A fairy tale from hell

There once was an ugly duckling

With feathers all stubby and brown 

And the other birds said in so many 

words 

Get out of town

Get out, get out, get out of town 

And  she went with a quack and a waddle 

and a quack 

In a flurry of eiderdown 

That poor little ugly duckling 

Went wandering far and near 

But at every place they said to her face 

Now get out, get out, get out of here 

And she went with a quack and a waddle 

and a quack 

And a very unhappy tear 

All through the wintertime she hid herself
away

Ashamed to show her face, afraid of what 

others might say 

All through the winter in her lonely 

clump of wheat 

Till a flock of swans spied her there and 

very soon agreed 

You’re a very fine swan indeed! 

A swan? Me a swan? Ah, go on! 

And they said yes, you’re a swan!

Take a look at yourself in the lake and 

you’ll see 

And she looked, and she saw, and she said 

I am a swan! Wheeeeeeee! 

I’m not such an ugly duckling 

No feathers all stubby and brown 

For in fact these birds in so many words said 

I'm. . . 

The best in town, 

the best, the best 

The best in town 

Not a quack, not a quack, not a waddle or 

a quack 

But a glide and a whistle and a snowy white 

back 

And a head so noble and high 

Say who’s an ugly duckling? 

Not I! 

Not I! 

Not I! 

Animals WERE harmed in the making of this movie!

There's no end to the things you find on Turner Classics, including moldy shorts (not the kind you find in the drier) dredged out of the '30s and obviously used as fillers when people went to the movies. Think of it: back then, instead of ads and previews, you got a newsreel; a cartoon; a short subject; another short subject; a movie you didn't want to see; and finally THE movie, the much-anticipated Feature. Imagine how long it took, how many trips to the bathroom and refills on popcorn.

There is an astonishing array of Dogville Comedies on YouTube, and personally I find them hard to watch because it's obvious the dogs are being manipulated in ways we would today consider cruel. Hell, dogs could be killed in those days and nobody would say anything so long as they didn't leave a spot on the carpet.

But as my millions of followers will attest - all six of them - I have a certain taste for the bizarre. I especially appreciate that murky and hard-to-describe category, "things that seemed OK back then and were appreciated as entertainment, but today would be seen as, at best, being in poor taste, and, at worst, exploitative and harmful to weak and defenseless beings".

In short: "PWWWWWAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Get the Spot remover.

The Ghost of Wesley Hall

(From a site called Eerie Places: Haunted Windsor and Essex County)


Ontario - Chatham - Park Street United Church - A tall man dressed in black has been seen at night running through a room called Wesley Hall. Two janitors had seen him. The odd thing was, was that the motion detectors were on. On another occasion, the same man was seen by a teenager playing hide and goes seek in the sanctuary. Also, in a certain storage room near the gymnasium, an intoxicating smell can be detected.

OK then. This might just be one-of-your-average, run-o'-the-mill ghost sightings. Most of the strange goings-on listed on this site really aren't so strange. But who is this mysterious man-in-black running around Wesley Hall?


I think I might know.

Eons ago, I wrote about the minister of my church, Rev. Russell Horsburgh, and the havoc he wreaked on a small-town congregation in the early 1960s. This had such a deep impression on me that I based a character on him in my second novel, Mallory. Who knows why the good folks at Park Street United hired a man like Horsburgh: he was a firebrand who believed in civil rights and actually allowed "negroes" into the church (and not just as cleaning staff). He  held meetings and discussion groups about controversial issues instead of sweeping them under the rug. As if that weren't bad enough, soon he had marshalled the listless young people's group into a passionate affair, which turned out to be a mite too passionate.

I was only eight or nine when all this happened, and my parents were trying to protect me, I guess, or else just get me to shut up, so I had to piece together whispered fragments: "psychopath," "in league with the devil," "what they found in the church," "liquor bottles, cigarettes. .  .and worse." There was national coverage of the scandal as Horsburgh was thrown in jail, tried, and found guilty of leading juveniles into immorality, vagrancy and delinquency.

I don't know how long he spent in jail, but a few years later he died of cancer, all his holy fires spent. He had a group of loyal supporters who in later years claimed to have exonerated him and found him completely blameless, the victim of a witch hunt, but by then it was too late.


Personally, I think Horsburgh was a megalomaniac and a sociopath. I remember him as a big, tall, scary man in black who harangued the congregation and literally pounded on the pulpit as he drove his points home. He once (infamously) printed Martin Luther's "casting my pearls before swine" speech in the church bulletin and signed it with his own name. ("Someone" - ? - had x'ed it out before it was mimeographed, but it was easy to read the original by holding it up to a window. Such goings-on.)

Do you believe in spooks? Ghosts, things that pound pulpits in the night? This account, full of spelling mistakes, may just be a hoax playing on a dark bit of Chatham history which the townsfolk would rather forget. In fact, if you asked anyone about it even 10 or 15 years later, they would likely have denied any knowledge of it. I once tried to hunt down a copy of The Horsburgh Affair, a book someone wrote to defend him, and it had to be dredged out of the inactive vaults of the Vancouver Public Library. Not exactly a bestseller, though I do remember a copy floating around our house in the book-lined den in about 1965.  As I recall, the book is exceedingly poorly-written and doesn't prove anything.

Oh, about that "intoxicating smell" in the storage room near the gymnasium. . . well, this is just too funny, isn't it? For one of the more vile rumors about Horsburgh was that he encouraged his teenage reprobates to partake of illegal substances in the church basement. I don't remember a gymnasium in the church, but maybe they added it when Dufferin Hall was torn down and turned into a parking lot for the dental offices and chiropractors who had invaded the main church building. (This was when the proposed Country Music Hall of Fame and the indoor parking lot for a local motorcycle club had been vetoed, along with other "unseemly" options which we can only imagine.)

http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9271.html
http://www.cktimes.ca/archives/column/11/9302.html

I attach a couple of links to a very well-researched article from the Chatham Daily News which I found a few years ago. This was the only detailed information I could find on the subject. The article is largely sympathetic towards him, an understandable attitude in light of the small-town primness of the times and the fact that most people never knew about the strange butts, empty liquor bottles and used condoms the (black) cleaning staff found on the floor of Wesley Hall.

(I just thought of something. The way that ghost-sighting report was worded, it's unclear whether it was that teenager in the sanctuary who was playing "hide and goes seek", or if in fact it was the Good Reverend Scary-boo Horsburgh himself. And if so, playing with whom? With the Ghost of Christmas Past, or the deceased maiden lady clerk at the Metropolitan store who sold goldfish for 15 cents, or that well-known reprobate of abandoned church sanctuaries, Ebeneezer Screwed?)

My heart will go on (until it hits an iceberg)

Just a little trick of photoshopping, and you've got an updated version of Jack Whatsisname and Kate Winslet in Titanic! My daughter's 35th birthday just happens to fall on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of that monstrous floating hotel and monument to human arrogance. So I had to make her a special birthday card, starring her and her hubby Jeff.

No, I'm not going to the new 3D version because the original one already made me extremely queasy! I've watched some of the slew of recent Titanic documentaries, including one with James Cameron that was so full of hot air, it should've been about the Hindenberg. A few of them have been, well, OK, but they all seem to have titles like "The Final Answer" and "The Mystery Solved", but they can't all be right, can they? 

Why is it such an elaborate thing to figure this out? The boat hit a big piece of ice. Didn't I learn in Grade 3 that almost all of an iceberg is UNDER the water? Isn't that where the expression "the tip of the iceberg" comes from, or are they talking about lettuce or some such thing?

Going to bed now, dead tired, can't believe my "baby" is 35! (And hey, you wanna see a great boat-sinking movie, go watch The Poseidon Adventure!)

The man with no strings

Joel Grey. Legend. First crush (almost: there was Maynard G. Krebbs on Dobie Gillis, and the robot on Lost in Space).  It's his birthday, he's 80 years old today. . .

. . . and yes, I did see him perform live once, but it sure was a long wait from that time I first saw him, in 1972 I think, in Cabaret: one of the best movies ever made and still near the top of my all-time-fave list along with Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce.

Nobody knew what he was doing up there in 1972 because there was no name for what he was doing. But there he was on film pretending to be live onstage, this ferociously sweet, snide, horrible, wonderful thing, this thing that dressed up like a human being and danced and pranced around.  Who even came out in drag, making a quite plausible blonde floozie with hair under his arms.

