Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (100 page)

But Elvis had another reason. “Elvis knew what a real bad temper he had,” says Sonny. “When he flashed, anything could happen. If he pulled the trigger in a rage, it would come up blank and give him just enough time to realize what on earth he was doing.”

It paid off. One evening when the Elvis entourage was at the movies (Elvis rented the entire movie theater and brought his friends with him), Elvis went to the men’s room and stayed there for a while. One of the group—a visitor who wasn’t part of the regular “Memphis mafia”—started joking around, pounding on the bathroom door. West recalls:

In one study, kids who’d been breast-fed scored eight IQ points higher than formula-fed kids.

“Elvis yells back ‘Okay, man, okay.’

“But this guy just kept banging on the door....Apparently Elvis flashed. ‘Goddammit!’ he yelled as he charged out the door. Then he screamed, ‘Who do you think you are, you m—f—r?,’ whipped out his gun, pointed it right at the guy and pulled the trigger. Jesus, thank God, he didn’t have a bullet in that chamber; otherwise, he would have blown the man’s head clean off his shoulders.”

CHOP! CHOP!

Elvis was fascinated with karate. He dreamed of making his own karate movie, starring himself as the evil karate master, and liked to drop in at various karate studios to shoot the breeze and work out.

Dave Hebler, a seventh-degree black-belt, remembers their first sparring session in
Elvis: What Happened?
:

“He came in with his usual entourage and shook hands all around. Then he wanted to show-off some moves. Within seconds...it was obvious to me that one, Elvis didn’t know half as much about karate as he thought he did; and two, he hardly knew where he was.

“He was moving very sluggishly and lurching around like a man who’d had far too much to drink....I mean he was actually tripping over and damn near falling on his butt.

“While I couldn’t make him look like an expert, I tried to react to his moves in such a way that he wouldn’t look half as bad as he could have.” Hebler became a regular member of Elvis’s entourage.

GOOD ADVICE

“Keep your temper. Do not quarrel with an angry person, but give him a soft answer. It is commanded by the Holy Writ, and, furthermore, it makes him madder than anything else you could say.”

—Anonymous

Uh-oh: 10% of U.S. high school students think the telephone was invented in 1950.

Thoughts from comedian Jay Leno, host of the “Tonight Show.”

On the TV show “Thirtysomething”:
“First I see the wife and she’s whining, ‘What about my needs?’ Then they cut to the husband and he’s whining ‘What about my needs?’ And I’m sitting here saying, ‘What about my needs?’ I wanted to be entertained. Can’t you blow up a car or something?”

“It is said that life begins when the fetus can exist apart from its mother. By this definition, many people in Hollywood are legally dead.”

“National Condom Week is coming soon. Hey, there’s a parade you won’t want to miss.”

“You’re not famous until my mother has heard of you.”

“On President’s Day you stay home and you don’t do anything. Sounds like
Vice
Presidents Day!”

“Wouldn’t it be funny if there was nothing wrong with the [Hubble] telescope at all? It is just that the whole universe was fuzzy.”

“A new report from the government says raw eggs may have salmonella and may be unsafe. In fact, the latest government theory says it wasn’t the fall that killed Humpty Dumpty—he was dead before he hit the ground.”

“The Supreme Court has ruled they cannot have a Nativity scene in Washington, D.C. This wasn’t for any religious reasons. They couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.”

“Here’s an amazing story. A man in Orlando, Florida, was hit by eight cars in a row and only one stopped. The first seven drivers thought he was a lawyer. The eighth
was
a lawyer.”

“New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.”

“I looked up the word ‘politics’ in the dictionary and it’s actually a combination of two words; ‘poli,’ which means many, and ‘tics,’ which means bloodsuckers.”

Good news for Heinz: 92% of U.S. household refrigerators contain at least one bottle of ketchup.

Teenage girls need all the advice they can get...so here’s more priceless advice from a 1950s teen self-help book
.

BLUE-RIBBON BABY-SITTING

Remember, mothers have a remarkable way of comparing notes on sitters. If you are serious about earning a few dollars, shape up!

A baby-sitting job
is no time for watching TV programs not permitted at home.
Act
as if this is business. You are being paid. Arrange a definite time for sitting, and inform your family when they may expect you home.

Arrive on time,
or a few minutes early to check facts before parents depart. Be sure you have a telephone number where parents, or a responsible adult, may be reached in an emergency.

Bring a book,
your homework or knitting. Don’t arm yourself with a long list of telephone numbers for a four-hour gab session. Don’t treat your employer’s refrigerator as a free raid on the local drive-in. Don’t glue your nose to TV and overlook sleeping children. Check them every half hour.

Before bed,
little ones often need a bottle. No cause for panic. The wiggles, small cries and faces are baby ways of saying, “Where’s my nightcap?” Be prepared a few minutes before feeding time to avoid a long hungry roar.

Once the children
are bedded down, stay fairly near the telephone. Light sleepers are frequently awakened by its ring.

Should the phone ring,
answer as your employer directed. Be sure to write down messages. Never say, “This is Ann. The family is out, and I am baby-sitting with the children” to a stranger. Sad but true, this occasionally leads to harm to you or the children.

The Blue Ribbon
Baby-Sitter is dependable and completely aware of her responsibility for others. Expect to be out of a job if you eat four hot dogs, two bottles of chilled cola, three packs of snacks, run up the phone bill with unnecessary calls to friends, or permit boy or girl friends to join you without permission!

Stuck in the ’70s: 31% of U.S. men say they like bell-bottom jeans; so do 22% of women.

DANGER: LEAVE YOUR GIRLFRIEND’S BOYFRIEND ALONE!

