Olney's famous homegrown “Avant-Gardistes”: Patty O’Donnel and Rachel Anne Greenberg

As a very special miserably-hot-day special edition of the Dan Leo Chesterfield King-Size Award Theatre, we proudly present, by popular demand, a rebroadcast of the following episode, originally presented May 24, 2007...

The year was 1965, and for some time the young Simon Gratz High grads Patty and Rachel, sales assistants and apprentice bakers at Fink’s Bakery on Spencer Street, had been experimenting with what they called “weed art”. They would wander through the abandoned lots and woods and construction sites of Olney with an Acme shopping cart and collect weeds and twigs and other odd bits of trash and detritus, and in the basement of the O’Donnel house on Sparks Street they began to create the masterpieces which would soon bring them fame and a certain amount of fortune.

After working in obscurity for a few months the girls decided to enter one of their favorite creations, “The Sticky Twig Man” (pictured above), at the annual Autumn Art Show at Sturgis Playground over at 65th and Second. Much to their delight they won third prize (a $50 gift certificate at the Mitzi Shoppe on 5th Street), and to their even greater surprise the very photo reproduced here was printed in the “Neighborhood Fun” section of the Evening Bulletin.

As it so happens the famed artist Andy Warhol and his entourage were in town that day for Andy’s first American museum exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Andy saw the newspaper photo of the girls and the “Sticky Twig Man” and pronounced it “really neat”. The “Factory” stalwart and Warhol right-hand man Gerard Malanga got on the case and tracked Patty and Rachel down. The girls agreed to meet Warhol at their favorite local stopping place The Three Babes diner on Fifth. Yes, it was a wild night at the Three Babes when Andy arrived with superstars Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling and the ubiquitous Malanga, along with the writers Terry Southern and George Plimpton, the actor Dennis Hopper and, not least of all, the gallery owner Janet Fleisher. Andy loved Patty and Rachel and immediately offered them parts in his next movie, but the girls declined as they didn’t think they would be able to get their shifts covered at the bakery. They passed around snapshots of their work and everyone seemed to be impressed, not least of all Miss Fleisher, who made them an offer on the spot to show their work at her world-famous gallery downtown on 17th Street.

Well, we all know what happened next. Helped out immeasurably by the imprimatur of Mr. Warhol, the Misses O’Donnel and Greenberg sold out their entire maiden show that December at the Fleisher, fetching as much as $5,000 a piece. Not bad at all for a couple of Olney gals who were still living at home and working at the bakery!

But this famous first show proved also to be their last. Patty and Rachel, in an interview with the Saturday Evening Post, said that they felt that they had gone as far as they could with weeds and twigs, and that they wanted to quit while they were ahead.

Rachel took her money and put it down on a semi-detached on Acker Street, and shortly afterwards moved in with her new husband Dave, a mechanic at the Atlantic station down at Fifth and Somerville. Patty for her part bought a brand-new Thunderbird. Rachel continued to work at Fink’s until she and Dave had their first baby. Patty went to nursing school and worked for many years at Einstein Hospital on Old York Road.

Their most famous work, “The Sticky Twig Man”, was recently auctioned at Christie’s for $750,000.

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And now, a word from the Shangri-Las:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 74: walk alone

Our previous installment of Larry Winchester’s Pennzoil Award-nominated masterpiece left our adventurers Harvey, Dick and Daphne soaring wildly through the atmosphere in a runaway flying saucer...

But meanwhile, back on the ground, let’s see what’s going on with young Hope, the beautiful but scary daughter of rancher Big Jake Johnstone...

Oh, and what about good old Moloch, the even scarier leader of the local motorcycle gang, the Motorpsychos?

Return with us now if you will to a September night in that faraway year of 1969, to that land of enchantment called New Mexico, and to a town called Disdain...

Hope had felt left out when Dick and Daphne and Harvey and Enid and that English guy Eric or Derek had all piled into Enid’s truck and headed off for Paco’s. They hadn’t asked her to come, and she really couldn’t blame them. Her father would have had an absolute fit.

