We are on day 205 of 15 days to slow the spread.
It’s Friday. I have a three-day weekend.
I assume that those of you dissing Christopher Columbus have all volunteered to work on Monday, right?
I didn’t think so.
October is the spooky month.
Tonight, we open Blood Lake Haunted Trail in Midlothian. Click the link for details and tickets.
Here’s some irony. I’m not a big horror fan.
I am, however, an actor who likes to work.
No, no, no, not the day job. That’s a different kind of horror.
I will scare you for money.
When I auditiond for Halloween Haunt last year at Kings Dominion, the talent coordinator asked me to name my favorite horror movie. I drew a blank and finally came up with Young Frankenstein.
In hindsight, I could have said Arachnophobia. I saw that years ago with a friend in Washington state. About halfway through we were sitting with our feet up in the seat.
True story. While I’ve never been attacked by a vampire or a werewolf, I have been attacked by a poisonous spider.
It’s not that I mind the horror as much as I do the startle.
I don’t like surprises.
I mean, don’t even try to throw me a surprise birthday party. It will not be appreciated.
I’m not good in dealing with the unknown.
That’s probably why I’ve struggled, along with many of you, with 2020. We just don’t know what horror comes next.
But I’m delighted to try to scare you into a Depends moment, so to speak.
I participated in my first haunted house my senior year in college for the fall festival. It was a joint project with the drama club. I was upstairs in the vampire room just before patrons walked out to meet the four heads singing “Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody.”
Sometimes silly and scary go well together.
I’m missing Haunt this year at Kings Dominion. I’m missing a lot of things this year at Kings Dominion.
I think I’m just missing Kings Dominion.
But a theater friend invited me to join Blood Lake Haunted Trail for the season. We’ve worked together on other projects, including a cemetery tribute to Edgar Allan Poe some years back.
Haunting will be difficult, and more challenging, this year. We have to wear our masks and keep our social distance. Scaring will be a lot harder.
But we’ll make it work and for a few minutes anyway, maybe the horror of our trail will make folks forget about the horror that has been 2020.
Of course, there’s an election in three weeks.
I don’t care who your candidate is, there’s no scenario that doesn’t reach a significant level of frightening.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Except, I will say that if I told you what I thought would happen some of you would be more scared than you would be by my horror character.
You might even find it startling.
Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash