I'm quite sure that wasn't me writing reviews of Bewitched episodes. I like that show but just as something to watch occasionally, rather like my enjoyment of The Addams Family, The Munsters, or Star Trek. None of them are shows I have ever devoted serious time to researching or discussing.

Some friends of mine did visit Ashenrider once. I don't think he was able to attend any Festivals or fan gatherings because of his job. He was a minister at a church somewhere, and I think the only time he got a weekend off involved travel to visit family or in-laws.

Fun to remember those old times.

G.

It's interesting what I do remember from the Sci Fi boards. I started a section I called something like Gothick's Gallery of Goddesses and wrote about actresses I felt deserved more recognition, such as Martita Hunt, Margaret Johnston, and of course Grayson Hall.  And I remember a very popular contributor on the DS board whose handle was Ashenrider and who was writing a novel. He had a thing for the old 70s film SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS.

They were fun times!

G.

Those were fun to see. Too bad the links to the hoDS and Patrick Macnee event photos no longer work, but I guess one can't expect miracles.

I have no memory at all of the pre-VantageNet days. I remember all of us chatting on some Sci Fi channel message boards, and then I remember a version of this site but even those memories, alas, are distressingly vague!

I'm starting to feel sympathy for Lara claiming she has no memory at all of playing Cassandra!

Best, G.

That sounds quite cool! I don't even remember this site. I look forward to having a look!

G.

On social media this morning, Mary O'Leary stated that she had interviewed Mark Perry, who was a fan of DS during the original airing and is writing the screenplay for the new DS re-boot, for the Jonathan Frid documentary. Perhaps there will be a Shadowgram release soon to report further on that.

cheers, G.

Something about this trailer made me think of DS, particularly some of the "dysfunctional family melodrama" storylines from 1966, 1897 and PT 1970:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi-1NchUqMA

Marvelous cast, too.

G.

This one dates to July 1961 and was published in a Delaware County local paper. During her season at the Hedgerow, Grayson performed the one-act monodrama (which means she was the only person onstage) "The Human Voice," by Jean Cocteau, originally written in 1928, about a woman having a hysterical meltdown breakup with her former lover over the telephone. I've always thought that this was what gave Sam the idea for the "Grayson solo" episode in 1967 which is mostly Julia going bananas at Collinwood while the ghost of Dave Woodard terrorizes her with phantom phonecalls.

G.

Headline: Actress avoids Village, moves instead to Country

A woman makes her home where she has to, be it in house or apartment, city, country, or suburb. An actress, according to legend, makes her homes (plural) in some of the least likely of the "has to" places. Hers are the hotels, trains, not-so-converted barns, cold water walkups in Greenwich Village, and, her audience half suspects, the trunks.

Grayson Hall -- a vivid, angular, graceful actress with energetic red hair and a deep fluid voice -- has avoided at least some of these dwellings: "I've always avoided living in the Village."

Christened Shirley Grayson (she dropped the given name after her marriage), she was brought up in Philadelphia without benefit of a trunk, although as a stagestruck teenager performing at the Neighborhood Playhouse, it may have been the only theatrical accoutrement she lacked. After her schoolgirls days there was a dormitory at Cornell University. Next, was the struggling-young-actress bit, a cold water flat in mid-town New York, but: "That episode ended when I was sent home to recuperate from malnutrition and pneumonia."

During a stay in 1955 in New Haven, Conn., where she was appearing in a play at the Yaie Drama School and being courted by a young writer named Sam Hall, she lived in a YWCA room. Later that year, after she and Sam were married, she alternated between numbness and heat prostration in a three room penthouse in New York. Of that she says succinctly: "It had charm, but no insulation." With the advent of Matthew, now almost 3, the Halls moved to the seven room Manhattan apartment they now occupy.

"... Divine. We went in at 10, looked at three rooms, and had signed the lease by 11."

Now Grayson is coping with life in the country in a decidedly sophisticated house here on Manchester Road. The Halls are in Delaware County while Grayson is a member of the repertory company now in mid-season at Hedgerow Theatre and while Sam, who by now has several television plays and a year's worth of TV soap opera to his credit, completes an adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel, "No More Parades," for production at Hedgerow late this summer.

The house is a mathematical affair with colored panels alternating in a geometric design with windows. "I'd never live anywhere but New York, but this is wonderful for the summer. No stock company (and Grayson has camped in those ramshackle accommodations too) ever had it so good."

The country isn't without problems for a bona fide city dweller. The septic tank which went on the blink when she had houseguests reduced Grayson to near-incoherence. The delicatessen isn't right around the corner when she miscalculates the milk supply. But there are compensations:

"The sunlight . . . the birds that sing in the mornings ... the yard that's right outside instead of four blocks away when Matthew wants to go out." There are compensations too in her work. After more than a year in the demanding lead in the off-Broadway play, "The Balcony," Grayson is glad to vary her roles by playing, among others, Eliot, Shaw, Chekhov, and Brecht heroines. "I'm growing as an actress," she explains, undismayed that her typically expansive gesture is interrupted by a sortie to help her visiting mother maneuver the car down the steep sloping driveway.

"In fact,"--she waves at her also-departing son--"as an actress, a wife, a mother, I have the best of all possible worlds.

"And you can say that right out, in print."

I listened to some of it. Unfortunately Lara did not have a good phone connection and it was one of those situations where only half of some words made it on the air... and other words dropped completely. When I stopped it, she was complaining about the humor in the Burton/Depp film and how she thought it ruined the movie and its chance to become a long running series (she referenced Pirates of the Caribbean).

G.