Not that she wanted to take peyote particularly; Hope had no need of drugs in order to alter her mind; her mind altered easily enough on its own, and often did, sometimes dozens of times a day. No, she simply wanted to be with Dick and Daphne.

She read some Lautréamont by candlelight and then she wrote in her journal in the private language she had invented at the age of four, and finally she decided to sneak out.

She changed into jeans and a t-shirt and her brother’s motorcycle jacket, pulled on a pair of boots and then tiptoed downstairs and went out to the stables.

She saddled up her black pony Whisper and then set off at a trot down the road to the Indian reservation.

****

Moloch felt as though his head were like to burst. It was a good feeling.

Moloch’s blood was aroar. He felt alive, gloriously so.

All around him in the cave his men snored and grunted in their swinish sleep.

He lurched up from where he had been sitting for hours by his fire and he stumbled over to an enormous stamped-iron sea chest. He knelt down, selected a key from a heavy chain attached to his belt, unlocked the padlock and lifted the lid. He parted the waterproof motorcycle cover which protected the contents and his heart swelled as he breathed in deeply that sacred odor of petrolatum and steel. For piled into the chest were all the weapons (and ammunition of course) that even the Motorpsychos durst not carry on their runs. These were for special occasions and emergencies only. Moloch had decided that tonight would be a special occasion.

Like a greedy housewife who has been let into a basement sale an hour before opening time he commenced lovingly to handle and fondle the grease-smeared weapons. Stout sturdy revolvers, lovely automatics, sawed-off shotguns and sub-machine guns. Lovely. There were even some grenades (both fragmentation and phosphorous).

And, swaddled safely in his old college rugby shirt, Moloch’s trusty and stolid Webley (Mark IV) service revolver.

He sat crosslegged on the ground, removed the gun from the shirt and laid the shirt out before him. He held the heavy weapon first in one hand and then the other, caressing it with his scarred and callused fingers. He stuck out his leathery tongue and slowly licked the length of the barrel (savoring that sui generis flavor of Cosmolined blue steel) and then he caressed his whiskered cheeks with it, feeling its divine metal hardness.

His breath quickening, his fingers trembling slightly, he set smartly to field stripping the pistol, laying its parts out onto the shirt. He then took from the chest a rag and a tin of kerosene and a cherrywood box of cleaning materials. He doused the rag and -- taking an occasional calming huff himself -- wiped the grease from the pistol’s components. He opened the wooden box, and with cleaning rod, patch, brush and swab he thoroughly cleaned each of the gun’s pieces and then re-lubricated each moving part.

At last he reassembled the pistol and snapped it smartly shut. He held it out at arm’s length, cocked it, squeezed the trigger: the hammer shot down with a satisfying pock. Splendid. Like bloody clockwork. Leaving the hammer down he squeezed the trigger again, and -- pock. Oh yes just fucking splendid.

He thumbed the barrel catch forward and broke the pistol open: the six clean empty chambers yawned hungrily at him.

He found a box of .380 cartridges, scrabbled it open and took one out. He paused for a moment, rolling the bullet between his thumb and finger, exulting in the death that pulsed quietly within this cold little drop of metal, and then manfully shoved it into the cylinder. He paused another long moment, then quickly loaded four more bullets. Five chambers filled. One -- the chamber of life, if you could call this fucking chaos life -- empty. He closed his one good eye and spun the cylinder twice, then snapped the weapon shut.

Keeping his eye closed tight, gape-mouthed demons screaming distantly at him from his own private hell, he pulled back the hammer to full cock and slid the muzzle into his mouth, the barrel sight running deliciously along the roof of his mouth.

His boyhood, his life, Eton, his military service, his years at Oxford, all the thousands of meaningless books he’d read, his marriage, his son (now also at buggery Eton the last he’d heard), his monographs on Rémy de Gourmont and Huysmans and James Branch Cabell and other wankers no one gave a flying toss about, his year teaching at Berkeley and his attendant decline and fall, it all meant nothing, nothing meant anything, all was only this horrible vile awareness of self, thrashing and pounding against the walls of one’s skull like a condemned prisoner in his cell.

