New Release: Zakia and the Cowboy by Lorraine Nelson
Today 10:00am at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005SEUZVW#reader_B005SEUZVW

Thunder Creek Ranch, 1 With a stalker following her every move Zakia has no choice but to flee the city. With her options limited she runs to the only place she’s ever felt safe…the Thunder Creek Ranch and her ex-husband, Lucas. Will he protect Zakia from the stalker? And if he does will either of them be able to ignore the feelings that have simmered for so long, ready to explode… before danger either draws them together or pulls them apart. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005SEUZVW#reader_B005SEUZVW

First, I need to point out that I co-wrote a book on Dark Shadows called the Dark Shadows Companion. I’m a first-generation fan. I’m one of those who ran home from school to see it. I am the audience that Depp and Burton will need to reach to reboot the franchise. I have bad news for them. They just spit in the face of a big portion of the audience. I ran home from school, my friends, and I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the triangle Barnabas/Josette/Angelique storyline that Depp-Burton focused on.

The whole show, for me, was about Julia and Barnabas. It was bad enough that the film turns Julia into an alcoholic (something she NEVER was on the series), but they show her smoking a cigarette. Yes, given what Grayson died of, I find this an incredibly bad creative choice, but I suppose that’s subjective nitpicking. HBC watched enough episodes to pick up a couple of her mannerisms, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Julia’s wardrobe is Mode o’Day if their fashion buyer was Bozo the Clown.

What they did was turn Barnabas into her murderer and utterly destroy their relationship as far as their franchise is concerned. Dark Shadows, at its worst, was about all the women obsessing on the vampire. From the end of the film and its stupid Godzilla ending, it’s clear they’re wanting to bring Julia back as a vampire to be the new villain, something she was for a brief time on the series.

Burton and Depp may as well burn the script for that one. They’ve already lost most of the Julia fans. I know they lost me. Admittedly, they barely had my interest to begin with, but yeesh …

As an independent film, I found it weird as hell. Visually, it wasn’t Collinsport for me. It was sort of Disneyland Collinsport. Collinwood itself looked like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. The woodlands looked like England, not Maine, which seemed as out-of-place as Beverly Hills did when Curtis used it for Collinwood in the 1991 series. The few bits I liked (Barnabas crashing on the rocks but not dying) were quickly overtaken by a lot more bits I just hated.

I gave it a 4 over at IMDB. I’m not thinking I was too generous.

Sorry, Johnny. You killed the franchise all over again for a lot of us.

I once thought I had severe clinical depression. My counselors thought I had. My friends thought I had. My family was of that opinion, too. I had always suffered from it, from early childhood, but my miscarriage and the subsequent death of my mother triggered it into a serious mental disorder. I could barely brush my hair, I could scarcely function, I only went anywhere when my husband, family or friends dragged me out somewhere. I managed to semi-control it with meditation and related disciplines, but I still found myself basically at others’ beck and call.

One summer in the mid to late 80s, I decided my depression was growing worse. My grandparents (who were very dear to me) were dying and I was their chief caregiver. I determined that I needed to boost my moods a bit. Being New Agey and too dumb at the time to see a real shrink, I picked up a book called “The Way Up from Down” which is a thoroughly helpful little primer for people with true unipolar depression. It related the problem of sugar-related depression. It also provided a vitamin regimen to be taken — tyrosine and L-tryptophan (this was before the recall) and various other things. At first, I felt TERRIFIC! I was functioning again, I wrote again, I was swept into a fandom for the first time in years, I even had my hair styled.

Then came the crash. And when I crashed, I CRASHED BADLY.

The paranoia was the worst of it, followed by my normally shy, very reserved self starting to act inappropriately. I once dreamed an entire interview with an actor and found it so persuasive at an auditory level that I believed it had actually happened. It took seeing a whole contradictory interview to challenge that belief. I was also moderately delusional at times. People to whom I’d been useful no longer considered me useful — I have to admit I was probably slightly annoying. To be fair, they were not psychiatrists and didn’t realize I was, in fact, hypomanic, so they assumed I had gone nuts or they conceived some other explanation. I finally broke off contacts with all but a few of my friends. It was, in fact, the best thing I could have done.

You see, to a misdiagnosed bipolar 2 sufferer, taking that vitamin regimen was comparable to giving crack to a kangaroo. Hypomania expresses itself differently than mania — the hypomania often is expressed in anger, frustration, grudges, obsessions, etc. BP2 don’t have the classic “I feel divine!” types of mania that BP1 sufferers (the ones most often cited in media) do.

From the clinical history, I can look back now and see I have the primary signs of bipolar disease in my family. My mother died of alcoholism, her grandfather died of alcoholism, depression of various forms runs through my family, and the list goes on.

I know there will be people who are shocked that I’m discussing this openly. Sadly, even in a modern age, bitches and bastards still use mental illness to demean their fellow humans. They can’t call someone a “whore” anymore, unless they’re a psychotic talk show host, so they resort to snotty rejoinders about “craziness”. The fact of the matter is I trust MOST the people who’ve had a diagnosis like this. I know they are being medicated. I know they are aware. It’s the unmedicated people who scare the shit out of me.

I am now seventeen years on medication. I have good days and bad days. Am I as creative? Probably not, but I’m much more productive. And I have something that is more important than anything to those of us who have experienced life without it — peace of mind.

Next time, more about bipolar and the writing mind

I can’t believe the number of times this page has been accessed by people seeking “melody clark banned” — I KNOW I don’t have that many relatives. I’m not the suicide.com lady, I’m not the oceanographic scientist, I’m not the visual artist, I’m the gimpy writer in Los Angeles County. I don’t matter to anyone but my family and friends, and a handful of readers. There are far more important things to search for.

Some of my newer writer friends are feeling down because of the lack of sales for certain titles, versus other people and their four and five-star #1 books. It’s important to remember this — the more books you write, the more readers will find you, the more readers will like your books, and thus the more regular readers you’ll have. That said, Mark Twain never had a bestseller. William Shakespeare never made it to the NY Times Top Ten. Few readers read anything Emily Dickinson wrote in her lifetime. The only reader that counts is the one that “gets” what you’re writing. And to quote Cyril Connelly, better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. Now cheer up — you know who you are.

Yes, I’m the Melody Clark who co-wrote (along with Kathleen Resch and Marcy Robin) The Dark Shadows Companion, which was edited and published by Kathryn Leigh Scott, with forewords by Jonathan Frid, Lara Parker, Matt Hall and a cast of thousands. It’s still available on Pomegranate Press, Ltd.

Secondly, here is a mini-defense of the original TV horror soap Dark Shadows …

It was shot in real-time. In other words, no one could stop tape, outside Joan Bennett and (much later) Jonathan Frid. Whatever goofs happened, however the line came out, that’s how it was sent across the airwaves. No actor EVER got a second take. In the words of Robert Rodan, who played Adam, “If the stagehand stumbling in the background still had his pants up, they kept filming” — and he wasn’t just joking. On DS episodes, you can see multiple instances of stagehands and boom mikes, along with sets collapsing, firetrucks wailing past, people snoring, people sneezing, eyelashes dropping off, earrings being flung across the room, people reading the wrong lines off the prompter, Jonathan Frid walking with his laundry in front of the camera as it capture the end shot, and almost everything else that could possibly go wrong on TV. Dark Shadows was shot on a minuscule budget. The amount the actors made would barely qualify as middle class earnings these days, even with cost of living adjustments.

The scripts were written rapidly. The actors had to learn their lines nightly. They often forgot them. They were all directed WAY over the top. And at the end of the day, they’d all meet up at places, toss back a beer and say, “Wow, thank god no one is ever going to see THAT again!”

Little did they know.

This won’t mean a lot to anyone who didn’t know her. She was my big sister — half-sister actually, both of us shared the same mother. Her father had been Jewish so there she was, with the Jewish last name Shulman, slung headlong into a very redneck family. She was funny, smart, had a quick temper but a swift capacity to forgive, she adored cats to the tune of twelve of them, with no expense too great to keep them well and healthy, and she was force-marched through hell more than a couple of times in her life. The first time was at the hands of my father, the details of which I’ll not relate until later.

The second time was when she was forced by my family to move, at the age of 17, to Japan with a new Air Force enlistee husband she barely knew. I think of that now and I can’t even fathom the terror involved. A whole nation of people who not only didn’t speak the same language but didn’t share a similar culture. It must have been a terror similar to a 18th century woman crossing the Atlantic to the so-called new world. Pam grew to love Japan and its people, but it was a hard sell to a fragile teenager. I vaguely remember the day she left — I might have been two. She wore these Palomino print slacks and a nubby sweater. I thought she looked so grown-up and sophisticated. At 52, I think of her situation and shudder at the thought. What the hell was my mother thinking?

First, you must understand a little about my family. My grandparents were wonderful grandparents, deeply kind and wise in their years. They had, however, both been raised in southern US farm families. My grandmother was the oldest of ten children. Her biological mother had died when she was four. Her stepmother was a gentle, sweet woman, but she seemed to believe that being happy was some kind of sin. My grandfather’s biological, half and step siblings amounted to twenty. He had lost his own mother at the age of nine. His father, a good man who had been a sheriff in Fort Smith, disappeared down a bottle and died young. My grandfather also lost a little sister he loved. My grandparents had survived tragedies, uncertainty and the worst of the Great Depression. All they knew, all their parents had known, was brutal survival. The fine details didn’t matter. As my grandmother often said, “Sometimes all we had to eat wuz bread and potatoes and we were glad to have it” — and they only had that because they lived on a farm.

As I said, they were spectacular grandparents. I can’t imagine they were that great as parents. I can sympathize with their situation. I think I pretty much sucked at motherhood by modern standards, but I managed to wing it and Ben seems to have survived. Anyway, I think they recognized their limitations and only had one child, my mother Barbara. My mother was a bipolar woman of widely ranging emotions and opinions. She was headstrong and stubborn as a “danged old mule” as my Arkansawyer family would say. She had longed to be either a singer or a professional ice skater, like the Norwegian Olympic medalist Sonja Henie, who was her idol. Mom often spoke of sneaking onto the frozen lake compound where Sonja was practicing. She watched her practice for over an hour.

But ice skating and her other great love, singing, fell victim to reality. She met a guy from Texas named Jimmy Shulman and, roughly about the same time, Jimmy’s best boyhood friend, Lee Tanner. We’ll get to Lee in a while. Momma did what every respectable young woman of the time did. She married her soldier boy before he shipped out, then, their first child conceived, she went onto creating the next greatest generation.

Mom had married Shulman at 16. My sister Pamela was born when she was 17. Momma managed to support the two of them with her jobs in downtown LA (that was at the time our people were civilized and actually provided a light-rail from our southeastern LA county suburb to downtown). Showing her single-minded, independent spirit, she even bleached her light brown hair to platinum blonde, which just wasn’t done at the time. She was 5’7″ tall and could have easily been an actress or a model. She was nothing short of beautiful.

Her soldier boy Jimmy came marching home again, but he was a very different man. The boy who had left was fun and carefree. The man who returned bore the deep inner scars of war. He didn’t want to be a father. He wanted my mom to leave Pamela with her parents so they could take off together and be teenagers again. Mom wouldn’t do that. Eventually, they split up. And Jimmy’s boyhood buddy, Lee Tanner, moved up and in.

But I must digress for a moment.

My mother was born with a slight tendency for pudginess, which she resolved by smoking. We’re all about results in my family. My older sister was born with the real tendency for obesity. My family started hounding her about her weight from a young age, just like they did me. By that time, people knew that smoking was more dangerous than obesity. Instead, Pamela took another route — she stuck her finger down her throat and never fully digested a meal again. We didn’t know the word “bulimia” back then. I suppose she heard about the “new diet idea” from other girls at her high school. Her “diet” quickly shrunk her down from a healthy eighty pounds overweight to an unhealthy slenderness that would often border on skeletal. She didn’t start her period until she was 17.

I was the only one she ever admitted the bulimia to, and that was only because I put the pieces together. I confronted her about it and got the “I’m the older sister” routine. My family had taught me well. I complied and didn’t reproach her again, though I did repeatedly point out the dangers. She brushed them off. The rest of the family cheerfully shrugged off her suddenly miraculous ability to binge on candy and soda pop without gaining an ounce on her skeletal frame. And I, fat little girl (daughter of a man with an ever greater history of obesity in his family), had absolutely no excuse, as my mother repeatedly told me.

My mother had wanted three boys named Matthew, Mark and Luke. She got a Mark. And she wanted some daughters, too. She seemed to want daughters for the same reason a little girl likes fashion dolls. I suppose that’s natural. My mother had pursued the dernier cri ideal of Classic Barbie, with her perfect blonde hair, and her, tall statuesque, and svelte figure. Mom achieved the ideal with a cigarette in her hand, but she achieved it. She also seemed to think, when wishing up a whole fleet of Barbie daughters that one way to do this was to marry short, chubby, Jewish or part-Cherokee men. My father was the part Cherokee one.

We now return from our digression.

My father had another problem, you see. A big problem. It was one forced upon him by a family secret that feeds on itself and, like salt, rots the structure from the inside out. He had been molested by an aunt I’ll call Roonie. She had been molested by someone else in the family. The same molestation problem had driven my beloved Great Aunt Bessie away from home at 16. My grandmother handled it with the admonition she gave my mother the day her son, my mother’s husband, my father, molested Pam — “Well, what do you want from him? He’s just a man.”

This is a comment that any sane man would be rightly disgusted at, as if molestation is a natural instinct. My father informed my mother that my sister, all of eight years old, had “given him the come on.” She was, as little girls often are at that age, innocently flirtatious. But no eight year old child makes a move on an adult man, least of all her stepfather whose last name she had taken on. Only a man who had been molested himself might think that was remotely possible — and even then the vast majority of sexual abuse victims do NOT molest others.

My father had no excuse. He knew better. He was sociopathic in that he really didn’t feel any guilt at all over what he had done. He was a pedophile. I now suspect that was his whole reason for zeroing in on my mother, because she had a little girl.

My mother, for some reason known only to her, and she took it to the grave with her, decided to send Pamela to live with her parents. My grandparents became parents again. And Pamela was the one sent away, as if she had done something wrong, and her offender was allowed to stay at home because, as everyone knows, no one would do that to his own blood, right? It was only because she was his stepdaughter, as if perversity has some sick sense of proportion.

I have to remember the day and time and my mother’s psyche to understand her choice. It must have been hellish. She had already had one child with this man (she would later have two more). She would have to work (at women’s wages) to support her children. So she shipped Pam off and kept the monster in the house with their son.

About nine years later, having been shrunk down to a disposable size, I suppose, my sister was ready for marriage. Her husband was handsome and young, an Air Force recruit. He informed her from day one that if she ever got fat, out the door she would go. No questions, no takesies-backsies, she’d be gone. So my sister, in her bulimia-induced skeletal prison, was shipped away again with yet another man.

While my sister was in Japan, she had her first baby. We have a habit of hatching ducklings on holidays in my family. Pam had been born on Halloween, I was born on Christmas, and Laura, Pam’s first child, was born on New Year’s Day, 1970. And Pam’s first lupus flare followed.

She was in absolute agony, from head to toe, and she was all alone in Japan. My grandparents, who had never left this country in their lives, flew to Japan to be with her. Lupus information was very sketchy at the time. Army doctors were even more ignorant at the time. Doctors told her she had about ten years to live, then someone suggested twenty was possible. My mother was crushed.

Eventually, Pamela returned home and saw better doctors. They informed her that her lifespan would be much longer than that. Not that it would be a lot longer than that. She didn’t even make it to 64.

And we now know what triggers lupus — lupus, the disease of slender young women — namely bulimia.

My mother was an alcoholic. That’s what they call it these days, back then she would have been a drunk. I know now she was self-medicating the effects of having been born with a tornado at the center of her brain. She was wildly bipolar. She also had just appalling taste in men — yes, including my father. I think, in his own way, my father intended to be a good person, but he was stuck in a similar polar shift that never seemed to end. Essentially, my father couldn’t feel and my mother couldn’t think. They found sanity, and eventual high madness, with each other. When they split, my mother (who had toyed with alcoholism the way she toyed with religion via the nice ladies who’d knock at her door and hand her Bible verses) careened into a tall, dour, mean Polish man who was the worst alcoholic one can imagine. My mother fell madly in love with the bottle.

Anyway, that’s all a long time ago. In this series of posts that I’ll eventually prune into a book (to be pubbed by Recoverama, my friend’s ACA press), I’ll eventually get into all that. I wanted to deal with something I hadn’t realized bugged me until this evening. This will make it into the book somewhere, if I ever get my sheets together.

I mentioned Dark Shadows here the other day, and my childhood TV hero of sorts, Dr Julia Hoffman. Tonight I sat down and made a note to a friend that they had turned Julia into an alcoholic in the new film version of Dark Shadows. I suddenly realized this really pisses me off. It has made me bitchy all day, so I’m venting it here.

My childhood nightmare was maternal alcoholism. And now they’re transforming Dr Hoffman into a drunk? This Dark Shadows is a comedy. Where have we come from if we now understand that alcoholism is a disease, but we still find it worthy of titters? The film Julia isn’t some stereotypical hard-drinking dame persona, which would be annoying anyway. She is described in advertising as an alcoholic. Grayson’s Dr. Hoffman was not an alcoholic. I guess they needed something for Helena to hang her fright wig on. I suppose it’s some character synergy with Barnabas’ lust for blood. That might be fun if this was a drama, but it doesn’t seem to be.

Female drunks die much, much faster than male drunks. Women can’t metabolize alcohol as anything other than a direct assault against their bodies. Alcoholism also demolishes families, destroys children, and does very few things that are even remotely funny.

I’ve been open-minded about liking the film, but I find myself more and more concerned with what they’ve done to Julia. I’ll post my thoughts about the film in case anyone wonders about them (other than me, I mean).

Stuff from the Blog

Before Dana Scully and all the strong women of television, there was Dr. Julia Hoffman

With the recent passing of Jonathan Frid, who played the original Barnabas Collins on the 1960s TV series, Dark Shadows, a lot of very apt commentary has come about regarding Jonathan’s monumental contribution to that TV phenomenon. Dark Shadows was an experience that could never be duplicated now. It wasn’t just a TV show, it was the TV show. Imagine that Twilight or Harry Potter was a daily series that everyone watched. That was what the experience was like for those of us who lived through that magical time. Jonathan will always be Barnabas Collins to all of us who remember him in that role.

While I deeply respected Jonathan Frid, and had the honor of meeting and getting to know him a little, my favorite character on Dark Shadows was always Dr. Julia Hoffman, played by the late, great Grayson Hall, an actress of tremendous power and range. It is impossible to overstate the level of her importance to women of my generation and yet she receives very little mention in the media. Grayson’s main DS character impacted the lives of nearly every woman of my age group. Before Dana Scully and all the strong women of modern television, there was Dr. Julia Hoffman. Julia was a trailblazer before the path had even marked out. She was so unique that her very invention only came about because of a typo in a script that turned a temporary character named Dr Julian Hoffman into Julia.

Dan Curtis, Dark Shadows’ creator, only ever thought of Grayson for the role. Julia was supposed to be killed off by the vampire Barnabas Collins who would then himself be staked to death in due course. The chemistry between Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid was so immediate and palpable that the audience couldn’t get enough. Not only did Grayson and Jonathan remain with the series, for many of us their characters of Julia and Barnabas became the series.

I have personally spoken to two different female physicians who were influenced to go into their professions by Julia’s persona. One of these women, Amanda, had grown up in a very small southern town. She had always thought women were nurses and men were doctors. She had been given the toy nurse case for Christmas while her brother received the toy doctor case. The gender modeling went on and on.

Then one day she discovered Dark Shadows. Dr. Julia Hoffman made Dr. Amanda Price possible. We can be sure there are countless similar cases regarding this largely unsung female hero.

When Grayson passed in 1985 at the ridiculously young age of 58, very little mention was made in the press. She was just another character actress passing on. But for many of us, she was a vital and important part of our formative years. She helped define womanhood for my own generation.

Shortly, Helena Bonham Carter will take on the role of Dr. Julia Hoffman, just as Johnny Depp will become Barnabas, in the big-screen version of Dark Shadows. This Dark Shadows will be a much lighter and funnier version. One can’t imagine there will be time enough in the plotline to let Barnabas and Julia return to their fabled partnership. But one thing is for sure, no matter how small Julia’s role in the film, Helena Bonham Carter has massive shoes to fill. For many of us, she’ll have to work very, very hard to be up to the challenge.

For more information on Grayson Hall, check out graysonhall.net

Grayson’s son Matt’s blog, http://msbhall.wordpress.com/

For more information about Dark Shadows, http://darkshadowsfestival.com

You know what’s very sad, I blog about my episode of mental illness (which was a long time ago, relatively mild and very short-lived) and now a few usually chummy friends are keeping their distance from me or acting strangely toward me. I was warned by several people this would happen. I thought surely not my friends! But, sadly, many people will use others’ mental illness issues to shroud their own misdeeds. Anyway, if you don’t know someone who has had a problem with depression, bipolar or an addiction issue, I’d be very surprised. I had thought we had all moved past most of these issues, at least most of my friends had. If you feel I am somehow now an unstable presence in your life (as if), feel free to defriend me. I won’t take it personally. And frankly, you’re a friend I can do without. My special thanks to people like Margaret, Tami, Annie, John, Susan and all the others who’ve treated me just like always.