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Owner/operator of Mister Herman's Publishing Company and Mister Herman's Production Company, Ltd. Author of A Consternation of Monsters, available in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.
EPISODE 03: “Limited Edition”
The Consternation of Monsters Podcast returns with a story of bitter rivalries, stolen opportunities, forgery, and the angel of death, set in the cut throat world of public television antiques appraisal–a world in which one of the most powerful objects is a fork.
This podcast is an excerpt of the audiobook adaptation of the short story “Limited Edition” found in the collection A Consternation of Monsters as well as the unabridged audiobook.
DOWNLOAD: Episode 03: “Limited Edition”
SHOW LINKS
The Prue Saga
A pup named Prue
While in the bedroom dressing one day a couple weeks ago, I happened to look out the window and spotted a dog run past, into the back yard. This would not be abnormal, as we do have three dogs. However, it was not one of ours. The dog I saw was very hound-dogish, probably around 50 pounds, black, white, and brown. It sniffed around, had a squat, and trotted off into the brush at the edge of the yard.
“Huh,” I said, figuring it was a dog from the neighborhood–one I’d not seen before.
Our actual dogs, who had been lazing on their dog pillows the whole time, suddenly came alive at my “huh,” somehow sensing the intruder or that I’d seen something of interest, and began barking the sort of vicious, ferocious barks that only come from the throats of dogs separated from their enemies by a pane or two of glass. The other dog suitably cowed (or at least now absent from sight), they settled down again, secure in the knowledge that they’d demonstrated enough ferocity that their jobs as defenders of the realm were safe.
The next day, I saw the dog again, this time lurking in the front yard. Our dogs didn’t notice and soon it wandered off and down the trail at the edge of our yard. I didn’t think too much about it. I wondered briefly if it was an escapee from the humane society, which is down the hill and across a couple of fields from us. But I didn’t wonder this too long.
Over the next couple of days, I saw the dog a few more times. Sometimes our dogs saw it as well. Sometimes not. My general policy, on the rare occasions we have such visitors, is not to feed them lest they stay and become dog #4. Soon, though, the wife began to notice it too and she has no such policy. It was getting cold out, she said, and it would need food to keep warm in the night. Fine. We put out a bowl and it was empty within an hour or two.
Last Sunday, the wife called me over to look at something on her phone. It was a picture of the dog we’d been seeing, as posted on one of the local Facebook yard sale sites. The author of the post was a lady named Amy who works for the nearby humane society. We contacted her and it turns out the dog was indeed, as I’d wondered, an escapee from the HS. This dog, whose name is Prue, was a young female pup that had been adopted by a family elsewhere and had been scheduled for delivery before her untimely escape from one of the volunteers who help walk the dogs. They’d apparently chased her all around the woods near our house until they’d reached the trail behind our house, which led them to our house where they found themselves staring down the barrel of our dogs. Our dogs have shock collars and stay in the yard, but the pursuers of Prue did not know that, so they said, “Today, my jurisdiction ends here,” and went back to the barn. (I learned this from them a couple days later.) Amy said that Prue was part of a litter of puppies of the treeing walker breed of coon hounds. The other pups had acclimated to humans. Prue ran from them on sight. She apparently did pretty well with other dogs, but was super timid when it came to people.
We let Amy know that Prue was a regular around our house. The following day, she had a great big live trap delivered and set up just off of the trail. They put some breakfast biscuits and canned food in it and we hoped for the best.
In late afternoon, we saw Prue creeping through the brush behind the house. I decided I was going to try and make friends with her, and went down to sit on the back steps of the house, armed with an open can of stinky wet food and a spoon. She saw me and fled like the devil was chasing her. What I later learned was that the wife could see Prue’s escape from inside the house. The dog ran around to the front yard and made for the trail. But she paused, near the fence behind which was the live trap, and sniffed at the air before trying to find a way through the fence to get at what she was smelling. Then, naturally, our dogs got wind that something was up and began barking their fool heads off, startling Prue and sending her skittering into the trees, not to be seen again.
It got cold that night. We hated the thought of the poor dog outside, let alone possibly stuck in the live trap where the winds could just whip through her. We checked the trap at bedtime and then the wife set an alarm for 2 am to go check again. The only thing in the trap at that hour, though, was a cat. It wasn’t one of our cats, but it was apparently just as pissy as the wife let it out. She then had difficulty setting the trap again in only the light from her phone, so she propped the door open with a stick and hoped the dog would somehow trip it going in. It did not.
The next morning, I reset the trap and put some new canned food within it to replace what the cat had eaten. In the afternoon, Amy texted to suggest we move the trap closer to the house. I was all for this, and suggested the boardwalk on the far side of the garage, out of eyesight of the dogs, but not from the laundry room window. We could check the trap without leaving the house.
There was a minor blizzard Tuesday night. We had a few inches of snow and lots of wind. Temps were in the teens. There was no sign of Prue. The wife made a concoction of ham and microwaved wet dog food and put it on top of the cage, hoping the smell would bring Prue in. We saw no sign of her, though, and soon the bowl was frozen solid.
“She’s found herself a place to hole up,” I suggested. There are, after all, any number of places to do that in this neighborhood–the crawlspace beneath one of our outbuildings the most logical to us. We still hated the thought of the dog shivering outside in the weather.
I was relieved the next morning to spot Prue in the yard–nowhere near the trap. And she stayed away from it, even after I’d rewarmed the dogfood/ham concoction and even climbed inside the cage to put it at the back, behind the trip mechanism. It occurred to me while I was in there that if I tripped it I’d be trapped in the cage, in the cold and might not be able to get turned around to let myself out. This did not happen.
Days passed and different treats were left in the cage to entice the stubbornly absent, though still living dog. We’d see her around, but if she saw one of us she was gone in a flash. The only dog to be caught in the cage was our dog, Sadie, who couldn’t resist going in for a weenie.
“Well, at least we know the trap works,” I texted to Amy the next day.
On Thursday, at Amy’s suggestion, I moved the cage down to the far back corner of our yard. Clearly, we reasoned, it wasn’t doing any good near the house, and we couldn’t let our dogs free in the yard without watching them every minute to keep them from getting trapped and eating all the bait. We had to put it somewhere outside of their collar range. (Or at least the collar range of Maya and Moose, as Sadie doesn’t usually wear her collar, since she knows her boundaries and stays within them. Usually.) I thought that maybe if I put the trap just out of the yard, in the brush I’d seen Prue lurking in a few times, she might care to investigate it.
