Bewitched and Beyond: The Fan Who Came to Dinner by Mark Wood Read Free Book Online

we could get out of there!
    I walked over, leaned against the marble piece that had his name on it, and as I did, the wall gave way and landed with a resounding “CLUNK” against his casket! I screamed (again!) and I also ran behind her! I am such the hero! HA!
    At any rate, Kasey began snapping pictures like mad, just waiting for the ectoplasm to come seeping out.
    We got the photos back and guess what?! NOTHING!
    That August, Kasey’s mom, Ina, celebrated her 92nd birthday. Ina couldn’t remember very much, but she used to smile from ear-to-ear when I’d come into her room at the nursing home. Apparently she had an eye for the “gentleman callers.”
    Ina, who had been an upstanding member of the Eastern Star organization, and used to throw many formal parties for them, always felt she was in charge at Dryer’s Nursing Home in Burbank.
    For her birthday, Kasey and I planned to pick up Ina and go across the street to meet some other family members at Bob’s Big Boy restaurant.
    This was all dangerous business because we had to wheel Ina over in her wheel-chair and cross traffic on a busy street. Ina made things all the more difficult because she kept dragging her feet! Finally I popped a wheelie with her in the chair and flew across the busy intersection with Ina screaming all the way… Geeze, I coulda killed us!

Mr. Webb did not have the decency to show up on film!

Me and Kasey’s mom, Ina.

Chapter 11
    A Precursor of Things to Come
     
    In late September, Kasey felt a lump on the side of her neck. It proved to be a rather large benign tumor, but the doctors still felt it should be removed if only for precautionary measures. It was located in the parotid gland so they removed it along with most of her thyroid. I can remember being scared, because no one I had ever known had had any surgery. As they wheeled her into the operating room at the Motion Picture Hospital, she made sure to tell me that if anything happened, “Tell my children I love them.”
    It was all quite nerve wracking!
    After she was out of sight, I rushed to the mall where she had recently seen and fallen in love with this big, clay Jack o’Lantern in a coffee shop. I bought it and went back to her hospital room to wait. Luckily, the surgery turned out to be rather simple, and she awoke to this big grinning clay orb staring at her. She loved it.
    That woman could heal faster than anybody I’ve ever known and because of that, our Hallowe’en preparations were still on for that year.
    Our first Hallowe’en party was a blast! Kasey wore the pink lamé Victorian gown that I designed and brought with me the previous year (She trusted my costuming ability by this time) and looked like a million bucks!
    On Hallowe’en night, we went to Beverly Hills and ran into Milton Berle who was in full drag, completely blitzed, and constantly pulling up his skirt. It was kinda like looking at a train wreck… You don’t want to watch but you can’t help it… So we wisely decided to go elsewhere!
    Christmas that year offered another opportunity to dress-up; the annual St. Nicholas Ball that our dear friend Julia DelJudge chaired every year at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel.
    It was a lovely affair! Every ballroom was decorated in a different color. One that I especially remember was decorated with a live tree that reached all the way to the ceiling, completely dressed in Tiffany ornaments!
    The stipulation for the ball was that you had to dress Victorian. Of course the Victorian era offered up several different dress styles, so Kasey wore a huge red and black lace hoop dress of the Civil War period that I had made a few years earlier.
    There was just one problem… she couldn’t get in the car while wearing it! So when it was time to leave the ball, the valet brought the car around and I stepped behind Kasey, pulled two draw strings simultaneously, and down came the huge skirt and hoop. She casually stepped out of it wearing nothing but the top, her