Up until the day I got my first digital camera, I used the kind that affixed images to this thing called film. When I was shooting black-and-white, I used the kind of film that yielded negatives that could be turned into prints. And when I was shooting color, I sometimes used the kind that easily converted to prints but more often used the kind that you'd turn into slides. As a result, I have thousands of slides of friends, conventions, friends at conventions, family members, events I attended, etc.
My last slide projector died some time in the late eighties and I never got around to replacing it. As a result, my slides sat in boxes in a closet, generally neglected and forgotten. Isn't that how we all wind up, sooner of later? Sitting in a box in the closet, generally neglected and forgotten?
Recently though, I hauled them out, shuffled through the stacks to select a few hundred that seemed to warrant preservation and took them to a place that converts slides to digital images. Some came out not so great but some are terrific…and there are images in there that I even forgot I took.
The above pic totally surprised me. It's from one of the funniest moments I ever witnessed, a scene I described in this column. In case you're all clicked-out for the day and don't want to go read that piece, I'll summarize…
It took place at the world premiere for the movie, Flesh Gordon. This is around July of 1974 and I am there, covering the event for The Monster Times, a tabloid with at least as much dignity as The New York Post. Buster Crabbe, who played Flash ("Flash" with an "a") Gordon is present…for reasons no one in the audience can fathom. Mr. Crabbe does not seem able to fathom them, either. Equally inexplicable is the decision to delay running the movie and to have famed "psychic detective" Peter Hurkos come up and give a reading to Mr. Crabbe and to actor Jason Williams who has the misfortune to be starring in the film we are about to see.
To find out what happened next, you'll have to read my article. Basically, Mr. Hurkos did not convince anyone in the room that he had any psychic powers. I don't happen to believe anyone does…and was very pleased, by the way, when this article got a fan letter from James Randi, and a request to reprint it on his site. But that night, watching Hurkos stammer and perspire and get every single thing he "saw" wrong, would have convinced Sylvia Browne that E.S.P. is a fraud and a half.
I recall laughing my ass off at the "psychic reading" but I didn't remember taking the photo. As you can see, Mr. Crabbe doesn't look too thrilled with any of it and neither does Mr. Williams.
Anyway, I wanted to share the picture with you and I'll be sharing more as I dig through my new library of pix.