Prue did not care to. A possum, however, did. He did not think the trap was awesome, and hissed at us, refusing to stop climbing the bars and escape when the door was left open for him. He also ate all the wieners.
On Saturday, Amy came by herself, armed with a bag of WalMart chicken tenders. She said she thought that this was the day we’d finally catch Prue. And, late in the afternoon, it seemed we were about to.
A Prue sighting from within the house
I’d let our dogs out to potty in the front yard and had strolled around to see if Prue might be in the trap. She was not, but Maya picked up the scent of the chicken and went over to sniff the air at the border of her collar. Then, her face darted to the side and she bolted around the back of the house. The other two dogs were still around front, so I knew she must have seen Prue. I dashed back around front and herded Sadiemoose into the house. Sure enough, I could see Prue in the back yard through the windows. And Maya was there too. And they appeared to be… playing. Prue was still skittish, but she actually seemed to be having fun. She would creep up to Maya (who, being a St. Bernard, was twice her size) and lean close to sniff at her. Then Maya would lunge playfully and Prue would bolt a few feet away before starting it all again. I ran to get the wife and we came and watched them–trying to find new vantage points along the back side of the house as the dogs romped and played closer and closer to the location of the trap.
Then we saw Prue stop and sniff the air, then move away, following the scent, moving down to the trap itself, leaving Maya to jump around at the edge of her boundary. Prue sniffed at the chicken through the back side of the cage. Then moved along its length and closer to the open door. Then, just when we thought she was going to step inside… she bolted away and back toward the front yard and was gone again.
“Noooooo!” I screamed as quietly as I could.
We moved all around the inside of the house, trying to get a view on where Prue had fled, knowing she wouldn’t be able to resist going back. We had to lock Sadie and Moose in the bedroom and close the curtains on them, because they woudln’t shut up.
Soon enough, Prue did return to the hill above the trap and then was back at the trap itself, and to its door. As we watched, we saw her step into the trap itself and take another couple of tentative creeps forward. And then she bolted and was gone again, this time running fully across the front yard and disappearing down the trail on the complete opposite side of the house from the cage.
The wife began smiling.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“No. What?”
“Well, you know… if she likes Maya so much, and is already hanging around the house… maybe it’s a sign that she’s really our 4th dog?”
“Uh uhhh!” I said. “This dog is strictly visiting. And as soon as she’s caught she’s getting shipped out to her new home, very far away.”
I wrote Amy a text, telling her that we almost had Prue, but that the dog was too smart for us. We did note that she at least had fun playing with Maya. Amy said it sounded cute and that she was still optimistic.
Prue goes home
Eight minutes later, Amy texted me a picture of Prue with the note: “Look who came home!!!!” I don’t know if it was playing with Maya or what, but Prue apparently decided that being on her own was for the birds and it was time to go back to her pack. She had turned up outside of the humane society and followed one of the dogs there right into the building.
I told Maya what a good dog she was. Maybe she had nothing to do with Prue’s return to home base, but I like to think that playing with Maya made Prue miss her buddies back at the Humane Society and that she decided being out on her own was for the birds. The fact that she ran immediately back would seem to maybe support this.
We never went down to spring the trap. It was still baited, so we half expected to find another possum in there. I joked that if we caught a skunk then I was leaving that to the humane society to release.
Instead, we caught Sadie again.
Yep, the siren call of day old chicken tenders was too much for her, and she was found trapped in the cage Sunday morning, after we let her out to potty. We left her in there for 20 minutes or so, since the weather was nice. She lay down and chilled out, but was super happy when her “pa” came to rescue her.
Release the Saidaukar!
EPISODE 02 REDUX: “The Ones that Aren’t Crows”
The Seward Whale Strike Tragedy, they called i
t. Twenty-five people dead. The worst accident in Alaska’s tourism history since Will Rogers’ plane went down in ‘35. Only one man left alive knows the truth of what really happened — the man everyone agrees caused the tragedy to start with. And if there’s one thing he’s sure of, the thing they hit that day was no whale.
Presented here is his testimony, as transcribed for an interview with Paranorm Violations Magazine.
This podcast adapts the short story “The Ones that Aren’t Crows” found in the collection A Consternation of Monsters as well as the unabridged audiobook of the collection.
DOWNLOAD: Episode 02: “The Ones that Aren’t Crows”
SHOW NOTES
Actual Conversations I Personally Witnessed On a Cruise Ship Last Week
Dressed in our casual formal finest, my wife and I approached the host station of the ship’s main dining room hoping to get a table for dinner. In line ahead of us, however, was an older man on a Rascal Scooter, who was clad in a formal dinner jacket and what appeared to be loose, baggy, white pajama shorts, from which were sticking his knobby-kneed pale bird legs.
MAN– You mean I have to go all the way back upstairs just to put on pants?! Aw, come on!!!
The maître d tried gamely to inform the man and his wife that the restaurant could indeed find a table for them if they insisted, but he suggested it would really be for the best if the man simply went and put on pants. The bird-legged man then attempted a three point turn on the Rascal, in an effort to beat a snail-crawl retreat, while his wife loudly defended her husband’s attire and good name.
WIFE– What’s the matter with what he’s wearing?! I’ve seen people in there wearing rags! Rags!!
We saw the man return later wearing pants, sans scooter.
Sophie’s Escape Room
Last Friday, our friend Belinda Anderson called to see if I and “the kids” wanted to go on a walk with her down at the fish hatchery in White Sulphur Springs. By “the kids” she meant of course the only offspring my wife and I have dared to produce, our three dogs, Sadie, Moose and Maya. I thought it was an outstanding idea, as the past two days had been nice, with temperatures in the 60s for the first time since November. I was also eager to get a look at the fish hatchery, to see how it was rebounding from the devastating flooding in the area last June.
Trouble was, I had a Sophie’s choice to make when it came to “the kids” because I had three dogs and only two leashes.
