The Dark Shadows Daybook: April 5

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1968: Episode 469

Julia and Lang square off when she learns that he may not only have the cure for Barnabas, but his loyalty, as well. Julia: Grayson Hall. (Repeat; 30 min.)

Jeff, Julia, and Vicki open the coffin in the secret room after Jeff reveals that he somehow knew the latch was there. The coffin is empty. In the hospital, Barnabas has excruciating blood pangs, and Lang explains that he may have a permanent cure. Later, Julia visits Lang, who brags that he can care for Barnabas far better than she. As she leaves, Julia passes Jeff Clark. Lang is furious that he is being associated with Clark. Jeff explains that he saw Julia at Eagle Hill. Lang says the bodies there are far too old for his purposes. It’s clear that Jeff is being blackmailed to work for him.

With more than a week of revolutionary plot advancement under the show’s belt, the staff now settles back into a standard pace. In an interview with Violet Welles, I read that she, Sam Hall, and Gordon Russell would plot out the show months in advance, finally getting down to week by week, episode by episode, and scene by scene. The process was surprisingly meticulous. I think the formula breaks down a bit like this:

10% Last scene of the prior episode.
30% Covering prior plot points.
10% Review and advance secondary plot.
30% Revelation of one new plot point in prime storyline.
10% Foreshadowing future plot point.
5% Debate about prior decision or confession.
5% Major new decision or confession.

In this case, we spend a lot of time in the mausoleum as Vicki and Jeff sort of remember segments of 1795. The major new ground we cover is that Jeff is going to graveyards for Dr. Lang… and that the bodies in Eagle Hill are too old for the job. Hint hint. The discoveries, of course, are that the coffin is empty inside the secret room and that Lang may be able to permanently prevent Barnabas from having any relapses.

But is that really a revelation? No. Lang never said that Barnabas is permanently cured. This is the trick that Dark Shadows does. It doesn’t reliably deliver new information. Instead, it reiterates old information with slightly more context. The characters sometimes act like it’s the first time they’ve heard things, but in the case of Barnabas and his blood pangs, he has no reason to be surprised. Barnabas may have “seen” the recent episodes, but not all viewers have. And for more seasoned viewers, the show still entertains by covering old ground in new enough circumstances that it feels like the first time. Usually.

The hot scene in this one is the conversation that Julia has with Lang. This may be Julia’s real turning point. Up to this moment, Barnabas has been a thorn in her side that she’s niggled about to their mutual masochism. She’s poisoned him. Blackmailed him. Lang seems to sense this. He revels in pointing out the legitimate truth that he can care for Barnabas better than Julia. After all, he cured him in less than a day. It feels like two pimps arguing over an, um, employee. They both pretend to have his best interests at heart. They both pretend not to be engaged in vicious combat. One pretends not to be weaker. One pretends not to be gloating over it.

Julia’s loved Barnabas, but not exactly lost him. He was close enough for her to bully, torture, and be tortured by. He was a problem, yes, but he was all hers. Seeing her contemplate losing him to someone who can pull off what she only claims she MIGHT be able to do? Not only that, but someone who offers none of the minuses of romantic jealousy? She’s suddenly behind an eight ball the size of Collinwood. If she gets out from it, her relationship with Barnabas will never be the same. She’ll have to tap into her humanity, not her guile. They might even wind up equals.

On this day in 2063, Dr. Zephram Cochrane and the town of Bozeman, Montana will welcome the Vulcan surveyor T’Plana-Hath on what will be appreciated as First Contact Day. The T’Plana-Hath

This episode hit the airwaves April 10, 1968.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: July 25

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1969: Episode 807

Tate pressures Aristede to reveal Petofi, but instead hears that the Count is in suspended animation, and only has a few more weeks to find his hand before a curse consumes him. Jamison, possessed by the Count, bluffs his way into freedom, then has Magda take him to Barnabas.

Welcome to the Gordon Russell Fan Club. Be seated.

