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

The worst Polish joke ever!

Backstory? OK. Lots of us (of a certain age) remember the kind of late-night TV that gave rise to satires like Monster Chiller Horror Theatre on SCTV.  But in the '60s, it wasn't satire: there really were late-night shows like that, with hosts much funnier than the lame movies they hosted.

Living in Chatham, which is near Windsor, which is near Detroit, which is sort-of-near Cleveland, we could at least get scratchy versions of Cleveland radio (WKYC, eleven-double-oh!), and eventually, these guys. Hoolihan and Big Chuck had rattled around in the broadcasting biz for years, doing this n' that, the weather, filling in for sick people. By accident they started doing comedy bits together, and somehow the chemistry was right for some very lame, very funny late night TV. So they kept at it for years and years. Big Chuck went on even longer after Hoolihan left, taking up with a dwarf, but that is most definitely another story.


Every so often I'd be allowed to sleep on the pull-out bed in the den and stay up as late as I wanted, and when that happened, I always watched these guys.
It was plain that they stole shamelessly from Ernie Kovacs (and don't get me started on Kovacs, because I periodically begin to write about him and can't stop: at one point I really, really, really wanted to write a novel about him but couldn't because he doesn't seem to be around any more to be "tapped": did too many people steal from him, I wonder?). Their collapsing cardboard sets and the props that fell to pieces in their hands weren't much better than the paper-and-black-marker that Kovacs was allowed in his meagre budget. Hoolihan and Big Chuck weren't geniuses like Kovacs, but they had a blast doing this show and communicated their laugh-your-ass-off style to a very loyal audience. They were wacky and insane and satirized the Polish culture in and around Cleveland (such as Parma: I remember a long-running soap opera called Parma Place) in a way you'd never get away with now.


I stumbled on this one - don't know if I actually saw it or not, maybe not coz this skit came on a few years after we moved away and I couldn't get Cleveland TV any more. (Or anything else.) But it's one of their best, or, at least, it's pretty good, or, um, OK or something, pretty cheesy actually, but funny as hell.


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

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

You might as well squeeze the cow

I'm not a million years old, but in many ways I might as well be.

I live in an era of tablets, social networks and i-this-and-i-that, and I have (very) imperfectly adapted. But I grew up in something else.

This was the kind of thing I heard, and saw, when I was a child. This is how we got our milk every day. Yes, this way.

Cloppa, cloppa, cloppa down the street every morning, very early. Snorting and whinnying. It was a little girl's paradise. Every morning I'd rush out the front door with a carrot.

Oh that smell, that I love to this day, the smell of horses!

I used to try to tell my children about this, and they rolled their eyes and said I was lying. Surely horse-drawn wagons ended some time in the 1890s.

But they didn't. They delivered milk, not to mention fruits and vegetables, well into the 1960s.

 This is a wagon from Bracebridge Dairy. All these wagons have a three-digit phone number on them, incomprehensible. I remember the name Bracebridge - somewhere in Northern Ontario, I think (a name I haven't heard in so long, like the old street names in Chatham, that it gives me an odd sort of thrill). We had Silverwood Dairies, mostly in southern Ontario but also, I believe, in parts of Alberta out west.

I just thought of something! My first real job was in the purchasing department of Silverwood Dairies in London, Ontario. My job had nothing to do with the milk, but I do remember filling out endless requisition forms for various ingredients. I was also on the taste panel for new products, one of which was artificial ham.

Supposedly, this is the very last Silverwood's wagon in existence. A picture both beautiful and sad. Accounts vary as to exactly when they were phased out: some say 1960, others 1964. If it was '64, I'd have very clear memories of it. But it seems incredible we got our milk this way right into the Space Age.

Bottles were still clinking together then, but no longer had the cream-top bulge that you skimmed with a little dipper. Later when I lived in Alberta, our post-war bungalow had a little cabinet at the back, the place where the milkman left the bottles and picked up the note for next day's order. Without the cabinet, the milk would freeze in the 40-below weather and the bottles burst open.

This is one of my favorites. By the look of the cars, it seems to have been taken in the early 1950s. The horse, looking intimidated, is completely surrounded by traffic.  I wonder how everyone managed. Did the horses have the right of way? What about the road apples?

Did any of them ever spook and take off at a gallop? Horses will be horses, after all.

More to the point, I wonder why everyone seems to have forgotten all about this. Like the elusive, mysterious Skeezix bird, it belongs to a past that now seems more like a mirage.