We actually own three leashes, but the third retractable leash was in the wife’s car, at work, and I couldn’t find so much as a cloth leash in the house. Even if I’d had all three leashes, though, the task of taking our three dogs on a walk with only two human beings present is not one I ever relish. I always wind up having to walk at least two of them, passing Moosie off to Belinda since he’s only 45 pounds of brown obedient dog to deal with. I then have to walk Sadie and Maya, who are 80ish pounds each, don’t really like each other much, and have a tendency to run in opposite directions when they’re not making a braid with Moose’s leash. But, hey, I only had the two leashes, I reasoned, so that meant I had to leave one dog at the house. And since Sadie and Moose have seniority, Maya was have to be the one to get left behind. Not that this makes the job of leaving her any easier. If you leave Maya outside with her shock collar on (her “purty collar”) she just howls and jumps on the car with her huge St. Bernard feet and claws, trying to get in with the others. And if you leave her in the house, she’ll just park herself in the stairwell window and leap on the glass there, potentially tearing down the blinds, while simultaneously rolling huge doggie tears that will break the heart of any dog parents backing out of the driveway, facing her.
Instead, I left her in our bedroom and closed the door. I figured probably have a nap on our bed, maybe do her nails, and really get in some “me” time while we were gone for an hour or so. Then I’d give her extra treats when I got home, take her for a walk down the trail and all would be forgiven. Thusly planned, Sadie, Moose and I left for our walk at the fish hatchery.
An hour or so later we returned to find Maya waiting in the yard.
Er.
This wasn’t good.
Maya being out of the house meant one of three things: A) the wife had come home early, and had let Maya out (not likely, as her car was not in the driveway); B) an intruder had broken in and let Maya out; or C) Maya had somehow managed to escape the locked house on her own. I wasn’t sure which of these options I liked the least.
We know from experience that Maya can get into the house if the doors are unlocked because she knows how to operate the exterior handles of both the back and front doors (one of which normally requires an opposable thumb). However, those doors were both locked, not to mention she’d been left in a closed bedroom the door knob of which she has yet to master. Given her weight, though, I was immediately afraid that she might have managed to break the glass of our floor-length bedroom windows, which are practically door-sized themselves. She had no blood on her, though, so if she broke out she did it cleanly. This would require investigation.
Slowly I unlocked and opened the front door. No intruders killed me. The back door, I saw, was closed and locked and the bedroom door was still in place and closed. I opened it to find that indeed she had gone through a window, just without breaking the glass. What she appears to have done was chosen the one window in the room that is covered by a screen, clawed through that screen and used her weight to force open the window on its track. She could have tried any of the other screenless windows, but, no, she had to go through the one with the screen. The window has two latches, but only the top one was closed. It gave to her force without actually breaking, though. Once it was open enough to squeeze out, she was free. Only later did we discover that she’d also peed all over Sadie’s dog bed, which was directly in front of her escape window.
I was angry, sure, but mostly at the screen being torn. Her escape was otherwise pretty impressive and definitely sent a message that she doesn’t want to be left behind.
When we were about to climb into bed that night, we discovered yet another doggie protest action, one which did not feel good to discover in sock feet: the dog bed directly beneath the window through which Maya had escaped was soaked through with what we can only assume is dog pee. At least, there were no empty 32 oz cups of water handy. And it was Sadie’s bed, Maya’s usual arch nemesis. She probably decided that if Sadie got to go somewhere, at least she wouldn’t have a dry bed to sleep in later. Either that or Maya just really had to go and didn’t quite make it until her escape could be enacted.
The job of replacing the screen has got us in a screen replacement project for the five or so screens our various doggie residents have destroyed over the years. They’re such a pain in the ass to replace, though, that after we did the one Maya tore up, we decided to make it a one-screen-per-day kind of project. Or maybe one a week.
Awful lot of honkies in here.
Things are about to get racial.
For Christmas this year, my wife got me something I’ve been wanting to have for the past several months: an Ancestry.com DNA kit. Now the true reason I wanted one to begin with has more to do with a short story idea I had than any major desire to research into my own genetic background. But, like many of us, I’ve always been curious about what that background might entail.
The first time I voiced my desire to get a DNA kit to her was while watching the TV adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s series Outlander. It’s a show set in Scotland and all the dudes on the show look cool in their kilts. I’ve always wanted to wear a kilt, but wouldn’t dare do so unless I actually had Scottish heritage myself. Otherwise it would be like that time in college when I bought a Rasta hat, only to be asked by a real Rastafarian if I was a believer or just wearing it for the fashion. His question, unfortunately, was my very first clue that the hats were associated with religious beliefs, and that people of that religion might not be too cool with me appropriating it for the sake of fashion. If I was going to go around appropriating Scottish culture, I wanted to at least have my genetic ducks in a row. I announced, during Outlander, that I was going to get an Ancestry DNA kit and if I was anything greater than, say, 10 percent Scottish I would be purchasing a kilt and tartan which I would then wear exclusively, at least until winter.
Unfortunately, I already knew that I was probably not all that Scottish to begin with. From everything I’ve been told, I come from Franco-German stock, with ancestors originating in Alsace Lorraine back when it was part of Germany. But then again, I reasoned, that’s only on my grandpa Fritzius’s side. I know nothing about my dad’s mother’s people, the Blaylocks, nor anything about the genetic history of my mother’s people, the Dunnams and the Huttos. There had also been some rumors of Native American blood somewhere on my Grandma Blaylock’s side–rumors which she always seemed cagey about, and which my dad believed must be true since Grandma was being so cagey about it all. Dad also suspected that we might have some Jewish ancestry woven in there somewhere too, which, considering our alleged European origins, was not beyond the realm of possibility. And the fact that my paternal grandparents vehemently denied this as a possibility only served to make the rumor seem stronger. As much as I longed for Scottish heritage, I was also completely okay with Native American or Jewish heritage. Or a combo of the three would be even better.
The wife ordered my DNA kit, which arrived just in time for Christmas. The kit basically involved spitting into a little plastic tube, pouring some spit fixer in after it, and shakin’ it up but good. (The downside, for me at least, was that in order to get a solid DNA sample, I had to refrain from consuming anything but water for an hour or so before the test–lest I turn up as genetically descended from a Dorito.)
