An Elegant Monster.

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An Elegant Monster.

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An Elegant Monster.

The Halloween Special : 2023

Jd Michaels

Oct 31, 2023

Welcome, Honored Guest…

to my Halloween special. It’s nothin’ fancy, like a 45, a single with two sides.

(…while maintaining accessibility, I must inform you that a great deal of audio elements are involved: so you may want to listen as well!)

First, I’d like to welcome my special guest,
star of stage and screen,
Mr. Vincent Price.

I interviewed Vincent Price in college: I worked for the film studies center, and he came to town, and someone arranged an hour for us to interview him, and because I was from Kansas City (his hometown) I convinced my boss that I should be the one to do it.

He was all kinds of charming, and his voice and tone was so warm that I made the classic error of saying,

“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I’ve known you all my life as a terrifying figure, but you are (and I’m not kidding) about the nicest person I’ve ever met. How did you get into being scary?”

“Well,” he responded, “I think that everyone in the world, no matter who they are, has a scary side. I just let mine out through acting. It’s the difference between this…”

And here he did exactly what you think he would;
He didn’t change the way he was sitting,
he didn’t lean forward,
he didn’t raise his voice… he just said the words,

“…and this.”

I’d like to find that videotape to see how loud I actually yelped. It was over in just a second, and that nice guy was sitting in front of me again. It was the best acting class I’ve ever taken, and it was free, and like, 4 seconds long.

When I say he’s our guest tonight, IN NO WAY do I mean there’s gonna be some awful AI tech involved (yuck); instead Mr. Price visits us from a record album he made in 1958 titled “CoStar”, one of a series of long-playing records where famous actors performed scenes as characters from classic plays, and YOU were supplied a script inside the album cover to act along with them.

It was marketed as a party game, with a variety of very random actors, but in my personal opinion, the two most amazing editions were Tallulah Bankhead, an actress with a voice so singular that it has not yet and may never be equalled (see Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”: even her everyday laugh was EPIC) and that of our special guest, Mr. Vincent Price, with whom (on tonight’s accompanying audio) I will reprise a bit of my high school role of Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”.

Now, my costume.
I stayed up til 1AM “sewing” it together, even though I’m not wearing it.

This year we lost an American composer who defined what I thought a composer was - his style was unmistakable and his range was vast.

I’m not dressing as the composer, goodness me, no: instead I, inspired by a bootleg online video of his 1968 musical, got all inspired to create a song in his style, something that could be sung in the middle of a Broadway show in the middle of a darkened stage, about a STORY, with CHARACTERS, with a further nod to all the songwriters who create happy songs with sad lyrics or sad songs with happy ones (#robertsmith).

So I came up with a whole plot (that I think would actually work for a new Netflix Christmas movie) and then put together this song. The emotionally jaunty 1960’s way-too-frank lyrics filled with sad optimism would be best sung by Dionne Warwick, but I’ll just have to do.

So, for the Halloween Brave-Of-Heart,
I present… this year’s Halloween costume:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Burt Blacharach.

BACHARACH. Sorry! It’s the thematic unity, it gets me every time.

Enjoy your Halloween!

See you soon.

I don’t expect

You to reflect

These feelings.

That’s my burden.

Yet part of me

Craves harmony

The likes of which