Vampire

The question came up this past weekend regarding my deep and murky past. "Dad," asked my son Stuart, "what kind of vampire were you?"

Stuart had heard me tell, from time to time about my part in my Senior class play in High School when I played the title role in Bram Stoker's Dracula. At this point, some mmmfffftheeen years later, Dracula, all that should have remained of the play would be a distant memory and a picture or two in my yearbook, The Arrow. But there are some roles which never quit giving to those who play it, and apparently Dracula was one of those roles.

Bela Lugosi never lived down the role and I may not either.

I've seen Bela Lugosi as Dracula maybe twice, three times at most. Lugosi, so the story was told, was a respected actor who had played a number of roles prior to being king of the undead. Being Dracula was the actor's undoing. He was so convincing that he found that the only other movie offers he got from that point on was as some derivative of the Eastern European blood sucker. He was driven to drink, then driven further to become a full-blown drug addict (morphine, I believe) when schlock director Ed Wood found and exploited him in a series of really bad movies in the 1950s. Lugosi's last screen appearance, filmed not long before his death, was inserted into the classic movie stinker Plan 9 From Outer Space... a film so bad it's good. What a shameful end to someone who had been considered an excellent actor.

I wasn't that good an actor, nor was I a bad actor, either. I was a teenager in a smallish Ohio city who played the classic villain. Smallish Ohio city should say it all. As part of the build up to the classic play, I did a couple of promotional appearances on the local media. Both stayed with me for quite some time to come.

For one, I went up to radio station WBEX and finagled some public service announcements to air for the week leading up to the performance. My announcement was recorded by WBEX morning man Bill Spahr. Bill was taken by my abilities and when I came looking for a job later that year, Bill hired me. I worked for Bill off and on for a number of years and was in contact with him from time to time almost until he died. Bill always called me Dracula, or Drac, or something of the sort. Always.

The other finagle was an appearance on Channel 2 News. Chillicothe had cable TV long before a lot of other cities and part of the deal was that Channel 2 was the local channel. And what's a local television station without local news and by golly we had local news reported by Jim Kennard and Gene Minney. Now, I didn't have to finagle too far to get on Channel 2. By the time Dracula came up, I had a part-time job at Channel 2 running cameras, schlepping equipment to ball games and city council meetings, and I had a 15 minute segment every other week with a television show presented on behalf of our High School Student Council.

Mr. Minney thought it would be a great idea to have me on a portion of Channel 2 news one evening to promote the play, which I dutifully did in costume and with my put-on Transylvanian accent. I don't know if it was him or me, but there arose a pun as an answer to a question... "Why, of corpse!"

For the rest of the time I worked at Channel 2, Gene would greet me saying "Why, of corpse!" I worked in and out of Chillicothe on radio for the better part of 25 years, and would meet Gene Minney from time to time and he would always greet me with "Why, of corpse!" I left the state and had lived in Texas for 11 years, went back last summer and met Gene Minney as he was going into the Cross Keys Tavern to play with the Goosetown Astonishers on a Thursday evening. He sees me and and the first thing out of his mouth after having not seen me for at least a decade was...

Mind you, I never disliked either man, Bill Spahr or Gene Minney, but both had me typecast as a monster from Transylvania for quite some time. In some ways I'm rather fond of the blood-sucking gent, and I'm much more able to relate to vampires than to zombies. But as one of my dear sisters pointed out, the vampire I played and the vampires which seem to be coming out of the woodwork these days are two entirely different undead creatures. Makes me sort of sad, really, to know that today's vampires are popular in a way that yesterday's vampires only dreamed of being.

My how times have changed.

Why, of corpse!


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