Although there were only four people in the game room before Alan arrived, the room was rampant with personalities.

Milton Bradley, Alan's 'Uncle Milty', sat closest to the TV, not because of any vision problems (his eyesight was 15/15-three steps above excellent as far as the American Ophthalmologist Association was concerned), but because he was chilly and liked the warmth that radiated from the 1950's-era picture tube. Milton also needed time to think, and sitting two feet away from the mindless senseless movie, Revenge, gave his mind time to wander the same way it had when he was a boy fishing on the Rapidan River in the tobacco-growing section of rural Virginia. It was then, when he was nine years old, that he applied for his first patent for his board game, Gooses and Mooses, and during the next ten years, he invented twenty-seven more games, investing his profit in mime schools and comedy club ownerships as he pursued his passion to become a CPA and counter espionage agent while moonlighting in a high-level government job in the Mortuary Department of the District of Columbia Government.

In Washington D.C.'s long inhospitable, antisocial evenings, in his five-story mansion overlooking the Robert F. Kennedy Baseball and Soccer Stadium (formerly the home of the Washington Redskins), amid the screaming fans, trombone players, and alley pissers, he read law, and within six months had passed the bar, becoming the first lawyer in the District of Columbia to pass on his first-or second-or even third-attempt.

Despite his CPA achievements and his law degree (and his incessant longing to lurk undercover), Milton devoted most of time as a stand-up comic at the Barbara Bush Comedy and Mambo Club, the Prince George's County Medical College and Mime Academy, and Pentagon Puppetry Productions (which covertly presented finger puppet plays to terrorists, even though this was in direct violation of the Geneva Convention). Secretly, however, Milton longs for recognition from the National Association of Mimes, Midgets and Clowns and dreams of the day he can stand on the Helen Hayes Stage in downtown Washington, DC (693 Twelfth Street, NW) and accept the Willard Scott Mime Award for top honors in the category of Mime Ability, which is given annually to the mime who can best perform 'outside the box'. But for now, he wiles away his hours by catching Champagne corks in his teeth at book signings and bridge tournaments (he has a 87.3% success rate), organizes Washington, D.C.'s fund drive for the clandestine Capitol Hill Brick and Sand Sidewalk's Annual Crack Up (in which Senate aides streak across Capitol Hill brick and sand sidewalks with their ass cracks exposed), teaches harpsichord lessons to the disadvantaged, mentors toddlers at neighboring nursery schools in the manly arts of Kung Fu self-defense, balances his longtime friend, Oscar winner Anita Baker's, professional and personal books, sponsors Alan Baker's educational activities, and supports the National Association for the Endowment of Midgets, a small but struggling self-help association located on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., which has, as its credo, 'to restore inches to midgets wherever they need them most' (and yes, they do add inches to midget penises, as well as to their height. Midgets, after all, do have the same rights as those who have more inches than they can handle). In addition, Milton is currently President and CEO of the Association for the Rescue, Elevation and Utilization of Mostly Young Disgruntled Aboriginal Dwarfs (ARE-U-MY-DAD), a 501(c) 3 association whose major goal is to re-establish America's lost dwarf colony. ARE-U-MY-DAD has raised $32.31 in their efforts and has just signed Sandra Bullock to conduct the upcoming after Labor Day Preserve Our Midget Heritage Telethon to further the cause (and Jerry Lewis has promised to throw in his support as soon as he finds a cure for MS).

For the past nine years, Milton's constant companion, lover, friend and would-be mime, has been his longtime friend, Suzi 'E.Z.' O'Brien. And they have done everything except live together because, according to Suzi, "the times they are a changing and I'm not ready to settle down with just any old clown." Milton, however, has been carrying a five-carat diamond ring (set in platinum with a hint of gold) in his vest pocket for the past three years, hoping that someday, some place, somehow, he can whip it out (along with the ring), fall to one knee and propose to the woman who comes to him each night (in between his dwarf and midget dreams). In the meantime, Milton frequently hangs out at the Casablanca Restaurant (a short walk away at 1859 East Capitol Street, where the chicken is fried, the pistachios are dyed and men in clown suits are pied with homemade custard creams), where he waits . . . and waits . . . and waits, knowing that someday his myopic version of Ingrid Bergman will come gum-chewing through his front door, hoisting a heart-shaped balloon with his name on it, aching with love. Ah, dreams . . . ah bliss.