It was no surprise at all when he won an Oscar for this: he had already won the coveted Tony. I fell in love with Joel Grey watching Cabaret in 1973, became totally obsessed with Joel Grey for years and years, chased down whatever information I could find about Joel Grey (and in those days this necessitated lurking about in library stacks with a sharp razor - I must have looked like a maniac - so I could steal his picture). I compiled him, I filed him, I watched him on The Mike Douglas Show and I often wondered who he really was.

I didn't get to see him doing what he really does, dancing and prancing live onstage in the manner to which he seems born, for another 15 years or so, when a road company of Cabaret stopped in Vancouver. He seemed tiny up there, though his dancer's legs still worked like springs. I remember a song that never appeared in the movie (and the stage version is radically different, the movie having been converted into a Liza Minnelli vehicle): it was called I Don't Care Much, and at one point his disembodied white carmine-lipped face was suspended in the air like some nightmarish ghost balloon.

What did I like about him, enough to stay on that decades-long bloodhound trail?  For the thing is, I never really stopped being obsessed with him. I had memorized his birth date from an LP of his night club act, in which he stepped out from a giant trunk and sang and danced. I knew it was April 11, 1932. Back then he looked almost ridiculously young, more like 25 than 40. 

Over the years I kept following the thread: I saw, sitting in our car at a drive-in, a very strange movie he did with Cliff Robertson in which he played a clairvoyant. A suspiciously diffident, shifty sort of guy given to sudden blasts of rage. I wondered if this was the real Joel Grey. Then I saw an even stranger movie he made with Paul Newman called Buffalo Bill and the Indians (or Sitting Bull's History Lesson), directed by Robert Altman. Notable to Canadians because it was shot in Calgary. He looked dishy in this, with a very Biblical beard that I was sure was real because he appeared on Front Page Challenge, an embarrassing Canadian panel show, and brought the beard with him.

There's no order to this, not really. Forgive me for being all over the place as I try to pin down the popcorn of memory. When the internet came in, Joel Grey was suddenly very accessible again. But in the meantime he had done a jillion things, a quadrillion things, and always seemed to be active. He'd pop up in the coolest and most cutting-edge TV shows. He never seemed to go away.  "Old" didn't seem to stick to him: he was even more than ever like a blob of mercury made flesh.

I couldn't add it all up because it was like one of those Chagall panels made of stained glass. You don't stir those colors together, you leave them to be what they are. Saturated and strange, they should clash and conflict, but they don't. The images: menorahs, flying bulls, violins, Christ on the cross, lovers sailing through the air in sexual rhapsody - they couldn't possibly work together, but against reason, they did.

Joel Grey was Petrushka, he was Pulcinella, he was a little clown being yanked on a string, but when I got rare glimpses of the real person, he was surprising, a real person, almost quiet. I paid attention to everything about him because that's what I do, I extract people, I make essence of them, cook them down. I saw kindness.

It didn't surprise me to find out he takes photographs and has become very famous for them. I remembered that book, I Am a Camera,  Christopher Isherwood's memoir which became the basis for Cabaret. He is an eye.

For quite a while, thinking only of his Oscar-winning keynote performance (I refuse to say iconic!), people began to think of him as "Jennifer Grey's father". Jennifer Grey has had a strange career, a good one, mind, but strange: perhaps peaking too early in Dirty Dancing, altering her appearance for some reason, then becoming kind of obscure. But popping up again in Dancing with the Stars, her famous parents commenting on her performance like the seasoned pros they were.

This is all over the place, I can't get it all in and I shouldn't try. It's 80 years, after all. We shouldn't be surprised - some people do 80 very well, thank you very much, and in spite of his apparent frailty I don't think Joel Grey is frail at all. Petrushka isn't frail, even when the puppetmaster drops him on the stage and cracks his head. Those strings have always been translucent anyway, and he is powered by something quite else.

From what I've been able to gather, all the bits and pieces of recent interviews and performances on YouTube, his main art has been living. I love this clip from Dancer in the Dark: I watched the bloody thing on a rented DVD about six times just to see his dance number, which he did when he was well into his '60s. He was still on springs, still striking sparks with his tap shoes and smiling at the audience in that slightly fierce, slightly vulpine way.

Be around, Joel Grey; be around for a long time, for as long as possible, because we like you, need you, want you. You are a slice of humanity and we find you interesting. You don't embarrass us by flailing around in your success. You are real, even while trying on all sorts of different people, then letting them slide off your shoulders because something else has suddenly come up that is a whole lot more interesting.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm