Archive | March, 2012

My Memories of Snow White

15 Mar

March 15, 2012

Snow White takes place a long time ago and someplace very far away. That is very convenient because it means that you’d have hard time verifying the story. The police hate stories like this. It is almost impossible to make a case.

So sometime back somewhere undisclosed there lived an Evil Queen, which I am going to capitalize since that serves as her name. Back then, whenever it was, there was a real lack of imagination when it came to names. And frankly, if I told you her name was Felicia, some of you may know a very sweet woman with that name and no way would you believe that Queen Felicia was evil so it is just better this way.

The Evil Queen just happened to be stunningly beautiful. She was also easy and according to some legends that I may or may not be making up she slept her way to the top. Plus she might have also have killed her husband the King because he doesn’t appear in this story. The legends are kind of sketchy. Hey, I told you, the police hate stories like this.

The Queen was utterly evil. One time in Reno she shot a man just to watch him die. So in addition to being beautiful she was also nuts, making her the exact kind of woman I’m attracted to. Anyway, part of her insanity resulted in her belief that her mirror talked to her. Seriously, her mirror. The Queen would wake up every single day and walk over to the mirror hanging on the wall and ask “did widdle kitty kitty sleep well?” For some reason she also thought the mirror was a cat. She put out a saucer of milk for it every morning. The Evil Queen had one servant whose only job was to clean the mirror’s litter box.

Being totally vain and self-absorbed, the Queen would daily ask the mirror “widdle kitty kitty, who is the fairest of them all?” Invariably, the mirror would answer “Oh Queen, your milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.” The Queen had no idea what that meant because Kelis wouldn’t drop that song until 2003 but it seemed to make her happy.

The Queen had a daughter named Snow White. See what I mean about the names being unimaginative? (Stick around, it gets worse.) Snow White dreamed of being an actress. She had plans to run away to the Big City, change her name to Lola LaSalle and become a chorus girl. The Evil Queen got wind of her plans and forced her to mop the floor, clean the stables, shoe, unshoe, and reshoe the horses, give piggy back rides to all the fat kids in town, you know, all the typical sort of stuff that horrible parents do in fairy tales. Anyway, Snow White was only 13 and if she ran away to the Big City and got carded she’d just end up brought back to the castle anyway.

Years passed and the Queen became more and more evil. She started dressing all in black like a funeral director. With her pale face she sort of had a Goth thing going on, but this was long before the Gothic era so everyone just assumed she was anti-social, which she was not, being so easy and all. She also got more and more crazy. She was convinced that her mirror was gossiping about her behind her back. The Queen once spent a week interrogating all the other mirrors from the castle but not a single one would admit a thing. One morning things went horribly wrong. She asked the mirror, as usual, “widdle kitty kitty, who is the fairest of them all?” and the mirror paused, twitched its whiskers, licked its paws, and said “Snow White’s milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. She could teach you but she’d have to charge.”

The Evil Queen was livid. No one made a better milkshake than she did. She used fresh milk and only the creamiest ice cream. The cherries she put on top came from her private reserve. As usual, she totally missed the point, but if Snow White did something better than her, than daughter or not, she had to go.

The Queen ordered one of her huntsman who happened to be hanging around to take Snow White out into the woods and kill her. As proof he was to bring back her heart, so not only was he to kill her he was to disembowel her. I told you this Queen was nuts. All that fuss over a milkshake.

The huntsman took Snow White into the woods, and yada yada yada, Snow White kept her heart in her chest, not to mention her life, and the huntsman returned to the castle with a big smile on his face. I won’t speculate how Snow White changed the huntsman’s mind but as they said back then, “what happens in the woods stays in the woods.” Yes, that is where that expression comes from.

Snow White wandered the woods. She still had dreams of being a chorus girl but she had no clue how to get to the Big City. She stumbled around the woods and came across a little house set deep in the trees. Inside she found seven little beds, seven little chairs, and even seven little packs of cigarettes. “Obviously,” she said to herself, “this must be the home of seven dwarves.” Because seriously, what other explanation is there? Fairy tale woods are full of dwarves and ogres and evil goats and those beds were too small to be ogre beds. So she sat down and helped herself to their food, and being normal-sized, she ate one meal but to a dwarf, it was all their food for the week.