Suzi 'E.Z.' O'Brien sits a foot behind Milton, ogling him, wishing she and he were rolling on the tiger skin rug (if only there were a tiger skin rug), making E.Z. love, steaming up each other's contacts, pawing straps and boxer shorts, searching for love, but secretly knowing that will never happen because she was born on the wrong side of the tracks in South Arlington, Virginia, and felt like a child of the Great Depression when she attended St. Agnes School for Girls (1st to 8th grades), each time she spotted her friends out of uniform, wearing the trendiest fashions from Lord and Taylor and Nordstrom's, while she dumpster-dove into the Central City Calvary Baptist missionary barrel looking for clothes, chachkas, and returnable soda bottles.

At Archbishop Denis J. O'Connor High School, however, Suzi turned outward, stretching her soul and mind away from the harsh realities of Falls Church fashions and mini-mansions, and realized that the majority of Virginians still suffered from a moral depravity they'd never be able to fill. Accordingly, she devoted all of her free time in her junior and senior years to mapping trash dumpsters for the needy, mentoring Catholic school illiterates, and briefly abetting the Youth for Christ Movement (backed by the Billy Graham Foundation, a non-profit, non-fundamentalist, non-sectarian organization, sponsored surreptitiously by B'nai Brith and the Black Panters). However, after her priest, Father Chucky, warned her that all Protestants were going to die and go to hell, Suzi dropped her affiliation with both Youth for Christ and the Billy Graham organization (although she still writes to her B'nai Brith friend, Wanda Wyzleski, three times a week, urging her to rejoin Jews for Humanity, a Jimmy Carter affiliate that promise to build a temple in every town in America with a population of 9,000 or more regardless of the number of Jews living there). "Better safe than to rot in hell," she shouted to her ex-Protestant friends as she rode her tricycle toward the Blessed Shrine of Immediate Danger to pray for the salvation of wayward Protestants.

As an Irish Catholic, Suzi attended Mass every day until she matriculated at William and Mary, where, in the beat of one heavily mascaraed eyelash, she lost her virginity and six of her Domino Pizza discount coupons to Rudolf (yes, with an "F" for you know what and not a "P" because she wasn't into water sports . . back then) Merenstein, while learning to party until dawn, as her Irish roots oozed out of her, three inches longer than her red hair. Within a week, Suzi was declared the freshman beer-drinking champion, and her reputation grew exponentially until she graduated at the bottom of her class, three steps up from Maria Ouspenskya, the Romanian soothsayer who had never bothered to learn the English language. Suzi's crowning achievement while attending William and Mary was that, in her senior year, she organized the dancehall-sing-along musical revue Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, in which all twenty-two original songs (written and performed by no other) consisted of the words beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, beer and forty-seven actors did nothing but drink beer (at five dollars a mug) for two hours and thirty-seven minutes. The show was a smashing success and Suzi, who netted over one hundred thousand (for the beer sales, not the admission), was nominated for (and won) William and Mary's prestigious "Coors Businesswoman of the Year Award" (a plague she still treasures-regardless of those horrible years as a kindergarten teacher when she had to sip beer out of a cocoa cup at her desk and tell her students that that dreadful smell was really Listerine. "Yes, this is what your mommy uses. It's Listerine, boys and girls, Listerine in its purest form."). After teaching for one year, with nothing but a piece of chalk to protect her from the screaming banshees, Suzi discovered her inner self by delving into her viscera, looking under the tissues deep inside the marrow, snapped open the cartilage and rescuing it, as she experience an epiphany, believing (yes, I say 'believing' hallelujah!) a screeching inner voice that urged her to devote her life to the travel industry (the fact that Mary Margaret McBride, her eleventh grade English teacher had just given her a medal of St. Bridgette, of course, had nothing to do with her epiphany), helping trepid travelers find their way. Therefore, for the ensuing fifteen years, she led school groups on tours of the Nation's Capital. Twice, she even ventured away from the Mall-once by leading a group of eighth graders a quarter mile from the Mall to the Kennedy Center-and once, by successfully undertaking a trip to the Coors Museum (at an undisclosed address, two miles from downtown D.C.) but then the repercussions of that trip and the unlimited supply of free beer (yes, Coors was more than gracious with their Business Woman of the Year Award) led to a three-day detox at the Will Rogers Institute for the Sanity and Temperance of Scurrilous Liquor Abusers and Philanders (WRIST SLAP), a Mel Gibson Foundation, where Suzi had her wrists strapped ever afternoon at four p.m.

As a tour guide, Suzi refused to drive any vehicle with more than three wheels because, on her first solo trip (in her father's XKE) around the circumferential highway (AKA the Washington Beltway) she accidentally ran over 632 cardboard boxes filled with displaced skunks. Terrified of getting behind any round opening larger than the half-inch hole of a CD, she still assiduously avoids the Beltway-even on her tricycle. (Today, most Virginians avoid that portion of the Beltway because, even though the state spent fifteen years and thirty-seven million dollars trying to de-scent the black-white-black-white-black-white skunk-smelling highway, there is still a lingering odor of skunk perfuming the Northern Virginian air that is especially egregious during the seventeen year cicada explosion-when dead locust and skunks form a perpetual union).

Now Suzi seldom ventures from her apartment other than to walk to the nearest liquor store to pick up her daily free twenty-four pack of Coors (summer and winter, night or day, she has no qualms about venturing out to retrieve her suds, wishing she could add a "T" in the right place and turn them into her studs.)

For the past nine years, Suzi has kept a small pied-a-terre on Capitol Hill, renting the lower unit of 1829 East Capitol Street, which by happenstance is immediately adjacent to Milton Bradley's mansion at 1827 East Capitol Street, where Suzi and Milton, along with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of William and Mary friends; Comedy Club hangers-on; multi-racial skunk haters; and migrating midget lovers get together nightly to drink Coors, Cokes and cocoa, play board games (and, yes, Suzi especially loves Milton's first game Gooses and Mooses), practice mime, and throw water balloons (If amber is the color of water) at the locals who piss on their houses, as they attend sports events at the ever-decaying and crumbling RFK Stadium across the street. Next to drinking, Suzi's greatest skill is screaming, an art form she says has been greatly enhanced because of the proximity to RFK. "You try talking above that fat bald-headed Negro trumpet player and 50,000 drunken fans. You try walking across Nineteenth Street in the middle of rush hour when 20,000 people clamor into the Metro-see how long you keep your sanity."

Suzi has had a crush on Milton Bradley for over fifteen years but is afraid of a commitment. "I'd love to marry Milty, but I'm afraid I'll end up living away from the city, away from the piss smell and the trumpeter who plays, Hail to the Redskins even though the damned Redskins moved to Maryland four years ago and neither he nor his inebriated fans seem to know the difference." Suzi knows she'd also miss the freedom of being able to walk fifty yards and hop onto the Stadium Armory Metro and be downtown to the bars and clubs in less than seven point three minutes.

She'd also find it unbearable to leave the region and forgo the pleasure of hanging out at Eastern Market, taunting the cheese lady, ordering her bear claw at the Quick E Market (next to the bowling alley across the street from the My-T-High Thai Massage Parlor and Carry-Out.), smelling the fresh fish (and hurrying along quickly before she vomited), and five-figuring a few of the knickknacks up for sale at the weekend flea market. Mostly, however, Suzi would miss the opportunity of kibitzing the tennis games and pick-up basketball games that took place across the street at Eastern High School and she'd pine in anxiety if she were unable to direct traffic when the signal got knocked down each time that red and yellow trash truck with the three-foot tall stuffed bear screwed to the front grill rounded the corner and bashed against the electrical box. Suzi longs for the good old days, when life was simple as that ubiquitous pie man and, as a God-fearing Roman Catholic, she didn't have to make her own decisions, think for herself, or schlep to the market to pick up her free beer. Life is so less complicated when you don't have to worry about egregious things like free will . . . and driving through boxes of skunks on the superhighway. Perhaps I'll go back to church. Life was easier then when Pope John Paul John Paul made all my decisions.

"Pope. Drinking. Pope. Drinking."

"Drinking Pope."

"Nah."

"Drinking."

"Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer."

"No brainer."

Now Suzi consumes a bottle of Chablis and a twenty-four pack each evening before turning in (the twenty-four packs are harder to lug than the smaller six-packs but it gives her a sense of self-assurance and, since she now exercise by lugging and chugging, she no longer needs to visit the Arnold Schwarzenegger Weightlifting Academy and Episcopalian Church, located on the corner of Seventeenth and East Capitol Street, across from the Ho Chi Minh Vietnamese Café and Whistle Stop). Perhaps that's why Suzi loves Milton so much; together they can stock their kitchen with a month's supply of groceries (nine loaves of bread, fifteen boxes of Velveeta, two boxes of saltines, four boxes of Rye Crisps, and two packs of those teeny tiny plastic knives-the ones that don't cut worth a damn but at least you know you'll never be arrested if you accidentally stuffed one in your pocket and jumped on a plane).

