Eddie.

Eddie Harris – Listen Here (Atlantic 2487) from boogaludo on Vimeo.

By Jon DeRosa

Just like most other genres these days, successful horror movies spawn franchises. The studios have indulged lengthy strolls down Elm Street and at one point, seemed to have taken great care to make sure there was a fresh installment of “Friday the 13th” every time the calendar dictated.

I’ve never seen any of them, but does the number of times people wanted to sit through the same basic story to be scared in the same basic way tell us something of ourselves as a species? I’ll leave that for someone who watched those movies to decide.

In fact, to be a successful horror movie franchise, the film doesn’t even have to be a true horror movie. Both “The Evil Dead” and the “Scream” movies are horror-movie derivitives, distilling or reducing the elements of horror movies and packaging them up with laughs for a new twist.

“The Evil Dead” is a horror movie that has mostly discarded plot, writing, acting, sound, editing, cinematagrophy, and lighting. All that is left is gore, suspense and comedy. It’s poorly made but still spectacular – I challenge you to look away during a screening. The efforts appear earnest, and it’s hard to believe the people responsible for “The Evil Dead” (Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert) would someday create the best super hero fight on film (Raimi’s Doc Ock vs Spiderman on a skyscraper) and torment our hero John Schulian (Tapert).

That’s not to say the movie just a bucket of corn syrup dyed red and an eerie score. There’s a lovely moment where Ash, played by cult hero Bruce Campbell, holds a gift for his girlfriend, Linda, and pretends to be asleep. Linda wants to to grab the gift, but she suspects he’s faking. The camera catches just their eyes as she looks between him and the gift and Ash takes occasional peeks to see if his ruse is working. And then of course when Linda dies, Ash tries to bury her before she can turn into a zombie-monster. He’s too late, but she fakes him out with the same game, pretending to be dead while he digs her grave, sneaking peeks to see if her ruse is working.

When he slices her head off with the shovel, there’s an extra pang between the chuckles. The movie rightly has a devoted following for it’s knack of being bad in just the right ways. And now a remake? I wonder…

On the other side of the same coin are the “Scream” movies. These films are loaded with everything modern Hollywood does best, and then polished to a sheen. The derivative nature of “Scream” lies within the plot of the film as the psychotic killers and the hapless victims of the film are themsleves horror film fanatics. They know how horror movies work inside and out, and when they find themselves inside one, they keep track of what is happening like play-by-play commentators at a sporting event.

Most of them still die, but it’s a lot funnier when the victim does something stupid a few minutes after she discussed the universal stupidity of female horror movie victims.

Like Alex, I don’t seek out a lot of horror movies. However, consuming American popular culture for over thirty years ingrains horror movie formulae in the brain. So it doesn’t take an expert in scary movies to enjoy seeing them turned in on themselves in ingenious ways. And with all the laughs “Scream” and “The Evil Dead” bring to the table, suspense is such a potent ingredient that even these horror-comedies will take you to the edge of your seat before you’re rolling in the aisles.

By Bruce Markusen

This is the only Topps card that shows Matty Alou as a Yankee. Upon first look, most fans are struck by the enormity of the Yankees’ “NY” logo. But it’s not the actual Yankee logo; it’s been airbrushed onto the photograph, along with the Yankee pinstripes and the navy blue cap. The artist who did the airbrushing simply overestimated the size of the interlocking “NY.”

In the actual photograph that Topps used, Alou is wearing the colors of the A’s, with the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum providing the backdrop. Alou spent the latter half of the 1972 season with the A’s, and played a subtle role in helping Oakland win its first world championship, before being purged by Charlie Finley in a cost-cutting maneuver. Without any photos of Alou in Yankee pinstripes, the people at Topps opted for the old airbrushing route.

All these memories of this card come back to me with the news of Alou’s death. He passed away on Thursday at the age of 72, apparently from the effects of diabetes. This is particularly hard news for me because Matty Alou was one of my favorite players. Though he only played part of one season with the Yankees, he was a guy who left me with a boatload of memories from various points throughout his career.