Eventually the dwarves came home and speaking of unimaginative names, as we did about five or six paragraphs back, here are the dwarves’ names.

  • Doc. Luckily for Snow White he was a gynecologist.
  • Grumpy. What was he grumpy about? What wasn’t he grumpy about?
  • Sleepy. He was a narcoleptic.
  • Dopey. He was hooked on drugs.
  • Sneezy. Poor man had the flu. He died a few days after the events of this story.
  • Bashful. This dwarf was so bashful that while the other dwarves were working in the mines, he worked in another mine on the other side of the mountain just to avoid having a conversation.
  • Happy. Until snow White arrived he was known as Pissed Off. See what a difference a woman in your life can make?
  • Bob. This dwarf was cut out of the movie.

Snow White moved in with the little men (like her mother, she was kind of easy too) and they took turns with the cooking and cleaning and split the chores evenly but whenever a light bulb needed changing or the roof needed fixing it seemed like none of the dwarves could find a ladder so she had to do all the things they were too small to do, like get stuff off the top shelf of the cupboard, which begs the question of why they were using the top shelf in the first place. It makes no sense. Why intentionally put stuff out of reach?

Things went along in the house for a while like that and I have no idea what kind of message this fairy tale is sending kids. A young woman living with seven old men? In what is more or less a one room house? This is a PG rated blog, I’ll stop right there, thank you very much.

The Evil Queen again asked her mirror who was the fairest of them all and once again the mirror answered that it was Snow White’s milkshake that brought all the boys to the yard. In fact, it added “damn right, it’s better than yours.” Immediately the Queen knew that Snow White still lived. Remember that I said this was all in her head, that the mirror didn’t really talk? So why did she make up a back talking sassy cat-mirror? Hey, I already said she was nuts.

Disguising herself as a gas company meter reader, the Evil Queen showed up at the dwarves’ little house and when Snow White opened the door the Queen shot her dead. Blew her head right off.

No, no, that didn’t happen, but it would have made a lot more sense than what did happen. The Queen gave Snow White a poisoned apple. Oh, it wasn’t poisoned with cyanide or arsenic or something that would actually kill someone, it was poisoned with a potion named “Sleeping Death.” The Evil Queen figured that Snow White would collapse into a magical sleep if she were to take even a single bite of the apple. The sleep can only be cured by the power of “love’s first kiss”. The Queen reasoned that this was no danger to her plans, as the dwarfs would not be able to awaken Snow White, and would think she was dead, thus resulting in Snow White being “buried alive”.

I copied that explanation right out of Wikipedia and italicized it because if I wrote that you’d think I made it up, it sounds that stupid. And why wouldn’t the dwarves be able to awaken her with a kiss? Because back then guys like that who never married and lived with other men were called “confirmed bachelors, if you get my drift.”

Anyway, Snow White ate the apple and fell into such a deep sleep that the dwarves simply assumed she was dead. This could not have been Doc’s finest hour. And where did he get his medical license from anyway? The dwarves were too overcome with grief to bury her and instead put her in a glass coffin and displayed her in Red Square, laying her in state right next to Lenin.

The dwarves vowed revenge on the Evil Queen. It wasn’t hard to see through her meter reader disguise: her fake mustache kept falling off. Confronting her on the edge of the woods, the dwarves tried to beat her up but the Queen was much taller than they were and try as they might, the worst the dwarves could do was bruise her kneecaps. Eventually Grumpy had enough and just shoved her off a cliff.

As for Snow White, she slept in her glass coffin for many days until a handsome prince opened her glass coffin and kissed her. To his total, utter dismay Snow White awakened and hopped out of the coffin. Turns out the Prince was into necrophilia but to cover it up he had to marry Snow White. Everyone lived happily ever after, if a bit awkwardly, except for the dwarves, who ended up pretty much where they started, living together in a cramped smelly house in the woods.

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A New York Minute (17)

14 Mar

March 14, 2011

Before the New York Minute begins I’d like to take some time to jump on the bandwagon and begin my own serialized pulp drama. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Hollywood Russell in The Case of the Virtuous Vixen.

