An Orgy of Sick Minds: The Heritage of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS
NOTE: This article has been written to accompany a screening of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS hosted by me—McBeardo! #1!—on Saturday, October 8 at midnight at Facets Multimedia in Chicago.
Bone up here now and be there then.
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You won’t believe the eye.
Nine minutes into Bloodsucking Freaks (1976), a giddy dwarf on stage in a theater hacksaws through the wrist off a screaming nude blonde. He removes her hand, kisses it and holds it aloft in triumph.
The well-dressed audience in attendance applauds.
“Now the eye, Ralphus!” instructs the saturnine Master of Ceremonies, and the dwarf reaches into the weeping victim’s ocular cavity, plucks out her meaty, dripping peeper, and pops it into his mouth. Then he chews it up and swallows it—right on camera.
Again, the hoity-toity audience applauds.
As stated: you won’t believe it.
But there it is.
Madonna Boots at the Crossroads of the World
Note: The following is a sequel to the original Madonna Boots, which you can read here.
The events described hereafter take place two years after what went down in that first piece.
A few key pieces of information: A) Madonna Boots is the nickname of the blonde cheerleader from New Jersey to whom I lost my virginity, and B) between 1985 and 1987, I managed to drop about 150 pounds off my delicate frame, roughly cutting my overall bulk in half.
It didn’t help. As you can find out below.
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The last time I saw Madonna Boots was on November 27, 1987. It was the day after Thanksgiving.
B
ootsy, as she liked to be called, was a freshman at Montclair State University in New Jersey. I was in my third semester at the State University of New York at Purchase, a public arts academy in endlessly dull Westchester County, just north of New York City.
I ran the college radio station, which got me a lot of free records and an abusable telephone.
While not going to class and not getting laid, I phoned Madonna Boots at school as the holiday season started. Things had gotten that bad. Since arriving at college, I had not so much as accidentally bumped knees with a female. No dates. No kissing. No hand-holding. Nothing.
For that, I lost 150 pounds?
The lone “almost” exception was Dottie Woodward, known around campus as The 
Girl From Mars. What a nutbar. A charmer of a nutbar, though.
Dottie was a ballet major who looked a ’50s advertising drawing of a spunky, strawberry-blonde scamp. She talked kooky and she liked the Monkees and my Hawaiian shirts and we both had the complete Weird Al Yankovic discography and we immediately hit it off. Just not enough (for me).
People assumed Dottie and I were a couple for the first few months of school, which both delighted and depressed me: on the one hand, it meant I was perceived as human enough to have a girlfriend; but in reality, she wasn’t actually my Girlfriend From Mars, so the fact of my subhumanism remained unevolved.
One night, Dottie was drunk and I was not. I was sitting in my dorm 
room, drawing heinously offensive posters to promote my WPUR program and talking to my friend Springo.
Dottie sashayed in and sat on my lap.
I freaked. Bad. But not outwardly. I just barely kept it together enough to not jump up and go hide in a corner. Here was the very first moment in my entire 18 years that a girl was expressing genuine attraction to me. Ho. Lee. Shit.
The 10 Shittiest Sitcoms I Love More Than TV Itself: LIFE ON THE FLIPSIDE
6. LIFE ON THE FLIPSIDE
NBC, 1988
Twenty-three years after its single episode’s single airing, I think about Life on the Flipside almost every day.
There’s no sane reason for this to be happening but, at some point, regularly, I flash back to my parents’ basement during the dark summer of 1988, watching NBC burn off this DOA pilot.
I hate that and I hate it.
Flipside, as the show was originally titled, was announced by Don Johnson’s production company as a sitcom vehicle for Ringo Starr, who was then the opposite-of-hot off his commercial campaign for Sun Country Wine Coolers.
The finished version, Life on the Flipside, seems very much created by and for individuals would declare Ringo to be their favorite Beatle.
Only Ringo’s not in it. Which, for sure, was for the best.
Now I love Ringo. Not only is he a Beatle, he’s The Funny Beatle, and he crafted one of the funniest, most godlike come-backs I’ve ever heard: when someone said, “How do you respond to people who claim you’re not a very good drummer,” Ringo replied, “I tell them I was the drummer in the Beatles.”
However, declaring Ringo to be your favorite Beatle is not unlike declaring Shemp to be your favorite Stooge.
It simply strains credulity, making one question the sincerity of the statement from even among the most likable and admirable of committed Stoogephiles, while also confirming, permanently, a desperation to be cute among the most construction-boot-to-the-bicuspids-inviting Stooge-fan fakers.
(Beatles-ranking-wise, the correct answer, of course, is that Ringo is the second best, with George and Paul tied for first.)
Life on the Flipside focuses on middle-aged rock star Tripper Day—yes, read it and puke—who doubles as a single dad when not selling out hockey arenas.
The anti-Ringo stepping in for Ringo here is British cipher Trevor Eve. Who? I don’t know either. Read More
The 10 Shittiest TV Sitcoms I Love More Than TV Itself: DELTA HOUSE
First things Furst: don’t miss my paean to numbers 10 through 8 on this list: Malibu CA, The Ugily Family and All That Glitters. Read that HERE.
Now, go:
7. DELTA HOUSE
ABC, 1979
Mad magazine saved my life when I was six years old. I exaggerate not here, as my earliest memories of suicidal depression date from kindergarten onward.
Then, at a 1974 flea market, I scored a shopping bag full of old Mads for a quarter and got a respite from that relentless post-toddler fatalism.
Pops McBeardo, my Vietnam vet Green Beret father, did not approve. To Pops, Mad was the product of irreverent “punks” created to subvert children and belch in the face of authority.
He was correct, of course. We just differed (then and now) as to whether that was (and is) a bad thing.
Even more contentious was my second signal that perhaps soldiering on past first grade might hold some promise: Saturday Night Live.
Pint-sized insomniac that I was, I caught the original broadcast of the third episode and instantly got hooked. Need I even point out that John Belushi was my immediate favorite?
As my childhood dribbled on, I grew more depressed and despondent and hostile and, therefore, more dependent on Mad and SNL for relief.
Pops, in turn, blamed these sources of aid and comfort for making me the way I was.
It rushed to a volcanic head in the summer of 1978, as I turned 10, and National Lampoon’s Animal House erupted among us.
My experience with National Lampoon, to that point, was a couple of freaked out flip-throughs in the magazine section at the Route 35 Shop Rite in Hazlet, New Jersey.
Quick enough, I learned to go directly to the “Foto Funnies”, mentally photograph the black-and-white boobs therein, and put it back on the top rack. I’d get there. In time.
A movie, though, with my comedy hero. Where the boobs would be in color. And moving around. I could hardly stand to wait a second, let alone the better part of a decade. So as each of my older relatives and teenage day-camp counselors saw Animal House, I quizzed them for details, even keeping a notebook, where I more or less accurately construed the plot and all the major gag points.
Imagine my stupefied ecstasy, then, when out of nowhere, I saw a promo for Delta House. Suddenly, there would be a sitcom version of Animal House with most of the original cast and even an interesting Belushi stand-in: Josh Mostel, son of Zero, of whom I was a lifelong fan (which is as powerful a testament as any to my 1970s New York City incubation).
The trick would be getting past Pops when Delta House premiered one Thursday, but that was easy enough. We had a tiny black-and-white Zenith in the basement. I volunteered to walk our Akita after dinner and, once I got back, slipped downstairs while he fussed over the dog, threw a blanket on top of the TV and myself, and inserted my transistor radio earplug into the side of the set.
The show came on. There they were! D-Day! Flounder! Hoover! Dean Freakin’ Wormer! A groovy pseudo-’60s frat rock theme song! Bluto’s brother, “Blotto”! The Delta House itself!
And then, Christ … that fucking bullshit show fucking sucked.
The 10 Shittiest TV Sitcoms I Love More Than TV Itself: PART ONE
Television as the glass teat is a notion not lost on me philosophically, practically or, as you’d expect, some better-left-unexplained turn-on.
