Click! Click! Click!

I watched a lot of television when I was a kid. In addition to the usual suspects like The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, and Bewitched, I was especially drawn to That Girl starring Marlo Thomas.

This may have been partly due to the story-line echoing my Mom's life before she married my Dad and I was born. That Girl ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. It was the story of Ann Marie, a young woman who has moved to New York City to be an actress. In the mid-1940s my Mom had moved to New York for the same reason. So Mom could tell me stories about living in New York, eating at the Automat, the subway, Central Park, Summer stock, dating, roommates, having pre-marital sex, all the things one does when one runs away to New York City to be in the theatre. Indeed, I did much the same stuff when I went to New York to do theatre in the late 1980s.

That Girl also shot a lot of location footage in NYC, so each episode was story-fodder for Mom. In the last couple years That Girl has finally been coming out on DVD. And since I had pretty much not seen it since the mid 1970s, I have been buying and rewatching it. It holds up quite well, the writing isn't bad, the cinematography is especially good, and the production and costume design is great! It truly is a little time capsule of fashion and fun circa late 1960s.

On rewatching the series I encountered a two part episode called "It's a Mod Mod World!" in which Ann gets a job as a fashion model after being discovered eating that old actor's treat, ketchup-and-hot-water soup, at the Automat. I had not particularly remembered this episode until I resaw it. But it immediately brought back a torrent of nostalgic glee. Because back in the summer of 1970 it set my little mind to working and got me all fired up to join the world of fashion. Mod Squad, move over! I got out my Instamatic camera, corralled my three-year-old sister, and decided that I simply MUST do a fashion shoot!

Now, of course I had much empathy with Marlo Thomas and her character Anne Marie. And perhaps deep down I wanted to be an actress, model, fashion-plate. Perhaps I still do! Yet this being 1970, me being seven years old, and my not being able to both click the camera and do drag at the same time—I enlisted my little sister.

I set up my photo-shoot in front of the sliding glass doors that led from the living room to the dining room (they looked sort of like store windows to me). I asked my sister to go put on her best dress, or as my grandmother called it, her "Sunday-go-to-meeting" clothes. And we were ready. I demonstrated the classy poses Marlo Thomas had used. A look of coy surprise! Click! Hands up and out so as not to cover the dress! Click! A big smile! Click! Sell it, sister, sell it! Click!

And then one has to take the film to the Skaggs Drugstore to be developed and wait and wait and wait. But eventually they were developed and I was the Fashionista of the Second Grade. No digital, no Polaroid, just a Kodak Instamatic, a box of blue flash-cubes, my three-year-old sister, and me.

Copyright © 2007 D. H. Maxine. All rights reserved.

La Planète des Singes

Monkey See, Monkey Do

As you may have gathered from some of my other postings I have been studying French for the last year or so.

The BF and I had a private tutor for the first year. But since then we've been working on our own. We have two weekly self-taught classes. We quiz each other, try to do homework, etc. And we've gone to France twice this year.

Still, one thing we don't get enough of is listening to fluently spoken French. So I've started watching movies and TV shows we have on DVD with the French soundtrack on. One of my favorites is of all things the 1970s Planet of the Apes TV series.

Why on earth, you might ask, does Planet of the Apes adapt so well to French study? Hmm, why indeed...

Reason No. One: the scripts aren't that good. But the simple, flat writing means that the characters speak in a simple, flat and straightforward manner. And luckily apes use little colloquial slang.

Reason No. Two: Since half the cast is wearing ape makeup the dubbing isn't very evident. General Urko moves his muzzle and whether what comes out is French, English, or Swahili you really can't tell. It's also a good dubbing job. The voices fit the characters very well!

Reason No. Three: The TV series and the five films are after all based on a 1963 French novel La planète des singes by Pierre Boulle. So, with a little twisted logic, these apes are SUPPOSED to be speaking French, no? I have also recently obtained a copy of the French edition of the novel and plan to work my way through it. I'm sure the French is a little beyond my current comprehension. We'll see.

A+ David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.
Blog copyright © 2007 D. H. Maxine

Dancing Naked with PUFNSTUF

In 1971, when I was eight years old, I was taken to see the then new PUFNSTUF movie. I already loved the psychedelic television show of the same name. But the movie appealed to me for many reasons. I wanted to escape, I thought Jack Wild was cute, it was a movie musical that resonated of many things I loved including a similarity to the plot of THE WIZARD OF OZ. I adored Jack Wild's peculiar British accent, and now as an adult, I can see other reasons that the film spoke to me.

