I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHISH-“Your Pet Cat” (MGM Grand Garden Arena, Friday 10, 31, 2014).

In honor of Halloween, these Ghost Box stories will be attached to a recent Phish Halloween show [with quoted material from various reviews]. 

Known for dawning musical costumes to celebrate [Halloween], Phish broke with tradition last year to offer a set of original music.  The Phish Bill read that Phish’s musical costume would be a 1964 Disney album of sound effects – Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House.  But it wasn’t a cover set. Phish played original music set amongst an incredibly psychedelic, theatrical graveyard stage accentuated by zombie dancers and a ghoulish MC.  At the start of the set, the stage was cleared before a graveyard came to the foreground.  Smoke filled the air, zombie dancers appeared, and music filled the venue. A haunted house was brought to the front of the stage, which eventually exploded, and all four-band members appeared, dressed in white like zombies. 

“Your Pet Cat” was a funk workout with a “Tube”-like beat from Fish and staccato synth stabs from McConnell as the sounds of cats shrieking poured out over the PA.

The announcer says, “From the time of the ancient Egyptians until today, many people have been cat fanciers.”

With a screeching cat sound and a repeating keyboard motif Trey plays five chords in rapid succession with a little air to breathe.  There’s a funky bass from Mike and some grooving from Page.

The song came to a climax when Trey played some wild solos and adding some cat-like noises of his own to the mix.

[READ: October 16, 2017] “Pumpkin Head”

Just in time for Halloween, from the people who brought me The Short Story Advent Calendar comes The Ghost Box.

This is a nifty little box (with a magnetic opening) that contains 11 stories for Halloween.  It is lovingly described thusly:

A collection of chilly, spooky, hair-raising-y stories to get you in that Hallowe’en spirit, edited and introduced by comedian and horror aficionado Patton Oswalt.

There is no explicit “order” to these books; however, on the inside cover, one “window” of the 11 boxes is “folded.”  I am taking that as a suggested order.

I really enjoyed this story although there were so many elements that just seemed so wrong (in 1982!).

It’s Halloween time in school and a teacher is celebrating with her class. They are rather misbehaved but only in good fun, I suppose.  There was a witch drawn on the board and when the teacher left the room someone scribbled Teacher under it.  [Why not her name, I wonder?]  She yells at them but then pulls out a witch’s hat from her drawer and they all laugh.

She hands out candy (!) and then they begin telling a story.

Each child in the row gets a line, but when they get to the last child she doesn’t say anything,  She’s new and rather shy.  And she is named Raylee.  When she doesn’t say anything the kids starts shouting “She’s a faggot!”  What?  Who says that in school?  What teacher allows that?

The teacher can’t get Raylee to join them, but Raylee does offer to tell a story of her own.

She gets up in front of the class and tells a story of Pumpkin Head.  He was a boy who was very lonely.  He had a deformity that made his head swell like pumpkin with very loose skin.  People said he looked that way because his father worked at an atomic plant.

Kids made fun of his at school all the time.  Eventually he had to take three days off from school because of the humiliation.

When he got back to school, he seemed pleased.  People still made fun of him, but he had a plan. He walked to the front of the room.  After locking the doors he took out a knife.

At this point the teacher stops Raylee and asks where she heard that story.  She says she made it up.  This concerns the teacher, of course, but things settle down.

The kids loved the story.  They ate it up and in fact Raylee was invited to a party that she had been excluded from.

At the party they asked Raylee to continue the story.  And she does.

She says that Pumpkin Head’s parents had arranged for a plastic surgeon to fix him, to make him sort of normal looking,  And his parents tried get Pumpkin Head to pass in a new school.

The end of the story is pretty spectacular.

This was definitely my favorite story despite the kids calling her faggot. What the hell?