As per instructions, I put the tube of fixed spit in their postage paid package, filled out my info online, and sent it off. Immediately, I began dreaming of the exotic lands my people may have come from. I didn’t actively start shopping for kilts, or anything–cause I’d first need to know my clan tartan, and all–but I could always dream. I was looking forward to receiving my results, all spelled out, with no actual research required on my part. After all, I spent a goodly number of years working in a public library in which I devoted more than a little bit of time ridiculing Genealogy People. In case you’ve not encountered any or are not one yourself, Genealogy People are folks, usually in their 70s, who frequent libraries looking for local records that will lead them to their ancestors, or who use library computers to sign in to their Ancestry.com accounts to do such leg work. To a person, Genealogy People are completely unafraid of accosting library staff, or anyone else who has the misfortune to venture into their proximity, and going on and on and on at extraordinary length about the mind-numbingly boring details of all of their research. I once had to gnaw off my own leg to escape such an encounter. God love `em for having a hobby and being passionate about something in life, but I refuse to become a Genealogy People.
Over the following weeks, Ancestry.com would send emails apologizing that my results were taking so long. They said they were completely backed up with spit vials from the Christmas rush and were getting to mine as quickly as they could. They would then further tease by offering to let me research surnames on their site so I could get a head start. I toyed around with this, trying very hard not to get excited about any of it, lest I catch the dreaded and fearsome Genealogy People virus. I did note that there were some Dunnams who’d turned up in census data in Scotland, but they were not necessarily ones related to me specifically. I’d have to do actual research, or get a full Ancestry.com membership to see if someone else had already done the research, before I could know any of that. If you thought about it, though, regardless of where the Dunnams, Huttos, Blaylocks, or Fritziuses were known to have lived, I could be partly anything, really. There were a good number of generations and a couple of continents between my grandpa’s Alsace Lorraine ancestors and today, with four contributing genetic donors for each successive soul along my genetic line. I might be part African, for all I knew–though my wife took particular glee in shooting down that likelihood. I was hoping for something that at least seemed exotic and distant. The possibilities were intoxicating.
“Ooh! Ooooh!” I exclaimed one night, while we were watching an episode of Vikings.
“You’re not a Viking!” the wife shouted, immediately guessing what I was about to say.
“You don’t know!”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “They’re all big, blond and Nordic looking. You’re short, dark, and stumpy.”
“There were stumpy Vikings, too!” I said. “I’d be a kick ass stumpy Viking. You’ve seen all those long boats I made in the garage!”
She refused to entertain the idea, nor to fetch me any mead.
The notes from Ancestry not containing any of my results continued on for weeks. Then, they sent another note still not containing my results but which said they were at long last actively working on them. And a week later they sent another note saying that they’d finished my results and would soon be revealing them to me, just not in that particular email.
A few days later, I was rudely awakened by my wife at the crack of 7:30. She’d been reading her iPad in bed, had checked her email, and saw that my genetic results were finally in. I blearily roused, squinting at the screen where a pie chart had popped up showing me the spectrum of my genealogy.
Turns out, I’m mostly just a white guy.
Yep.
Bout as white as they come, in fact.
It seems my ancestors primarily hale from darkest Great Britain, to the tune of around 40 percent. (Your average native Great Britainer is around 60 percent, so I’m in the genetic ballpark.) Initially I was excited about this. After all, Scotland is a part of the UK. Looking at their colorized map, though, the darkest of my tiered color ranges largely excluded Scotland and Wales, which fall in the next lighter shade down (as are the Netherlands and a chunk of France). I’m 27 percent Irish, which means I can get 27 percent of a Celtic tattoo and will forever more be compelled to have a shot of Jameson with my Guinness when I’m down at the local Irish Pub. What was a surprise to me is that I’m only 13 percent Western European, with Alsace Lorraine smack in the middle of the map there. I’m also around 9 percent from the Iberian Peninsula, which centers out on Spain and Portugal. Who knew? I’ll take it.
Oh, and I was delighted to learn that I’m approximately 6 percent Scandinavian, and two percent Finnish/Western Russian, so all my stumpy-legged Viking longboats may yet come in handy. I’ll sail down the Greenbrier and pillage Alderson, or something.
In the less than 5 percent genetic estimate range, I’m apparently 1 percent Greek and/or Italian, 1 percent Eastern European, and, in point of fact, I do appear to be 1 percent African. North African, to be general, with a possible origin spread across Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and maybe the edge of Libya thrown in. That’s how genetics works, right? I’m 1 percent from all of those places.
What I am apparently NOT: I’m 0 percent from anywhere else in Africa, 0 percent European Jewish, 0 percent Pacific Islander, 0 percent middle Eastern, 0 percent anywhere in South America, and 0 percent Asian (except for 1 percent that they say originates from Caucasus, which I think is where they invented white people, so I guess that gives me bonus honky points).
All in all, I guess I’m happy with my results. It is odd to think that I’m not nearly as French and German as I had assumed I would be, but I’ll take Great Britain. Some of my favorite things in the world come from there anyway, from Doctor Who to Neil Gaiman to Douglas Adams and Monty Python. If that’s my heritage, I guess I’m in good company. I still would have liked a more specific tie to Scotland, but if that’s to be determined I’ll likely have to join up with Ancestry and do some actual research. And then I’ll be dangerously close to becoming a genealogy person, and will soon be blogging exclusively about it. Maybe I’ll save it for my 70s.
EPISODE 01 redux: “…to a Flame”
The Mothman of West Virginia is reported to be a winged creature, the size of a man, but w
ith glowing red eyes. It was reportedly witnessed on multiple occasions around the area of Point Pleasant, W.Va., during the 1960s and has been reported around the world since. An ominous creature, its presence often seems to portend doom for those who see it.
When Virgil Hawks shoots one behind his tool shed, he knows the portents for his own future aren’t good. He seeks help from the one man he can trust… his good buddy Jeff.
This podcast adapts the short story “…to a Flame” found in the collection A Consternation of Monsters as well as the unabridged audiobook of the collection.
DOWNLOAD: Episode 01 redux: “…to a Flame”
ASSOCIATED BLOG ENTRIES
EPISODE 00: Foreword (REDUX 21)
The Consternation of Monsters Podcast is an ongoing project, adapting and excerpting a few of the stories found in the short story collection A Consternation of Monsters as well as the unabridged audiobook of the collection.
While many of these stories have been featured in the previous iteration of this podcast from 2015, this redux edition will feature new stories, new live readings and stage play adaptations, as well as excerpts from the official unabridged audiobook of the collection now available through Amazon.com, iTunes, and Audible.com.
This EPISODE 00 features the foreword to the book by noted paranormal radio host Rik Winston.
DOWNLOAD: Episode 00: Foreword
Associated Blog Entries
A Consternation in Audio Book
Upcoming Sightings & Appearances
Eric is making signing and speaking appearances to promote A Consternation of Monsters. (He also occasionally does some acting.) You’ll find those appearances and roles here.
February 2-4, 2017– (Greenbrier Valley Theatre, Lewisburg, W.Va) Eric will be directing The Magic of Niagara by playwright Margie Semilof, and will be acting in Barrage from the Garage by Dan Borengasser, as part of the 2017 New Voices Play Festival.
March 23-26, 2017– (Longwood University, Farmville, Va.) Eric’s short play Fargo 3D will be produced as part of Longwood University’s 0 to 60 Ten Minute Play Festival.
May 19-20, 2017– (Pocahontas County Opera House, Marlinton, W.Va.) Eric will be directing the full length play The People at the Edge of Town by A.J. DeLauder, for the Pocahontas Drama Workshop’s May production.
May 11-13, May 18-20, May 25-27, 2017– (Madlabs Theatre, Columbus, Ohio) Eric’s short play Fargo 3D will be produced as part of the three week long 18th Annual Madlab Theatre Roulette festival. It will be performed during one night of the festival per weekend (May 13, 18, 26 at 8 p.m.) and during the 21-play complete roulette run on May 27.
On Free Passes and Places in France
The wife and I were lying in bed last night, talking about Lenny Kravitz, as you do. She noted that for all nearly 17 plus years of our marriage Lenny’s been in a pretty high position on her Celebrity Free Pass list and how sad it was that he’s been entirely unaware of it.
“Dear Lenny,” she began composing aloud. “Too bad, so sad, that you could have been doing dirty dirty things to me for all these years. Also too bad that Nicole Kidman had to go and ruin you and make you cut off your dreads and now it’s far too late,” she continued. “Maybe,” she added. “P.S. I saw your wiener when it fell out of your pants during that concert in France, or England, or wherever it was.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was in France,” I said. “Cause I heard there’s this place in France where naked ladies dance. And the men all walk around with their dingdongs hanging down.”
I waited for the burst of laughter from her side of the bed at my brilliantly-constructed joke. It was not forthcoming. “Come on!” I said. “That was a nice piece of business.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“You don’t get it? You’ve never heard the song?”
I then began to sing for her a verse of one of the oldest songs in my repertoire, sung to a tune that is over 160 years old, it turns out: “’There’s a plaaaace in Fraaaance where the naked ladies dance, and the men walk around with their dingdongs hanging down.’”
“Nope. Never heard it.”
“That’s too bad, cause if I had told that joke to anyone I knew in the 4th grade, it would have gone over like gangbusters.”
“What are gangbusters?”
Actual Conversations Heard at an Actual CVS Photo Counter
(Upon receiving our new passport photos.)
THE WIFE: This is awful. I look like an ax-murderer.
ME: I look like a bored ax-murderer.
THE WIFE: (Looking at my picture) Yeah, they’re not even letting you on the boat.
Awsomegang interview
I did an interview a while back with the website Awesomegang.com. You can check it out at this LINK.
This made my week! (And my week needed making)
Here are the finalists for Longwood University’s 0 to 60 Ten Minute Play Festival:
Cupid’s Beau by Babs Lindsay
Raghead by Tom Coash
The Wedding Night Tweets by Daniel Guyton
Santa Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Patrick Gabridge
Fargo 3D by Eric Fritzius
Superiority Complex by Jack Karp
The Ben Folds Experience in 20 Year Increments (Sorta)
On June 8, 1996, Ben Folds Five was to play the New Daisy Theater in Memphis, TN. I was working in college radio at the time and our station had been given a supply of free tickets. Unfortunately, I had no car. Fortunately, I had several friends who did, so I proposed we all make a road trip to Memphis to go see the show.
My experience at WMSV (91.1 FM) out of Mississippi State University, from 1994-1997, was a formative one. Not only did it finally allow me the experience of being a DJ (which had been a longstanding dream of mine since being told by multiple people in 1989 that my voice would lend itself to a career in it), but it exposed me to a lot of music I would never have heard otherwise. It helped shape my musical taste to a large degree.
I was already a kid who was more at home with Paul Simon than Poison, but getting force fed a steady diet of Live, Dave Matthews Band (and a few years before the rest of the country had heard of them), Ani DiFranco, Barenaked Ladies, Moxy Fruvous, Sarah McLachlan, Phish, the Eels, Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne, Jason Falkner, Primus, Trout Fishing in America, the Subdudes, Taj Mahal, October Project, Ben Folds, and so many others, helped refine my musical taste and send me off in different directions. Most of these acts seem like no-brainers now, but at the time I’d never heard of most of them, nor, in many cases, had much of the rest of the country.
Now Ben Folds and his band the Ben Folds Five went on to have some top 40 hits in the later 90s, but in 1995, with their debut album, they were new to the national scene. I can even recall the first time I played a song by them, which I believe was their song “Philosophy.” It was a revelation to me because it sounded like the guy who used to do the old Kleenex Says, Bless You jingles from a decade earlier was now writing awesome rock music using primarily piano, bass, and drums. (For the record: not the same guy.) Also the fact that they were called Ben Folds Five and there were only three members in the band was something I found superbly charming. I played the ever-loving-snot out of that CD on the air. In fact, I played songs from it so much that Ben Folds Five began to encroach upon the play numbers of my standard regular overplayed airshift band, They Might Be Giants. “Philosophy” was my favorite song on the album, but “Underground” came a close second, and “Best Imitation of Myself” probably third. Folds and the band had a definite sound that I had heard nowhere else.
So when, in 1996, I heard they were going to be playing at the New Daisy, it seemed a done deal that I would be there to see the show. After all, we’d done a similar road trip with folks from the station–spearheaded by our fearless leader and general manager, Steve Ellis–back in December of `94, to see Milla Jovovich and Toad the Wet Sprocket. (Yes, THAT Milla Jovovich. Check out her album, The Divine Comedy. It’s good stuff.) The only difference was that this road trip wouldn’t be a university sanctioned event, and we’d have to carpool it rather than ride in an official MSU van. It would be awesome! And it was free!