For those of you too young, too old, or too foreign to know the film, the story goes thusly:

A boy named Jimmy is picked on by his classmates and teachers. Jimmy plays the flute and one day his flute comes to life and starts to talk. A nasty old witch named Witchiepoo wants Jimmy's talking flute for herself and she tricks Jimmy into boarding a beautiful boat which traps him and brings him to Living Island. Jimmy escapes the witch's clutches and befriends a yellow dragon named Pufnstuf who wore little white cowboy boots and a Stetson. Jimmy wants to get back home, protect his flute from Witchiepoo, and in the end finds peace and love with his friends on Living Island.

There's an interesting Freudian interpretation of the film that I've heard about. Our boy hero Jimmy is about to enter puberty and his "flute" which had been inanimate suddenly comes to life. Witchiepoo (the mother figure) wants to take away Jimmy's "magic flute." For protection, Jimmy seeks out an even bigger phallic symbol, Pufnstuf himself. I wonder what PUFNSTUF creators Sid and Marty Krofft think of this interpretation. Pufnstuf himself does look pretty phallic. Look at his "head" in the photo at the top of this blog.

Okay, back to being eight years old... Well, I loved the movie and I loved my copy of the soundtrack album. I played it to pieces, played it for my friends, and being a little gay boy I had as big a fascination with Witchiepoo as I did with Jimmy.


Soundtrack album cover for PUFNSTUF (1970)

In the movie Witchiepoo hosts the Annual Witch's Convention in her castle. Witches are quite "political" it seems; and there is a power struggle to obtain the title of "Boss Witch." The current Boss Witch was played by Martha Raye; and other contenders for the title included Witchiepoo, and another witch named Witch Hazel who was played by Mama Cass Elliot. Witch Hazel sang a song called "Different."

"When I was smaller and people were taller
I realized that I was different.

It's kind of an ode to being gay (from a little gay kid's point of view anyway). It's not unlike Cass Elliot's big hit "Make your own kind of music." On the soundtrack album, this song is followed by a spectacular production number called "Zap the World!" which is what the witches want to do. I lapped it all up!

My best friend at the time lived next door. One summer afternoon while we were playing my PUFNSTUF album we decided to make "magic wands." In the movie the magic wands look kind of like striped pencils. And indeed that's what we made. We took some unsharpened pencils and carefully wound them with colored tape making spirals about the pencils. We also made them "magic" by putting spells on them and saying magic words and stuff. At some point my best friend said, "You know if we want to make them really magic, we're supposed to be naked."

"What are we supposed to do then?" I asked in my best naïvely coy eight-year-old manner.

My friend said, "We have to dance with them."

It sounded like a good idea to me! So we locked my bedroom door. We put on the PUFNSTUF album, and played "Different" as an invocation while we got undressed. When we were both naked we stood on my twin bed and waited for "Zap the World!" to begin. At which point the eight-year-old, wand-waving, naked, wannabe-witches began dancing excitedly, jumping up and down on the bed!

So what do you do when the music stops?

Well, you put on your clothes, you put the magic away, and you grow-up. You try to make friends with other people, hoping for a friendship like Jimmy's and Pufntuf's. And you long to find a Living Island where you attempt to avoid the witches, where you can play your magic-flute, and when the planet gets too obnoxious, you can …
Zap! Zap the World!

David

Blog copyright © 2007 D. H. Maxine.

Below, you can enjoy "Zap the World!" from PUFNSTUF the movie!

Dr. Zaius in Oz or; Leggo my MEGO!

I've been thinking a lot about play - or more specifically, how I played as a kid. I am trying to remember how it worked, how I did it, what it felt like.

All of my favorite toys were puppets, stuffed animals, and the like. I also loved movies and had a strong passion for PLANET OF THE APES. I devoured the movies, watched the prime-time TV series, and the animated Saturday morning cartoon. I even tracked down the Pierre Boulle novel - which I also loved. I found it especially sexy somehow that Boulle's astronaut was completely naked as Zira took him for walks around the city.

I also loved L. Frank Baum's Oz books. My Second Grade teacher, Mrs. Strong, at Monte Vista Elementary School, in Albuquerque, read them to us a chapter to two a day after lunch. I also discovered the MGM movie, which I came to love as well. So one can hardly overestimate my childhood joy at discovering MEGO (a toy company) was producing 8-inch action-figures of PLANET OF THE APES characters, followed a bit later by WIZARD OF OZ characters, among many others including another childhood obsession, STAR TREK.

But back to play. I would ask my sister something like, "Do you wanna play Oz? or Apes?" And she pretty much always did. We would then go to my room and prepare the universe. We had a couple dark furniture throws and these would be tossed over carefully arranged pillows, cushions, piles of clothes to create mountain ranges and valleys as wide as the bedroom - a terrain for the play to occur within. We would then set up the Emerald City or Ape City in our room-scape and the play would begin.

But I dont remember how we did it! We devised such elaborate plots and story lines! They often continued from day to day, too. But there was no discussion that I recall about how to do it, no set rules for who "operated" which characters. It was a seamless flow of interaction between the two of us: handing off characters, improvising dialogue, manipulating plot, creating back-story with no effort whatsoever. But I don't remember how we did it! We were just so in synch - everything worked. And we both fell into a hypnotic state where the room would fall away, our hands hopping the characters across the bedspread would vanish, and we did little more than channel Zira, Cornelius, and Dorothy Gale! Yes we mixed the worlds up quite often.

It worked REALLY well, too! Sometime apes would go to Oz; and sometimes Oz characters would go to the Planet of the Apes. If you think Dr. Zaius (the ornery orangutan) freaked out when he saw a talking human you should have seen how apoplectic he got over talking lions, Tin Men, and little girls with dogs!

Sometimes Zaius went to Oz! At least once the Wicked Witch captured him and thought he was her runaway flying monkey. She could NOT understand what happened to his wings. "Curses! It's that Dorothy Gale's doing!" But then again sometimes Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock would beam in at just the right moment and then all hell would break loose! The Wicked Witch would over hear Kirk talk about dancing Orion slave girls (who are green!) and the Witch would decide she could trap Kirk and Spock by stripping and dancing for them! You may recall that the Wicked Witch is green, too.

I do not know if other MEGO-loving kids did this cross-pollination thing. Sometimes I would buy duplicate characters to make them into additional characters. I "aged" a Cornelius with white paint and miniature glasses to make someone I names Dr. Barlow. We turned an extra Glinda the Good into Laverne DeFazio to play with my sisters Fonzie figure. A few characters I just made from scratch - a Patchwork Girl and a Sawhorse come to mind. Some ideas we never quite pulled off probably due to lack of money. Grandma and Grampa Walton would have made a wonderful Aunt Em and Uncle Henry but I guess i just didn't feel like spending $15 to get two sort of boring characters.

But is was so magical, so addicting! This hypnotic-state of play occurred whenever my sister and I played with our anthropomorphic toys: puppets, stuffed animals, etc. Once on a car trip I told her that there was a miniature universe in my pants-pocket. I pulled out bits of lint and stuff from my pocket and introduced them as animals, live stock, etc. I made a tiny little woman out of a scrap of Kleenex, too. But I swear we could see "pocket-world!"

And that's what I miss! I miss my imagination being that powerful. I think I still have a strong ability for fantasy and imagination and daydreaming - but I can't quite make the real world disappear anymore - at least not with pocket lint!

David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.

Copyright 2006 D. H. Maxine.

Mom had sex with Colonel Klink

All right, my mom never had sex with Colonel Klink -- but she did have a summer-stock affair with actor Werner Klemperer back in the late 1940s. Klemperer went on to play Colonel Klink on HOGAN'S HEROES - the 1960's television show set in a Nazi-run POW camp. My mom did not watch the show - she was offended by the whole idea of making light of Nazism. However, I loved telling neighborhood kids that my mom "dated" Colonel Klink; and also telling them that she "dated" Jack Klugman, Oscar on THE ODD COUPLE. She also "dated" Jerry Orbach - but I didn't know who he was at the time I was bragging to my pre-pubescent pals about my Mom's sexual conquests back in the day.

This little tidbit of arcane family lore is offered up primarily to show that I did not come from an average family. My parents were a good deal older that most of my friend's parents. When I was born my Mom was 38 and my Dad was 44.

My Mom grew up in a Methodist Democrat family in Texas during the depression; and when she turned nineteen she moved to New York to become an actress. This was 1943. She spent the next fourteen years in the theatre (mostly stage managing and sometimes directing) and working in film and photography. She also spent seven years in psychoanalysis. She met my Dad in 1946 or 47 while they were both working on the Henry Wallace Caravans. They were in a relationship for about a year. They broke-up because my Mom wasn't ready to get married, and my Dad was. They didn't see each other for ten years. In 1958 my Mom felt she was ready to get married, she called up my Dad and asked if he was still interested, and they were married. I was born four years later.

My parents were very unusual. They were deeply political, deeply spiritual (though not terribly religious) and both were very well-read. My Dad only graduated from high school; he hated structured education. He was quite brilliant in many ways. Mom went back to college after I was born and went on to get her doctorate. My parents were very involved in the civil rights movement, feminism, they were "radicals" who thought "liberal" was an insult. They both cared about our country more than almost anyone I've ever met.

This just seemed like the normal American family to me. But it seems many kids didn't grow up in this wacky, progressive, politically-infused, sexually frank, over-educated, semi-socialist stew pot. By the time I was thirteen I had met George McGovern, and Ted Kennedy. Mom had been tear-gassed. I'd met German philosopher Herbert Marcuse (his favorite American TV show was MANNIX, in case any scholars need to know!) And we have home-movies of Joan Baez. Our house was always filled with peace-niks, hippies, and lesbians.

Does anyone wonder how I wound up like this?

In 1984, just before I came-out (to both myself and the world) I was working as a Production Assistant at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. One show I was assigned to was Director Peter Sellers' HANG ON TO ME - a mish-mash of Maxim Gorky's SUMMERFOLK with two dozen Gershwin songs added in. It was fabulous! It was five hours long, but it was FABULOUS! Werner Klemperer was in the cast. So now I knew him, too - but not as well as my Mom did! The Guthrie Theater had a bar for the staff and a couple times my Mom came in and had drinks with Werner. It was really interesting seeing the two of them relate, seeing a part of her youth bubble to the top as she and Werner drank and told stories.

That is now over twenty years ago. Werner Klemperer, and both of my parents, are gone. It's over fifty years since my mom and Herr Klemperer made hay in a summer-stock barn in Arden, Delaware. And I'm still using her affair with Werner Klemperer as a social introduction to make friends and break the ice.

Be careful what you tell your children!

David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.

Copyright 2006 D. H. Maxine.
All rights reserved.

Who's the Little Gay Boy?

Who's the little Gay Boy!

I recently answered a mySpace-group questionnaire that asked if I had ever dressed up in Drag. Initially I thought the answer was "no," but thinking back further in time, I realized the answer was "yes." That is, if it counts as Drag when you're eight or ten.

As a child I was a big Lucille Ball fan. I watched I LOVE LUCY, and LUCY SHOW reruns, and watched HERE'S LUCY, which was still running in prime-time. My mom helped me send her a fan letter and I was out-of-my-mind-crazy when I got a signed photo of Lucy in the mail a couple weeks later. It was in black and white - and signed rather generically "Love, Lucy."

A few weeks later I got my third-grade school pictures back. I raced home, cut one free from the sheet of small photos, and boldly signed it, "Love, David," and sent it to Lucy. A couple weeks later I got a full-color photo of Lucy back in the mail! Show-and-Tell here I come!

I eventually wanted to be Lucy and asked my Mom and Grandmother if I could get a red wig. They bought me a fright-wig ala Ronald McDonald!

"No, no, no," I say. "Not like that, like real hair, like Lucy!"

For some reason my Mom and Grandmother didn't bat an eyelash. And when my Grandmother was at the beauty salon next she let me pick out an inexpensive red-head wig. I think it cost $2.00, which was several times my allowance. It was a start. Next I wanted false eyelashes! And at the local Skaggs Drugstore I'd spotted a pair of Deep Blue lashes that were to be my next purchase.

I don't know how many times I dressed-up as Lucy. It was more than once, though! My grandmother had a pretty silk blouse, that on me, worked splendidly as a mid-thigh length dress. And I loved my grandmother's heels! My grandmother was a nice, southern, Methodist lady. But my Mom was a feminist, women's rights activist (who didn't really wear dresses!) and my Mom had a number of lesbian friends. I remember one coming over to our house and lecturing me on female stereotypes; and saying that I didn't have to do my hair and wear false-eyelashes to pretend I was a woman. "Oh, please," I thought. "I'm not dressing up as a woman, I'm Lucy!"

The last time I remember donning "drag" was when I was ten, when I wrote a play for me and my best friend, Gail, a black girl who lived down the street. It was called Millicent Martin takes Manhattan and featured me as Millicent Martin. She was a penthouse-living, New York Socialite, based loosely on Eva Gabor in GREEN ACRES and, of course, Lucy. My friend Gail played Leroy, an African-American homeless bum. In the play we fell in love and I introduced Leroy to New York society! I invited my family and assorted kids from the neighborhood to attend the play. A couple of my male friends seemed fascinated by my costume, too.

I didn't figure out I was Gay until I was 22 - kinda' hard to believe!

--David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.

Copyright 2006 by D. Maxine.
All rights reserved.