Ester's Feathers

Show me the way to the next whiskey bar or I tell you I must die.

Or not. This is Day 11 of no hooch and it's just ridiculous the false barriers we impose upon ourselves. I've agonized over this decision for the duration of the summer. At the end of the day, it ain't nothing but a thang. And no big thang, at that.

Last night, the critters and I retired to my studio while I played around with some possible new project and I put Thriller in the crappy DVD player in my studio (the only one that's working). For the uninitiated, Thriller was a television show in the 60s, hosted by Boris Karloff. It began as mostly a suspense anthology, but by the end of the first season began dealing with the supernatural. It had the best haunted houses: they used the Psycho house in several episodes. Anyway, I was sort of weaned on this stuff. And speaking of Psycho, my mother took me to see it in the theater: I was 6 (and am still vaguely uneasy in showers), but I grew to love the shit.

Recently, I was able to buy the entire Thriller catalog. Some enterprising guys taped them off some late night show called Scream. I guess they're in the public domain now, and are unavailable anywhere else. One of the pleasures of the series was the steady stream of wonderful character actors that I grew up with. The episode last night featured a young, and even then terrifically weird, William Shatner and the guy who played the professor on Gilligan's Island. And it was genuinely creepy, but it struck me that it was ready for a remake. I wonder how straight up haunted house stories would play these days, without the mandatory gallons of blood and gore. Maybe we'll come back to that. I hope so.