of Ed's vintage films and a smattering of documentaries, TV specials, and articles about the infamous director and his career. A radio industry professional himself and the son of a popular sportscaster, Bob Blackburn was there to serve as Kathy's guide through these unlikely events.

As a bonus, Kathy Wood & I includes a letter that Kathy drafted in 1998 and submitted to a Los Angeles probate court as part of a dispute over Ed Wood's estate. Her purpose in writing it was to demonstrate that she was Ed's partner, not just his wife. I didn't mention any of this in my review of the book last week, but I thought Kathy's letter deserved some extra attention, as it's really the closest thing to an autobiography she ever wrote. It also offers a fascinating glimpse into Ed Wood's private life that we won't get anywhere else.

A Canadian who relocated to Los Angeles in 1954 for professional reasons, Kathy O'Hara Everett first spotted Edward Davis Wood, Jr. in 1955 when they both started attending meetings of the Church of Religious Science at the Wiltern Theatre. Kathy considered Ed quite handsome but noticed he was always alone at these lectures. They finally met a few months later when a down-on-his luck Eddie approached Kathy at a Hollywood night spot called The Cameo Room. They remained a couple for the rest of Ed's life, eloping to Las Vegas in 1956 and staying married for 22 years.

"Life with Eddie wasn't a bed of roses," Kathy writes, "and I paid dearly for loving and standing by him." This sentence serves as a thesis statement for the entire letter.

Kathy Wood helped write this scene.

By the time he met Kathy, Ed was 31 and had already made Glen or Glenda (1953), Jail Bait (1954), and Bride of the Monster (1955), but his most famous film, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), was still on the horizon. The creation of that now-classic sci-fi film is a big part of Kathy's letter. She served as Ed's typist and creative consultant on the script, as she details:

It was during this time that Eddie started writing Plan Nine from Outer Space (Grave Robbers From Outer Space). We spent many hours discussing the story and dialogue and the plot. I helped him with my ideas and typed a large part of the script as usual. It was a happy time and a crazy time. [...] Ed and I kept working on the Grave Robbers script, both of us throwing lines back and forth to each other. I remember one Sunday afternoon we were both stumped for some kind of horrific bomb. I grabbed our Bible and was reading it when some certain passage came to mind. Something about the powers of the sun (or the "Solarnite" bomb in the script). We had a lot of fun talking ideas back and forth on the script.

I've heard Kathy tell similar stories in documentaries about her husband, and I feel that the Bible passage she is referencing must be Revelation 16:8-9, which states: "The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were seared by the intense heat and they cursed the name of God, who had control over these plagues, but they refused to repent and glorify him." Let's face it, if there's a book of the Bible that would have appealed to Eddie, it's Revelation, with its often surreal, grotesque, apocalyptic imagery.

For the most part, Kathy's letter describes her often chaotic domestic life with Ed Wood. Surprisingly, there were many good times along the way—pool parties, vacations, nights on the town. The Woods were social animals, and their circle of friends included many of the kooky characters we know from Ed's movies: Duke Moore, David De Mering, Bunny Breckinridge, Tor and Karl Johnson, Kenne Duncan, Dudley Manlove, and Paul Marco. These folks often did what they could to save Ed from impending doom, but occasionally, they couldn't even save themselves. That's life in Hollywood for you. It seems Ed and Kathy could never hold onto a residence or a vehicle for long, and Kathy's letter is full of  stories of disputes with various landlords, including Plan 9 investor Ed Reynolds.

Money, or the lack of it, became the dominant issue in the Woods' lives. (Isn't that true for most of us?) While Kathy worked as a secretary and stenographer at various companies, including Muzak, Eddie's career as a writer-director was unreliable at best. He'd sell a screenplay or a novel, but the money would soon be gone. She also claims that some of Steve Apostolof's checks to Eddie bounced, which may explain her longstanding resentment toward the director-producer and his "cheap girly movies." Kathy does not dwell on Eddie's raging alcoholism, even though it was the chief cause of his professional decline and early death. As Kathy sees it, the drinking was just part of the problem, along with Eddie's "cranky" moods and his consumption of salty foods.

Every Ed Wood fan knows how this sordid story ends. In December 1978, the Woods were evicted from their Yucca St. apartment by the local sheriff and had to move in with actor Peter Coe. They'd undergone similar trials in the past, even rooming with Duke Moore in his one-bedroom unit for a while, but this final disgrace proved too much for Eddie. He died heartbroken—literally and figuratively—on December 10, 1978, at the age of 54. Kathy's letter comes to an abrupt conclusion here: "Our world had ended." There's no redemption arc, no deus ex machina, just loss and despair. She does not mention Ed's posthumous, ironic fame.

And yet, Kathy's letter is not merely an exercise in misery. She clearly had a lot of fond memories of her late husband, and that comes through in her writing about their marriage. She relates a bittersweet anecdote about the time Eddie tried (unsuccessfully) to nurse an injured bird back to health, for instance. She also remembers the way he kept her and a neighborhood child enraptured for hours with his action-packed and largely fabricated World War II stories. That child, Tim Brockman, grew up to be a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War.

Above all, through this letter, we get little glimpses of Ed Wood in his prime, back when he was still the life of the party. You can almost see why Kathy stuck by him for so many years, possibly hoping the old spark would somehow return. As it says on Kathy's grave: "She hitched her wagon to a star."

Kathy Wood and I: How I Fell Down the Angora Rabbit Hole is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions right here. Or you can purchase it directly from the publisher.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 79: The 10 Most Shocking Stories in 'Nightmare of Ecstasy'

Ed looks very pink on this book cover.

Lillian Wood and Rudolph Grey (1984).

Memories can be tricky bastards. Most of us can barely recall in precise detail what we were doing last week, let alone 10 or 20 years ago. Over time, our memories of the past get blurrier and blurrier. Plus, as we try to make sense of an often chaotic and unpredictable world, we tend to take the events of our lives and shape them into meaningful, coherent stories. Often, that means exaggerating, eliminating, or flat out inventing certain details. These stories may not bear much resemblance to the truth, but we tell them to others and to ourselves so often that they become somehow stronger than the truth.

Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) is truly a book of memories. In compiling the first (and still only) full-length biography of notorious filmmaker Ed Wood, Grey assembled the book largely out of quotes from Ed's friends, relatives, and professional associates. Though Grey does not annotate his sources whatsoever, most of these quotes presumably came from his own extensive interviews. Since Ed himself was already deceased by the time this book was being assembled, his quotes derive from old letters and vintage interviews. 

Nightmare is a great source of raw data and provided the foundation of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's script for the 1994 biopic Ed Wood. Some passages from the book made it directly into the movie, almost word for word. But none of this means that Grey's book is factually accurate. The author was more interested in compiling colorful anecdotes about Eddie than in curating the objective "truth" about the man.

Which is to say that some of Nightmare of Ecstasy is likely bullshit. But it's bullshit that I haven't tired of reading and rereading, even though I bought my copy 25 years ago. In fact, while scouring its pages, I keep finding stories that shock me even today. Ed Wood, let's not forget, was an emotionally volatile alcoholic operating on the fringe of the movie business, so a little seediness is expected in a story like this. But there are a few anecdotes that are sordid even by the standards of this book, and those are the ones I'd like to highlight. These are the ugly, uncomfortable stories that didn't make it into Ed Wood.

These are presented in no particular order. And, again, if I haven't made it clear already, I am not declaring these stories to be true or untrue. But I can verify that each one appears in Nightmare of Ecstasy. Let's dive in.

Revisiting a (mostly bad) Christmas album from my childhood

This album was somehow part of my family's Christmas tradition.

Built for comfort, not for speed.

The Winston Singers. They sound famous, right? You're pretty sure you've heard of them. They had that one song. Or was it an album? Or maybe it was a TV special with Jim Nabors and the Marine Corps Band. Whatever. They did something.

Didn't they?

The truth is that The Winston Singers were a bunch of uncredited session musicians who made two quickie cash-in Christmas albums for a low-budget record label in Pennsylvania called Wyncote in the mid-1960s. For the most part, their albums weren't even sold in real record stores. Instead, middlemen called "rack jobbers" would rent space in drug stores and department stores to hawk these inexpensive albums to people who were buying sweaters or talcum powder or lawnmowers.

One of those LPs, simply titled Christmas Carols (aka 14 Christmas Carols and released in 1964), found its way into my family's music collection, along with my dad's Joan Baez albums and the Sound of Music soundtrack. We used to bring it out every December, though the only thing we had to play it on was a Fisher-Price portable turntable that was designed to be sturdy rather than acoustically pleasing. Eleven months out of the year, this album was collecting dust in some hall closet.

In retrospect, that was probably for the best. I recently revisited The Winston Singers' album and found it to be mostly terrible. The jacket does not include any sort of credits or liner notes, just plugs for other holiday-themed Wyncote LPs like Organs and Chimes and Silent Night. No legitimate singers, musicians, or producers would want their names on an album like Christmas Carols. Wyncote may not have been at the absolute bottom of the American record industry, but it was in the lower third. The nicest thing I can say about the LP is that it's pressed on good quality, durable vinyl, much better than some of the flimsy compilation albums I've found from the '70s and '80s that are so wobbly they're almost like flexi-discs. (Even the sleeves on those are thin and cheap.)

The short-lived, low-budget Wyncote Records.

As its title suggests, Christmas Carols—which was available in both stereo and mono (our family splurged for the stereo)—consists of chintzy, rinky-dink choral renditions of Yuletide songs like "Jingle Bells," "I Saw Three Ships," and "Joy to the World." The stuff everyone knows, in other words. Of the 14 selections, there were only two titles I didn't immediately recognize: "Hail to Christmas" (from the Babes in Toyland operetta) and a somber number called "Christmas Hymn," which closes the album.

The music is best described as loud and shouty, with very little subtlety or nuance. Dynamics are not in evidence here. I can't quite tell how many Winston Singers there are. It sounds like maybe five to ten, both men and women. They are accompanied by an organist, whose shrill tones occasionally threaten to drown out the vocals. The mixing seems noticeably "off" somehow. I'm not sure if the singers could hear the organ at all, since they're never quite on pitch. Musically, Christmas Carols is just not of professional caliber. It's more like what you'd hear at a smallish church or school with limited resources.

The one track I remembered most vividly from my youth was "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." That's a carol I've always liked anyway because it has an eerie, spooky vibe to it. Plus it name checks Satan—rare for a holiday tune. And, sure enough, "God Rest Ye" is probably the strongest part of the entire Christmas Carols experience. The tinny organ and curdled vocals actually kind of work to the song's advantage.

"Go Tell It on the Mountain," on the other hand, is a disaster. I don't know why the very Caucasian Winston Singers thought they could tackle a spiritual, but they were misinformed. At least this rendition is brief. In fact, all 14 songs on this album are brief. I doubt anything goes past three minutes. A wise decision. Christ is merciful; albums recorded in his name should be, too.

Overall, despite its many technical shortcomings, Christmas Carols fulfills its destiny, which is to be generic, instantly recognizable holiday music. On that count, it succeeds where the bombastic Mannheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra so often fail. The Winston Singers' LP is something (mostly) unobtrusive to have on in the background at a holiday party, for instance. My folks used to have big Christmas parties at our house every year, inviting mostly work friends, and I'm sure this record got some playtime there. You could also listen to the album while wrapping presents or trimming a tree. Maybe we used it for that, too.

The sophomore (and farewell) LP.

And so, this obscure, indifferently made Christmas album from 1964—probably the result of an afternoon's work by people who did not care how it turned out—became an integral part of my family's holiday traditions. It served in that capacity for at least a decade, maybe more. Because I associated this record with vacations and presents, I was even excited to see the ugly LP cover, which depicts some creepy, dead-eyed Dickensian caroler figurines in an unflattering close-up.

I'd say we got our $1.99's worth out of this LP.

No other Christmas album ever had quite the same importance in our household as the Wyncote budget record, but there were a few pretenders to the throne. My mother bought a copy of A Very Special Christmas in 1987, for instance, only to be horrified that it contained a newfangled rap song, "Christmas in Hollis" by Run-D.M.C. Even the offerings by Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, and Bruce Springsteen were too noisy for her liking. About the only track that met with her approval was "The Coventry Carol" by Alison Moyet.

Maybe The Winston Singers were on to something. Or maybe not. They released a second album, Little Drummer Boy, in 1966. The title track was the only new recording on it; the other nine songs were borrowed directly from Christmas Carols. Neither "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" nor "Go Tell It on the Mountain" made the cut. Wyncote Records went under the next year.

Spirits from the vasty deep

A Pink Flamingos family portrait, modeled after a Diane Arbus photo (right).

What's in my filing cabinet.

Probably the oldest thing I have in my apartment, other than what's in the refrigerator (that's a joke; my fridge is empty), is a large gray filing cabinet that I keep in my bedroom/home office. It's an ugly, ungainly monstrosity that dates back to, I'm guessing, the 1950s. There's nothing elegant about it. In fact, it has sharp metal corners that have injured me several times. Why do I keep it around? I don't know. Sentimentality, I guess, though I can't say for sure where the cabinet came from or how it came into my possession. I used to have two of them, but I threw one out. So what's in the one remaining filing cabinet? Junk, mostly. Old CDs and VHS tapes take up the top three drawers. The fourth is filled with manila folders, containing assorted papers from the late 1980s and 1990s.