I got no takers.
Nope.
Nary a soul among my crew of nerd herd friends seemed at’tall interested in attending Ben Folds Five in concert.
So we stayed put in Starkpatch, ate pizza, and probably watched old episodes of Red Dwarf instead.
Now, I didn’t know this until this morning, but it turns out that our staying put was probably a good thing. Apparently the concert had to be cancelled. One site I found which reprinted old newsgroup posts noted that someone in the bad had gotten sick and they had to postpone the concert indefinitely. So this puts the resentment I’ve held toward my friends at this missed opportunity in a bit of a different light for me. It would have been awkward to have made that journey only to learn there was no concert at all. We would have been left with no recourse but to consume our weight in barbecue and craft beer. Yeah, that would have been a terrible time.
I kept up with Ben Folds Five after college, as I have many of the college radio bands I became a fan of back then. My favorite album of theirs is probably The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, which I hold is a masterpiece, though it was a critical and commercial failure at the time. The band broke up not long after its release and it took a few years before Ben began releasing his amazing solo work, with Rockin’ the Suburbs. I’ve picked up most everything since, though I’ve not yet delved into all of the side projects he’s done, such as The Bens, or quite all of his work with William Shatner.
After a semi-bitter 20 year wait, I finally got to see Ben Folds in concert last week when he played at the Clay Center in Charleston, sans the Five. In fact, the tour was called Ben Folds and a Piano.
I got to town a little early because I wanted to check out Lost Legion Games & Comics, the Rifleman, a comic store on the south west side of town. It’s the parent store to the one I used to go to in Princeton, but I’d never visited it. Turned out to be a great shop and very busy for a Thursday night. My plan was to next head back down town to Graziano’s Pizza. Unfortunately, there seemed to be some sort of parade or gathering of marching bands and ROTC kids going on near the comic shop and this had brought traffic to a halt. It didn’t look like anyone was going to clear out any time soon, so I decided to stay. The Happy Days Cafe was next door to Lost Legion and they had an open-faced meatloaf sandwich on special with mashed potatoes and gravy as a side. I asked if they would substitute french fries for the mashed potatoes, but keep the gravy–as gravy fries are one of my all time favs. They were spectacular.
Traffic jam having passed, I headed over to the Clay Center for Ben’s concert, which was also spectacular and nearly everything I could have asked for in a Ben Folds show.
Nearly.
After the first song, Ben talked to the crowd a bit, noting that half of his family comes from West Virginia. He wasn’t sure from where exactly and was awaiting a text reply from his father to find out. But he said that between his relatives from WV and NC his redneck street cred was pretty strong. It made such lyrics as “my redneck past keeps nipping at my heels” from “Army” ring even more true.
The concert was wonderful. Ben talked between most of the songs, telling stories–sometimes song origins and sometimes funny stories that resulted from songs–and being the personable dude I’ve heard in his appearances on podcasts like Nerdist and Adam Carolla. He even enlisted audience participation, such as having us do four part harmony in the bridge to “Bastard.” Then, after an audience member shouted out a request early on, Ben noted that we were welcome to shout out whatever we wanted to, but he was going to stick to the set list on his paper. However, we should stick around, cause at the middle of the show shit was going to get crazy. And he was not wrong.
Just before the last song of the first half of the concert, he explained that during intermission we were all welcome to go into the lobby where we would be given sheets of paper upon which we could write our song requests. We were then welcome to fold those pieces of paper into airplanes and, upon the resumption of the concert, we would be invited to launch them at the stage and Ben would play the rest of the concert based on those suggestions.
Unfortunately, I could not find paper in the lobby. Everyone was walking around with multiple pieces of it, but I couldn’t locate the central paper distribution point. I could have asked someone, sure, but that involves communicating with humans. I figured it would be fine even if I didn’t get paper, since there was no way the song I wanted to request, “The Luckiest,” wasn’t going to be requested by multiple other people. Chances were high it would be sung. Also, my seat was far enough back that there was no way I could engineer a paper airplane that would make the journey to the stage without some added ballast to carry it. (My seat mates caught a glimpse of the mailing tube my recently purchased Ben Folds tour poster came in and thought for sure I had a brought some kind of paper airplane bazooka. In retrospect, I could have used the poster to make the biggest paper airplane in the room, which would have certainly drawn the attention of Mr. Folds. It would also have cost me $30 to do it, but how awesome would that have been?)
Ben came back from intermission and gave us the countdown for the launching of the planes. Maybe ten percent actually made it to the stage. Many immediately nose-dived back into the crowd. There followed much relaunching and re-relaunching until more had made it. True to his word, Ben played the rest of the show from the request planes, including a few songs that weren’t even his to begin with. He did a great version of “Tiny Dancer,” a song he had learned for some concerts he’d done with Elton John in Australia. Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” he claimed to know not even a little of, then played a respectable version that he just made up lyrics to as he went. Then Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire” was requested, which one of Ben’s crew said he’d played once before. He didn’t know the lyrics, though, so he just sang phonetic gibberish for the whole thing and it sounded perfect. And, of course, someone had to request Ben’s beautifully arranged cover version of Dr. Dre’s rap song “Bitches Ain’t Shit” from his Magnum Opus album The Chronic. With a title like that you can probably guess the Joseph Campbell Heroes Journey it’s going to take you on. If anyone there was shocked at the first verse, they were probably even moreso by the second, which around another third of the audience sang in unison without Ben’s vocal assistance. (He explained that he doesn’t like to sing that verse, probably due to all the racial slurs, so he was going to let us do that. I was not among the “us,” though, because I don’t have it memorized and am pretty sure that’s a good thing.) I imagine there were those present who were shocked by the content of the song, regardless of the beauty of the melody. Some might have even wondered why Ben would have covered it in the first place. I think the Village Voice sums it up nicely: “The greatest way to show up musical misogyny for the absurd bullshit that it is, is to break it down into a ballad and have it gently sung by a charming nerd. Here Ben Folds takes a super-sexist, curse-laden track, flips it on its head and makes Dr. Dre look like an idiotic buffoon. What’s more, taking gangsta speak and enunciating it like a middle-class white guy is always going to be comedy gold…” And comedy gold it was, even if not everyone in the audience was in on the joke.