Are you the kind of girl who would dream up an elaborate and ridiculous plot to steal your girlfriend’s boyfriend?

Perhaps the compulsion
comes to you one day during a geometry test after you have borrowed a pencil from him because something is wrong with your ballpoint pen. You flunk the test. His darling smile keeps coming between you and the angles. At the end of the period, you return the pencil. He hands it back.

“Keep it,” he says with a smile. “You’ll probably need it in your next class, and I have another.”

Another smile! The light in his eyes! You tremble with excitement. This is it! He loves you, and you love him. No one, not even your dearest girlfriend must stand between you.

After school you walk
half a block behind him until both he and you are away from the crowds. Then you catch up and “just happen” to appear and join him. In a moment you “just happen” to stumble over nothing so that he must catch you in his arms.

He releases you quickly, a strange expression on his face, and then he strides ahead. You turn back toward your own home on the other side of town, overcome by the wonder of it all. You are sure the boy is too overcome by emotion to speak—that is why he went away so fast.

Unhappily, that evening
you see him with your girlfriend. They are so engrossed in each other, neither sees you. Evidently the boy has spoken of your afternoon pursuit, however, for your girlfriend is cool toward you. In fact, you find yourself very lonely these days. You are a pitiful case because you are not only dishonest but ignorant.

SHOULD GIRLS TELEPHONE BOYS?

Careful, girls:
In a poll of high-school boys more than two-thirds said they do not like to have girls call them on the telephone. They feel that this is a boy’s privilege, and that a girl seems forward when she phones a boy. In fact, most say their families
tease
them about girls who call them at home.

It takes 100,000 gallons of water to make one automobile, car manufacturers say.

There are plenty of worthless Westerns. But few can match this combination of two—count ’em—hilariously lousy films in one. Director Bill “One-Shot” Beaudine managed to capture the worst elements of both dumb Westerns
and
cheesy monster movies and roll them into a single feature film
.

J
ESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER,
Starring Narda Onyx, John Lupton, Cal Bolder, Estelita, Jim Davis and Steven Geray. Directed by William Beaudine
.

Background:
William Beaudine was a film pioneer who began working for legendary director D.W. Griffith in 1909. During the the golden age of silent films, he became a director himself and churned out some of Hollywood’s biggest hits. But he specialized in Westerns. In
Incredibly Strange Films
, Jim Morton writes:

Beaudine hit his stride during the early days of Hollywood when studios were less devoted to big-budget productions and more interested in getting as many films as possible out to the American public. In those days, a western had an immediate audience. If it was a
Western
, it couldn’t fail. These took anywhere from two days to two weeks to make. Beaudine dutifully churned them out, rarely lavishing much attention on any of them....One of the ways Beaudine kept his costs down (and his speed up) was by avoiding retakes whenever possible. He became so notorious for his refusal to reshoot a scene that he earned the nickname “One-Shot Beaudine.” If a boom mike dipped into the frame, if a cowboy started to fall
before
he was shot—
oh well
.

Once, when told that he was behind schedule with a film, he responded: “You mean someone’s actually waiting for this c--p?”

During the latter part of his career, Beaudine directed mostly TV shows—including more than 70 episodes of “Lassie.” But in 1965, he directed two last films (both flicks in a drive-in double-feature). The first was called
Billy the Kid Meets Dracula
. This second, and worst, was
Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
.

Beaudine, who wound up directing over 150 films, died in 1970.

Q: On average, how long is a giraffe’s tongue? A: 14 inches.

At age 78, he was Hollywood’s oldest working director...and he has the unusual distinction, for a B-film-meister, of having a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

He certainly didn’t get it for this movie.

The Plot:
Dr. Maria Frankenstein and her brother Rudolf have settled in a small town in the Southwest. It’s the perfect location—there’s plenty of lightning to power her experiments, there are plenty of fresh young boys to experiment on, and the Austrian police will never find her there. (Seems she’s been experimenting in Europe, too.)

As the film opens, all the Mexican peasants are leaving town—mostly to get away from Maria. Only one family remains, waiting for their son—who works at the Frankenstein hacienda—to get over “the sickness.” Actually, Maria has operated on the boy, giving him the artificial brain her grandfather (she’s really Frankenstein’s
grand
daughter) created.

Rudolf is spooked by all this mad scientist stuff; he gives the boy poison rather than letting Maria succeed. Maria doesn’t know what’s going on—so she decides the boy was too weak; she needs a big, strong man to experiment on.

Well, it just so happens that Jesse James is riding around the countryside with a hulking doofus named Hank...and Hank has been shot during a robbery. He needs a doctor...so he and Jesse conveniently wind up at Frankenstein’s hacienda.

To make a long story mercifully short: Maria gives Hank a new brain and calls him—what else?—Igor. Then she gets Igor to kill her brother. Then Igor kills Maria. Then Juanita, Jesse’s girlfriend, kills Igor. Then the sheriff takes Jesse away. The End.

Don’t Miss:

•
The Frankenstein “hacienda”
overlooking town. Viewed from Main Street, it’s obviously a 20-foot-high painting. You’ve gotta see this one to appreciate it.

•
The generic poison bottle
.
Rudolph poisons the boy with a beaker full of red water, labelled POISON. What kind of posion? Who knows? Who cares?

•
The Indians riding by
.
Blissfully pointless footage cut in from some other B-film.

If you had to eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? In one study, 36% said pizza.

•
The helmet
.
Maria uses it to activate the artificial brain. But it looks like a Rastafarian chemistry experiment, topped with a wire fence. Should win some sort of prize for low-budget props.