Teevee Time: A story in stills — Gumby, “Balloonacy.”

Oh, my gosh, dudes — Gumby!! Turns out it’s simply all over that there ol’ youtube. I’ve had flu today and it has kept me some Excellent Company. So it’s Teveee Time!

From the late-breaking children’s nostalgic expansion series The Gumby Adventures, which aired in the ’80’s — and I am glad of being able to have at least been in on the ground level of that much of this wonderful franchise — by which time good ol’ green bendy-flexi hero Gumby had gained a sister and quite the phalanx of diverse friends. This episode was titled “Balloonacy.”

It’s Denali’s birthday, so Gumby and Pokey get some balloons for the party. As well as some normal helium balloons, they decide to pick up some magic, self-inflating balloons.

The episode begins with Granny, the neighborhood Model T aficionado, pulling up to the Gumby household, having just fetched home in her gleaming hearse of a jalopy young Minga (Gumby’s little sister, a latebreaking Material World addition to the Gumby family of characters) from a birthday party, from which Minga has clutched in her gooey little hands the souveneir of a single, crummy balloon.

Gumba, mater familias to Gumby and Minga, invites Granny in for some tea to thank her for ferrying Minga about Whatever-Its-called town (I’m sick or I’d wiki it, sorry).

Naturally bored, Minga wanders with her balloon out to the front yard, where Pokey the Pony and Gumby are playing a little frisbee.

Yikes. I have no idea why Pokey looks so unbelievably sly and spooky here. What gives, good pal?! Good gravy!

So then the worst thing ever happens, and Gumby and Pokey accidentally send Minga’s balloon back to that great party store in the sky.

Oh, shit! Minga tries to be really sweet and cool about it but you can tell (as can good brother Gumby) that she is in actuality totally bummed.

Pokey and Gumby were heading in to Town after aimless coy-eyed frisbee anyways to pick up supplies for their friend Denali the Mastodon’s upcoming hopefully-surprise birthday party — not making this up, and everyone knows how tough it is to “surprise” a mastodon …

… so have some empathy for their plight, please — and the pair secretly agree to replace Minga’s lost balloon while they’re at it, using Any Means Necessary.

Oh, my heavens. Loose cannons, these two! Gumby and Pokey, I want your guns and your badges on my desk by three o’clock, and if I ever catch you up to the shenanigans you were trying to pull at the mayor’s wife’s Tupperware party again, you’ll be on traffic patrol the rest of your natural careers! And I hope you two know another thing — I … I …. *sniff* god dang it — I’m proud of you (we all cry).

Okay, so then they pick up some balloons on the regular streets of toy Town of your expected, standard, non-magical variety in several shapes and sizes, and then Gumby does this Totally Freaky Thing where he turns his two triangle leg-thingies into a vestigial single tail-thingy and straight up slithers back into his car.

Tried to capture it fully but this is the best Science can do. Totally not okay.

Shortly after the slithering and with not even slant eyes from Pokey, who is apparently hep to his friend’s possesssion troubles, Gumby and Pokey are cruising back to their yellow dinosaur-friend thingy’s farm-place to assemble Denali’s party surprises when they pass what appears to be Just The Ticket to appease young Minga and her tragic, all-their-fault balloon loss!

They clamber from the car to go see what’s up with that. No tail visible, please note. (Look. All I want are answers. None come.)

Unbeknownst to them, Gumby and Pokey have an audience — the badassical Blockheads, “G” and “J”. (May the lord strike me dead if I ever stop rooting for them. They are red and they are good archers. What is so wrong with adoring them?! Gumby is kind of a goofy putz, you must admit: it’s not like thwarting him has ever stopped Nobel peace work or something.)

Gumby and Pokey enter the book, beautifully …

… and encounter an intriguing and powerful magician who is really frankly styled to be outlandishly Mexican (how I wish this was not so. But it is, and how — sorry.).

They explain their predicament.

The magician is astonished, but then assures them he can help them, and he blows their minds with some tricks. What the magician and I are now about to show you, I am not sure is legal …

… but Gumby and Pokey soldier through the guttwisting demonstration and wisely surmise it is the End to their Troubles with finding dazzling birthday gifts for Denali, because what do you get the prehistoric beast who’s literally seen it all, and young sister Minga!