I was more of a pack rat back in the '90s. I was also more fanatical about my pop culture obsessions: Rocky Horror, They Might Be Giants, Spinal Tap, John Waters, Phantom of the Paradise, A Clockwork Orange, "Weird Al" Yankovic, etc. I still like all that stuff, but I'm not a rabid collector the way I used to be. I have a few thick folders of newsletters, postcards, and clippings related to They Might Be Giants, dating back to about 1988 or so. Nowadays, I barely keep up with TMBG. I think I've skipped their last two or three albums, something that would have been unthinkable to my teenage self. I haven't seen them in concert in god knows how long. Sixteen years at least. Yikes.

What happened? I dunno. People get older. Ardor cools. Adulthood calls. There are bills and dental appointments and shit like that. The Internet killed a lot of my fandom, really. When I started out as a TMBG fan, it was hard finding their stuff. I had to go to out-of-the-way record stores to locate EPs and singles. Press coverage was minimal, so I obsessively clipped every magazine and newspaper article I could find. That was oddly rewarding to me. Now, with just a one-second Google search, I could find more information about TMBG than I could ever hope to get through in a dozen lifetimes. Yawn.

But every once in a while, I get the urge to go through that filing cabinet and rifle through my grunge era memories. Today I went through my personal John Waters archives. Mostly, it was articles I'd photocopied at the college library. There was a mid-1990s Polyester Odorama card, too, and it very much retained its original smell. To a fault, you might say. The oddest, most personal find was a bit of fan art I'd apparently started and then abandoned about 20 years ago. It depicted the cast of Pink Flamingos posed as if they were in a Diane Arbus photo. Drawn in pencil on fragile typing paper, it was badly faded and barely visible. You can see it at the top of this post. Other than making it darker so that it shows up on your screen, I've left it as it was back then. It reminds me of the person I used to be, the one who would do crude fan art while watching VHS tapes of his favorite John Waters movies.

Camaro memories

A car much like the one I describe in the story.

My mom's last car was a fire-engine-red Chevy Camaro.

It was the early 1990s, and she used it mainly to commute back and forth to her job teaching at a local community college. This is remarkable because she was far from the typical Camaro driver, i.e. a brash, mullet-wearing young male with a lead foot and a hot temper. Instead, she was a kind-faced woman in her mid-40s, short in stature, soft-spoken and gentle in demeanor, and she wore a pair of over-sized glasses which gave her sort of an owl-like appearance. You'd probably have guessed her to be a librarian, but she drove a car beloved by hormonal teenage boys.

It was the unlikeliness of my mother driving a Camaro which led her to buy it in the first place. She needed a new car for work, and the whole family went to the auto dealership to watch as she picked one out. Of course, she and my father mostly concentrated on the sensible, dependable cars that parents usually choose in such a situation. But that Camaro stood out from everything else on the lot, almost beckoning us to it. My sister and I joked about how hilarious it would be for my mother -- this sweet, small woman -- to be behind the wheel of this monstrous muscle car. But the salesman who'd been tailing us could see that she was genuinely intrigued by the prospect of owning such a machine. My mother was in no way a rash or irresponsible person, but she decided on the spot to buy that Camaro.

She genuinely loved that vehicle. She'd tell me how the engine would surge at the merest pressure applied to the gas pedal and how the car would growl impatiently at red lights. It was a surprising side to my mother's personality, and it was good to see. She dropped me off at school a few times in that car, and instead of being mortified by being seen in the presence of my mother in front of my fellow students, I enjoyed the respect that car always got from the other boys. If it had been practical or possible, I would have been taken to school every day in that vehicle.

Cars play a big part of the folklore of many families, I think, because you wind up spending so much time in them together. There are certainly some memorable ones in the history of the Blevins clan, like the seemingly invincible black Vega we called "The Jelly Bean" or the hideously ugly station wagon whose vinyl upholstery would heat up on summer days and scald our legs. But that Camaro was probably the most eccentric of all our vehicles. We sold it not long after my mom died, but I kind of wish we'd held onto it. I'd love to take it for a spin now.

My mother definitely would not have approved of the following song, but I am dedicating it to her anyway. Maybe she would have laughed at it privately.