Happy Halloweeeeeeeeen!!!
Say cheese.
1 Happy Halloweeeeeeeeen!!!
2 Always a great day.
3 This year in particular.
4 For as far back as I can remember I have told the Heidi Chronz, a name I swiped from Wendy Wasserstein's 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning play called The Heidi Chronicles.
5 I felt it was pertinent to the nature of the DN, the same way The New York Daily News is pertinent to the name of this folderol.
6 So far, so good.
7 I clearly am NOT the New York Daily News any more than I am the author of The Heidi Chronicles. I'm not. Wendy Wasserstein is. My story is unrelated. Wendy Wasserstein is a pro. Go see her stuff. I'm just a guy who has a story to tell. I never even asked for this.
8 I borrowed the name because the name of my "ghost" is Heidi.
9 I have to be quick here. A pink ribbon of highlight just appeared above this piece with all sorts of warnings about errors taking place with the saving and publishing. Blog warnings coming in from the East.
10 They pop in like ghosts, and disappear just as swiftly, although last week they managed to erase my entire night's work.
11 The DN doesn't write itself. It has to go through me.
12 I've often felt that I don't really write this stuff. In some ways I feel I almost have no choice.
13 I consider that interesting.
14 The current "blog" place I'm using is either called "Blogger" or "Blogspot." I'm not really sure, to be honest. The Daily News was the Daily News long before the word "blog" was ever invented. I sometimes consider it the world's first blog, in an effete yet brazen claim that should turn most of the world on its side.
16 So I do this goofy thing in hopes that their hot oatmeal will explode through their noses when I show them something like this:
17 Anybody lookin'?
18 Whew.
19 Where was I?
20 Oh yeah. Getting full of myself.
21 Makes me want to drop everything and do this:
22 Or this:
21 That guy is the best.
22 Where WAS I?
23 Oh yeah. Pink ribbon ready to erase all of this.
24 I don't know about anybody else, but I wish it would snap to it.
25 Nah.
26 It's Halloween, after all, and Heidi time.
27 Beginning at around 8:15 I will tell that classic tale in our Theater, all day 'til two in the afternoon. Needless to say I am a sodden rag.
28 I don't really know how prepared I am, since SO much has happened in the past couple of weeks.
29 It's a little scary, but I'm not too concerned.
30 Because despite all of the evidence to the contrary, I don't believe in ghosteses.
31 A student actually once spelled it that way. Ghosteses.
32 Don't get me wrong. There is plenty of evidence to the other contrary, but until a ghost publicly appears and hands me a million dollars, I'm not going to believe.
33 I figure that's a safe bet.
34 I don't wanna be famous anyway.
35 I never asked for any of this.
36 The greatness, as they say, was thrust upon me.
37 Heidi is my companion. She seems to follow me around. Coincidences beyond all reason happen to me on a daily basis.
38 They always make me smile, for the most part. Sort of like I'm giving a nod to all the spirits that float around, especially this time of the year.
39 It's their big chance. So if they were to get active, I would imagine this time of the year would be their most entertaining.
40 I always felt that there might even be people who either died in or survived the Titanic tragedy perhaps coming in and listening to the stories. It might be upsetting to them, but it might also seem a tribute, a memorial in many respects. Maybe they need to let it be known that this was a tragedy the magnitude of which we can only imagine.
41 I don't know if any of this makes sense, but there is a lengthy part of the Heidi Chronz that concerns itself with the Titanic. For the layperson, I can only say this: I used words of survivors in a one-act I wrote, long ago. I coupled it with research, and even some poetry, candles, masks, music, and sound effects to bring an artistic version of that event to the stage. Each rehearsal turned cold and frightening, each performance ethereal.
42 The story I tell happened long before Leo De Caprio and Kate Winslet.
43 It was the result of a few weeks of immersion and research into that tragedy.
44 It's a long story, and I haven't time to tell it right here.
45 I will try to put it out there once again. It did exist on Geocities, but Geocities blew up and scattered all of its websites and archives to the far reaches of the universe.
46 The story also involves a story about a skit involving Abraham Lincoln, both the real one, and the one who works Main Street in Disneyland. The story involves lots of other things.
47 It brings in very many odd and interestingly impossible coincidences: creaking seats, uncanny electrical coincidences, cold theatres, falling airplanes, and even a raven-like bird that flew into my chamber one Halloween season.
48 It involves a girl named Audi, an old Apple computer spellcheck for the name Heidi.
49 It involves lots of fun things, and it involves things like strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.
50 And I never know exactly what will take place as the day progresses.
51 This year is particulary interesting as I am not only telling the stories all day in the Theater, but I will be doing same outside at the Homecoming Dance on Saturday night, somewhere around 9:30 p.m.
52 This will be my first public "performance" of the story. I consider the other tellings just that: storytelling for my classes.
53 So it is a tad nerve-wracking, particularly when the students who originally found Heidi never liked the circus that eventually came to town every Halloween.
54 My answer to that is simply this: I did ghost stories long before Heidi ever jumped into the mix, and at first I was really skeptical.
55 I did treat it as nonsense.
56 I no longer do.
57 I do respect the possibility that my story could possibly be true.
58 I just could use the million dollars right about now. I would even give part of it to charity, if I wouldn't be sunk in capital gains.
59 Anyway, we are going in today, and I look forward to bringing this incredible saga to light more time.
60 Saturday is pretty strange, but wish me and Heidi lots of luck.
61 The scariest part of the Heidi Chronz is the telling of them.
62 Anyway, I'm going in.
63 We're going in.
64 Have a great weekend.
65 See you again.
66 Peace.
~H~