Chapter One.

Hollywood Russell entered the room. His steely eyes twitched to the left, then the right.

To be continued.

And now, your New York Minute.

Hollywood may be the movie capital of the world, but New York might be Hollywood’s favorite city.

In 1908 The Thieving Hand was shot in Flatbush Brooklyn, and the upcoming Avengers will be set in New York, though mostly filmed elsewhere. In the years between Hollywood has taken us to New York’s past in Gangs of New York, New York’s future in Escape from New York, and gave Charlton Heston the New York surprise of his life in Planet of the Apes. New York’s trains have been hijacked in The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, chased in The French Connection, helped a gang escape to Coney Island in The Warriors, and crashed in Die Hard with a Vengeance. 

Yes, Hollywood has made its fair share of New York films and more than its share of fair to mediocre at best New York films. And that brings me to The Bowery Boys. During the 1940’s and 1950’s Hollywood cranked out dozens of B-movies featuring a rotating cast of juvenile delinquents from New York. Since these films were comedies these youthful offenders, led by the increasingly not-so-youthful Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, never smoked dope or ripped off a liquor store. The Bowery Boys were more likely to get mixed up with Nazi spies, spend a night in a haunted house, accidentally break up a crooked boxing syndicate, or somehow help the police track down a foreign princess. They were also known at various times as the East Side Kids, the Dead End Kids and, early in their history, The Little Tough Guys. People usually only change their names that often to avoid creditors. In at least two quote unquote memorable films they met Bela Lugosi, demonstrating in just which direction his career was moving.

Of course, any student of history will tell that history lies, and any student of the movies will tell you that Hollywood lies with every agent’s breath, so it is a sad fact that the real Bowery Boys were nothing like the bunch of clumsy nincompoops featured onscreen. 

The Bowery Boys were an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish gang based north of the Five Points section of Manhattan in the mid-19th century. This was a time of great Irish immigration. They gang was based in the Bowery section of New York, hence their name. It was said that the gang was so strong and even popular during its time that many of the smaller or weaker gangs in Bowery followed their lead. One of their main rivals was a gang called The Dead Rabbits. I don’t know about you, but I think The Dead Rabbits is a lousy name for a gang. But I would never say it to their faces.

The Bowery Boys were young men who frequented the saloons and brothels of the Bowery and dressed in black stovepipe hats, red shirts, black flared trousers, high-heeled boots and black vests, with slick hair. I mention this because they were generally well-dressed and most of them even had respectable jobs. One famous member of the Bowery Boys was William Poole, also known as Bill the Butcher. As far as I know, none of them were named Satch, Slip, or Glimpy. It took Hollywood to come up with those brilliant monikers for The Bowery Boys films. Their most famous leader was known only as Mose the Fireboy, and some research suggests that he may have simply been a tall tale or urban legend. Ballads and songs were sung of him in the Bowery and his name was a common battle cry among the Bowery Boys throughout their existence. He was supposedly eight feet tall and had the strength of ten men. It was sort of like if Paul Bunyan joined the Crips.

At this point I would like to mention that I never saw and refuse to see Gangs of New York, despite how good I hear it is. But I digress.

Some odd facts popped up while researching The Bowery Boys. For example, they ran their own local fire department. They were fiercely patriotic and were actually allied with the Metropolitan Police Department. This makes sense when you realize that New York had two competing police departments. The Metropolitan Police Department had a feud with the Municipal Police. Over the course of two days in 1857, fighting between the two police departments, The Bowery Boys, The Dead Rabbits, and several smaller gangs left eight people dead,. That was only the official number. Unofficially the body count may have been much higher.

The gang was cruel and violent. During the New York Draft Riots of 1863, the Bowery Boys took part in much of the looting while fighting with rival gangs. The brawling was so bad that the military was called in to stop it.

Eventually infighting and other disputes caused the gang to splinter and weaken and they eventually disappeared into history, with only their name carried on in such films as Spook Busters and Dig that Uranium. Sigh. History may forget you, but it takes Hollywood to insult you.

This has been your New York Minute.

An audio version of this legend recently appeared (or is about to!) in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

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