Bewitched and Beyond: The Fan Who Came to Dinner (10 page)

“I remember this from when I was a kid,” she said. I immediately quipped, “Don’t be silly, he wasn’t dead yet!” If it hadn’t been so funny she may have killed me on the spot!

While there we were scouting locations for our new witch story this time around called
Son of a Witch!

With all the copyright troubles we were having with the
Bewitched
franchise, we decided to write a brand new story about America’s first boy-witch and take it completely out of the copy-written world of Samantha Stephens.

The story was a good one too, if I do say so myself. A combination of
Superman
meets
Cinderella
meets
Bewitched.
Son of a Witch
is the story of Sam Haines (anyone get that joke?), a baby who is sent to the future from the persecuted 1690s of Salem, Massachusetts by his doomed-to-die witch parents, and grows up in a Catholic orphanage totally unaware of his “heretical heritage.”

Enter three elderly witches from his past; Edna, Mrs. Gladstone, and Tituba, who witnessed his transport to the future, and who have been trying to find him for centuries. As they soon find out, he’s actually been under their very noses the entire time, but having never practiced any spells, they were unable to see him in the crystal ball.

With the help of his “familiar,” an alligator bag (see picture) he was placed in as a baby, they find him and implore him to sign an official Son-of-A-Witch contract before all hell breaks loose at midnight on Halloween, his 31st birthday. It’s a fun story with a lot of humor and Sam even saves the day in the end by twitching his nose, to which the other witches ask “Where did you learn that?”

“Reruns!”

Son of a Witch
would have boasted quite a memorable cast. Mrs. Gladstone was to be played by Sandra Gould. Bernard Fox would play Professor Hawthorne, a modern day witch hunter (whose daughter, Judy, Sam is engaged to), and Marla Gibbs would rule the roost as the rather imposing witch Tituba.

Rose Marie would round out the cast as the Reverend Mother (bow well hidden under habit).

Sam would teach grade school history, paving the way for kids to be introduced to the episodes, greatly adding to the fun as they help the witches convince Sam about his past.

Unfortunately, the project was never given the green light, so one can only imagine what a fun show that would have been.

During this same time, the Internet began to pick up steam, Kasey and I happened upon one of the first web sites about
Bewitched
; one sponsored by Nick-at-Nite. Kasey was fascinated by its potential, so we immediately began
surfing
the web.

I certainly can’t blame them, but most Nick-at-Nite fans wouldn’t believe that it was actually KASEY ROGERS answering their questions on the
Bewitched
message board. A few of them got downright mean-spirited about it, thinking someone was pulling their leg, but we just used to laugh. So if any of you doubters are reading this, and I hope you are, guess what?! That really was “Louise Tate”!

We actually met a few of those fans, first from the Nick-at-Nite site, and later from a website run by our soon-to-be-dear friends, Joe and Wendy. Some of these fans, including Joe, even flew out to attend our
infamous
Halloween parties. If you look at
Joe and Wendy’s site,
you can still find many pictures from those halcyon days of Hallowe’en.

Publicity still for our script
Son of A Witch
(NOT to be confused with
Bewitched… Again!).
The “Alligator Bag” was going to have vicious looking teeth put into its mouth as it was not supposed to like “Elliott” (Kasey)!

Me at the famous
Munsters
House while preparing to be a Universal Tour Guide.

Kathleen Freeman, the doddering witch, Edna, would be computer proficient and cast spells by looking them up under “spell check”.

Chapter 13

Witches in Clouds, Monsters in Trees; Happy Times with Mark and KR

Yes, silly title.

Kasey and I had the uncanny knack of being able to “see” the exact same figures in clouds. It’s funny — we would see witches on brooms all the time! At the beach, at dinner, in the leaves of a tree by the lake across the street, and once even in a cloud at her brother’s house on Thanksgiving! We got everyone to see that one!

But it didn’t stop there.

Often we’d pass two very distinctive looking trees. One looked like a monster on its hind legs holding a rag doll and another looked like an angel’s wing open for flight. (Even Sandy Gould once saw that one!)

Clouds and trees weren’t the only things we could “see” things in. We were also pretty good with puddles!

The things we’d “see” in puddles usually made us laugh because invariably, they were “dirty” pictures. We even began shooting photos of our finds and wanted to put a book together called “Pornographic Puddles,” but we never did. (In the attempt of keeping this book rated “G,” I won’t be including any of those photos!) Speaking of visceral subjects:

Chapter 14

The Poop Deck

Once when Kasey and I were getting ready to go somewhere, I needed to let Wink out so he could go to the back deck (forever christened “The Poop Deck”). The sliding glass door in my room was temperamental and too hard to lock and un-lock, so sometimes I would use Kasey’s bedroom single door to let him in and out. I knocked on Kasey’s door and asked if she was decent.

She quickly answered, “Yes,” so I opened the door.

There she was in all her glory, bent over with her pants around her ankles! Full moon. Starless night! The moment hung like hours as I slowly, silently, closed the door. She busted out laughing and I was immediately on the floor in hysterics trying to spit out, “You said you were decent!!!” I guess she didn’t expect me to really open the door, but we laughed about it for years, just as we did this one.

On the “Poop Deck” there once sat a curved wrought iron chair with no cushion. In the middle of the night, Kasey arose to go to the bathroom. She really wasn’t prone to sleep-walking but somehow she managed to unlock her door, go outside, sit down on the wrought iron chair and “commence,” before she woke up and realized what she was doing!

The next morning through tears of laughter, she confessed to me what had happened. There she sat staring at me asleep through the sliding glass door and silently praying, “Oh Mark, please don’t wake up! Please don’t wake up!”

Luckily, for her sake, I didn’t, but
boy howdee,
I’m still getting mileage out of that story!

As you can tell, you never knew what Kasey was going to do.

She once told me that she and her second husband, Bud Lewis, attended a sort of “garage sale” at the Ambassador Hotel, where Bobby Kennedy was killed, shortly before it closed down.

She ended up buying a couple of tall candles, but later got rid of them after they began to lose their shape. The other thing she ended up nabbing that day from the hotel was one of the bullet holes from the kitchen wall! She actually snuck into the kitchen where that unfortunate event had taken place on June 5th, 1968, and gouged out one of the bullet holes made by Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan! I still have it somewhere in a baggie, along with a chip off of L. Frank Baum's tombstone that I picked up on one of our cemetery adventures.

OK, so if you ever wanted proof positive that Endora really, REALLY liked the food at Mario’s, here it is! Agnes Moorehead boogies the night away with Vito Scotti.

Chapter 15

Earthquake ’94

Sounds like the name of one of those disaster movies from the past, but guess what? It
was
a disaster and it all began precisely at 4:32 a.m. on Monday, January 17th, forever known as the day Northridge fell down!

The room was pulsating back and forth! I remember leaping out of bed and losing my balance as I came to the little hallway that separated my room and bathroom from the rest of the condo. I was yelling for Kasey, but she wasn’t answering. It never occurred to me she couldn’t hear me over the roar. I hadn’t a clue where Wink was, as he had been on the bed next to me.

I was momentarily trapped inside the hallway. Eerily, it was still dark outside, yet everything was bathed in blue light, reminiscent of a full moon. I grabbed the first available door knob I could find and ended up back in my bedroom!

When the first quake subsided, I found Kasey out in the kitchen. I began feeling nauseous and ended up lying down on the floor with my feet up. As I did, I could hear glass crunching underneath my back. There was broken glass everywhere. It’s amazing I didn’t get cut.

I quickly recovered and Kasey handed me a paper bag and the two of us spent the next few hours amidst tremendous aftershocks throwing away anything that had once been made of glass.

Luckily, I had the foresight to quickly call my Mom and Dad down in Atlanta. They were not up yet, but I had enough time to tell them no matter what they heard on the news, Kasey and I were fine. It would be days before we would be able to make any more calls in or out.

A couple of odd incidents also happened that day. Kasey had two, rather stylized glass swans with long thin necks that sat on small bases about the size of a quarter. They were heavy enough to keep them from falling over, but had moved all the way to the edge of the table. Just one more inch and we would have added them to that paper bag.