I WAS A KINDERGARTEN MONSTER For as long as I can remember, Ive always loved monsters. In December 1976, not four months after I had started kindergarten, a certain magazine reached out to me from the rack at the Sky-City store in Berea, a thing called Famous Monsters of Filmland. The front cover of that issue boasted a beautifully ripe Basil Gogos portrait of Peter Cushing in character as Dr. Van Helsing, executed as only Gogos could, with vibrant strokes of acrylic that made the image seem more alive than any mere photograph. I drove Mom and Dad nuts those next few months, asking them to read the articles to me again and again and again. It was the only time those two were ever at parity with me in terms of monster knowledge. When I taught myself to read sometime in early 1977, they had no hope of closing the gap. Famous Monsters galvanized me. I made up my mind I wanted to devote my entire life to the study and appreciation of monsters. Its a big decision to make when youre 5 years old, but sometimes you just know. Right around that time, I found Moms old castoff peacoat, in a Navy blue so dark it might as well have been black. It was just the perfect size for me to clasp it round my neck to make an ersatz Dracula cape. I wore that thing every single day to kindergarten. I wanted to be Dracula. I wanted all my little friends to see me as Dracula. I told everyone to just ignore the two useless arms dangling off the sides of my wonderful vampire cape. I dont know how many of you remember book-and-record sets. They were illustrated softcover books, sometimes out-and-out comic books, but printed on high quality paper. They were always about 32 pages long, and they came with a small phonograph record, the size of a 45 but designed to be played at 33 1/3. The records narration, music, sound effects, and occasional dialogue matched exactly the text in the book, and children were meant to read along as the record played. Book-and-record sets were a heckuva lot of fun. If ever you owned one, youll no doubt remember that familiar phrase, When you hear the chimes, please turn the page. Well, my great prize in kindergarten was a book-and-record set from Power Records called The Curse of the Werewolf, which featured a spectacular extended cameo by none other than Count Dracula himself. It was a joy to behold and a thrill to hear. I still remember the day I took it in for show-and-tell. You see, every day in Miss Moores class we had a period of structured free time. Four or five students would gather in one area and do an activity or project together. Four or five would gather nearby and do a different activity or project. In this way, 30 children could be kept occupied doing six or seven different things in various corners of the room. Miss Moore and her assistant Miss Merritt—it took two people to handle us lot—finally badgered me into handing over my beautiful book-and-record set to a group of children privileged to be going to the listening corner, where they had access to a school phonograph and a stack of records. I was not so privileged that day. Me, I was held prisoner in a different spot clear on the other side of the room, dropping shaped pieces of wood (squares, stars, triangles) through like-shaped holes. A chimpanzee could just as easily do what I was doing, although a few of my little friends were finding it a pleasant challenge. If I looked through a little gap in the wooden shelves to my left, I could see the kids in the listening corner with their impossibly huge 1976 headphones—the kind that made you look like Yuri Gagarin—sitting in grim-faced silence, purportedly listening to the adventures of Dracula and the werewolf. It was an exquisite torture, wondering if they were doing anything to hurt my book and record while here I was, made to perform like a clever monkey. When at last I was permitted to move, I high-tailed it straight to the listening corner. I looked down at my disc, spinning on the turntable. The tone arm leapt half an inch with each turn of the disc. This was highly abnormal. I put on a fallow pair of headphones and looked around at my little classmates as I listened. They quietly resisted my gaze. Someone had scratched my ding-dang record! And my little friends, stoical or idiotic or both, had been sitting there listening to the same two seconds of audio repeated over and over and over and over, for who knows how long. I snatched up the record and grabbed the book out of this one little girls hands. They had ruined my book and record, absolutely ruined it, and I made good and sure the whole room knew about it. Well, Mikey, said Miss Merritt in her sweetest, gentlest voice, if you dont want your things to get damaged, you shouldnt loan them to others. What logic! Miss Merritt was very alarmed when, later that year, she and I and another small group did a craft project together. Our task was to take those big, rounded, primary-colored safety scissors and cut photographs of fashion models out of glossy magazines, to be pasted onto construction paper in a separate operation. One little girl did a surprisingly careful and intricate job cutting the exact outline of her fashion models, even taking careful heed not to lop off the curls of their hair. I tried to follow her example, but it was just too much. The scissors were much too bulky and unwieldy, the glossy paper too thin and delicate. To Miss Merritts horror, I snip-snip-snipped around nearly the entire outline of my fashion model, then with a last, neat little snip, cut off her head at the neck. Mikey, you cant cut off their heads! She laughed when she said it, and not with amusement. I tried to explain that I was going to come back and tackle the cutting out of the models head separately, an approach I hoped would make the task manageable. But how are you going to get the head and the body back together? Miss Merritt asked, in the softest, sweetest tone of faintly concealed horror I have ever heard to this very day. Just stick em back together and glue em. But you cant stick a girls head back onto her body! Miss Merritt protested. Dr. Frankenstein does, I answered, and went back to cutting with my big green scissors. The greatest outrage of my kindergarten year came right before Halloween, when our schools itinerant Art Teacher—a humorless, heavyset dirty blonde whose name is lost to time—came into the room with colored chalk and black construction paper and terse instructions for us each to draw a spooky graveyard scene. Just about any of my little classmates could make a serviceable tombstone, or draw a crazy tilted wrought-iron fence. But I had really been practicing for this moment, and for a long, long time. I already knew how to make a Dracula figure (replete with cape collar surrounding his face), a Frankenstein, and most especially a mummy, who was easy to draw. Just make a scary-looking dude, then put lateral stripes across his body at uneven intervals. Voila. The mummy. Mine was a beautiful graveyard scene, let me tell you. The piece-de-la-resistance came when I added a beautiful full moon overhead, in bright white-yellow chalk. As a finishing touch, with a light, light hand, I drew wavy wisps radiating off the face of the moon, pleasingly faint on the black paper. What are those? The blowzy blonde art teacher leaned in uncomfortably close over my right shoulder. Thats light coming off the moon, I said. The woman literally harrumphed. The moon doesnt give off light, she said, and would not stay for an answer. Here it is nearly 40 years later, and Im still ticked at that broad. Dracula would never stand for that.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 21:34:13 +0000
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