A Few of My Favorite Things

            Someone had the nerve to ask me last week, “How do you like living this “third act” of your life?” Third act? Are you kidding? I’m living the “epilogue.”

            But at least I don’t wake up every morning in a panic that I don’t own enough rain bonnets.  Or the fact that I haven’t used the word “recapitulate” in a sentence in months. Or regret pushing that old boyfriend off a cliff.

            I do wake up and look around my apartment noticing all these things on shelves and mounted on the wall that fill me with unreasonable happiness. Believe me, that can be enough to get one through the day. Or, the messy “epilogue” of one’s poorly written life.

            Here are twelve of my most prized possessions.

            Director William Castle was a big on “gimmicks” to promote his films in the 1960s. He had a skeleton fly over the audience during House on Haunted Hill. He had a “fright break” at the end of Homicidal. He wired the seats to give your ass a jolt during The Tingler. But these gold plastic coins were passed out to promote his goofy comedy Zotz!, where Tom Poston comes into possession of a supernatural coin that can freeze people around him. I gave one of these Zotz coins to my best friend for Christmas and I instantly regretted it. Not the fact that I gave it to him, but the fact that it wasn’t in my apartment anymore. Christ, I never much cared for that stupid movie in the first place. But it wasn’t until I found another coin on eBay years later, and was able to put it in a little collector’s box I bought for it, that I could feel “whole” again. Go figure.

            The years I spent as nanny to the son of actor Willem Dafoe and Wooster Group theater director Elizabeth LeCompte were probably the happiest of my life. I’m glad I didn’t realize it at the time. But every day with that extraordinary kid was a joy. I remember he brought home this little boat he had carved in art class and it seemed the most perfect thing I have ever seen in my life. It was so simple and smoothly sanded- I was shocked at how much I loved it. It now sits proudly next to my phone so that I can return to a Zen-like state of calm looking at it while enduring a difficult friend whine endlessly on the line.

            I used to collect the Aurora monster model kits in my youth and I recall the countless hours I spent in the basement painstakingly painting the figures of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Phantom of the Opera. It was their later model kits that really pissed off parents and probably brought a halt to the line. They were kits of a torture chamber; a hanging man and my favorite- The Guillotine. It even had a little male victim with a detachable head which you could actually guillotine off into a small basket. I would spend hours and hours shrieking “It is a far, far better thing I do,” from A Tale of Two Cities in my bedroom until I lowered the blade separating his head from his body. It’s the only finished model that survived through the years and looking at it actually makes me remember my childhood in a better light, however wrongheaded that is. I recall the incredible bliss I felt brushing in the blood red paint on the severed neck stump.

            This crusty frying pan was from my good friend Mary, who came back late from a bar in Provincetown (where we all lived in the 70s) and attempted to cook up a pork chop. She passed out and mercifully it didn’t start a fire. But what was left when she woke up was this blackened pork chop solidified into the pan. She presented it to me as an art piece and christened it, “Liquor and a Low Flame.” It still makes me laugh every time I pass by it.

            I’ve loved the crackpot, prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike right from the beginning of his career. One of his high points is Ichi the Killer (2201), an outrageous gangster gore-apalooza about a cry-baby killer in a superhero costume who is sent in to slice and dice entire rooms full of bad guys. Hot on his trail is a masochistic, bleach-blonde yakuza (who has slits that run down each cheek held closed by safety pins). This is Miike at his most gleefully shocking and hilariously deranged. But when I found that they made an action figure in Japan of the slit-faced gang leader (played by Tadanobu Asano) I nearly lost my mind. It took years to track down one in mint condition but now he stands in his gorgeous iridescent suit to transport me into a state of ecstasy every morning. Let’s face it, any movie whose credits rise up from a pool of spilled semen clearly is not from any sane planet and should be reverently celebrated in my apartment.

            I have always adored actress Carroll Baker. You can really see her talent in movies like Baby Doll, Ironweed and the wonderfully strange Something Wild. I really love the films she made in Italy with director Umberto Lenzi like Orgasmo; So Sweet…So Perverse; A Quiet Place to Kill and Knife of Ice. It’s her trashier early sexpot period that I enjoy the most- like The Carpetbaggers, Harlow, Sylvia and especially Station Six Sahara. That movie is set on an oil rig in the desert filled with a lot of frustrated, angry, horny men. Baker crashes her car there in the middle of the night and her sexy presence drives the men wild. This is one of the “favorite” films Martin Scorsese programmed at Lincoln Center, and it’s really a terrific, well-acted movie. But there was a promo gimmick in conjunction with the film- a little card with Carroll Baker’s figure and if you jiggled it in your hand her hips move from left to right. It totally makes me mental. And I find myself playing with it far too much.

            In my years as a nanny one of my best memories was traveling to Morocco to be on the set of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I’ll never forget the drive way the hell out into the desert to where they were shooting the crucifixion scene. Willem Dafoe called out to his son and I while suspended on the cross, nude, covered in fake blood. He wanted us to come on over in between takes. Now these Italian craftsmen had made hundreds of incredible fake crushed skulls which completely coated the sand and you felt them crunch underneath you as you walked up the hill to the cross. That was when I looked down at Willem’s son and saw him shaking like a leaf and realized, maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all. But on the way back to the trailer I pocketed a piece of skull. I just had to. It seemed like a holy relic at the time.

            Always on the lookout for ugly paintings in thrift stores and rummage sales, I really struck gold when I found this hideous picture of a small boy in a bunny suit. It’s so fabulously awful I was stopped in my tracks when I saw it. And the over-sized white frame only made it more ludicrous. I have hung it in different spots in my apartment, trying to find the perfect place for it. And, to be quite honest, the perfect place for it probably should be in a landfill. But it makes me so happy to see every day. What is the purpose of art, anyway? To engage. To evoke emotion. To enlighten. To thrill. To annoy. To stimulate the senses. Well, that’s what this ugly child in a bunny suit does to me.

            Hydrochloric Acid. Yes, there really is a bottle of Hydrochloric acid on my kitchen table. That’s for any house guest that gets a little too mouthy for my taste. 

            It must have been the late 80s when someone I really cared about surprised me by having a dozen red roses delivered to me. I think he was in L.A. at the time. Now, I’ve received and given flowers plenty of times in the past. But for some reason these roses really got to me. Now, here’s the weird part. I just left them in a vase on top of the refrigerator and they withered and dried out. Now that he’s no longer alive I cannot, for the life of me, throw them away. Coated with layers of dust and cobwebs, it’s my most “Miss Havisham” (from Great Expectations) icon in the apartment.

            As a hormonal teenager, I was obsessed with The Wild Wild West on TV. Yes, it had action and great villains, but mainly because of actor Robert Conrad’s incredibly tight pants. As a teen, his magnificent ass was like a gateway drug. I found this movie publicity still of Robert Conrad on eBay– think It probably was when he was in the film Palms Spring Weekend– and just knew I had to own it. The picture has magical properties, too. His ass seems to follow you wherever you go in the room.

            When I was a kid the only way you could collect movies was to get an 8mm projector and watch these truncated 10-minute films. I used to re-watch Tarantula repeatedly in my bedroom at night, setting up a flat white sheet at the foot of the bed. But it wasn’t until about 10 years ago I found this Super 8mm of Trog, Joan Crawford‘s last film and a movie that makes me insane. I have a feeling that when I am gasping my last breath the one thing that will pop into my mind will be Joan Crawford explaining circles of colors to the Neanderthal in her lab. ”This is green, Trog, green……” I hope and pray those will be my last words.