(After all, why should she not also have the best in inflatable pig-anus-whosa-whatisis-thingy-balloon-dolls? just because she is a little kid and the entire inflation process looks hella ten kinds of traumatic? don’t make me laugh!)

Soon, Gumby and Pokey are on their way, with the Blockheads trailing them, all the way to Prickle’s barn.

Prickle the dino-thingy acts totally shady about the helium inflater. I don’t know if he’s a former huffer or what the deal is, but his actions and expressions around it are really weird and out of character. He seems untrustworthy in its presence. And that is a concern.

Gumby, like Lucille Bluth and your loving, flu-ridden hostess E, hella sucks at winking. Phew! There are so many more of us than I thought!

Gumby and Pokey explain the crazy magic balloons to Prickle and Goo. Why are you puzzling over Goo? Goo is a flying mermaid, duh, and she can take on any shape she chooses. Happens all the time.

Okay, now do you see what I mean about Prickle and that helium tank? Hecka shady! I haven’t seen a little yellow dinosaur looking so sneaky since B.J. from Barney and Friends knocked up Sesame Street’s Prairie Dawn. Oh, my gosh. Worst joke ever. I need to go eat glass now. I’m so sorry. Forever.

The Gang heads to Denali’s big pink mansion with the ballons (which completely dwarfs the suburban tract house that Gumby and Minga live in, where we can only assume Pokey is stabled, unless he stays on Prickle’s farm when Prickle is not busy huffing hecka all kinds of inert monoatomic gasses).

Goo is all in to the tiger, while Prickle goes for the pink elephant. Gumby, meanwhile, has slipped off to patch things up with Minga.

I’m not precisely sure into what Gumbo is trying to talk Gumba in this scene — although I have my definite suspicions — as she bemusedly washes dishes at the sink while he clearly spins a spiel.

While they are tied up in whatever exactly private-times planning they are doing, Gumby has dropped off with Minga the inflatable bunny balloon from the magician and shown her how to pump him up. (Anally. No connection, I’m sure, to their parents’ conversation.) The shock of all this sauce combined with a giant bunny, the very symbol of fertility, makes Gumba faint in to Gumbo’s arms.

Back at Denali’s place, Denali wakes up and goes out to investigate the noise from his front porch.

Oh, holy crap! A bunch of giant balloons and a banner! What a — oh, my ticker, gassssspppp…

Way to go, you guys. You killed him.

Yes, Goo, you should be perturbed, you shapeshifting blue scamp — and let that be a lesson to you about plotting to “surprise” a thing that has been around longer than sin and cockroaches.

Aw, just kiddin’, kiddos! Look: Denali is okay! Yay! — although I must grimly warn you that being a pachyderm he will Never Forget this shock, even 70 years from now when you are drooling in your oatmeal at an old folks’ home and he unexpectedly bursts through the door to yank you outside and stomp your shoulder blades in the street while you can only moan “why?” — he will know why, even as you struggle to remember how to piss your pants from the pain. That’s what you get. Anyway, happy birthday, Denali!!

The Blockheads have had just about all they can stand of this merry and cheesey, “all-gods-chillun-gots-birthdays” chicanery so they amiably start shooting arrows at the balloons, which naturally pops them.

This freaks Pokey out so bad that his eyes turn in to Shelley Duvall’s rack. (Sick left-field ’70’s burn on one of my favorite actresses!)

G and J get totally busted by Goo, Denali, and Prickle (look at Goo all flying off with her determined, shapeless little blue body to catch those bad boys) before they can do more than pop a few. Bummer.

By the time Gumby gets back from mending fences with Minga, the Blockheads have been captured and are sailing off in a balloon toward an uncaring horizon, ostensibly chastened by the prospect of cruel starvation and never setting foot on land again (just punishment? I think not).

And that’s “Balloonacy”! Sorry that went forever but I am sick as hayull. Thanks for playing!

