MONEYPENNY CASHES IT IN: R.I.P. LOIS MAXWELL (1927-2007)

The spy movie genre has lost one of its most familiar faces with the passing of Lois Maxwell, better known to the general public as the original Miss Moneypenny, wry secretary to 007’s boss, M.

Born Lois Hooker, she changed her name to Maxwell for some inexplicable reason and, after years in entertainment, found screen immortality as the horny office goddess who relentlessly — and fruitlessly — flirted with James Bond while keeping M’s administrative shit together, her invaluable services noted aloud by both 007 and M in 1969’s superb ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE.

Maxwell’s passing is a great downer to those of us in lifelong Bondage, and her life and career will no doubt be covered in far greater detail on other sites, so I’ll leave that to the other fans/geeks. We all know she was in a bunch of the best of the James Bond flicks, appearing in 14 of them from DR. NO (1962) through A VIEW TO A KILL (1985), but my favorite screen appearance of hers was in OK CONNERY (1967, aka OPERATION KID BROTHER and OPERATION DOUBLE 007), one of the legion of 1960’s “spy spoofs” — translation: “James Bond ripoffs/cash-ins” — but OK CONNERY stands unique for its complete and utter shamelessness.


While there were literally dozens of Italian Bond swipes, none of the others had the unmitigated balls to feature Danielle Bianchi (Tatiana Romanova in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE), Adolfo Celi (THUNDERBALL’S arch villain Emilio Largo), and Bernard Lee (the original M), all from the classics of the series’ early days, but the radioactive icing on the cake is star Neil Connery, the talent-free younger sibling of the awesome Sean Connery, whose voice is obviously dubbed by an American actor.

With a plot that basically amounts to the real Bond not being available for a mission against evil organization Thanatos and his martial arts expert/mystic hypnosis master brother called in as a substitute — swear I’m not making this up — the flick is ludicrous enough on its own, but it’s truly hilarious to see a fantastically bad Bond ripoff starring the actual Bond supporting cast members. Maxwell even played a secret agent named Miss Maxwell, for fuck’s sake, but unlike in the straight 007 flicks she got to kick mucho ass with guns, fists, and feet in some of the movie’s several nonsensical fight scenes. Played absolutely straight, OK CONNERY is hands down the funniest of the so-called spy spoofs and is quite lively — most of the Bond clones of the time simply laid there like roadkill, and often stank just as powerfully — but it’s unfortunately not available on DVD (although there are professionally-made copies available on eBay, or so I’ve been told…), not even in the version seen on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 as OPERATION DOUBLE 007 back in 1993. Hopefully that oversight will be remedied soon.

So, rest in peace, Moneypenny. You were one of the last breaths of the pop culture Cold War, and Bond may have just been being a professional in the workplace, but he was a fool not to break off a piece of your good stuff.

SOUND & FURY: KICKASS KID'S ALBUMS OF YORE

Fred Flintstone blackmails his creators with compromising photographs — thereby guaranteeing THE FLINTSTONES perpetual reruns and residuals — while hired muscle Yogi Bear looks on.

Back in the days when I was but a wee Bunche, Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio responsible for THE FLINTSTONES and a slew of cartoons destined to dominate American TV reruns for nearly three decades, put out a series of children's LP's featuring pretty much all of their characters who'd been unleashed up to that time (roughly 1964-1966). My parents gave me several of them and I wish I still had them on vinyl because they're rather rare these days and fetch a high price on the collector's market, plus they had really gorgeous cover art, something you don't see anymore thanks to how fucking tiny CDs are. But it's all good since I found a guy who had damned near all of the HB albums burned to disc and was kind enough to dupe them for me — for an unbelievably small fee — and I'm happy to say that they hold up quite well.

Each LP had performances by the voice actors from the cartoons, as well as the familiar sound effects and music, giving further credence to comments made by HB's detractors who described the company's output as "illustrated radio," but that not-inaccurately-perceived drawback worked in favor of the material when enjoyed sans visuals. Most kids at the time knew who the stars were — although some of them, like Super Snooper, Wally Gator, and Touche Turtle didn't play in syndication by the time I was six, their timeslots now usurped by the first wave of Japanese imports like SPEED RACER and MARINE BOY — so little was required by way of back story and the actors could just drop back into familiar characters and get to do a bit more acting than they normally would in the cartoons because they had to work a little harder to sell the stories since there was no visual accompaniment.

Like anything that's produced as a series, not all of the HB albums were great, a state of quality that had to do with, in some cases, having a dud character to start with and then placing said dud into an uninvolving story. Even as a child I felt some of the albums were disposable and only listened to those once or twice, but there were three that absolutely stayed with me to this very day and are still ranked among my favorite recordings.

1966's ATOM ANT IN: MUSCLE MAGIC is a terrific piece of "illustrated radio" that tells of an invasion from outer space by malevolent giant ants. After an album-side of some hayseed cops and the Air Force failing to repel the invaders, wee Atom Ant is called in by the President and, with his trademark war cry of "Up and at 'em!" (or "atom" if you prefer) exploding from the speakers, the tiny superhero rushes into the fray and kicks ass like nothing I've heard on a children's record before or since (with the notable exception of "Parker, Well Done," in which Lady Penelope and Parker from THUNDERBIRDS pursue a saboteur down a British highway and actually kill the guy by machine-gunning his car off the road to a fiery death in twisted metal). The battle, though aimed at the kiddies, is very exciting and the running commentary provided by the cops — Officers Bo-Diddly and Chief Mildew — is vivid enough to make you think you're seeing it from the sidelines. And then there's the kickass, jazzy re-do of the Atom Ant theme song, this time minus Ted "Lurch" Cassidy's unmistakable vocals, that gets the listener ready for the ass-kicking to come:

He's Atom Ant/that tiny ant
And his atomic power
Has what it takes/and always makes
The vilest villain cower

He's rough! He's Tough!
And bad guys yell, "Enough!"
'Cause he is up and at 'em'
Atom Ant!

Every hero needs a good signature tune, and man, that's some good shit.

Moving away from the superhero stuff we now venture into that most venerable genre in kiddie records, the fairytale, and Hanna-Barbera's LPs retold a shitload of the classics in their own inimitable way. Many of the HB versions merely opted for a retelling rendered by whatever cartoon character was headlining that particular album, and as result the stories were often irritating. But there were a couple of gems among the assembly line product, one of which was the 1965 album of Snagglepuss recounting THE WIZARD OF OZ.

For those of you out there who are too young to know who the fuck Snagglepuss was, he was a flowery, scenery-chewing pink mountain lion in a collar and bowtie...

"Exit, stage left!"

And as queer as that was, the whole effect was compounded by voice-acting veteran Daws Butler performing Snagglepuss as sounding like Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion and a less-nasal Paul Lynde, a delivery that lead some of my mates on the playground to refer to the character as "Faggotpuss." Hey, I always liked Faggotpuss, er, Snagglepuss, because — unlike many in the HB repertory company — he had a discernable personality, so I don't know how I escaped getting the shit beaten of me on a daily basis during second grade.

Daws Butler (1918-1988), the voice of Snagglepuss, as well as Chilly Willy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Elroy Jetson, The Funky Phantom, and many, many more.

Snag's version of the story is a bit of an update on the L. Frank Baum original and it's a boatload of fun thanks to Snagglepuss' languorously fruity storytelling style that practically turns the air lavender, and by a unique rendition of the Scarecrow that re-imagines him as the cleverest retard of all time. Mention must also be made of voice-acting goddess and eternal teenager Janet Waldo.

Janet Waldo, with Sam Edwards during her days on the long-running radio series MEET CORLISS ARCHER (1943-1956).

She's on hand here as Dorothy, but her voice is instantly recognizable to anyone who's seen an Anerican television cartoon in the last forty-some-odd years as Judy Jetson and Penelope Pitstop, a character that she gave voice to as recently as the year 2000 at the age of eighty-two (!!!). Possessed of a voice that perfectly conveys a cute teenaged girl, Waldo conjured up all manner of questionable fantasies when I was a pre-teen — I used to wonder if Judy Jetson's bush was as stark white as the hair on her head, and I know some of you out there did as well — and I still think she sounds sexy as hell when her cartoons air today.

Judy Jetson: does the carpet match the drapes?

But no other HB album shines quite as brilliantly as another 1965 entry, PIXIE AND DIXIE with MR. JINX TELL THE STORY OF CINDERELLA.

Note Cinderella's borderline-delinquent/biker chick look.

