Tuesday's Treasured & Tipsy Timeslip: This Weeks Traveller is A.B Funkhauser
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| A.B wanted me to clarify that the ciggy is a prop. Perhaps in honor of her father to whom she pays tribute to below. |
Throw on your pj's and climb in the casket with this week's guest, funeral director and fiction writer A.B Funkhauser as she takes us on virtual voyage through her memories and dreams relaying the places and times that inspired her.
A.B. Funkhauser is the author of a Dark Humor series and Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home is the setting of her new release, HEUER LOST AND FOUND. Coming this April. 23rd 2015. A visceral journey of two people: one living, one dead.
THE LAKE AND THE DRAGON
THE SHADOW RADIO SHOW
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Only The Shadow knows...Bwahahahahaha.”
For many my age and younger, knowing the
origin of the above might be a bit of a stretch: yet I do. Corny? Yes.
Hilarious? Absolutely! The quote, or more correctly, the radio program to which
this voice over belongs comes from none other than The Shadow, which got its start in pulp fiction and later ran an
incredible seventeen years on American radio from 1937 to 1954.
Featuring lurid tales narrated by a supernatural all-seeing being that always knew
better than the affected hapless humans it oversaw, The Shadow spoke to me in
reruns throughout the Seventies.
What got me was the voice. What hooked me
was the medium. Radio, you see, forced me to conjure up images of just where
the plays took place. As a ten year old, it was no mean feat, seeing that my
world barely extended past the hydro field in summer and the school yard in
winter.
“What evil lurks?” I wondered. And was it
always in sinister places?
The answer, I found, lived in dreams, and
it was to some of these that I return over and over again years after they
first played out. That I have recurring dreams—usually in Technicolor—I think
speaks to the impact of radio: if given a choice, I would color my dreams no
matter how frightening. Somehow, in color, the sinister seems palatable. Even
inviting.
PLANET OF THE BATHROOM STALLS
I remember finishing a harrowing week of
Grade 12 second term exams. Exhausted, relieved and flat out broke, I had no
choice but to celebrate my accomplishment with a long sleep. Waking in dreams,
I was confronted by a highly stylized ape man in an orange jump suit. He wasn’t
Roddy McDowall from Planet of the Apes,
but a curious hybrid that co-opted equine features in a high cheek-boned,
narrow face that embraced intelligence and a promise. The ape did not speak as
he took my hand, ushering me over verdant hills backed by brilliant vistas I
instantly recognized from the beats out of Sgt.
Pepper’s. We were barely out of the Seventies at this point, so strawberry fields made perfect sense, even if my companion—a behemoth of eight feet or more—could have easily made Poe’s House of Usher his home. I asked him where he was taking me, but the ape said nothing, pulling me along with kind, if not gentle urgency, until, at last, we arrived at our destination: a row of bathroom stalls as orange and shiny as his coveralls. He wanted me to step inside the first one, yet I could not. It was a pay toilet, and I didn’t have a dime.
THE LAKE AND THE DRAGON
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It will be eighteen years this May since my
amazing German daddy passed away while on vacation in sunny Florida. His death,
completely unexpected, knocked all of us near to him on our collective rear
ends. Yet his passing was perfect—at least for him. My dad came from another
age, an age currently celebrated on AMC’s Mad
Men. Cool, collected and always on top of his game, my pa drank scotch and
smoked cigarettes to his end of days: his pockets, when turned out, contained
an empty pack of Chesterfields. He smoked his last one. Good on you pa. I
missed him in those early days—I still do—yet in the afterburn of the funeral,
seeing him again was paramount. It was not long before he visited me in dreams,
this time in a lake setting muted with sepia tones save for a cobalt sky and
bone bleached trees denuded of their summer leaves. My dad, you see, was
renowned for saving the day. And so it came as no surprise when I tipped my
fishing boat and fell into the dark water, that he would rescue me from an odd
looking creature that reminded me of TV’s H.R.
Pufnstuf.
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Confronted by the large yellow beast with his oversized spots and
tousled felt-twist mane, my first impulse was to shoo him away. “Be gone absurd
beast with your goggly doll eyes!” Before I could reach him, strong arms
overtook me, drawing my close. It was dad in his favorite black and rust
hunting jacket, impossibly dry despite the cold water we found ourselves floating
in. Pufnstuf, the dragon, opened his soft felt mouth at the sight of dad, as if
to frighten him, but my father just laughed, reaching out with one of his short
fingers (the rest of it claimed by a band saw in the Fifties) to poke the silly
bugger in the eye. Puf retreated beneath the waves. I haven’t been back to the
lake lately, nor have I been visited by the large, yellow, felt-mouthed
beastie, but I wish it so most terribly. My dad is there, and I’d love to see
him again.
THE HOUSE OF USHER AS HOME
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Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House Usher stayed with me if only for the author’s
assertion that the cursed family tree ran vertically and without branch. “How
strange,” I thought at the time. Yet, when I woke for the first time in an
amazing home—high ceilinged and trimed with thick mahogany baseboards and crown
molds—I knew where I was. Imagine a long hall, the plaster walls stained
cerulean blue to compliment large crystal chandeliers to mark a white ceiling
honeycombed with bowed crossbeams of black and tar. The hall, never ending,
opens every thirty feet or so into rooms beautifully decorated from the Age of
Empire; each a different color, each recognizable every time I visit because
I’ve had this dream before. And never, ever, is there an intersection along the
way. It is Usher’s family tree, but I do not fear it. This is not a family tree
cursed, but a home filled with history, its rooms lovingly curated by something
I have yet to see.
MISTRESS BISCUIT AND HER SHORTBREADS
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| www.travelmob.com |
In a similar vein, I have visited the home
of Mistress Biscuit many, many times. Each time, it is the same. I wouldn’t
have it any other way. The front door opens into a spectacular foyer, shitake
monochrome walls accented with glass and chrome backed by sky high windows
capped by a vaulting ceiling twenty feet above our heads. I say “our” because
the guests are there, wrapped in looks reminiscent of the disco era, but
tasteful to one who was there. “Mistress is busy,” the tall, slightly balding
fellow in livery informs me. “Would madam care for a swim before chicken?”
Don’t mind if I do. Pocketing a couple of sweeties fetched off a silver tray of
shortbreads and arugula, I head to the indoor pool where a friend awaits. He is
young, wearing a white terry cloth robe. I have no idea who he is.
#authorinterview #authorspotlight #featuredauthor #travel #beautifulplaces #whimsical #fantasy #mystery #writers #books #fiction #bookstoread #treasuredtipsytimeslip #tuesday #dreams #theshadowradioshow #Pufnstuf #Edgar Allen Poe
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