A Story For Our Times

If your friends tell you to do drugs then they aren't really your friends, are they? They are goblin-monkeys from the hogpit dimensions. They only look like your friends because they have stolen your friends' noses. Look at my pinny. I'm a mummy and I know these things. So if anybody offers you drugs, tell them you'll stick to guns, booze and Jesus. Now, would anybody like a cupcake and lemonade?

Many will remember fondly this public information film from 1958. The role of daughter was played by Marcia Greenwood, cheerleader, homecoming queen and mistress of the clam-bake. Many will recall her dramatic and very public sex change on the Carson Kyle show and Michael Greenwood's subsequent career as fullback for the Ozark Crocs. Many will recall his inflatable penis, the tricks he could play with it and the tunes he could play on it. "To think I wasted so much time with titty-bosoms," he would say. "I call this next trick kinder surprise. Who will play the kinder in the garten?"

In 1967 he married socialite and gravy heiress Madison Slack and the two disappeared from public view. They even found it difficult to see each other, and they could afford very expensive eyes indeed. And there it might have ended, if not for the fact that the two were still alive and felt obliged to keep on doing things, if only to stave off the boredom of marital bliss.

For some years they amused themselves with experimental surgery. Michael acquired the heart of a lion, the eyes of a hawk and the swift, sure legs of a deer, while Madison refurbished herself with a lamb's tail and the trotters of a pig. "Boo-yah," they whispered tenderly to each other each night. They couldn't have done it better if they'd been written by Tarantino.

But it couldn't last. With the invention of entertainment in 1973, Michael's film acquired a fanatical cult following. "They aren't really your friends, are they?" one would quote, and they'd burst into fits of cannabis giggles. "They're goblin-monkeys from the hogpit dimensions," another would recall, and they'd laugh until somebody passed the chillum. "They really knew how to do comedy in those days," observed the bespectacled one. "Why don't we find them and, like, turn them on?" The others stared at him. "Yeah man, like, far out, as we say in these groovy times," they agreed. And so, after six weeks looking for the front door key, that is what they did.

When the Cult Following found their idol, Michael incorporated so many animal parts that they didn't know whether to hunt him, farm him or barbecue him. On the spot they gave up cannabis and took to LSD instead, since with a little acid inside you everybody looks like that. Michael, Madison and the Cult Following entered the film in the Swiss TV Festival of Switzerland, and together they row, row, rowed their boat along the golden rows of Montreux until their cows came home to roost.

The moral of this story is the subject of another film to be released on You Tube in 2015, if global warming hasn't melted the planet by then.