Oh fuck it.

He squeezed the trigger, the blackness yawned and howled, he knew a moment of ultimate falling pleasure.

****

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. And please turn to the right hand side of this page for an exhaustive listing of links to all other extant episodes of Larry Winchester’s Railroad Train to Heaven™, a Sheldon Leonard Joint.)

Ladies and gentlemen: Gerry and the Pacemakers:

“Railroad Train to Heaven’, Part Seventy-Nine: "Women dig madmen..."

A hot August morning in the year 1963, in the quaint seaside resort of Cape May.

Arnold Schnabel, the author of these critically-praised (“America’s Proust; or should one say instead that Proust was France’s Schnabel?” -- Harold Bloom) memoirs, has sat down in Mrs. Biddle’s backyard to collaborate on a screenplay with that living legend Larry Winchester...

“Fade in,” said Larry, typing away. “Exterior. Paris. Day. Oh, wait. The title. What’re we calling this?”

“What was it called before?”

“Sidewalks of Blood,” he said.

“Sidewalks of Blood?”

“Sidewalks of Blood.”

“I like that, Larry,” I said.

“Yeah, me too, actually. I like the French version even better, Les trottoirs du sang.”

He backed up the paper and typed in the title.

“All right,” he said. “Back to the first shot...”

I’ll spare the reader (i.e. myself) my usual second-by-tortuous-second blow-by-mind-numbing-blow account of the next couple of hours. Let it only be said that as we sat there on that hot forenoon composing the opening scenes of our story I effected that escape from the prison of myself which normally I accomplish most profoundly — not in sleep, nor in drunkenness — but oddly enough only when I am all by myself alone in a room composing this chronicle of my body-entrapped life or making my little bad poems. But now I was achieving this not alone but with someone else, traveling with another person into that freedom I’ve only ever found in the deeper regions of my own self.

At last Larry said, “Damn! This is good, brother! We got almost the whole first act worked out here!”

I didn’t even know the movie had a first act, but I kept my ignorance to myself.

“So what about lunch, Arnie? Then you can finally smoke that cancer stick you got in your ear.”

Amazingly I hadn’t even thought about that cigarette since we had started our work.

I took it out from behind my ear and looked at it. The day had gotten increasingly hot as we were sitting there, and now the cigarette was completely sodden with sweat. I crumpled it up in Larry’s ashtray, and we headed into the house, going around it and coming in from the front porch.
Mrs. Biddle and Tommy were playing cards at a small table covered with some sort of Oriental-looking cloth.

They were both smoking cigarettes and they had a pitcher of what looked like Tommy’s special iced tea on the table, with accompanying glasses.

“Ah, the scribblers,” said Mrs. Biddle.

She was dressed like a lady in a 1930s movie about people on a safari. Come to think of it, Tommy in his cream-colored suit was like someone in the same movie, but the guy who stayed at the plantation and couldn’t be bothered to go on a safari.

“Or should I say the typists,” she added.

“We deal in the magic of sound and vision, Mrs. Biddle,” said Larry. “In dreams. We deal in mystical journeys through space and time. In other words we give the poor yokels what they want: two hours of escape from their miserable little lives.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Tommy.

“Yeah, speaking of which —” said Larry.

“Some of Tommy’s special iced tea?” said Mrs. Biddle.

“Thanks, Mrs. Biddle,” said Larry, “but I was thinking of something in a more alcoholic vein.”

“Help yourselves,” said Mrs. Biddle, gesturing towards a drinks cabinet.

“Ice and beer in the kitchen.”

“Oh, allow me,” said Tommy, rising.

“Sit the hell, down, Tommy,” said Mrs. Biddle. “These are two grown men and they are more than capable of getting their own drinks.”

“Yeah, take it easy, Tommy,” said Larry, heading over to the liquor cabinet.

“What are you drinking, Arnie?”

“Whatever you’re having,” I said.

“Old Crow and soda it is then.”

Larry made us a couple of tall strong drinks, using one of those old-fashioned soda siphons. He didn’t bother going into the kitchen for ice.
We chatted a bit with Tommy and Mrs. Biddle. Tommy wanted to know what our movie was about, and Larry told him what we had so far.

“I’m enthralled,” said Tommy. “Then what happens?”

“We have no idea,” said Larry. “But we’ll think of something.”

“Write me in a part,” said Tommy. “I could be an undertaker or something.”

“We’ll think about it,” said Larry.

“You’re not going to forget our tea date, are you, Mr. Schnabel?” said Mrs. Biddle.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“We’re gonna grab some chow,” said Larry.

“Help yourselves. You know your way around that kitchen.”

Larry and I went in to the kitchen, and Larry made us a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches, and we each had a beer, sitting there at the kitchen table.
Larry said we should break for the day and pick it up again tomorrow. That was fine with me.

Somehow it had been gotten across to me that we were indeed going to write this screenplay together. Larry hadn’t mentioned money again, but frankly I didn’t care. When you’ve written nonsense for nothing but your own idle amusement your whole life you get used to it. And what else would I be doing with my time, anyway? Staring into space? Watching re-runs of M
Squad and Johnny Staccato? Watching the hairs on my arm grow?

Daphne came into the kitchen.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I am so hungover.”

She sat at the table with us. Hungover or not she was stunningly beautiful. She wore a dress with little red and blue flowers all over it, on a white background. I think the flowers were zinnia.

“Have a beer,” said Larry.

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “I never want to drink again!”

“I told you not to try to keep up with Frank and those guys.”

“Never again! They’re not human! They never even went to bed. They just drove off this morning for Atlantic City, something about a dice game, and then they’re all performing at the 500 Club tonight. Do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” said Larry. “It seems like a lot of work, driving all the way up to A.C. just to see those guys. I mean I heard them all sing all last night, and I didn’t even have to move.”

“You have a point. Do you think Tommy has any of that special iced tea he makes?”

“Yeah, I believe he and Mrs. Biddle are having some now in the living room.”

“Oh, good, let me get a glass.”

She jumped up, got a glass out of a cupboard, put some ice in it from the freezer, and left the kitchen.

“Nice kid,” said Larry. “But don’t mess with her, Arnie. Dick Ridpath’s in love with her.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t —” I started.

“I saw the way she looked at you. It’s just if she gets you alone you might justifiably be tempted.”

“Larry, really —”

“Women dig madmen, Arnie. Don’t ask me why. But nobody gets more action than a maniac. Not even movie stars. Although it occurs to me that those two métiers are not mutually exclusive. But really, it would kill Dick if he found out. ‘Cause he really likes you, too.”

“You don’t have to worry, Larry.”

“Come to think of it though, it’s the same deal for women. It’s always the nutty dames that drive guys nuts. I know this has always been the case with me. Normal chicks, you know, nice everyday gals, I don’t know, they just leave me cold. I like them as human beings and all, don’t get me wrong, but I just don’t want to, um, you know — hey, that girl of yours — Clytemnestra?”

“Elektra.”

“Boy, that chick, Arnie, I’ll tell ya —”

“What chick?” said Daphne, coming back into the kitchen with her glass full of dark special iced tea now.

“You, baby,” said Larry.

(Click here for our next thrilling chapter. And please see the right hand of this page for an exhaustive listing of all possible episodes of Arnold Schnabel’s Johnson & Johnson Award-winning Railroad Train to Heaven™, a Four Artists Production.)

And now a word from Miss Dusty Springfield:

“A Town Called Disdain”, Episode 73: lift-off

Larry Winchester (“Like Melville in his epic scope, like Whitman in his poetic music, like John Ford with his painterly eye, like Groucho Marx in his humor” -- Harold Bloom) now brings an understandably flustered Daphne Ridpath onto the set for her close-up.

(Click here to go back to the very beginning of our tale. Go here for our last chapter, which will be included in the material covered in next week’s exam.)

So I’m in the spaceship. Three dead spacemen, two dead foreign spies, and Dick and Harvey the soldier boy at least temporarily hors de combat. Because after this mystical healing thing they both just sort of lay back and went to sleep.