I think, of all the deceased DARK SHADOWS luminaries, Gordon Russell is the one I’d like to meet most. As fans of the show, we focus so much on the actors -- the collective face of the show -- that we forget the writers who gave them their sound. Dramatic writing is crushingly hard. Keeping individualized voices, especially when so many of them come from the same social world, is a difficult task on its own. But that’s not even the toughest part. DARK SHADOWS episodes are like telephone cords made of progressing Möbius strips. Most dramatic scenes are about economy. Nothing can be wasted. You have discoveries and resulting conflicts eliciting change. A chain of those creates the play. Badda boom, etc. No matter the medium, this never changes. But on DARK SHADOWS, you have to do that and also stretch the storytelling to the longest format possible… one that makes a Wagner opera look like a Bazooka Joe comic strip. But you can’t let it feel stagnant. Philip Glass luxuriates in the fact that his listeners know that he’ll take his time. Soap fans think they want action-action-action when what they actually want is to distract themselves for as long as possible with people they care about doing things that are vitally important. If a standard writer had been given the outline to 807, they would have written a script half as long and a tenth as interesting. Russell and the other writers fill the scenes with intense discoveries and purpose, fleshing it out with memorable characters, but with no linguistic flab. How they do it is simply the alchemy of their art. I wish I could replicate it, but in lieu of that, I have no recourse but to marvel at it.

Russell is helped by dropping one of 1897’s most easily-forgotten exposition bombs, courtesy of Aristede, the Smithers to Petofi’s Montgomery Burns. Petofi’s mission to find his hand has been going on for a century, placing him beginning it within a year of Barnabas’ initial entombment. If publishers realized there could be a DARK SHADOWS author whose name is not Lara Parker, we could enjoy a book of short stories looking at the adventures over that century. Just imagine Quentin and Desmond using the hand for dimensional travel. A young Nicholas Blair using it. And so on. Petofi is helped by how others refer to his legacy as much as what he does. In this, Tate calls him someone who enjoys only the suffering of those around him. This both clashes with Thayer David’s ebullient performance and gives it subliminal menace. That mix -- Petofi’s jovial appearance versus the fog of evil that others describe -- may be what makes him one of the richest and most watchable characters in all of DARK SHADOWS. He is their Falstaff and their Gloucester all at once. Helping this is the fact that he’s the only character on the show to be played to the hilt by three actors, all of whom are named David -- Thayer David (whose first name was actually David), David Henesy, and David Selby.

Coincidence?

But where would Petofi be without the writing? Nowhere at all. It’s fitting that this episode should feature Charles Delaware Tate and his curse so prominently. That’s a strange story -- even beyond Barnabas and Josette, it’s the closest we come to pure fairy tale. Imagine writing characters who inflame the public imagination so ardently. Like Tate’s powers to craft paintings that spring to life, that’s what the DARK SHADOWS writers must have faced at this time. How much are they Tate and vice-versa? And does that make Dan Curtis their Count Petofi?

Come to think of it, he was an avid golfer who was often seen wearing a single glove….

Coincidence?

This episode hit the airwaves July 29, 1969.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: July 19

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this date in 1967: Episode 292

Woodard confronts Julia about Maggie’s extended stay at Windcliff, and she reveals the connection to the supernatural, convincing to continue covering for her. Outside the Old House, Sarah bemoans the fact that she can’t find the very much alive Maggie. David takes the story of Maggie’s survival back to Collinwood, and Vicki reveals to Burke that she’s become strangely smitten with a new house by the sea.

Let’s hear it for Gordon Russell and his first episode. Over the next four years, he will become DARK SHADOWS’ most prolific writer. In it, we see his one of his great strengths: writing relationships with truth, twists, and surprises. Grayson Hall is particularly adept at pulling off his verbal labyrinths. In the first scene with Woodard, Julia actually talks the hard-headed generalist into receptiveness toward her vision of science’s conquest of the supernatural. She evades, warns, bullies, and eventually flirts her way into his trust. Her coming out as what has become a mad scientist is done with both credibility and wit. DARK SHADOWS has expanded its redefinition of the soap opera universe as one in which the supernatural is seen as something absolutely real… and one in which we humans have a fighting chance. By selling Woodard on it, she further sells the audience. So often, supernatural stories -- from DRACULA to the world of Lovecraft -- posit a universe where terror exists because it cannot be understood.  Her quest to do so isn’t folly at all, and it further roots one of the key concepts of the series. These things have limits and origins, just like we do. Moreover, they have accessible weaknesses. This isn’t man vs. the omnipotent. The seemingly “omnipotent” have challenges and foibles of their own. The story shifts from drama to horror, then back to what DARK SHADOWS truly is: drama involving horror. The power that people like Barnabas wield makes their vulnerabilities all the more poignant. And doesn’t DARK SHADOWS begin that way? Despite all of their sway, the Collins family cannot escape guilt and fear.