Why did I like Alou so much? I think part of it has to do with his unconventional hitting style. He used a very unorthodox style at the plate–he swung a heavy bat, often hit off his front foot, and blooped a lot of singles to the opposite field–all of which made him intriguing. Ted Williams, the most scientific hitter in history, used to say that Alou broke every rule of batting, but somehow managed to succeed. And unlike Williams, Alou was an extremely aggressive hitter who didn’t walk all that much. But the man could hit singles with the best of them. Alou batted for a very high average, which coupled with his base stealing ability and the speed that allowed him to go first to third, made him a useful player.

Alou began his career with the Giants, where he had the privilege to play in the same outfield with his older brother Felipe and his younger brother Jesus. But Matty never found his way in San Francisco. It was not until he was traded to the Pirates, where he worked with manager Harry “The Hat” Walker on his hitting. The Hat completely retooled Alou’s approach, and to his credit, Alou openly accepted the advice.

The results were undeniable. In 1966, Alou batted .342 to lead the National League. In his next three seasons, he batted .338, .332, and .331. That represents one of the great four-year stretches a hitter has ever experienced. Alou was also a very good center fielder with range and a plus arm, making him a fairly complete package in Pittsburgh. All that he lacked was power.

By the time that Alou joined the Yankees in 1973, he was no longer the same player. Injuries robbed him of his arm strength, while slowing bat speed erased his abilities as a .330 hitter. But the Yankees felt he could help fill a void in right field. The Yankees were set in the other outfield spots–Roy White played left and Bobby Murcer starred in center–but right field had become a problem. Alou stabilized the position somewhat, though he lacked the arm or the ideal amount of power that once expects from a right fielder. He also made 40 appearances at first base, something he had done previously with the Cardinals. At five feet, nine inches, Alou looked odd playing first base; he could have used a phone book to stand on first base and corral high throws from Gene Michael and Graig Nettles.

Alou hit well for the Yankees, batting .296 with an on-base percentage of nearly .340. If the Yankees remained in contention, Alou would have lasted the entire season in New York. But the Yankees fell out of the pennant race, convincing them to try a late-season youth movement. So they sold Felipe Alou to the Brewers and sold 34-year-old Matty to the Cardinals, ridding themselves of two expensive contracts in the process. And that was it for Matty Alou in pinstripes.

As it turned out, Alou did not have much left in his hitting tank. He batted only .198 for the Padres in 1974, but he did not want to call it quits. So he headed to the Japanese Leagues, where he put in three seasons before retiring.

Alou was still playing in the Far East by the time the Yankees became good again and won back-to-pennants in 1976 and ‘77. Like so many of my favorite old players, like Johnny Callison and Walt “No-Neck” Williams and Jim Ray Hart, he did not last long enough to see the glory years in pinstripes.

But at least fun players like Matty Alou made those lean years of the early 1970s a little more bearable for a Yankee fan like me. For that, I will be ever grateful to Matty Alou. Rest in peace, Matty.

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Some of you guys might have some trouble resetting your password this morning. If that is the case, be sure and check your spam folder for the reset e-mail. That should do the trick. Anyhow, thanks for putting up with us.

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“The Kiss,” By Auguste Rodin (1882)

‘Cause he don’t know what time…it happens to be.

[Photo Credit: Joaocanziani]

For those of you who are knuts for the stuff, you can now have In-N-Out burgers shipped to you for $50. Eater has the story.

[Painting via Front Room Cinema]

By Steven Goldman

Many elements of “The Old Dark House” come courtesy of the Brits: the original novel by J.B. Priestley, director James Whale, and a good chunk of the cast including top-billed Boris Karloff (born William Henry Pratt) and Charles Laughton. Yet, the very idea of an old dark house has deep resonance in America’s very DNA, more than the idea of the “haunted house,” which goes back in time as long as there has been a tradition of literature and found its first modern expression in Horace Walpole’s 1764 novella The Castle of Otranto.

The American version, the one that belongs to us, arrived with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which is not a ghost story but, with its themes of corruption, decay, insanity, and incest, embodies a more primal American fear than the angry dead, one built for the wide-open spaces of an entire continent, that if you knock on any door down one of our isolated country roads you will discover that the people living behind it have been left alone for so long that they have become perverse and dangerous. Every quaint farmhouse harbors a family of demented maniacs who want to fuck you and put you in the soup, as does every shotgun shack and even Hamptons mansion, although motivations and order of operations may vary. Europeans fear ghosts, Americans fear the living.

That’s largely the situation in “The Old Dark House,” which contains the blueprint for every “the car died on a cold and rainy night and there is nowhere to seek shelter except that place up the road” story that followed, including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” “The Old Dark House” is basically “Rocky Horror” without the stockings and the songs, although Whale’s movie is funnier in that the picture winks at its grotesques rather than simply parodying them. When Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore) the puritanistic, sex-obsessed crone who makes up one half of the inevitable brother-sister pair that lives in the house, compulsively repeats that her unexpected guests can stay but, “No beds! You can’t have beds!” her single-mindedness is laughable, but also frightening in that you wonder what her fixations portend—no one denies sex so insistently if they’re not harboring kinks too disturbing to be faced.

Let’s backtrack: Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, and their dissolute pal Melvyn Douglas are tooling around the rain-darkened countryside when the road gets washed out. Whaddya know, there’s a light on at the Femm place. They are greeted at the door by a servant, Morgan, a shuffling, drunken mute played in heavy makeup by Boris Karloff. Karloff was coming off of his great success in “Frankenstein,” and the makers of the film really want you to know that yes, that is him playing Morgan—before the credits roll, even before the Universal Studios card appears, there is a note from the producers saying, yes, damn it, that’s Karloff. Trust us. “We explain this to settle all disputes in advance, even though such disputes are a tribute to his great versatility.”

The Massey-Stuart-Douglas trio is soon joined by two other wayward travelers, an unrepentant capitalist played by Charles Laughton in an early American role, and his flighty mistress, portrayed by Lillian Bond. There are some soap opera-ish interactions among these characters and a “Lost Generation” characterization for Douglas (the actual point of the Priestley novel, rather than horror), but like the songs in Metro-era Marx Brothers movies, these are just annoying changes of pace—the real interest of the film is in the Femm siblings and the other family members they’ve got stashed away upstairs, including an ancient pater familias so old that he had to be portrayed by a woman credited as a man (actually the wonderfully-named Elspeth Dudgeon) and the ominous Saul, who is locked in the attic.

Director Whale, the subject of “Gods and Monsters,” leavened his scare flicks with a bit of ironic detachment, puncturing frightening moments with jejune actions that are somehow still disturbing. There is a moment in “House” when the various guests are sitting down to dinner with the Femms, and the atmosphere is so heightened that when brother Horace Femm says, “Have a potato,” it is momentarily frightening, then quickly comic, because, damn it, it’s a potato.

The dinner scene is a good example of the way the film expertly veers in tone. Horace and Rebecca are played for laughs in that scene, with Horace’s pushing of the potatoes and Rebecca loading her plate with vinegared onion after vinegared onion, but it is preceded by a scene between the attractive young Stuart and Eva Moore that begins with Rebecca’s comic eccentricity—“It’s a dreadful night. I’m a little deaf. No beds!”—and then quickly becomes serious as it shows how the obsessive fear of sin can become sinful. The drenched Stuart needs to change her clothes, and Moore takes her to an isolated bedroom dominated by a cracked mirror.

“My sister Rachel had this room once,” Moore says, “She died when she was 21. She was a wicked one, handsome and wild as a hawk. All the young men used to follow her about, with her red lips and her big eyes and her white neck. But that didn’t save her… On this bed she lay, month after month. Many is the time I sat here listening to her screaming. She used to cry out to me to kill her, but I’d tell her to turn to the Lord. But she didn’t. She was godless to the last.”

Stuart changes into a sleek gown, because if you have Stewart ’32 in your film (as opposed to the aged version James Cameron had portraying the elderly Kate Winslet in “Titanic”) you show her off a bit. Moore notices her 21-year-old body. “You’re wicked, too… You think of nothing but your long, straight legs and your white body and how to please your man. You revel in the joys of fleshly love, don’t you?” As Stuart pulls on her gown, Rebecca grabs the hem and says, “This is fine stuff, but it will rot!” Then, pointing at Stuart’s chest, “That’s finer stuff still, but it will rot, too, in time!” Then Stuart looks into the mirror, and sees that it is true.

In many ways, “The Old Dark House” is just a play, with a few darkened sets and a lot of talking, but it’s an effective one. The cast is very good. Laughton would go on to have a long, Hall of Fame career, and it’s foreshadowed in his smallish part here. If Massey is remembered today, it’s probably for the 1960s medical series “Doctor Kildare,” in which he supported Richard Chamberlain, but he had a gift for playing messianic figures, notably in two Civil War pictures he made in 1940, Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” in which he took the title role, and “The Santa Fe Trail,” in which he plays John Brown against Errol Flynn’s Jeb Stuart and Ronald Reagan’s George Custer. Yes, that Ronald Reagan, yes, that George Custer.
Karloff doesn’t have a lot to do, but as an actor he was a lot more than a man in makeup. Douglas would have a long career, winning two Academy Awards (though not until roughly 30 and 50 years after “House” was made).

In the end, a few things that shouldn’t come creeping down the stairs and there’s a desperate struggle, but no Usher-like fall happens to the House of Femm. The picture ends with Horace beaming as his guests depart. “It’s a pleasure to have met you,” he smiles. A night of madness is just a bit of diversion for the Femms, and you get the sense that they’ll quickly get to work straightening up the place so it can all happen again the next time it rains.

Subsequent iterations of freaks-in-an-old-house (as opposed to “haunted house”) template, including a risible 1963 remake directed by William “The Tingler” Castle, have upped the level of violence, fear, and insanity far beyond anything in the house that Whale provides here, but I prefer the Femms because they’re knowable. There is nothing supernatural at work here, just some loosely-alluded to debauchery in the distant past and a moralizing streak that wouldn’t stand out in some quarters of the Republican Party.

That’s why I like “The Old Dark House.” It’s planted squarely on our soil, haunted only by a little sex and a little violence and the knowledge that if there’s a light on at the place up the road, it’s probably because someone needed to illuminate something dirty. It’s that animating Puritan spirit of paranoia that Hawthorne wrote about so brilliantly in stories like “Young Goodman Brown.” Whale’s “House” is the rare film that has fun while exploring this concept, the knowledge that, as Sartre wrote, hell is other people—or in the American case, the other people just up the road.

The Big East fell apart this year. I have a lot wrapped up in that conference, since I went to a Big East basketball school and grew up watching Thompson and Boeheim take on the Roman Catholic Coaches Association (Carnesecca, Massimino, Carlesimo, Pitino). Watching the disintegration, led by Syracuse of all places, made me realize my experience with college sports was done.

Over at Grantland, Charlie Pierce thinks the NCAA is coming down.

Every few years, some angry, stick-waving prophet would come wandering into the cozy system of unpaid (or barely paid) labor and start bellowing about how the essential corruption in the system wasn’t that some players got money under the table, but that none of them were allowed to get any over it. Sooner or later, these people said, the system would collapse from its own internal contradictions — yes, some of these people summoned up enough Marx through the bong resin in their brains from their college days to make a point — and the people running college sports had best figure out how to control the chaos before it overwhelmed them. Nobody listened. Very little changed, except that college sports became bigger and more lucrative, an enterprise of sports spectacle balanced precariously on the fragile principle that everybody should get to make money except the people doing the actual work.

What comes after that? Someone is going to have to stuff steroids down these teenagers’ throats to get them big enough for the NFL, right? If athletes were employees of their universities, would anybody want to watch? And if we removed colleges from the equation entirely, would anybody tune into watch whatever intermediary staging area develops?

The best example of what would happen to the NCAA is probably the current baseball model. There is scant interest in NCAA baseball and Minor League baseball. All anybody cares about are the Major Leagues, because the best talent in the world, from all ages is on display there and only there.

Compare the incredible amount of revenue surrounding the NCAA title games in basketball in football to whatever will be available after the NCAA cracks like an egg and you can see how ugly this is going to get.

Matty Alou has passed away.

Check out this BBC radio documentary about the loneliness of the goalkeeper.

[Photograph by Ryan Heffernan via Zach Ancell]

I know the clocks change this weekend but for the past few weeks I’ve been up early in the dark. Today, as I was sitting on the living room floor, stretching, I looked up and saw the sun through the drawn shades. Nothing like the sun to start the day off  on the good foot.

Grand Central Station by Bernice Abbott (1941)

Nice piece in the Times on the lost art of buying from a butcher.

I don’t go for horror movies. Sure, I watched a mess of them when I was a kid–“The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” I also saw “Halloween,” and “Friday the 13th,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “I Spit On Your Grave,” all that stuff and more. I had a stronger constitution then. Now, I just don’t like being scared.

I even worked on a “horror” movie, was the assistant film editor on “The Blair Witch Project II,” although the scariest part of that project was the silence in the screening room after the executives saw the first cut. Scary for the director, I should say, I thought it was pretty funny.

Anyhow, horror movies aren’t the only ones that are scary. Heck, you could argue that “The King of Comedy,” is Scorsese’s scariest movie (and that “Taxi Driver” is his funniest). I’ll never forget the final shot of “Planet of Apes,” when I was little and hiding under the covers wondering about the big questions of life.

The movie I can’t get over, though, is “Mad Max II,” aka “The Road Warrior.” Scared me as a kid and makes me jittery when I watch it today. It’s a comic book but an effective one. Watch this scene and tell me you don’t get nervous in spite of how silly it all is.

My basketball game ends around 8:30 PM on Tuesday nights. Always check the Yankee score before I get on the train. Then, when I get off at 207, I sneak a peak into the bar on Broadway, which is sure to have the game on. If I can’t catch the score there, I’ll definitely get a glimpse in the cigar shop, where five or six guys will be huddled around their old school TV set.

Last night the end of the season hit home for the first time. No score to check. Nothing interesting at the bar and the cigar smokers blowing smoke at each other instead of Derek Jeter.

The baseball season, a constant presence for such a lengthy part of the year, functions as an adhesive to life in the city for a lot of people. I’m one of them. And when it’s gone, especially in those years the Yanks don’t win it all, it’s an effort to move on without it.

The Circle Home

By John Schulian

I went from vanishing to vanished in the speed it took me to drive away from Universal for the last time. There was no talk of an opening on another writing staff, no phone call from my worthless agent to buck up my spirits. The truth was, my spirits didn’t need bucking up. I’d done what I’d set out to do. I’d worked in Hollywood and lived to tell the tale. I’d been part of the game, and now I wasn’t. That was fine with me. Hollywood never defined my life. Maybe that’s why there are days now when it feels like it never happened.

And yet it was a thrill each time I drove onto a studio lot. It didn’t matter which one – 20th, Warners, Paramount, Universal, old MGM – because miracles were the coin of the realm in them all. The real world was something that wasn’t supposed to get past the guards at the gate. They stood between the public and the buildings named for Jerry Lewis, Clara Bow, and Abbott and Costello where I tried to navigate a business that can make you Malibu royalty or leave you like driftwood on the beach.

At lunch one day in the Universal commissary, I saw Paul Newman get a big hug from Lew Wasserman, who was then the most powerful man in show business. I scribbled dialogue on a legal pad or typed it on a computer screen and watched actors use it to give life to characters who sprang from my imagination. I embraced the silliness when an assistant producer on “Hercules” told me why she couldn’t get an actress’s breasts to stay submerged in a milk bath and keep the censors off our back: too much silicone. Most of all, I’ll never forget the kindness of two actors on “L.A. Law,” Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, who sought me out to say thanks for the script I’d written. I blush at the fact that I didn’t tell them it was Steven Bochco they should be thanking, but maybe they already knew that. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that even with the rough patches I hit, I wouldn’t give back a minute I spent in Hollywood.

I loved the work when it was just me and a piece of paper. As for the rest of it, I wavered between ambivalence and outright hatred. But I could never hate it for long because I didn’t know when luck might start breaking good for me again. Even now, eight years after from my last TV job, I’ve got an idea for a screenplay rattling around inside my head. A friend with big screen credits planted it there after he read a short story of mine and saw the makings of a movie. I’ve made notes on it, toyed with how to structure it for the screen, come up with dialogue while I’ve been out on my daily walk. I’ve also put it away, but always with the caveat that I can take it out again. That’s how the business works for most of us: once seduced, always seduced.

But let me not get carried away by dreams and nostalgia. I’m no longer part of the show-biz whirl with its non-stop talk about movies and TV pilots I’ve got to see, actors and writers and directors I’ve got to be aware of, and salaries that will make my head explode. When I’m around friends who are still in the game, it takes me half the night to get up to speed and the other half to forget what I’ve heard. There are too many names I don’t recognize or need to remember. And if there are any executives who remember me, they would probably just say, “Oh, yeah, the sports writer,” and move on to the next subject.

By the time I arrived in Hollywood, I had downgraded sports writer to the pejorative. It was a label that stuck to me like gum to the sole of my shoe and I resented it. I was sick to death of games and athletes and the words I lavished on them. But no sooner did I leave the Philadelphia Daily News than Sport magazine asked me to assay Sugar Ray Robinson for its 40th anniversary issue. Never mind that I’d not been closer to him than a TV screen. I wrote the piece. When I went to buy the magazine, convinced that it contained my unofficial farewell to sportswriting, I could hear practically hear a booming old-fashioned score in the background, something by Dimitri Tiomkin or Max Steiner or one of those Newmans who are related to Randy. Show business had such a hold on my brain that it wasn’t until years later I understood that the true significance of my ode to Sugar Ray. It stood as proof that part of me would always belong to sportswriting.

In 1988, when a screenwriters’ strike lasted five months, I wrote a spec screenplay that eventually ended up at the right studio at the wrong time, but I also wrote an essay for GQ about how the American male gets his first lessons in personal style from athletes. In 1992, when I came off my first unhappy year in TV, I regained my balance by doing a bonus piece for Sports Illustrated about L.A. when it was a minor league baseball town and an essay for the L.A. Times Book Review about my two favorite boxing novels, “Fat City” and “The Professional.”

Strange how I was taking refuge in something that just a few years before felt like a noose around my neck. And it felt as if I were writing better than I ever had. I don’t know how much, if any, of that I can attribute to my work for the screen, but I certainly felt more confident and more comfortable with the language. Maybe screenwriting–and the myriad smart people who did it for a living–opened my mind to ideas that enriched my prose. Just as important, I was no longer too good to rewrite something, and not just once either. What I once would have turned in as a finished product was now being constantly rewritten, tinkered with, and buffed to a shine until I had to turn it in or miss my deadline. That would have been unthinkable with a four-times-a-week sports column. In any case, it was a joy to be writing for magazines and the occasional newspaper again. Even when I was up to my ears in alligators on “Hercules,” I would write 1,000-word GQ essays not just on sports but on my favorite guitar shop, the joy of greasy-spoon dining, and why white-collar criminals deserve the death penalty. Never once did those pieces feel like work. They were a tonic. You might even call them a salvation, just as TV was a salvation when I bogged down as a sports columnist.

In the lulls that grew longer and longer as I neared the end in Hollywood, I wrote for old friends at SI, GQ, and msnbc.com and new ones at the Oxford American magazine and the New York York Times. Yes, finally the Times – but I arrived in its pages not as Red Smith’s successor but as the author of a piece about a reclusive country singer named Willis Alan Ramsey. Vic Ziegel, whose death last year left a hole in a lot of lives, thought that was hilarious. “A shitkicker?” he scribbled on a postcard.

It was guys like Vic, Bill Nack, Tom Boswell, and Dave Kindred who over the years made certain I didn’t forget the ballparks and boxing halls where I’d battled deadlines, the all-night diners where I’d eaten too much too late, and the friendships without expiration dates. I heard from John Ed Bradley once in a while via a predictably courtly hand-written note, and talked on the phone with Peter Richmond, and had dinner with Leigh Montville when he was in L.A. I wondered if Charlie Pierce was ever going to come this way again and provided lodging for Mark Kram Jr., Phil Hersh, and my favorite editors at SI, Rob Fleder and Chris Hunt. And always there were the old sportswriting friends who had become L.A. guys, too – Mike Downey, Randy Harvey, Ron Rapoport. They were conduits to my past, the lot of them, and to my future, too.

Oscar Charleston painting by Michael Hogue

In Hollywood I rarely thought beyond my next job. But when there were no more jobs for me, it seemed only natural to write a piece for SI about Oscar Charleston, the black Ty Cobb, and to begin putting together a collection of my baseball writing called “Twilight of the Long-ball Gods.” No trumpets blared, no one hailed my return, and that was as it should have been. The days of need I’d experienced as a columnist – the need for acclaim, money, and a chunk of space in the paper to call my own – were gone. I was seeking something different now, a chance to recapture the joy I’d felt when I was a kid alone in my room, listening to Little Richard on the radio as I wrote for an imaginary newspaper or sketched scenes for a movie that would never move beyond a wish. I couldn’t recapture such innocence, of course, but that kid still lived inside me just the same. I counted down from three and stepped into the wind.

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