I think I mentioned there were these buttons on the wall, a sort of keypad that the sailor guy had used to close the door behind us, so I thought I’d try punching some buttons to try and get this door open again. I wanted to get out of there of course, but more immediately you see I really had to go to the bathroom, so I was quite desperate. I punched all of the buttons repeatedly in all sorts of random combinations, but nothing happened. And of course there wasn’t anything so mundane as a doorknob.

Okay, now I really had to relieve myself something awful, so I thought I’d go and investigate and see if I could find a bathroom somewhere on this crate.

I took this little gun of Dick’s just in case there were any more spies or whatever and stuck it in my coat pocket and off I went down this purple glowing corridor. Round and round it went and up and down.

I came to this circular room and there were all these instrument panels with chairs in front of them and this big TV screen that wrapped completely around the room and on the screen you could see everything outside: Paco’s tin house, a hill, some other houses and trailers off a ways, the desert and the stars. All very clear and in living color.

Enid was out there, too, standing there, one hand on her hip, smoking a cigarette, it seemed like she was looking right at me.

I waved to her, stupidly enough, but she couldn’t see me of course.

Also in this room were a bunch of smaller round TV screens, some of them showing what seemed to be different parts of the spaceship, because on one I could see Dick and the soldier boy, still sleeping, with the dead spies and spacemen and the blood everywhere.

Some of the other TV screens were blank, but suddenly one of them lit up and this new spaceman in a sort of military uniform appears on it and starts speaking in this weird lingo.

I sat myself down in the chair in front of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really don’t understand you.”

But he keeps talking in this weird dialect, and I’m trying to make him understand I can’t savvy a solitary word he’s saying, and on it goes, both of us jabbering away and now I’m really getting frustrated, and remember, I had taken peyote and had just gone through this absolutely horrifying shootout, my husband coming to within a hairsbreadth of being killed, and I’m absolutely dying to go to the ladies’ room -- well --

But finally this other spaceman guy in a uniform comes on.

And, thank God, this one speaks English, and guess what, he even knows my name.

He asks me what I’m doing there and where the three little other spaceman are.

As reasonably and as concisely as I could I let him know what had happened. He was not pleased. He didn’t show a whole lot of emotion, or any really, but you could tell, somehow.

“This is most distressing, Mrs. Ridpath,” he says.

“I agree, sir,” I said, “but right now I wonder if you could tell me how to get us out of this thing.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be best,” said the man.

Darn right, I’m thinking, squirming in my seat.

He says he’ll tell me which buttons to push to get the door of the spaceship open so we can get out of there.

He says I need to punch the second button from the left on the top row twice and then the first button twice, and so right away I do that, punching these buttons which are directly in front of me there on the console, and then -- uh-oh -- I could have died, because the spaceship starts rising up off the ground. I could feel it, plus I could see it on this big wraparound TV screen.

And, oh, this spaceman’s going crazy!

“What have you done, Mrs. Ridpath? What have you done? I meant the buttons next to the hatchway, not those buttons in front of you!”

How was I to know that? I suppose in retrospect I should have asked again and made doubly sure before pressing any buttons, but at this point I was frantic. I really had to go to the ladies’ room something fierce, and I found it difficult to concentrate to say the least.

Meanwhile the spaceship is simply soaring away, whoosh, but not in any sensible way at all, it’s just swooping all about in a very disconcerting fashion, and meanwhile this spaceman expert, Mr. Know-It-All, now he’s jabbering in that awful language to someone off-screen, and I’m deathly afraid we’re going to crash into a hill or a butte or something at any moment, so I’m like, “Hello? Sir? A little help here?”

He starts to gather himself, I can see he’s trying to get a grip, so he goes, “Please, listen very carefully, do exactly what I say. Exactly. And nothing else!”

And I’m there, “Yes, yes, right, hurry,” I’m practically peeing myself and we’re zipping all over the place like on one of those vomitous amusement park rides, and it’s just -- oh -- enough already!

****

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We give you the lovely and talented Anna Karina: