KNIVES IN KNOTS

We wrote the first draft of this blog just after the 65th birthday of Lisa Loring, who has since passed away and was the first actor to portray "Wednesday Addams" in a media production.  If you're reading this, you probably know, too, that Loring could really tear up the (F)rug "Drewing" on the 1964-66 television horrorcom, "The Addams Family," the first non-print media presentation of the Charles Addams comic strip family. But who would this woeful but winsome child, this Wednesday in long, twin tail braids, one day become?  Let's share a strange interlude and consider some options.   First, we have this child and she can really dance. Not sure if she can sing, but she's already showing some performance promise, so let's just go with it. Aside from the dancing, she's got potential! On her mother's side, Aunt Ophelia Frump. Note the hair-braid action, the ecstatic beauty, the dipsy-daisy head-gear of an Alphonse Mucha model from Cze...

Epiphany Epiphany has come and gone, but we're still pondering the narrative that the Magi (Gentiles, also known as the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men) seeing and saluting the infant Jesus as a "god" (some say THE God") functioning as a "Messiah" entails revealing the child, Jesus' face to the three exalted and sage non-Jews. Epiphany generally celebrates this interaction (let's not start on the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, a whole other megillah) between human beings and a deity.  Human beings seeing a god. It's happened to others but usually with negative, incendiary results. The Magi Larry Cohen's "God Told Me To" (1976) We caught Cohen's film this week, just by chance, on one of the Roku channel's we stream.  And there it was, again: seeing and interacting with a god-thing. We can't, here, go into all the questions this film raises. There are just too many.   Catching more than just a "glimpse of a ...