Valentine Vixen: Laura Misch Owens, Miss February 1975

So many Valentine Vixens to post up in all their fun and special glory, so little time left in February all of a sudden! Yikes. As with the NSFW November project, I am once more faced with the question of whether I’ve bit off more than I can chew. It’s a challenge, but that’s all right: I was so selective with this month’s lonelyhearts ladies, handpicking only my tippy-toppy-bestest, most favoritest centerfolds, that there is literally not a single one that I am not totally psyched to share more about with you. So let’s do this!

Photographed by Richard Fegley.

The lovely and talented Laura Misch Owens was Playboy’s Miss February 1975. Those aren’t just pretty code words for taking it off on this one, dudes. Besides being beautiful, as evinced by these photographs, Ms. Owens is also a brilliant, witty, published author who happens to be forthright, charming, and absolutely-fall-down-freaking-hysterically funny. I’m going to let her talent speak for itself as I juxtapose the Playboy purple prose that accompanied her pictorial spread for them with her own take on the events, excerpted from an article she contributed to Salon.com about her time as a New Orleans bunny, written in 2005.

The headline and summary for Salon run, “When I was a Playboy Bunny in New Orleans: ‘I married a cop of easy virtue, posed nude in Hef’s magazine, drank all night at Lucky Pierre’s, and appeared in the worst movie ever made. It was Big and it was Easy, and now it’s gone.'” (“When I Was a Playboy Bunny,” Misch, Laura. 10 Sept 2005. Salon.com.)

Playboy sez: “Delta Lady: Meet Laura Misch, a New Orleans lovely who’s taken the Crescent City to her heart. Lucky New Orleans!” (“Delta Lady.” February, 1975. Playboy.)

Playboy sez:

Fresh out of high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 18-year-old ex-cheerleader Laura Misch was confronted with that same question that has plagued most new high school graduates: What now? … She pictured herself with rabbit ears and a Bunny tail. She had an idea! “I dashed off a letter, enclosed a Polaroid of myself and sent it to the New Orleans Bunny Mother, since she was the closest to Tulsa,” Laura recalls. “The next thing I knew, I was in New Orleans with a new job.”

Laura writes:

I stepped off the Braniff flight from Tulsa, Okla., at Moisant Field on Jan. 12, 1973, with $34 in my pocket and the promise of a job as a Bunny at the New Orleans Playboy Club. I was 19, with big, proud titties suitable for framing, and wearing enough Maybelline to sink a barge in the Industrial Canal. I didn’t know it yet, but I would spend the next seven years in the City That Care Forgot. By the time I escaped its humid clutches, the Big Easy would fill me up and wring me dry.

On the subject of a career in moving pictures, Playboy quotes Laura and adds their own advertiser/biz-skewed copy to her youthful sentiments, saying,

“I adore everything about New Orleans. I’ll never leave.” This creates a conflict in her life, for she also wants to be a movie star (“Who doesn’t?”) and most stars have to emigrate to Hollywood sooner or later.

No longer a Bunny since the temporary closing of the New Orleans Club some months ago, Laura has just finished an on-location shooting as an extra in Dino De Laurentiis’ new film, Mandingo, starring James Mason and Susan George. In the movie, which is about life on a slave-breeding plantation in the pre-Civil War South, Laura plays one of the girls in a Mississippi delta whorehouse. This is how she describes her big scene: “A door opens and through the doorway you see me standing there, clutching my underwear. Then I blow a sensuous kiss to a satisfied customer.” Since it was her first scene in a movie, and she appeared seminude, to boot, Laura admits to having had a certain initial apprehension. “I thought it would be awful with all those people watching me,” she says. “But they were good about it and kept their eyes on my face.” If you say so, Laura. (Playboy, February 1975.)

I had lines in those movies but only walk-ons in Mandingo and Hard Times. Strange; I always played a prostitute. Didn’t they see my shining thespian talents?

Oh, Laura. You had me at “Hello!”

This picture of Laura as a young bunny in N’Awlins is not from the Playboy pictorial spread. It accompanied her delightfully fun article for Salon.com.
For her part, the real, unvarnished, marvelously disingenous Laura says today,

I’m sure you’ve seen me in Mardi Gras Massacre, having my innards cut out by a guy wearing an Aztec mask. One Web site lists this gem as one of the worst movies ever, ever made. I’m proud. And remember “French Quarter,” with Bruce Davison and Virginia Mayo? You don’t?

