Strange Confessions

The internet has served a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people, but last night it served a very special role for me... therapist.

You see, I've had this secret that I've been carrying inside me since I was just a young thing. It's the sort of secret that you never admit to anyone under any circumstances, not to your best friend in the world, not in your most drunken moment of Dashboard Confessional. This was a secret so perverse and heinous that I knew the rest of the world wouldn't be able to handle it... I had a little thing for Teenage Frankenstein!

Yep, since the very first time I caught a Saturday afternoon movie matinee of the movie "I Was A Teenage Frankenstein" on one of our local stations I became aware of the beginnings of a strange stirring inside me every time the title monster was on screen. I also became aware of the freakishness of this situation. Not only was this a hideously deformed and murderous mistake of science, but he was dead! Technically I was a necrophilliac!!! Nothing good ever came of that!

Through the years I've admitted to having a lot of strange youthful crushes (at one point in my life I was determined to marry Julie Andrews) it's something we all do. We tell our friends our crushes and they tell us theirs and we laugh and say "Oh my God! You had a thing for 'fill-in-the-blank? Weird-o!" But I knew that Teenage Frankenstein was not a pin-up idol that my peers would ever accept. The only Cold War-era creature feature monster that it was even remotely safe to admit to stiffening for was that chick on the 50-Foot Woman poster. Admit it, at some time or another we've all wanted to be parked along that stretch of highway she's straddling. But Junior Frankenstein was not, and would never be, centerfold acceptable.

And thus it was that I resigned myself to a lifetime of silence... until last night.

But before we get to that... Here's Frankie!

















Okay, so he's not much to look at from the neck up, it's what's below the clavicle that counts. You could stick a sack on his head and call him "Skippy" for all I cared... my primal pre-pubescent longings were more than happy with what Frankenteen had to offer from the neck down! Freaky I admit.

Then last night I'm puttering around the web (I don't surf. I've never had the balance.) and I don't remember how or why but I stumbled across a picture of the guy who was hiding behind all that monster make-up... Mr.Gary Conway-

And the heaviness in my soul lifted!!!

Now there was a guy worthy of hanging in somebody's gym locker. So it turns out that I wasn't just a freak-chasing necrophilliac after all. I loved Teen Frankenstein because I was able to look past the monsterously deformed features and see the true beauty that shone with-in him!

I am a very, very good person.

And Teenage Horror Factory is a very, very good web site all about "I Was A Teenage Frankenstein" and other 1950's teen horror flicks!