Some day when I'm drunk enough or too afraid to scream, Milton will propose and then . . . Suzi's eyes hazed over, thinking of her future, forgetting her past, hating the present, wishing for tomorrow, hoping for Milton, afraid of Milton, hoping for a better life, disowning life, wanting Milton, wanting Milton, wanting Milton.

"Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer. Beer."

"The Holy Roman Catholic Church?"

"No brainer."

"One more beer for the Jesus."

Nancy Baker, Alan's Mother, sat closest to the cocoa, rolling her tongue around in her mouth, savoring the taste of the brew. As the only child of Anita Baker and William Tecumseh Sherman Baker, Nancy was born in between her mother's filming of The Ketchikan Salmon Bake and The Terrible Taboo of the Tiki Tiki Totem and literally grew up in the business. She was named after Nancy Walker, who later played Rhoda's Mom in both the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, and was Anita Baker's second banana in The Terrible Taboo of the Tiki Tiki Totem, which was released the day Nancy Baker was born (hence the naming).

Nancy was nurtured by Nina Perez, a Peruvian Mormon nanny who dreamt of becoming a forensics technician and performing autopsies on descendants of the Ancient Incas to determine if they were members of the Lost Tribe of Israel or if the tribe had split, as the church said, and migrated to the Great Salt in the U.S. of A.

Nancy's first toy, a gift from Nina, was a stethoscope and with it, her fate was sealed. From her earliest memory, she eschewed the theatre and comedy clubs of her father, the Hollywood of her mom, and even the mime schools owned by long-time family friend, Milton Bradley: Nancy wanted to become a forensics proctologist and dreamed of examining the entrails of modern-day Romans to see if their DNA matched up with Gaius Julius Caesar's.

On Nancy's twelfth birthday, Anita, in a state of mind two steps past angst, shipped Nancy off to the Red Skelton Mime School and Pie Factory in Mustang, Oklahoma (which, by happenstance, was also the training ground of the Gay Rodeo Association of North America, which promised to turn red blooded homos into red blooded rodeo girls), where Nancy learned the dexterity necessary to perform mime, but at the same time, clandestinely studied forensics (and although the choice was surreptitiously Nancy's, her mother prayed that the Lord's Will would be done and Nancy would end up on the Big Screen fighting terrible Tiki Tiki monsters and poaching salmon just as she had done during her Hollywood heyday.)

The next year, however, Milton Bradley, who had just purchased a 51% interest in Red Skelton Enterprises, Inc., spent part of his spring vacation in Mustang, where he courted Nancy, and falling to one knee, mimed his proposal, to the hooted delight of the fifty-seven gay cowboys who had flunked out at lariat training school. One of whom was Yancey Garner, the gay cowboy with the cutest touché, who had been called to Washington shortly afterwards, where he joined the F.B.I. and became one of J. Edgar Hoover's favorites. It is rumored that J. Edgar died in Yancey's arms while bobbing up and down on Yancey's 11-inch-long cock, and that that explosive event had been recorded and the remaining evidence is now housed at the Tallulah Bankhead Archives for Queers and Trans, at Twelfth and G Street, NW))

Moreover, Since the legal age for marriage in Oklahoma, with parental consent, was thirteen, and since Nancy was two days shy of her sixteenth birthday (which needed no parental consent), the couple married that afternoon in the Round 'Em-Up State Park and Frijoles Arcade (where the locals Frisbeed frijoles across the Red River each afternoon from four until six) and honeymooned in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where Nancy became pregnant (she swears) five minutes into their honeymoon. Seven days later, their marriage was annulled when Anita Baker protested her daughter's nuptials because Nancy had presented a forged parental permission slip to the one-armed female albino Jehovah Witness minister who performed the ceremony. (And although no one ever proved that Nancy or Milty forged the permission slip, such documents are as easily obtainable in the South as they are heavily frowned upon in the North). The unflappable Anita Baker held no ill will toward Milton (whom she adored as her CPA, auditor, and personal friend) and her daughter (whom she was stuck with)-however, because of a previous Saturday Night Special Made for TV filming commitment (in which she played Nellie Cassidy, a toothless street walker) and a season hosting the Tonight Show, Anita decided to leave Nancy in Oklahoma to deliver her only child, Alan, who was born on July 10, 1985 and, because Nancy was still in school, baby Alan spent his first two years with Milton Bradley, whom he fondly referred to as Uncle Milty, in Milton's mini-mansion on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in the shadow of the RFK Soccer Stadium where their motto was "Goodbye, Redskins, hello, DC United."

Meanwhile, Nancy rejoined her parents for their newly renovated castle-warming party in November 1985, but, Nancy, who quickly became bored with medieval castle life and senseless frocks, wrote to her nanny daily while secretly studying forensic medicine by flashlight under her covers in the nethermost regions of the castle each night. Although she was home-schooled, ultimately both she and her parents felt it wise to send Nancy to the Prince George's County Medical College and Mime Academy, a rural semi-state supported college nestled in the tobacco fields outside Washington, D.C., where she surreptitiously enrolled as a student of mime, but clandestinely spent her college career carving dead bodies into numerous pieces, seeking the answers to the forensic sciences, the lower order of proctology, and cataloguing the differences between digits of the left hand and the right, while wondering how to mime them for college credit. Nancy graduated summa cum laude, applied for a position with the DC government as forensics proctologist pathologist and was immediately promoted to the position of head proctologist. The next day, Nancy stood on a gurney and exclaimed somewhat louder than Scarlet O'Hara (her teenage idol), "As God is my witness, I shall never mime again!" To this day, however, Nancy is neither able to watch Rhoda reruns (starring her namesake Nancy Walker) nor attend Washington's infamous gay rodeo events, nor visit a dwarf fair without a grimace of remorse. If only Rhoda's mom hadn't dreamt of mimes, she wonders, perhaps I'd be free of this clown curse that has dogged me all my life

Anita Baker stood, regally, next to the table, so she could admire herself on the blank TV screen while watching the reactions of those around her.

Anita Baker Baker (yes, her maiden name was Baker!) was born, not with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, but with the entire set of Sterling crammed down her esophagus and the family joke was that her first words (at age five) were "Will someone take out the God-damned silverware?" As the scion of the rich and powerful Baker Family (originators of Baker's Cocoa, Boston, Massachusetts), whose family fortune currently exceeds thirty-seven point six billion dollars, Anita was educated at Briarcliff Finishing School for Girls (Briarcliff Manor, New York) and accepted at Smithfield College (Bacon, Mass) three days shy of her sixteenth birthday.

At Smithfield, Anita excelled at sports and co-founded Smithfield's First Annual Dead Weightlifting Event and Ham Festival, ultimately coordinating it among the coeds at Vassar and Wellesley. Her triumphant victory, dead-lifting one-hundred-sixty-three pounds and five ounces, garnered her a year's supply of Nike sneakers and a gift certificate for ten leotards in various colors from H. L. Green's Department Store. At the culmination of her sophomore year, Anita was chosen to represent the United States in the Olympics and became the first female to win a gold medal in weightlifting. Immediately after her Olympic victory, she dropped out of Smithfield and became a representative for the Welder Weightlifting Company. Two months later, as the results of a barroom wager at the Empty Rail Grill in White Plains, she entered the Miss New York State Beauty Pageant; and a week later, outlasting forty-seven flat-chested, skinny hipped, cross-eyed contestants, became Second Runner up in the Miss America Contest. It was rumored that she had had a brief affair with emcee Bert Parks the night before the crowning (and the fact that she spread her hands nine inches each time she looked at him added to the myth), but the scandal merely added to her Carole Lombard-like reputation, propelling her into stardom and accenting her blossoming acting career.

Immediately after her near victory in the Miss America Pageant, Anita studied acting with Constantine Stanislavski and appeared on Broadway with Maureen Stapleton, Elaine Stritch and Marlon Brando in The Boys from Syracuse (both Stritch and Stapleton played male roles to critical accolades, but Anita was stuck with the ingénue role and remained virtually unnoticed. (In the subsequent re-casting of The Boys from Syracuse, Barbra Streisand played the ingénue, and she, too, was ignored by the critics-other than by Howard Fast of the New York Post, who said, and I quote, "If that dame's nose had been any bigger, I would have been knocked out of my third row seat. If New York knows what's good for us, we'll ship this Streisand person off to the boonies where half the viewers are blind and the other are. . . well, you can fill in the blanks.)

After turning down marriage proposals from Brando and Tab Hunter (it is reported that Brando did a handstand and Tab did a cartwheel before both men knelt simultaneously begging for Anita's hand), she eloped with William Tecumseh Sherman Baker, a New York City illustrator-and third-not her first cousin-as reported by the Washington Times Herald. Wm. T was a part time Plants Rights Activist (and refused all vegetables, especially the red and orange ones which he considered to be filled with the breathe of life), would-be-screenwriter, TV second banana, an internationally known womanizer, bar-brawler, and Avant-guard Mad Magazine cartoonist who ultimately slithered into the debt of the Reno gambling syndicate (he wasn't big enough [in more ways than one] to make the Las Vegas crowd) so deeply that their families disowned both of them, donated their final resting places in the prestigious Baker Mausoleum (located next to Bunker Hill Memorial Park, across the street from the Wal-Mart, three doors down from the Ben Franklin Five and Dime) to Mormons Seeking Christ (a trade association subsidized by the NAACP's Finance Committee and expatriate Sandinistas for Jesus).Then the senior Baker family pounded every pair of Nikes in their Hampstead Long Island 'cottage', literally shaking Anita and William's dust from Anita's last year's Christmas presents: nine pairs of oversized Nikes, and removed all references to Anita and William's branch of the family from their dance cards and social registers. (Philadelphia family researchers at the Mormon Genealogical Archives still wonder why there are blackened spaces in the Philadelphia Blue Books.)

Despite an unconsummated beginning to her marriage because Bill, although surreptitiously a womanizer, had a non-retractable prepuce and was unable to get it up and keep it up, Anita Baker, as the intrepid woman in his life, pulled herself up by her complimentary Nike shoelaces, sobered up her husband and, at four a.m. the next morning, dragged his sorry ass to the Friends of Bill W. (also known as the 'You Know What') which met under the downtown Boston T at the Maverick Station (which was named far before that famous TV show, thank you) where she laid William on the train track and threatened to drive the train over him if he didn't 'rise to the occasion'. Luckily his prepuce retracted and Bill rose along with all his component parts-like Jesus Christ-from the train wreck of life. . . . Luckily the trains stopped running at three a.m.

The next morning, Anita kicked Bill out of bed, tossed him a fresh, though thoroughly un-ironed, pair of boxer shorts, packed all their non-breakable/non-perishable belongings in three cardboard suitcases and grabbed the Sky Chief to Hollywood. Four days later, while munching on a cheeseburger at the Hollywood and Vine R&W Root Beer Stand, she was spotted by a Hollywood talent agent and signed by Paramount, where she was acclaimed to be, "The new Ingrid Bergman but without that dreadful Swedish accent or svelte body." Anita Baker nixed all B movie offers and had the gift of knowing which A movie roles to decline and which ones to pounce upon like a starving leopard and, within three years, was nominated for four Academy Awards (garnering Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress nods her first time out) before winning 'the little man' for playing the role of Elvira Widgett in Revenge. Her acceptance speech is still considered to be among the wittiest in the history of the Academy (only Sally Fields' "You like me, you really like me," ranks higher.) Anita's speech is recorded here:

"This Oscar is dedicated to Texaco and Ernie Jancovitz, my proctologist, for giving me enough gas to play my part."

Revenge, a Hollywood Blockbuster and late night cult film, airs regularly in Hollywood, New York City and Cheboygan Wisconsin (where Anita was born while her mom tried to rush back to Boston but was caught in a snowstorm, broke her ankle, slipped on the pavement, swallowed a mouse (The episode with the mouse is chronicled in the Family History of the Bakers, published by Houghton-Mifflin, 1976, but, unfortunately, all extant copies have been inked out by the family. It is rumored that there is a sole copy in the Gay Rodeo Museum in Lawrence) and was rushed to the emergency room of the Cheboygan General Hospital), and as a cult film, ranks #4, just behind The Night of the Living Dead, The Wizard of Oz, and The Rocky Horror Show.

Unfortunately, Bill Baker hit the bottle heavily during the filming of Revenge and became involved with the 'long list' of promiscuous Hollywood sex starlets so flagrantly that Anita decided to sell their Bel Air mansion and motor coach East (yes, she had the money to fly, but she also had the time to see the country and, besides, Route 66 was inundated with hamburger stands and Dairy Queens: and I don't mean the ones of homosexual persuasion.)

Moments before she packed up the van to drive east, however, Anita read about Virginia's Abandoned Castle and Haunted House Foreclosure Sale and put in the ridiculously low bid of $9,215.17 for a castle situated on a small island in the Chesapeake Bay. Four days later, in Lawrence, Kansas (famous for John Brown and the sobriquet 'Bleeding Kansas, On the night of May 24th, 1856, John Brown and his five sons banged on the door of James Doyle, a proslavery renegade, and ordered the men to come outside, while eating her third Big Mac (without that dreadful special sauce) of the morning, she read in the Lawrence City Examiner that her bid was accepted: she was now the lady of the manor at McDougall Castle and owned its four hundred sixty three acres, including the Southern half of Mount Willoughby, along with the entire castle, including its ten-foot deep moat, its nine turrets, four towers, wine cellar-exercise room-dungeon, and thirty-eight rooms riddled with arrow slots. (Goodness, she was heard to exclaim. I'll never be able to afford a militia to defend the castle, let alone enough archers to mount the battlements-with or without prepuces.)

A dozen years later, while performing a perfunctory Goggle search looking for Best Supporting Directors, she discovered, to her chagrin, that she was the only bidder for the McDougall Castle, which she had now renamed the Baker Family Castle and B&B-even though the castle was located in Virginia and Virginia had outlawed all families unless they consisted solely of husband, wife, and children, thus effectively eradicating the rights of homosexuals to form unions. As a fundamentalist Christian, Virginia's laws never bothered Anita, "The State says it, I believe it, that settles it" was her motto, but she was upset that she could have purchased, as she stated to every listening smithy and tour guide who visits the castle, "this entire palace for a buck fifty. Oh well, there's no use crying crocodile tears. I'll just have to cut back on the broccoli and bake fewer rhubarb pies."

The McDougall Castle (c. 1253-1387) had originally stood in Killaloe, on Ireland's Shannon River, but was shipped, stone by stone, to Raspberry Island in 1645, where the Beale family of Beale Island, Virginia, restored it, lock, stock and turret. Unfortunately, the castle had fallen upon soft times because the rocks were crumbling, the moat was polluted, the ramparts rambling, the dungeon disgustingly dirty and the crusty crocodotles nearly emaciated-their leather literally hanging from them like pocketbooks swinging from the shoulders of the Flappers of the Nineteen Twenties, and it literally took the remaining portion of Anita Baker's fortune to restore the castle to its Fourteenth Century decadence.

During the first few years at the castle, Anita and Bill co-edited Mad Magazine cartoons and wrote three full-length screenplays: Tales of a Dungeon Yard Sale, Crocodiles Cry in Moonlight, and O'er the Ramparts We Pole Vault. Although two of the three movies were "picked-up" by Hollywood agents (Crocodiles Cry in Moonlight was deemed to be overly sentimental, literally inundated with crocodile tears, and was never considered, even though it was Anita's favorite), neither was ever produced and Bill, in frustration, decided to buy a Jaguar with the remaining money in their joint CD account (which had just matured the day before). Bill had taken to racing Jaguars (the car, not the critter) in and around Newport News and one evening, after a round of liquor-laced R&W root beers at the Richard G. Nixon Nudie Bar and Auxiliary Christian Science Reading Room, he wagered with an Audi owner and a Jeep driver that he could outrun Amtrak's 235-car Southbound Auto Train faster than they could.

The Audi was the first to climb the well-rutted dirt trail approaching the access to the hump that crossed the RR tracks, and the Jeep was a mere fifty-three yards behind (according to the algorithms prepared by the Statistical Department at the University of Virginia three months after the event), and as it passed the Jaguar, easily hugging the corners of the road next to a newly fallen boulder, the Audi hissed as its radiator began to leak. Meanwhile, Bill waited, revving the engine of his Jaguar, knowing he had an ample power reserve to leave the other drivers choking in his high-octane soot, already salivating, envisioning his split-second victory. Moments before the Audi could reach the crossing, however, Bill floored the Jag, soared past, and reached the RR Crossing, but his car stalled the moment it hit the tracks. Unable to restart the engine, and discovering that his right shoelace (yes, it was one of those danged free ones Anita had won in her beauty pageant days) was tangled in the accelerator pedal, he fumbled, considering for the briefest moment (because the train was bearing down on him. Duh) of cutting off his foot if he could only squeeze his left hand into his back pocket to retrieve the pocket knife he thought he had left there) and while struggling like a monkey caught with his hand holding a banana in a milk jug, but stalwartly refusing to humble himself by kicking off his loafer, his carcass and what was left of the jaguar was pushed to the border of North Carolina by the morning express. All the Virginia-North Carolina State Police ever recovered was a bent penny (which they surmised had popped out of Bill's penny loafers), and that damned brown bloodstained shoelace (the DNA matched Bill's 99.999%). No accelerator. No skin. No bones. "It was the damnest thing I ever did see," Myron Flanagan, the Audi driver, reported, "One minute the Jag was there, sitting on top of the RR track and the next instant, poof! It vaporized like a bad hairdo in a February blizzard." (Myron, an expert on both snow and hairdos, had owned the Zazu Pitts Beauty Salon and Nail Academy in Buffalo, New York, for nearly twenty years-where their motto was, "Hair today, Goon tomorrow." No one ever totally understood the salon's motto, but Myron and his fourth wife got a big kick out of it, so they made a wooden sign, posted it over the john and waited for their customers' reactions.) Meanwhile, Anita Baker, a quick study from her lengthy stay in Hollywood, realized that her life would continue with or without Bill, so she converted her showcase fully restored castle into a B&B, renting out the high and dry rooms with teeny-weeny arrow-slit window views of the Chesapeake for $19.99 a night/ $9.99 to locals. She also gave dungeon tours, taught rappelling from the ramparts (and yodeling when the heights were overpowering), and turned the East Tower into an all-night disco (operating on weekends only, of course). The next year, she turned the moat (during off-crocodotle hours) into a lap pool for the local children aged 6-12, giving them all small bunches of bananas in cases of emergency, for ninety-nine cents an hour (free on Sundays and non-religious holidays). In addition, on every third Thursday, she invited weightlifters, Lionel train enthusiasts (as long as they didn't mention the word "Amtrak'), and former Miss America colleagues for armor lifting contests. Unfortunately, Myrtle Gillespie, who knew that Anita was a ringer, turned her into the Virginia State Gaming Commission, which ended the practice, and confiscated the armor on Friday the 13th in May of '03. Milton Bradley, her attorney of record, is contesting the decision and hopes that a new verdict will be rendered in her favor when the State Appellant Court meets in the summer; however, Anita, an Obama Democrat, is not convinced that the right-winged Anti-Constitutionalists will overturn the decision. "It'll be found money if we win, and 'if' is the operative word," she says, remembering that the last time she found money was when she was eight and discovered a dime in her father's black leather recliner-even though the memories of stealing that dime, breaking the Eighth Commandment, dying, and going to hell-still make her blood run like ice floes in Norway (especially at night when she kicks the blankets off her bed in the West Tower (also fondly referred to as the Hollywood Tower because it faced West and reminded Anita of that short 3,000 mile hop across country to the city [that next to San Francisco, Paris and Elmira, New York] that she loved best).

Two months after her armor was confiscated and ultimately sold to the Ivory Tower Clock Repair and Pawn Shop, Anita Baker's mind snapped like a walnut tree in a Vermont blizzard. She had lived in the real world a tad too long and wanted to escape-if only for a fortnight-to a more blissful, less maniacal world, knowing that her daughter, Nancy, would never be able to take over the day-to-day operations of the castle and that her grandson, Alan, would, more than likely, skitter off to Greenwich Village to be with the boys . . . for yes, Alan was gay and everyone knew it, and accepted it, and that settled it! (There is a joy in being a fundamentalist and that is accepting every spoken and written word as the literal truth of God. "I heard it. I believe it. That settles it!" [Yes, Anita. is like most creationists in that manner. She also believes that mathematics is so complex that it, too, must have been created by Intelligent Design. "{God says if you add 1+2+3, you get 3 and if you add 1+2+3+4 , you get 4. That settles it: there's an Intelligent Design to mathematics, a Higher Force, that controls our every movement."}])

After her first moral majority mental breakdown (during which time she sipped holy water from the Great Salt Lake), Anita secretly wished that she could ensnare a boyfriend for Alan-a sweet young innocent youth who would continue the fantasy she relished-a young man who could continue her love of frivolity, while he masqueraded as lord of her Fourteenth Century castle. Unfortunately, each evening's games grew increasingly bizarre and each time Alan brought home a cute young "thang," the boy ended up diving off the ramparts and swimming across the moat to safety. Tonight though, Anita's life will change. Since completing her Goggle searches, under "Gay Male Dating Services," and "Don't Be a Drag, Date Me," she now knows, for a certainty, that, with the right tweaking and coaxing (and the fact that she holds the Bob Eubanks card), she can corral the next hunky young man who crosses the moat into playing the Newlywed Game with Alan and living in the castle (or at the very worst of being racked in the dungeon until he accedes to her demands) for the next twenty or thirty years, which would be long enough for her to laugh giddily over her husband's back issues of Mad Magazine and rework her favorite screenplay, Crocodiles Cry in Moonlight into a Broadway musical starring Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.


On to Chapter Four
The Beat Goes On
Back to Chapter Two
Cocoa, Anyone?
Complete Chapter List

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