Doing the near-impossible, the writers and cast transform what is perhaps the girliest fairytale of them all into an hilariously anachronistic yarn involving Elvis gags, a pumpkin that gets transformed into a souped-up dragster — referred to by the narrator, Jinx the cat, as "a real tool job" — with custom augmentations that would make the Nascar set weep, a rock 'n' roll ball, and a kingdom filled with girls so ugly that Prince Charming, when ordered by his dad to choose a bride, asks his father, "Have seen some of the goons around here?" to which his father thoughtfully replies, "Yeah, son...I see whatcha mean!" The gags fly fast and furious, many of which go right over the heads of the intended audience, and even now I still laugh my ass off when I listen to it. Hands down, this is one of the funniest albums in my collection, and they even had the decency to hold off on the songs until after the story's over; at the end of the tale, Pixie and Dixie — two mice who share the house with Jinx, a living arrangement that allowed for a latter day Tom & Jerry scenario, which is ironic since HB created Tom & Jerry for MGM back in the 1940's and were now essentially ripping off themselves — call Jinx on his obviously bullshitted version of the details in Cinderella's story, after which they throw in a nauseating and girly song about the real story, a tune I listened to exactly once back in 1969 and have skipped ever since.

Yeah, those three HB albums are gold in my book, and one or two of the others have their merits — considering my tastes, how could I not have a soft spot for SQUIDDLY DIDDLY'S SURFIN' SAFARI? —

but the one thing that the majority of them had going on was the previously-mentioned excellent cover art that lured the kids and delighted fans of quality cartoon design. I mean, look at some of these:








If I had all of these in mint condition and sold them for what they fetch on eBay, I could pay my rent for a good three months.

And in closing I would like to single out one HB album in particular for special derision, namely JONNY QUEST IN 20. 000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1966).

Very much a sought-after collector's item thanks to the cult popularity of its excellent source TV series from 1964 — probably the best thing HB ever did — this album bombs because the story is in no way up to the sci-fi/espionage/adventure offerings found in even the weakest episode of JONNY QUEST. It was recorded two years after the series, so Tim "Jonny Quest" Mathieson's voice had begun to deepen, features an overlong and dull version of the show's awesome and classic theme tune, and, worst of all, doesn't include Hadji.

(STUNNED PAUSE)

How the fuck do you have a Jonny Quest story and leave Hadji out of it? That's like making a Fantastic Four movie and excising the Thing, for fuck's sake! It just doesn't work.

Model sheet for Hadji's head, c. 1964. Art by Doug Wildey.

Simply put, this album is a huge disappointment (although the cover looks great hanging on my album wall).

HEAVY HANGS THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN

One of the things I love about trawling the web for idiotic things to discuss on this blog is running across crazy shit totally unrelated to my intended search, yet the random items somehow find me and turn out to be perfect fodder for the Vault. Case in point, while looking for images relating to Black stereotypes, I came across this photo and laughed my ass off:

According to what I could gather from a number of online sources, NIGGER KING is a store in a Taiwan shopping mall that sells hip-hop attire. Considering that the term "nigger" is considered highly offensive in most of the known universe, I find it hard to believe that the geniuses behind this store were unaware of the potential for pissing people off, whether located in Taiwan or not, unless they've been lead to think its use is somewhat acceptable due to its constant use in assorted popular hip-hop recordings. Anyway, it was inevitable that someone would have something to say about it, so the police shut NIGGER KING down until the company decided on a new name:

I swear you can't make this shit up. And as if NIGGAR KING isn't ludicrous enough, there's actually talk of yet another renaming, this time to NAGGER KING. Me, I like the original and wish I could have been photographed in front of the signage, thereby instantly creating a great Christmas card. Oh, well. You snooze, you lose...But then again, there's always the magic of Photoshop!

SHOWDOWN! BARE-KNUCKLE BURLESQUE!!!

Ever a supporter of the lively arts, I'd like to direct you to what looks to be one hell of a show taking place next next weekend on Manhattan's West Side. My pal Kate is one of the masterminds behind this and I can honestly say that I've never failed to have a great time at any of her live events. Seriuosly, the shit's gonna be fun, and filled with wall-to-wall hot chicks! Here's the skinny:


Katherine Valentine, Michelle Juliette Carr and Thirsty Girl Productions present:

The Velvet Hammer Vs. The Va Va Voom Room

SHOWDOWN! BARE KNUCKLE BURLESQUE!!!
Friday October 12th at 9PM!

Hosted by Miss Astrid! Accompanied by Brooks Babyface Hartell & His Orchestra!

The 2 longest-running and most critically acclaimed burlesque shows in the world go head to head to present THE STRIP-OFF OF THE CENTURY!!!

Who’s the winner? You, champ, ‘cause you get to see TWO — count ‘em, TWO — super shows in one!

In the far corner, from the west coast a and points across Europe: the infamous VELVET HAMMER BURLESQUE. Known for their flawless pageants, tributes to the female form in all its glorious variety, the original — all others are imitators!

FEATURING: Valentine Violette, Princess Farhana, and Selene Luna!!!

And in the near corner, from NYC, the show with the hometown advantage: Your den of iniquity for vaudeville and burlesque, THE VA VA VOOM. Often imitated, but never duplicated…the gold standard in sassy, classy laffs and goodtimes!

FEATURING: The World Famous “Bob,” Tigger, and Dirty Martini!!!

Plus many more surprise guests TBA

Tickets $20 in advance, $25 at the door

When: Friday October 9th at 9PM
Where: The Zipper Room
336 West 37th Street (between 9th & 10th Avenues)
Tickets available through www.thezipperfactory.com
Or call (212) 382-3101

DON'T MISS THE RUMBLE IN THE CONCRETE JUNGLE! ACT NOW! THIS SHOW WILL NEVER BE REPLICATED!

So what are ya waiting for? I'll definitely be in attendance, so join me for some drinks, some laffs, and help me root for the home team! Fuckin' Left Coast wannabes, encroaching on our Yankee bump & grind territory...

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM LISZTOMANIA (1975)

After recently reading a biography and overview of the works of British director Ken Russell , I was consumed with a longing to once more sit through my favorite of his loony filmic catalogue, the much-maligned LISZTOMANIA (1975), but after some research I found out that it's not available on DVD in the States. Luckily for me I know of a terrific source for "gray market" DVDs, and they had the film, albeit a transfer from a pan-and-scan VHS tape, so I watched it again and laughed my ass off with — and at — its glorious and schoolboy-vulgar excesses.

Playing fast and loose with the life of classical composer Franz Liszt, LISZTOMANIA is a cornucopia of visual insanity and extremely questionable taste featuring a shitload of stuff that will either offend or amuse the moviegoer. I mean, how can you not love something as ludicrous as Ringo Starr playing the Pope?

Or how about Yes keyboardist (and the film's scorer) Rick Wakeman as Wagner's Sigfried in a Marvel Comics Thor getup?

And, speaking of things Wagnerian, how about the buck-nekkid Rhine Maidens worshipping Das Rheingold that happens to looked like a huge, gold-tipped dick?

That's pretty good, but LISZTOMANIA is infamous for a much more outrageous bit of phallic folderol.

During the course of the story, Franz Liszt — played by the donkey-faced frontman for the Who, Roger Daltrey — symbolically sacrifices his womanizing ways for the patronage of Princess Carolyn (Sarah Kesselman). The princess greets him in a room supported by gilded dick-pillars,

and once he agrees to the bargain things go balls-out Russellian and in no time Liszt, in a dress no less, gets sucked up the princess' vagina by wind-tunnel-velocity gusts.


Once inside this titanic pussy, Liszt is assaulted by a chorus line of former lovers, each decked out in goofy burlesque costumes.

The girls tear and claw at Liszt, who whips a harp from out of nowhere and goes into his "Orpheus" schtick, a move that soothes their savage breasts and inspires them to summon out his trouser snake with a sweet siren's song. Their lilting calls yield totally unexpected results as Liszt's member expands and expands,


finally ending up at a length of about ten feet.

As rinky-dinky "pee-anny" music blares on the soundtrack, Liszt cackles like a fucking madman and proudly slaps his monstrous bacon bazooka in time to the music, occasionally treating the stunned audience to the old "fist-up" erection gesture.

He then kindly gives the ladies a ride on the mighty baloney pony,

after which the choreography changes gears and turns into a phallocentric Busby Berkely number wherein Liszt bobs his pecker up and down between the legs of his spread-eagled harem,

before obligingly letting the women dance a merry maypole around his engorged man-root.

But all good things must eventually come to an end, and the girls use the maypole ribbons to drag a loudly-protesting Liszt to a guillotine wherein his kielbasa will be sacrificed, the pillory through which his behemoth boner will be thrust framed by the splayed thighs of a now demonic and bat-winged Princess Carolyn (I particularly like the inverted crucifix pasted to her crotch).

It's a pretty delirious sequence, but it pales in comparison to the film's finale.

By the time the film's nearly over, all sorts of crazy shit has happened, but of greatest importance to the "plot" is how the stylistic influences vampirized from Liszt by Richard Wagner lead to the creation of Nazism, personified by a risen-from-the-grave Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler who not only looks ridiculous but also packs a combination machine gun/electric guitar.

No, you are not going insane: It's Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler!

So as Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler rampages through the streets of Germany,

aided by apple-cheeked Aryan youth in Superman costumes while he blows away klesmer-music-accompanied Jews, Liszt is in heaven, residing in a huge pipe organ with all of the significant women from his earthly existence, even his daughter, Cosima, who was depicted as killing him with a voodoo doll (don't ask).

After Liszt and the ladies play a soothing classical number, their moment of peace is interrupted by all of them noticing Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler's heinous deeds. Liszt figures it's up to him and the ladies to fly to Earth and kick Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler's ass, so we then find out that their pipe organ-cum-love-shack is actually a spaceship with dime-store angel wings,

which Liszt swiftly pilots to a ravaged Germany.

Once there, he sends the ship into a nosedive,

and blows up Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler with rainbow-colored/psychedelic laser beams. Once the day is saved, Liszt pilots his ship into deep space, toward Heaven or who the fuck knows where, or for what purpose. THE END.

Sure there are some slow-moving moments in the flick — it can't all be gigantic cocks, Nazi vampires, Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitlers, and naked chicks with big boobs...or can it? — but now don't you wanna see LISZTOMANIA for yourself? It's not for all tastes, but how can you not give it up for the sheer, glorious insanity that is Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler? I couldn't have come up with that one even if I were savagely dosed-up on tequila and cheap, Mexican cough syrup, and that's saying something!

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

WEEKEND ADVENTURES: SUMMER'S LAST HURRAH AND RUNNING AROUND WITH EDDIE

And so the summer winds to a close.

I don't know about you, but I found this summer to be mostly uneventful, although I did get to see more of my friends than in the past two summers, so at least there was that. The annual blockbuster movie season pretty much sucked despite major cash being raked in at the box office, and my vote for the best of the summer's crop goes unreservedly to the excellent RATATOUILLE, followed closely by SUPERBAD. Yeah, going to the movies was about as exciting as my summer got.

This past weekend my friends Cat and Richard hosted the season's final cookout at their home in Long Island's New Hyde Park — just a stone's throw form the local casket vendor who sells caskets direct to you, the consumer —

and I trekked out there early on Saturday morning to prep and marinate some halved chickens in lime juice and work the falling-off-the-bone culinary magic of my slow-cooked oven ribs. Not as many of the usual suspects were in attendance since it was a bit of a last minute thing and also landed on Yom Kippur — many of my extended family are Red Sea pedestrians — plus it rained for the early portion of the day and gave the backyard deck the aspect of a ship caught in a squall,

but it was still fun thanks to good food, good company, a shitload of beers, and me and Steve Hughes getting to have fun with Cat and Rich's incredibly cute and charming little girl, Cleonir-Rose (Cleo for short).

Princess Cleonir surveys her kingdom. And wouldja believe this is a bad photo of her?

Several of my friends have a real way with the little ones, as do I, but next to the borderline-diabolical antics of Ed Murr, no one gets the kids going quite like Hughes.

A princess and her all-too-willing fool.

Somehow striking the perfect balance between manic absurdity and soft-spoken fun, Hughes kept Cleo happy and amused for hours by breathing a new and bizarre personality into the three-year-old's Polly Pocket doll, a suspense-generating take on the unexpected shit that one's toys can get up to, in this case being that the previously well-behaved Polly turned her attention from a proposed shopping spree to randomly biting people. Hughes would hold Polly, speak to her in the most nonchalant of conversational styles, and then press her mouth to some random part of his body and let out a startled yelp, jerking his lanky body in feigned alarm and then loudly complaining about the doll being a serial biter. I played along with this as well, and in no time Cleo had taken Hughes' lead and run with it, menacing all within reach of her now cannibalistic plaything.

Sunday was considerably better, weather-wise, and I was all set to do my usual weekend trip into Manhattan to see what cool stuff I could find when my pal Ed Murr — a freelance illustrator who just got his new website together — called to say he was in Brooklyn and wondered if I'd like to get something to eat. We met at the New College Inn, a local diner around the corner from me on 4th Avenue that was the weekly gathering place for myself and all of my friends when we all still lived in the area, a once mighty tribe that has now dwindled to only myself and Lexi, and whenever I eat there these days I get a wee bit sad when the Wayback Machine in my head recalls those brunches of barely five years gone.

Eddie and I caught up on what was going o in each other's lives, bitched and moaned about the sorry state of the comics industry and what a soul-crushing place it can be — Ed and I met when he arrived as a freshman at SUNY Purchase in the fall of 1986, and we both did time in the Marvel Comics Bullpen — and dished about the looney circus of dysfunction that are our biological families. I always feel a great sense of relief whenever I visit with Ed because he's one of the handful of people who I truly "get," and I know that he gets me since we have many of the same interests and obsessions, so when our meal ended I suggestsed that he accompany me into the city for a mini-safari to a comic shop and two of the remaining decent independent record stores on the Lower West Side. He had time to kill before hooking up with his wife, the charming and frequently hilarious Olivia, so he said "Why the hell not?" and with that, we were off.

Unfortunately, the one thing I neglected to fully take into account was the peculiar property of New College's rather greasy breakfast menu, an effect that for some unknown reason makes the majority of the vittles a powerful laxative, something that Ed can attest to because he was a frequent victim of it when he still lived in Carroll Gardens and would race home after bruch to, as he so eloquently put it, "savage the bowl." I had wolfed down a couple of sunny-side up eggs, a small mountain of corned beef hash, a side of uninspired bacon, a Coke, and a large glass of milk, and just before we were ready to leave I figured I'd avail myself to the bathroom as a preemptive measure. When I'd taken care of business, we hit the subway and, wouldn't you know it, after only two stops my guts began to rumble, ache, and moan, a sure sign of an anal apocalyse about to happen, along with said anus practically sewing itself shut to prevent disaster most foul.

When, after what seemed like a short eternity, we finally arrived at Canal Street, I frantically looked around for a public commode, first attempting to use the one at a nearby Starbuck's, only to be thwarted by a line of at least nine women waiting for the location's sole restroom to become vacant. I then fled across the street to a McDonald's and got on line for the upstairs can, only to have an obnoxious Hispanic chick express distaste at the wait for the women's room and shove past me to enter the men's room. Finally she left the restroom and I darted to sanctuary, letting nature have its cruel way with me as I sat in perhaps the foulest pesthole of a fast food restaurant bathroom it has ever been my sheer displeasure to experience; having worked in the food biz I was horrified by the pestilence of this restroom and was assaulted by the reeking stench of ammonia-piss and God only knows what else, coupled with the nauseating ambient aroma of the chain's signature French fries and Chicken McNuggets, or, as Daniel Maranci used to call them back when they were first introduced, "Chicken Buttpluggets." The place was so vile that I forced my fecal funtime to end a bit early, my nose no longer being able to endure the olfactory horror, and soon Ed and I commenced our adventure proper.

We stopped off at Generation Records — one of the city's two best independent record shops, the other being Rockit Scientist on the East Side — and soon made our way in the direction of the infamously overpriced Bleeker Bob's when our attention was drawn to yet another example of the kind of free entertainment that you'll only find in NYC. Now keep in mind that Eddie and I have shared years of wandering about the Rotten Apple in appalling states of inebriation, witnessing strange sights that would have sent lesser men H.P. Lovecraft-style barking mad, such as a six-foot six-inch bright green cross between Gumby and Kermit the Frog in a gas mask, and a homeless Tommy Chong lookalike wandering about in a stained ladies' slip, so we've pretty much seen it all, but even we were surprised by the sounds of a couple arguing across the street from us. We looked over in the direction of the fight and couldn't see the participants but noticed passersby giving them a wide berth. Then the source of the shouting made its way up to the next corner and turned out to be a fifty-something, absolutely hideous drag queen who looked like Jerry Garcia and was carrying on a fight with him/herself, shifting between male and female voices depending on who was talking at any given point in the exchange.

The one-person marital spat: I wish I'd worked up the balls to cross the street and take a clearer shot, but at least it's on par with the famous picture of Bigfoot (SEE BELOW).

The guy/gal would hurl vitriol to whichever gender was in control at the moment, and the most memorable quote had to be, in a really bad "feminine" voice, "It's all about my pussy!!!" Indeed.

Then we hopped the C train and headed uptown to Mid Town Comics' Time Square location, after which we parted ways, me promising Ed to do a better job of keeping in touch.

Ed Murr and Were-Bunche on the C train.

Even though I've been gone from the barbecue joint and my schedule where my weekend fell on Monday and Tuesday, I'm still kind of in the rut of not checking in with my friends on days when we can all get together. I've got to break myself of that shit, pronto.