At one point during the second half, I thought my unlaunched request for “The Luckiest,” was going to be played when Ben picked an airplane featuring a short letter from a girl in the audience. She wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, that she didn’t want to be the typical white girl who requests “the Luckiest” but she was attending the show with her man who wanted her to feel like the luckiest woman there. So Ben used the content of that letter as lyrics for a song he improvised on the spot. I figured that he’d just blend that beautiful and funny tune right into “The Luckiest” afterward. Nope. He’d honored the letter of the request and moved on–probably confident that it would turn up in a future airplane. Sadly, it did not.
It was a great show. And when Ben returned to the stage for the encore, he announced that he’d received a reply from his father and that his family was from Webster county, which is about as hinterlands as hinterlands go in this state. His final song was the aptly chosen “Army.” Once again, his redneck past keeps nipping at his heels.
The “Weird Al” Experience in 31 Year Increments
On September 2, 1985, 31 years ago, I turned 13. In addition to becoming a teenager, I became a man. A giant nerd man. Why? Because it was for that birthday that I got to see “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert for the first time.
His breakout album, In 3D, had only been released the previous year, ramming his “Beat It” parody, “Eat It,” into the ears of popular culture. I never purchased the album–at least not with money. Instead, I traded a cassette of it from my friend Bo. I forget what he got out of the deal. Probably some comic books. But I got the better end of the bargain, for In 3D was a towering achievement to my 12-year-old brain.
“Eat it” might have been the most famous song from the album, but it was loaded with greatness. I wasn’t always even familiar with the songs and artists he was parodying, but it definitely put those artists on my radar when later I would hear “The Safety Dance” (“The Brady Bunch”) or “Our Love’s in Jeopardy” (“I Lost on Jeopardy”) or “King of Pain” (“King of Suede”). 
It also introduced me to the concept of stylistic parody, where Al did not parody a specific song by an artist, but parodied the style of the artist instead. “Buy Me a Condo” was a basic Bob Marley reggae, without parodying a specific song. “Mr. Popeil” is a brilliant sendup of the B52s–a realization that only hit me this year when it got stuck in my head one day and I had to stop down and try and recall who it was parodying. It’s so obvious now. Sadly, I didn’t know who the B52s were in 1984 and wouldn’t for another five years. But maybe my favorite song on the album was the final track, an epic five minute long rock tale of about a horror movie called “Nature Trail to Hell.” The song, I think, is a general parody of heavy metal music–possibly with an eye in the direction of Black Sabbath. Funny thing, though: because the cassette listed all the songs on the album at the bottom, and because of “Nature Trail to Hell” featured the word HELL prominently, and because we were Southern Baptist, I knew there was no way I could ever play that song in my dad’s presence. I also decided to manage his inevitable unhappiness with my listening material by “accidentally” spilling green metallic paint pen ink all over the bottom of the cardboard insert. In retrospect, I could have achieved the same effect by spilling it on the clear plastic cassette cover.
While my dad would have had a negative reaction to his son listening to songs with the word HELL in the title, all I really needed to do to counteract this was let him listen to the other songs, which I did. And thereafter he was a Weird Al” fan too. When Al was going to appear on the Tonight Show in July of `85, I got to stay up and watch it. I wondered what song he would do. Probably “Eat It,” but maybe “Rocky XIII,” I thought. What I didn’t realize in that moment, though, was that Al had a new album out, that was only a month old, called Dare to Be Stupid, and the song would be from that. He came out, with his Stupid Band (as were called) and did a parody of a song by the Kinks’ I was unfamiliar with then called “Lola.” Al’s version was the now classic “Yoda.”
I lost my damned mind. Not only was Yoda one of my favorite fictional characters, the cleverness of the song just fractured my 12-year-old funny bone. I told EVERYONE about it. (And forever after, whenever I heard “Lola” on the radio I was disappointed, because it wasn’t as good as “Yoda.”)
DIGRESSION: Okay, I just went and looked up the lyrics to “Lola” to see if it was as nonsensical as I remember. WOW! That song’s about things 12-year-old Eric didn’t realize it was about and 44-year-old Eric is shocked it took him this long to realize it. Don’t let the weak-sauce spell-singing put you off as it did me. That song’s both layered and in-your-face all at the same time. Pretty impressive, Ray Davies!
Turns out I only thought I lost my mind then. Not too long later, I learned that “Weird Al” would be appearing in concert on the Mississippi State University campus, scant miles from my house, and BOOM it was gone again.. Not only that, but the concert would be in early September, just in time for my 13th birthday. Dad said that not only could I go, but I could have a sleepover party and invite all my friends to go as well. Why the heck not? The concert was free!
The concert was in a big open grass space in front of Frat Row on the Mississippi State campus–an actual amphitheater is located there now, but in those days it was just open space. We got there extra early, because it was all lawn seating so we needed to get a good spot. Then we abandoned this idea to instead go hang out near Al’s tour bus in the hope of getting a glimpse of him as he ran to the stage. And after much waiting, out he flew and we were mere feet away from “Weird Al” himself. Then we booked it back around front, as close as we could get for the concert.
The concert was everything I wanted it to be. He played lots of stuff from In 3D, but also a good mix from Dare to Be Stupid. (This isn’t from memory. I found his set list online.) And there I was, with fingers crossed and prayers uttered, that one of the new songs would be “Yoda.” But he finished out his set without it, and he and the Stupid Band left the stage.
Being a fairly new concert goer at that point in life so I didn’t know much about encores. (I’d been to some gospel and contemporary Christian shows and about five Tammy Wynette 4th of July concerts in Malden, MO, but I somehow didn’t know from encores.) But everyone stayed put and continued to clap and cheer until Al took the stage again and finally graced us with “Yoda.” And I lost my damn mind again. It was one of the most satisfying things I’d experienced in my life to that point. Before leaving, I purchased one piece of Al memorabilia, a “Weird Al” button.
Cut to this past summer, when I learned that Al would be playing the Clay Center in Charleston, W.Va., a scant 112 miles from my house, as part of his Manditory Fun tour. As soon as tickets went on sale to the public, I was on their website. The wife, unfortunately, could not come with as her new job didn’t let her out until 6p, leaving us not much time to get to Charleston by show time. She liked “Weird Al” well enough, but is not the life long fan she agree to marry nearly 17 years ago. As much as I regretted the wife not getting to go, running solo meant I could buy a better seat because the only ones we could have gotten together were in the far back. I picked an aisle seat, midway back from the stage. Turned out to be a good choice.
Cut to last night. I turn up to Charleston, eat some excellent pizza at Graziano’s down town, and make it to the theatre. I hung out in the lobby for a while, looking at all the other tubby white guys with facial hair. Some people wore aluminum foil hats. Some–I believe the ones who had been to the special Al signing beforehand–wore red revolutionary berets. Some people were dressed as the Amish, I presume either as costumes related to Al’s Amish Paradise, or perhaps the real Amish are just fans. Regardless, I saw more than one instance of other attendees being extra polite to those dressed like the Amish, which amused me.
I went to find my seat, but went down the wrong corridor and wound up behind the box seats. I turned around and went back, moving past some nice wooden wall-paneling in the process, then found the left rear entrance to the theatre, which led to my seat.
The show began with the band taking the stage as “Fun Zone,” an instrumental track from UHF, played. Then a screen lit up above the stage and Al could be seen walking out of one of the other smaller theater spaces at the Clay center and into a hallway, singing his “Happy” parody “Tacky” to camera. As he moved down the hall and into another lobby area, I began to recognize some of the guts of the Clay Center building itself. I’ve performed there on a couple of occasions before and have been all through it. Then I saw a familiar looking area with steps leading up to box seats and then the familiar wood paneling of the corridor leading there and knew Al was approaching the lobby of the main theatre itself. I think I was one of the first people to turn around and see him come in the back doors of the theatre on my aisle, the camera man and cable tech moving just ahead of him. Once again, Al passed within mere inches of me on his way to the stage. Part of me wished that I’d taken a picture or even video of that, but the rest of me told that part of me to shut up and enjoy the moment. I’m sure the moment was captured by one of the 300 other phones being aimed at Al anyway. That wasn’t going to be the only brush with Al of the evening, though.
The concert was spectacular though, much like when I was a 13-year-old, I was often unfamiliar with the music being parodied, now due to the fact that I simply don’t listen to the radio. And between many of the songs were intermissions featuring video of Al from other media throughout his history, such as his appearances on the Simpsons, Scooby Doo, My Pretty Pony, etc., or clips from the ALTV takeovers of MTV. Usually these would thematically lead into the next song, and gave he and the band time for some pretty impressive costume changes, including into a fat suit for “Fat.” One of the intermissions featured a very funny ALTV interview with Eminem as the lead in to “Word Crimes,” which may be my new favorite Al song ever. But it was his song “Wanna B Ur Lovr” that brought him out in a sleazy pimp outfit, then down into the aisle again, where he proceeded to sing directly into the faces of a number of ladies, climbing onto the seats on occasion to gyrate in character. He continued on up the aisle, singing to ladies along the way, until he past my seat again and began singing cheek to cheek at the girl directly behind me. And she could not have wanted the attention less. Which he sensed. So he kept coming back to her with perfect comic timing. Every time she thought he was finished, he would press his microphone between their faces and sing away again. It was fabulous.
The songs were great and a nice mix of classic and current. And even old standards like “Eat It” were spruced up a bit by being sung in the acoustic style of an MTV Unplugged concert, complete with candles.
Al ended the evening with “Amish Paradise,” said some slow goodbyes and left the stage James Brown style. (Though, unfortunately, not with the accompanying “Living with a Hernia” which would have made me even happier to see.) The crowd stood and chanted “Weird Al! Weird Al!” until at last his band filtered in, dressed in Jedi accouterments. Then a variety of storm troopers, what looked like a female Jango Fett and Darth Vader himself filed out as backup dancers for Al in Jedi robes, singing “The Saga Begins.” And this, of course, led right into “Yoda” which made the 13 year-old-boy inside me lose his damn mind all over.
Horribly True Redesign
I’ve had this WordPress version of my website for a couple of years now, and it’s gone through some alterations here and there. At one point I’d had a theme that allowed me to conveniently organize my 40 plus Horribly True Tales in a manner that allowed for easy navigation. You could see all of the HTT title displayed in one place, giving you a better idea of what they were about rather than having to scroll through page after page as if they were originally written as blog entries.
Recently, my sister-in-law and biggest Horribly True Fan of all time, Amber, requested I do a reading of one of the stories. And when I went to try and find one I could barely make any sense of how to find the one I was looking for. Not sure what happened, but somewhere along the way one of my redesigns inconveniently ditched the convenient all titles on display feature.
So I’ve added them all back on the main Horribly True Tales page. There you’ll find list of all of the tales in reverse chronological order. (I’d love to have some sort of widget that would allow me to make them sortable, but so far my coding skills have not allowed this.)
Furthermore, let it be hereby noted that during a recent spelunking session into the depths of my hard drive, I found a handful of previously unpublished horribly true tales in draft form. Most are in pretty good shape already, but did not see publication for various reasons. I have also located a number of Horribly True Tale worthy stories I’d written for previous blogging efforts, some of which involve lost tales of our dogs, that I plan to publish as well. And, as if that weren’t enough, there’s a horribly true Alaska tale or two to come as well.
SO keep your eyes on this space for all new/old horribly true material.
Sightings and Workshops
September 17, 2016– (Sydenstricker Cabin on the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Museum) Eric will be conducting a workshop on memory mining for fiction to take place at the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Museum. See poster below…
Dream journal
In last night’s dream state, my recent RV trip to Alaska was replayed as a Wes Anderson movie. My mother-in-law, Susan Holloway, was played by Anjelica Huston. Actress Imogen Poots also had a prominent role, except everyone kept calling her Imogen Poots instead of her character’s name, cause it’s just fun to say Imogen Poots. The RV’s interior dimensions did not always match its exterior, which looked like a hand-crafted toy model of a 1960s era Winnebago. And the title of this little road movie kept changing from scene to scene, yet consistently contained the word “Coterie” (as originally used in the brilliant SNL Anderson parody, “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders”).
This is what I get for watching The Royal Tenenbaums and eating pizza after 8 p.m.
Wes Anderson – The midnight Coterie of sinister intruders from MisterB on Vimeo.