Ookie…

Dearest Rachel –

Considering that it’s likely to be a busy day once it actually gets started – I’ve reconciliations to do for the church regarding their bank statements, I’ll be meeting Lars for our customary walk (although yes, it’s later in the week, and the day, than usual), and with any luck, we should finally be managing to get the group together to get out to celebrate Logan’s birthday (as he apparently wants to go to the same place we all went to for Daniel’s a couple of months ago, the copycat) – I really should be giving credit to my subconscious for trying to come up with something interesting to tell you about in the way of my dreams. Unfortunately, it was something of a muddled mess even as I was in the midst of it, and in the waking and retelling, it will probably get even more so, so please bear with me. I should also add that there was a certain… inappropriate… nature to the whole thing as well, but given that it all involved the Addams family, that sort of takes it straight through the looking-glass back to being perfectly appropriate again, wouldn’t you agree?

I hardly need to explain who they are to you, of all people, as you rather grew up with the family in a way that many of your peers (including myself) would not have. Your folks had several collections of Addams’ work (as well as a few volumes of general New Yorker cartoons), including a book he put out that didn’t include many of his drawings (apart from the cover, which might have been considered a slight case of bait-and-switch) but rather dwelt on curiosities and oddities of what were even at that time days gone by (the book was literally entitled Dear Dead Days, for heaven’s sake!), highlighting the nonchalant, matter-of-fact, even cavalier take on death as a part of life common in turn-of-the-century society. All of which seemed in line with your own father’s interesting sense of humor, and I certainly enjoyed reading through it all when we came down to visit (and I needed to stay out of the way). But anyway…

Part of the premise seemed to involve me as a staffer for Mad Magazine, of all things, trying to come up with a series of gags parodying the series in a four-page spread – presumably for the October issue, as it takes time to get these things assembled for publication. I was dimly aware that it was ostensibly meant as a tribute to one of the actors that had recently passed away, despite the fact that I couldn’t recall any such thing happening in years – although, I was surprised to discover, upon looking things up, that Lisa Loring, the original Wednesday, left us only a little more than seven months ago in real life – but with the spooky season upon us, is there really a need for such excuses? The trouble is that, trying to make a parody of a series (be it movie, television or cartoon like the original) that was something of a parody in itself is something of a self-defeating exercise. In order to succeed at it, you actually have to be better than the original source material in some way that, presumably, it was logistically incapable of; for instance, by bringing it to the screen, the show gave voice and mannerisms to characters that Charles Addams could not have bestowed upon static drawings. These days, in fact, our impressions of the characters more rely on the show and the movies to define them than the original New Yorker cartoons.

But given that I was stuck with working with a magazine format, with the same limitations as the original, how was I supposed to outdo it in any way? How do you make this family more outrageous than it already was?

Really, you can’t, unless you go for a different definition of the term ‘outrageous’ than they already exemplified – which would probably better belong in a magazine such as Playboy than Mad. Ironically, the original live-action show was already decidedly more open than most (if not all) for its time about the amorous dynamic between a husband and wife – so even attacking the concept from that angle would be somewhat pointless. Even the concept of Wednesday as a potential focus of desire has been done, not to death (if you’ll pardon the expression), but multiple times in her deadpan, gothic teenager incarnation as essayed by both Tina Ricci and Jenna Ortega. Not really in line with the spirit of the original source material (which depicted her as somewhere between six and eight – which I suppose would be outrageous in its own right, but for all the wrong reasons)

While I don’t remember much of what I put together for publication (and worst of all, I can’t recall any of the punchlines, which is either sad for having lost them, or a relief because they weren’t any good in the first place), I think I decided to focus on the interplay between Gomez and Wednesday’s suitors, wherein daddy would catch his daughter in flagrante delicto with her boyfriend. This, I depicted in full detail – and I really wish I had the artistic ability in real life to do so – which I had to vigorously defend to my editors, relying on my mandate to be at least as outrageous as possible in my efforts, and the fact that they were bothered by it indicated that I’d actually succeeded at my assignment beyond their expectations. I also reminded them that, for them to shy away from controversy was most out of character – this was the magazine that, back in the seventies, literally put a hand flipping the middle finger to its readership on the cover, claiming to be ‘number one’ in shock humor.

But at least I could throw in a bit of true Addams-style turn-the-situation-on-its-head approach to the tableau. While you might expect Gomez to be protective of his ‘little princess,’ and somewhat threatening to the boy who might force his attentions upon her (and given the family history, he would have plenty to threaten him with), he simply lets the two of them carry on, wishing his ‘little mantis’ a good time with her paramour, leaving Wednesday to explain what mantis girls do after a good shagging, and adding that she was developing a bit of an appetite, now that she thought about it…

Needless to say, most of them ran off in a hurry, but not without a few bite marks. I think I may have had a final panel where the boy was willing to stay, to which Gomez indicated to Wednesday that he was ‘a keeper’ – but by then, in keeping with her mantid personality in this sphere of her life, he had already been rendered to look much like her treasured doll Marie Antoinette (who may or may not have been lying on the floor of the bedroom in the foreground), so the question of ‘keeping’ him was somewhat moot – although not entirely out of the question, given this family.

Well. Didn’t expect to get so much coherent material out of that one after all. I may have to reward my subconscious for it, if I can figure out how. Hope you enjoyed it, or at least found it interesting.

Anyway, for now, keep an eye on me, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.