We see further limits with the next scene, involving David and Sarah.  Sarah, a ghost who can materialize at will, has lost Maggie. As the scene went on, I wondered what the show would be like if Sarah had simply followed Maggie to Windlciff and encouraged her to escape. Just as interesting, but probably shorter. There is a natural sadness to the scene. Despite all of her talents, Sarah is a prisoner to the Collins estate, as are so many others for so many reasons, most of which boil down to relationships.

Russell curiously juxtaposes this with the next scene involving Burke and Victoria. Vicki is a human empowered by knowledge of the paranormal, and credits it with helping her discover Seaview, a house beyond, to which she’s inexplicably drawn.Escape from Collinwood may be possible after all.  So, what is the supernatural in so many of these cases but love? It’s an extraordinary power to some and an imprisoning imposition to others. Instead of referencing it literally, DARK SHADOWS accomplishes the same thing figuratively. It’s all the business of the daytime genre, but by using the supernatural as a metaphor, Russell gives the idea an even greater universality. Not only that, he opens up a world in which both love and the occult can be examined with fresh, occasionally jaundiced, and ultimately optimistic eyes.

This episode hit the airwaves Aug. 8, 1967.

The Dark Shadows Daybook: NOVEMBER 6

By PATRICK McCRAY

Taped on this day in 1968: Episode 623

In exchange for distracting Nicholas, Angelique sends Eve back in time to 1795. There, she visits her old lover Peter Bradford, who awaits execution for killin’ some guy. But he’s innocent. Because he’s Peter Bradford. She offers to help him escape, but he refuses. Her plan is to gather evidence to convince Jeff Clark that he’s really Peter Bradford. Meanwhile, Joshua orders Ben Stokes to destroy Vicki’s book of Collins history. Eve gets wind of this, and hoodwinks Ben into giving it up. Ultimately, she is unsuccessful in rescuing Peter, but she does get a note that he writes minutes before his execution, and she proclaims it to be exactly what she needs.

This is the kind of thing you could only get away with while the boss is in Tahiti. And yet, I have no evidence that Dan was in Tahiti. In fact, I could just as easily see him giggling like a demented toddler at the audacity of what the show was doing. Less than a year before, when 1795 began, I’m sure there was a mixture of excitement and “we’re doomed” at the ABC offices. Now, what the hell?  Let’s throw a 1960’s soap back to 1795 for a day. Why not? Better yet, why? The answer was simple. Sweeps. It’s when the Neilsen ratings really examine the books. Look at November, February, and May, and you’ll find shows doing things at their wackiest. In fact, around this time, 1795 was beginning for the 1967 year, they were doing another 1795 flashback in 1968… with another one coming in December, 1969 was introducing the Leviathans, and in 1970, the events leading to Quentin’s witchcraft trial are coming to a (severed) head (in a box). 

The episode itself is the kind of nutty, absurdist fun upon which Gordon Russell could always be relied. So often, his scripts feel like parodies of DARK SHADOWS that won’t quite come out and admit it. First, the patent lunacy of Peter Bradford being the end-all-be-all for both Vicki and, bafflingly, the most evil woman on earth, Danielle Roget, in Collinsport from France by way of the Yancy Street Gang. What was the attraction? Who throws a shoe? Honestly? If he has a shot, I do, too, and my dance card’s open. (Ahem, ahem, female DARK SHADOWS fans.) Then, Joshua gets so upset over his inability to avert Peter’s death that he orders a valuable book from the future to be burned. I guess it was cathartic. Danielle even tries to seduce the elderly gaol guard, who just seems weirded out by the whole thing, as if she has an unwholesome fetish with which he wants no part. It’s a lot of fun and an unofficial sequel to 1795 that makes me wish they’d checked back more frequently. Of course, Jeb Hawkes would also be anchored back here, making 1795 the Queen Mother of all jonbar hinges.

On this day in 1968, Richard Nixon defeated Washington beefcake and teen heartthrob, Hubert Humphrey, to become the 37th president of the United States. In many ways, his administrations would satisfy a conspicuous number of left-wing initiatives for a republican. If you want a smoking conspiracy gun, it’s that.