That’s OK, Davison apparently doesn’t either, because he won’t list it among his credits. You can run but you can’t hide, Brucie. I was there. You were in it, pal!

Adorbably candid! Love it.

On the subject of her corrupt-cop, but seemingly loving, as much as he could be, given all time and circumstances, husband during those years, I think Ms. Misch Owens has a light and bittersweet touch, appropriately appreciative/critical/reflective (as all reviews of such relationships must always be) but not overly maudlin; a delicate balance to reach.

Somewhere along the way I had gotten married to Eddie, a cop in the French Quarter. … I thought he was terribly exciting. He’d bring me along to all-nighters at Benny’s, a joint on the levee. I was required to sit silently for hours while Eddie twirled his gold wedding band.

Benny was like 75 with about three teeth and had a 14-year-old girlfriend. This last fact struck no one but me as particularly odd or disgusting. Like everything else wild and evil in New Orleans, it was greeted with a shrug and a wink.

He introduced me to the shady characters, shady ladies and shady ways of the Crescent City that I never would have tapped into otherwise. Without him, I never would have had a private room with a private waiter — Joey Guera — at Antoine’s. Never would have had a real king cake at a family party, never would have gone fishing out of Empire, La., with so much beer aboard our little flotilla that we almost sank. And if we had, so what? There is nothing like a native New Orleanian.

I cannot, in my broken state, express strongly enough how much I aspire to acheive Ms. Misch’s disarmingly candid brand of levelheaded, logical but loving, analytical prose in regard to my own dissolving marriage some day.

We parted ways, eventually. I went down to Miami and he went back to being a bachelor. He retired from the force as a lieutenant and was freelancing as a security man at “tittie bars” and rich people’s houses Uptown on Audubon Place, last I heard.

Reporting on recent events, Ms. Misch adds the following epilogue to her relationship with her Big Easy first husband:

I phoned him just before the eye of Katrina must have passed very near his house. I got his answering machine. Some silly nonsense about how he wasn’t home, he was checking out the latest Saints trade. I said, Hey, you idiot, call me.

He hasn’t called, and now I just get static when I dial the number. C’mon, Eddie, check in. Check in, dammit.

New Orleans is gone.

Today, Ms. Misch Owens is a novelist under the name of Laura Watt and has written non-fiction for the Miami Herald, the Rocky Mountain News, and the Denver Post. Sardonic and enduringly adorable — thanks a mil for the inspiration, Ms. Misch!

Sam Haskins Month, Day 9: November Girl

“Dance.” From his 1966 book November Girl. He also included it in 2009’s collection Fashion Etcetera. I’ll go in to that one a different day.

November Girl, like most of Sam’s books, is out of print. Still, it’s not as though all copies were burnt by papal decree and Illuminati appointment in all parts of the world at the precisely same hour it quit being printed, enforced by guards with muskets and sabres and saltpeter; it’s a photography book with boobies in it, not a worldwide conspiracy or any kind of forbidden-treasure-map.

You can pretty easily, though expensively, find November Girl online from rare booksellers and nudity-fans (those poor, brave pariahs who actually find the naked human body of interest — ugh, I cannot imagine what their lives are even like, they should really have their own charity) of all stripe if you got the cash for that kind of thing.

Perhaps one good thing to come from his recent death will be that demand might increase for his books and they will go back in to circulation.

Advice: NSFW spoonful of sugar edition

Breasts are like a spoonful of sugar in that they help the medicine go down, don’t you agree?

“She could tell me I’m going to die tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter, so long as she told me topless.” — Brody, Mallrats

“Veronika smoking” by blanchenot on deviantart

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” –Lorraine Hansberry

I’m sorry to break this news to you, but if you are different, and by all means please be so!!, your life is going to be harder than that of those dime a dozen nondreamers who come out of the jerk vending machine like a predictable package of m&m’s. Don’t let it get you down. I am trying not to and genuinely hope the same for you.