People collect dairy memorabilia now the way they collect old weather vanes or butter churns. I suppose back then, men with cold hands milked those cows every morning. It would be bottled by some primitive method, sealed with a cardboard cap. This was before the days of "homo milk", milk that had magically been homogenized so that you could no longer skim the rich yellowy cream off the top.

Just a model now, but I remember when it creaked and clopped and smelled like horses.

I wonder if there's still such a thing as "homo milk".

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

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

Oh my hormones.

Separated at birth, Part 576. . .

Contenders: the new Mad Man at Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce, one very cute but pushy Bronxy Jewish guy named Michael Ginsberg, played by an unknown (to me) named Ben Feldman.

Ferris Bueller! Matthew Broderick when he was still young and dishy.

I'm going to mix these up. You decide.

Brothers? Cousins maybe? Who knows.

OK, then, at least a stand-in. . .

They're both pretty dreamy. . .

. . . but only this guy is still young.

Bueller?. . . Bueller?. . . Bueller?. . .Bueller?. . .

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

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

Walk Like a Man (with very tight shorts)

Oh my oh my, the things you find on YouTube while looking for something else! After watching a searing episode of Mad Men tonight (it took the first 2 episodes for the current season to really get off the ground, but my scalp was on fire throughout this one), I heard the end theme, was shocked all to hell and had to see if it was a real song. It was called He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss), sung by a group called The Crystals (Da-Doo-Ron-Ron and a few others). The song seemed to echo all the convoluted sadomasochistic dynamics of this sphynx of a show. I was astonished to find out that Carole King wrote the words and that the song was essentially censored for decades and got no air play.

But then one thing led to another, and then this bit of '60s orgiastic glee fell into my lap. It's from an afterschool teenybopper program of the early '60s called Where the Action Is. I remember it. "It's so neat to meet your baby where the action is." The camera pans across the crowd (and who's the guy with 2 broken legs? I don't know), and we see glimpses of Mark Lindsay - wasn't he Paul Revere or something? - and the Supremes, complete with hair bands, kind-a-like I useda wear. 

The dancing deserves its own post, but I'll sum it up by saying that it resembles a vast parade of Scandinavian sweaters, with a lot of blonde hair flying around. Someone (Alexander Pope?) once described dancing as the vertical expression of a horizontal wish. This especially applies to The Jerk, which is what they appear to be doing. Or else they have forgotten their medication. Picture them on the floor in pairs; need I elaborate?
But then comes the main act, which for some reason takes part high on a balcony as if the group is infected with something catching. The Four Seasons kicked ass and were even sexy in a real low-class, skunky kind of way, a knife in your shoe way. Frankie Valli is a god. I forgot what a fox he was, even with his greaser attitude. Who else can sing "walk like a man" in descant soprano and get it across? Most of their hits came out when I was prepubescent and really had no idea what any of it meant. That Cole Porter song "I've Got You Under my Skin" was especially nonsensical to me. Under my. . .?

I had no idea then of the itchy hot screamy jump-off-a-building sensations that were soon to surge through my endocrine system, changing me forever (and I confess that it is not over and that they still surge today). I know now that sex is essentially an itch you cannot scratch. It's like saying, I'll eat this meal here and be done with it, be "full". A musician friend of mine once said that all music is about sex, the essential drive, whatever that is. The pollen-ruptured flower pistil exploding in slow motion, the follicle-stimulating hormones spurting and spraying like something out of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Music tries, it really does, and sometimes it almost gets it. But what is "it"?

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

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

Bunnies from hell

It's Easter. A time of fun. Of frolic. Of hollow chocolate chickens and marshmallow thingies covered with yellow dye.

But something is wrong here. Very wrong. Someone, somewhere must have a horrifying concept of what the Easter Bunny really looks like.  These photos are documented proof.

Little children understand. This isn't really the Easter Bunny. It's a predatory beast who shows no mercy to sweet little girls who only want a few jelly beans to take home with them.

(This experience was permanently stored in the traumatic memory bank.)

The grafted-on head of molded plastic is a nice touch, but where did it come from? And what's that thing in his hand? It's either an explosive device or a 40-pounder of vodka.

I wouldn't bring this thing out at Halloween. I'd burn it. The little girl seems to have given up hope.

NOW IT CAN BE REVEALED: Peter Cottontail's allegiance to the KKK!

Bringing Easter joy to every girl and boy.

You're next!


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

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