Can a 172-year-old vampire find love and happiness?

In 1968, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post spend a week on the New York City sets of DARK SHADOWS. The result was one of the most in-depth pieces written about the show during its prime, though there's still a great deal here that's sure to piss off fans. The tone wanders between wry and condescending, managing to be both honest and spiteful in equal doses. Despite all of this, writer George Fox never really breaks new ground in regards to understanding the appeal of the show. Fox does everyone a disservice by hitting the usual beats found in almost every story written about DARK SHADOWS. Still, it's an interesting read and might still be controversial enough to prompt some discussion more than 40 years after it was originally published.

Note: Following the clues given in the story, it appears Fox was hanging around the DARK SHADOWS studios in May that year. The story was not published until November, around the same time that actor Robert Rodan left the series.

Can a 172-Year-Old Vampire Find Love
and Happiness in a Typical New England Town?
By GEORGE FOX
The Saturday Evening Post
November, 1968

In some ways the situation wasn't unusual for a soap opera. A girl and an older man in the process or eloping had been hurt in an auto accident. However, the condition of the still-unconscious male patient baffled the examining doctors at the hospital. Although he had suffered only a minor head wound and was breathing normally, his veins were almost empty of blood and no heartbeat or pulse could detected. The treatment — massive transfusions — was already under way when the patient's physician and a friend arrived at the emergency ward. "What do you think Will happen to him?" asked the friend in a desperate whisper. "Who can tell?" was the M.D.’s equally tense reply. "After all, no one's ever given massive blood transfusions to a vampire before."

A burst of eerie music is followed by a denture-adhesive commercial, and one more episode of ABC's "continuing suspense drama," Dark Shadows, comes to a cliff-hanging conclusion. "All soaps are basically problem shows," one of the writers says.”'Most deal with issues of tremendous interest to the American housewife. You know, abortion, adultery, adolescent rebellion, drug addiction, stuff like that. Our problem is 'Can Barnabas Collins, a 172-year-old vampire with a guilt complex, find love and happiness in a typical New England town?'"

Seen on ABC at 4 P.M. (E.S.T.) Monday through Friday. Dark Shadows is the top-rated daytime attraction. With females between the ages of 12 and 34. In recent months the show has become something of a national fad. Barnabas Collins board games, posters, Halloween costumes, masks, capes, coloring books and bubble-gum cards are being rushed on the market. One entrepreneur is even preparing Barnabas Collins plastic fangs, adjustable to any juvenile mouth.

Until the character of Barnabas was introduced last year, the program's darkest shadow of all was a cancellation notice lurking in the wings. Surveys made early in 1967 showed that it was being watched in only 2,750,000 homes, as against a whopping 4,480,000 today. The story had originated as a straight "soap" With Gothic trappings — an old dark house on the Maine coast; young governess menaced by unspecified evils, etc. Topping the cast was former movie actress Joan Bennett, the diminutive brunette whose more than 70 film roles had ranged George Arliss' niece in DISRAELI to Elizabeth Taylor's mother in FATHER OF THE BRIDE. "We were really bombing." admits Dan Curtis, the independent producer who packages the show, "so I figured, to hell with it. If I'm going to fail, I’ll at least have a good time. I went wild, tossed in witches and ghosts, you name it. But that vampire made the difference. Two weeks after he came on, the ratings began to climb.”

"That vampire" is, in reality, a 44-year-old Canadian actor named Jonathan Frid, a tall, attractively homely man with a face like a gardening trowel. I first met him in the Dark Shadows studio, a rancid-yellow structure the size of a two-story commercial garage. A warren of cramped dressing rooms and production offices — drenched with antiseptic pale light — fills the top floor. The effect is a little like being trapped in a submarine.

Frid was in full costume: black Inverness cape; long hair plastered down in spiked bangs; tombstone-white skin: large, slightly cruel gray eyes. He was asked if he had any personal theories on why his character had become such a success.

"To be frank, I haven't thought about it much," he said in his somber, dramatic voice. Paradoxically, his off-screen mannerisms — sweeping gestures, eyebrows arching almost to the hairline — are more florid than his acting style. Frid's vampire is restrained almost to the point of rigidity, as if fighting to hold himself back from some dark, nameless act. "There was the fan mail, of course," he went on. "It's up to two thousand letters a week now, mostly from women. They even send me nude pictures of themselves.