My obsessive/compulsive association with “boob” and “tube” likely commenced in utero and it flourishes to this very keystroke, albeit not in the guise it took most deeply in my formative years: that of the half-hour situation comedy.
Aside from the Sunday night Fox cartoons (and, if I’m around, The Office), I presently view no primetime network funny fare except by happenstance.
This just sort of occurred over the past decade or so ago. And if you’d known me up to say, the Seinfeld finale, you’d recognize this as an apocalyptic change of habit.
As for my favorite sitcoms, meaning the ones I think are genuinely good and funny, there are few surprises: the aforementioned Seinfeld, The Abbot & Costello Show (from which Seinfeld was conceived), All in the Family, Bosom Buddies, Bewitched, Addams Family, Munsters, The Partridge Family, Hogan’s Heroes, Green Acres—all your expected answers.
For much of my life I had a complicated relationship with The Brady Bunch.
As a kid, I genuinely thought the show was stupid and unfunny, but I could not NOT watch it twice every day, three times if I was home sick from school (as the Bunch aired at 9am, 5pm and 6pm on channel 5 on weekdays throughout the 70s, and then for a solid hour on Saturday afternoons).
Around the time that the Lunachicks released “Jan Brady”, I surrendered to simply, non-ironically loving the story of the lovely lady (and her bohunk second hubby with SUCH a delish secret!).
The lowest-profile sitcom that I will forever champion is It’s Your Move, which pitted Jason Bateman against the future next-door-neighbor from Married With Children (who was dating Jason’s mom, played by Caren Kaye of My Tutor) in a stunningly inventive battle to ruin one another’s entire universes week in and week out.
It ran one season, 1984-85, and I’m often nicely surprised by how many people remember it, in particular the brilliant “Dregs of Humanity” episode (and no, no, nooooo, I ain’t no Arrested Development fan).
Small Wonder, of course, is a meisterwürk of genius in a league by itself that would require a hundred doctoral dissertations to properly begin to analytically appreciate.
One severely obscure show that I’d love to see now is No Soap Radio, an attempt at Monty Python-style surrealism that aired for a few weeks after Bosom Buddies in 1982. Clips exist online. They’re pretty dopey, but No Soap was, and remains, one of the goddamndest things ever broadcast when everybody only had about six channels from which to choose.
Another two in the running got eliminated by being, respectively, a little bit too legitimately funny and a little bit too actually shitty—Silver Spoons and Out of This World, in that order.
Today, though, I come to … not quite celebrate, but rather illuminate a dire near-dozen sitcoms to which I have been and, to varying degrees remain, profoundly attached.
None of them are good. Each of them is perfect. And their presence in my skull, and soul, is great. And deep.
Let the countdown commence:
Mr. Skin’s 12th Annual Anatomy Award Nominudes
Tits That Time Again: Watch and Vote on the Best Nude Scenes of the Year
G’wan, now, to Mr. Skin’s official 2011 Anatomy Awards and vote for your favorites to win The Peepers’ Choice Awards.
There’s an iPad prize but, really, it’s your civic duty.
Come, peruse the nominudes for Mr. Skin’s 12th Annual Anatomy Awards:
BREAST PICTURE
Piranha 3D
Chloe
Love and Other Drugs
Boogie Woogie
Lake Placid 3
McBeardo’s Pick: Piranha 3D, glands-down. Here was a self-conscious take on grindhouse excess, that never veers into the self-congratulations of neo-Troma spittle like Machete. The outright gall of the never-ending underwater lesbian ballet is topped only by naturally monster-bosomed Gianna Michaels nude parasailing as her triple-G cups explode right off the screen and compete with popcorn for space in your slack-jawed maw.
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BEST NUDE TV SHOW
Boardwalk Empire 
Gravity
Hung
Weeds
Spartacus: Blood and Sand
McBeardo’s Pick: Boardwalk Empire. Spartacus came out swinging a terrible, swift sword, to be sure—Xena! At last! Nude!—but the audacity of the increasing-to-the-point-of-gynecological nakedness of Paz De La Huerta on Boardwalk every week, coupled with gratuitous Gretch Mol gazongas, made me look forward most to each Sunday night trip down Atlantic Titty way.
BEST CELEBRITY LESBIAN SCENE
Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in Black Swan
Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore in Chloe
Kelly Brook and Riley Steele in Piranha 3D
Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko in Room in Rome
Heather Graham and Jaime Winston in Boogie Woogie
McBeardo’s Pick: The worst is Black Swan. And I don’t just mean this year, I mean 
maybe the worst ever. I can think of only one more appallingly asexual sex scene between desirable women, in the 1993 softcore abomination Wild Cactus. Hefty-chested Playmate India Allen and raven-maned Michelle Moffet get in bed and just sort of gyrate in the direction toward one another, without touching. Still, it beats the tampons out of the Portman-Kunis anti-event.
The winner, then, is Chloe. Amanda Seyfried looks like a jugsy Rainbeaux Smith and post-partum redhead nipples—a la the lusciously used milk-spigots of Ms. Moore—are impossible to top where I come from. And onto.
*****
That’s just three of the categories on which you can vote. 
Others include Best Boobs, Best Butt – Nude, Best Butt – Thong, Best Full Frontal and Nudecomer of the Year.
So, go—vote for the Peepers’ Choice Awards.
You can watch all of the above-mentioned nude scenes, and more, for free at Mr. Skin.
And as noted, you might win an iPad.
That way, McBeardo can be with you all the time.
Just the way you love it.
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My First Porno Theater: A (Short) Adventure Story
For all my years upon years of seeking out any and every possible professional sex venue I could, I never actually worked up the nerve to venture inside, beyond the door, until I was 19 years old. 
That was the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1987, when Madonna Boots, the sexually deranged cheerleader to whom I lost my virginity, essentially dragged me (neither kicking nor screaming, just sweating) into Peepland on 42nd Street. (And that story’s coming. Fret not.)
There was one previous exception, in summertime 1984: Cinema Kings Highway, Brooklyn’s very first adults-only movie theater, running the 1970 German skin-flick He and She for more than a year straight.
Amazingly, this mastubationasium remains open and festering to this day, so now Cinema Kings Highway is Brooklyn’s very last adults-only movie theater, too.
On a side note, Queens still lays claim to the mighty Fair theater, which now shows Bollywood Films in its main auditorium, while an insanely huge labyrinth of hardcore screening rooms and buddy booths oozes just a few feet away. That must be comfortable for all involved.
Okay, back to Brooklyn.
For me, throughout the ’70s, Cinema Kings Highway was my Saturday biking objective, every week.
I’d park across the street, make it look like I was waiting for my mother to come out of a deli and then I would just stare and stare … and wonder and wonder… and wait and wait.
So it was a solid decade in coming when, on a hot July evening, I deigned to finally penetrate whatever might lie beyond the foreboding box office. But I couldn’t do it alone.
Read More
THE MOVIE GOO-ER: How I Made Love to a 20-Foot-Tall 16-Year-Old for 84 Cents on the Cusp of 1985
At some glistening point in the early 1990s, I was exiting one of Greek smut witch Chelly Wilson’s shoebox-sized porn commodes on Eighth Avenue (the Venus? The Capri? Who could tell?) when I heard, behind me, a very loud, very determined, “PSSSSST!”
I turned to see a Mexican midget on the staircase that led up to the balcony. He leaned back on one elbow, had the other arm draped over his knee and seductively parted his thighs while giving me a wink.
“PSSSSST! Papi!” he shout-whispered. “Papi! Papi!”
He raised and lowered his brow repeatedly, rolled his eyes and tilted his head a few quick times up toward the balcony, and made some kissing noises.
“Papi! Please!” he insisted. “Please, Papi! Mwah-Mwah-Mwah! Papi-Papi-Papi!”
I did not take my Hispanic half-pint admirer up on his proposition (I swear), but I strutted out into the glaring Eighth Avenue sunlight with my head held high, as my ego soared to dizzying heights well above and beyond the nearby roofs of Show World and the Port Authority bus terminal.
That Mexican midget wanted me.
And that was all I ever wanted anyone to ever do. Ever.
Back in December 1984, not even that diseased and desperate a come-on would have come my way. And, Lor-dee, did I know it.
Life was condemned to be eked out by me and my hand exclusively—and by life I mean any and all love relations—so I would at least put my all into the acquisition of outside stimulation, fully accepted the fact that none of them would be human. Ever.
Movies were as close as I’d come. And come. And come.
Home video was well established by the ’84 holiday season, but a market for softcore sex on actual movie theater screens remained vibrant (if not, per se, “healthy”), as evidenced by the likes of 1976’s brilliantly titled but shockingly tame Chesty Anderson, US Navy continuing to bounce around 42nd Street and bottom thirds of triple bills in outer-borough grindhouses.
Jack Wrangler and Margaret Whiting Reunite
A Requiem for Mrs. Tripod
Like Ugly George, like bag-lady/freedom fighter Billie Boggs, and like the manster I used to see
on 42nd Street who had a finger growing out of the middle of his palm, Margaret Whiting was a champion charmer in a rare league of peculiarly beguiling local New York figures—super-intense emphasis on the “peculiar” there.
I’ll spare you the inevitable “Dude, where’s my New York City?” bellyaching, but these past few decades have eradicated this wholly distinct brand of Gotham celebrity—anti-stars who you just loved to let make your skin crawl.
Yes, I know Joe Franklin still mitzvahs among us, but he’s been off TV for 18 years now and he even recently moved out of his legendarily proto-Hoarders freak-pit of a Times Square office.
So things happen. Times change. And glazed, ancient, grape-shaped cabaret ladies depart this mortal coil to reunite with their incandescently homo porn star husbands in whatever weirdness may lay after—super-intense emphasis on the “lay” there.
Margaret Whiting, her New York Times obituary tells me, was discovered as a kid singer by songwriter Johnny 
Mercer and then emerged during her teens one of the most popular big band warblers of World War II.
From there, she scored numerous pop standard hits, became the toast of Broadway musical theater and remained among New York’s most elite nightclub songbirds who appeal to a very particular audience of men.
Just men.
Since her recent death on January 10, 2011, I’ve been checking Rex Reed’s column maniacally to read his eulogy, if you catch my rainbow drift.
As to how Margaret Whiting blipped on Youngman McBeardo’s radar, I’ll just turn it over to the Times completely:
“In her later years, Ms. Whiting was known to many as the unlikely wife of Jack Wrangler (originally John Stillman), a star of gay pornographic films in the 1970s who went on to become a cabaret and theater producer.”
Ms. Whiting and Mr. Wrangler, 22 years her junior, met in the 1970s, lived together for many years and married in 1994. She wrote about their relationship in an autobiography, “It Might as Well Be Spring,” saying it was based on similar interests and mutual respect, not sex. When they first became involved, he told her, “I’m gay,” to which she replied, “Only around the edges, dear.”
More directly, let us turn to the indispensable (and now very expensive) 1984 autobiography The Jack Wrangler Story of What’s a Nice Boy Like You Doing?, wherein Ms. Whiting suggests that our hero move in as her common-law spouse and, right before the lights dim on the Broadway show they’re attending, he blurts out:
“But I’m a fucking faggot!”
Read More
MANIAC 30th Anniversary Blu-Ray: Long May You Dip
The practice of media companies “double-dipping”— that is, reissuing the same essential product (e.g., a popular cult film on DVD) with minor changes (e.g., different box art or meaningless bonus features)—has long drawn deserving bitchery, albeit usually from those who gripe online and then financially support the practice anyway.
The most extreme examples I can think of are the endless permutations of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, which have appeared (and, as far as I know, continue to appear) in infinitely repackaged “collectible” forms, often with as seemingly little as a line of box copy changed to differentiate from the last gelt-reaping.
Those two particular titles, I’ll admit, may stick out to me because I hate those movies and resent their audiences so much, but also because they make me wonder if I’d ever succumb to that level of suckerosity.