"Frid works with a secretary to answer the thousands of letters that pour in each week -- most of them from admiring women."

"I suppose women see Barnabas as a romantic figure because I play him as a lonely, tormented man rather than a Bela Lugosi villain. I bite girls in the neck, but only when my uncontrollable need for blood drives me to It. And I always feel remorseful later. In the story, I was murdered and turned into a vampire by a jealous witch back in 1796. Actually, my main interest is curing my condition. It's even happened occasionally, like the time I was given massive transfusions by mistake. They made me a normal human. Unfortunately, there was a side effect—I actually looked 172 years old. It was either bite girls in the neck again or die of old age …”

The scripts of Dark Shadows are tailored to make Barnabas Collins sympathetic in spite of his more antisocial tendencies. "He does terrible things," says Gordon Russell, one of the writers, "but we always give him a good reason.” An especially vivid example of this philosophy was the demise of the Reverend Mr. Trask. The episode took place during a flashback to the 18th century, detailing the hero's early career as a member of the living dead. The Reverend Mr. Trask, as it happened, was organizing a mass execution of suspected witches at the time. Emerging from his coffin one night. Barnabas learned of the enterprise and immediately denounced it as "superstitious nonsense " (How a man who had been turned a vampire by a witch could be certain the reverend's victims were innocent was never explained.) DARK SHADOWS fans cherish moment when Barnabas trapped the cleric in the basement of an abandoned house and hit him the haughty phrase: "l thought you were a pious hypocrite when I was alive, and I think you're a pious hypocrite now." He then proceeded to wall up Trask in an alcove.

"Dress rehearsal, dress rehearsal," screamed the loudspeaker in Frid's dressing room. "Personally, the success of the show hasn't meant all that much," he said, rising and brushing a spot of talcum powder off the collar of his cape. "l got a raise when I signed a two-year contract, but that's it. The trouble, I guess, is that soaps are rather subterranean. The people you want to impress are working while you're on. Somehow, this sort of thing just isn't real ...”

If Jonathan Frid can't quite come to grips with his offbeat celebrity, it's understandable. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, trained in his craft at London’s Royal Academy and the Yale Drama School, he'd spent nearly two decades as one of the hundreds of New York-based actors who, somehow, just never make it. Respected by other professionals, they fill out the years between Broadway roles in regional theaters, touring with road companies, playing small parts in Shakespeare summer festivals.  "l portrayed so many conspirators m Shakespeare's historical plays that even today my only real political allegiance is to the House of York,” Frid says. To find fame and relative fortune as a vampire in a soap opera, his manner hints, is improbable almost to the point of hallucination.

Jonathon Frid, actress E.J. Peaker and Robert Rodan attend a party for the cast of DARK SHADOWS in 1968.

Descending from the neat, sterile confines of the studio's second floor to the bustling, dusty clutter of the taping area is something of a shock. Because of limited space, sets are crammed in one upon another at unexpected angles. A single step takes you from the huge, murky living room of Collinwood — the house around which most of the action revolves — to a sunlit artist's studio, which in turn borders on an ancient graveyard. Through it all move technicians, wheeling their cameras like robot dance partners. The actors — who put in 9-10-11-hour days —sit in odd corners, memorizing their lines, oblivious of the activity around them. The show even has a late shift — stagehands who labor most of the night to erect the sets for the following day's program. The three-man writing staff works in an apartment about 10 blocks from the studio, struggling to keep the scripts at least two weeks ahead of the taping schedule.

The actors talk a lot about wages and working conditions. Daytime serials, some of winch have kept the same character for 18 years, are the closest thing to real job security an actor can find, although the 13-week option clauses add a certain amount of suspense. The week I watched the show, the action revolved around a Frankenstein-type monster, played by a young, six-foot-six-inch actor named Robert Rodan. The role required him to spend most of his time as an inanimate, stitched-together hulk lying on a lab table. Having just come from a talk with the show's writers, I remarked that they were planning to throw him off a cliff in a few months. He sat bolt upright. "Do I get killed?" he said.

Robert Rodan, Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid.

Other cast members are more casual about their labors. Redheaded Grayson Hall implied that her main reason for staying with the show is professional laziness. A gifted actress with a solid stage-and-screen reputation, she received an Academy Award nomination several years ago for her performance as a Lesbian schoolteacher in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. "I guess I could have gotten more Hollywood work, she said with an easy laugh, "but it meant living out there and going to the parties and everything. Movie people can't separate an actress from her role. To them I'm still the crazy dyke who chased Sue Lyon all over Mexico. Anyway, this show is comfortable and I get to work with my husband, who's one of the writers.

"I play Dr. Julia Hoffman, a kind of female mad scientist. She's one of the few people who know Barnabas is more than a harmless nut who hates sunlight. Actually, I’m in love with him, and I get jealous as hell because he bites young girls in the neck but refuses to bite me. Middle-aged housewives are always sending me letters saying they understand the situation perfectly."

The girl bitten most often Alexandra Moltke. She plays doe-eyed, virginal Victoria Winters, the show's original protagonist. With three more years to go on her five-year contract, boredom has set in. "Victoria is so dumb," she said with an exasperated grimace. "All I do is stand around saying, ‘I don’t understand what's happening.' Jonathan has hypnotized me into eloping with him, tried to cut off my boyfriend's head to stick on that goofy monster they made, even sent me hundreds of years Into the past during a séance. And I still haven't figured out that he may not be quite normal."

To Joan Bennett, who plays the reclusive mistress of Collinwood, the show is obviously a means of semi-retirement. Although still the only performer given "star" billing, she usually appears only twice a week, at her own request. “I hated the job at first," she admitted in her familiar, tartly suspicious tones. "All that getting up early and eating soup in a paper cup for lunch. But now I don’t mind. After all, poor Jonathan does most of the work. Isn't that amazing about him? Some of it has rubbed off on all of us. A month ago I was In the Midwest, narrating a fashion show, and the teeny-boppers just inundated me. I felt positively like a Beatle.”

Many parents forbid small children to watch the program, less because of the violence (gory scenes usually take place off camera) than because of its odd moral ambiguity. Barnabas is universally accepted by kids as the hero. Barnabas is universally accepted by kids as the hero. Some people apparently get nervous when their children identify with a character who bricks up living people in alcoves. This possibility was mentioned to producer Dan Curtis, a husky, ebullient ex-salesman with one of those suntans that must have been initiated in the cradle. He smiled tolerantly. "We have the only show on the air that kids can accept all the way as make-believe,” he said. "If you watch it regularly, you'll see what I mean. Nobody ever really dies. During the flashback to 1795, we killed off just about the whole cast — and as soon as we returned to 1968, there they there again as their own descendants. If we can't do that, we bring 'em back as ghosts or zombies."

"Frid, as Barnabas Collins, goes over a scene just as the day's shooting begins."

Before leaving, I dropped by to say good-bye to Frid. During the four days I'd followed the shooting, he had been in virtually every scene, a feat requiring countless hours of rehearsal and memorization. "The worst part is that I'm a slow study," he said. "You can't always be looking at the TelePrompTer. The audience notices." Although the concept of DARK SHADOWS seems humorous in print, the actors — Frid, in particular — play it in an intense, realistic style. On Monday, after a weekend's rest, he had delivered his lines with energetic authority. By Thursday, the accumulated strain showed in slurred or misread speeches and ill-timed movements.

"I was awful today." he said. "We never retape, no matter how many fluffs the cast makes, not even when scenery falls over. Costs too much."

It was the first time I'd seen him without makeup, and he looked remarkably the same. His face was still pale and haggard, his eyes shadowed. He collapsed into an armchair. The excessively actorish mannerisms had disappeared, and abruptly I found myself talking to a shy, almost self-depreciating man. "This is the only time I really relax," he said, "when I know I'm not on the next day. You asked me earlier what direction I'd like my career to take, and I couldn't give you an answer. Actually I was trying to keep the day's lines straight in my head. Well, I’d like my own repertory company someplace. I've never been all that ambitious, though I enjoy being a big frog in little pond. The biggest kick I ever had as an actor was playing Richard Ill at a college in Pennsylvania. They really liked it, appreciated what I was trying to do. A show like this pays well enough, but— well, you know …”

As I left, I noticed a dozen or so teen-aged girls patiently waiting for Barnabas Collins to appear. I waved to them as I went out the door and, giggling, they waved back.