Angels of Groovy Death #IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition

With her big cat eyes, button nose and sudden smile, Lynn Lowry was a startling presence in the post-Manson horror of the early 70s, playing more or less the same character, a starry-eyed flower child, part of the latter downward spiral of the LSD generation, the ephemera poster girl to for the wary terrified but even more intrigued way Middle America now looked at the 'happy folk' and their girls they watched grow up. What Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, she glowed with a kind of worldly ephemeral luminescence. There was the urban legend of the strung-out babysitter who cooks and eats the kid and puts the chicken to bed on acid, such a strong and common legend and source of real anxiety that when Alice finds out she's been dosed in Go Ask Alice(1973) she locks herself in the closet to ensure she wont end up 'testing' the Radarange.

Well, now you know... the innocent serpent flower child was a new kind of femme fatale--framing you for murder or shaking you down with blackmail like in the 40s-50s; she wasn't even a new version of the old spoiled nympho drug addict waif like Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep; this new acid waif homicidal cultist was never be spiteful or mischievous, their heart was too full of love; acid had burned out those small minded reptilian fear-desire tail-biting instincts, and it's this above all else that made them dangerous and unpredictable. Utterly without the kind of morality and impulse control that guided the culture, they belonged more in a comfy psych ward where they couldn't have long fingernails or access to sharp things like pointed scissors until the drugs wore off. If you're a guy and you look at that picture below left you know that you'd have no problem ressting the ones on the left and right but the girl in the middle, if she wanted to go home with you, and your wife was't around to shoo her away, she'd go home with you and more than likely you'd be dead by dawn, and she'd wake up snug in your entrails with no knowledge where she was or who you were. Then she'd shower off the blood, eat enough acid to send a rhino to the psych ward, then fingerpaint on the walls with your coagulating blood while softly singing "tralalalala."

"We have no jelly donuts for you today... only death."

The 'Manson Girls" singing and chanting as one, had become national figures and though I was too young to remember the Manson hooplah I do remember the urban legends about the baby in the oven and the fear some crazy cult would put razors or acid in your apples on Halloween, so better cut them open first. This fear goosed the 70s along and gave seemingly helpless little street-corner waifs and psychedelic flower-covered urchins a kind mobster street gang clout. No one dared mess with them. And as a kid nosing through mom's record albums, the ones with similarly clad babes, or electric fros and evil looking dwarf monsters all had a queasy bone-chilling dread about them. I felt towards them as a rabid dam worker might towards a splash of water. Then again, my aunt on my dad's side in Chicago ran off and joined a commune, and we went to visit, and man that was a hairy place - I tried cat food for the first time, and ran through lots of beaded doorways, and groovy art, and so forth. My aunt was dating her fourth guy named Randy... four Randys.... in a row... the mind boggled.

My parents were just a few years too old for that scene, there's was the one seen in Mad Men, that bridge club wife swap 70s middle class golf game walk to school of your own accord freedom type. And after school, TV.

And if you grew up kind of crushing on Susan Dey (from The Partridge Family) even if you rarely watched it (Danny was gross; the music too horrific), then she might be who comes to mind the first time you see Lynn Lowry; with that downturned lip and sultry eyes and wavy straight hair, Lowry strikes me first as if she's Dey crossed with a cute alien hybrid drawn by a Disney animator unwittingly dosed by a CIA operative at a Washington cocktail soiree. Someone sure should have dosed the Partridge Family. God I hated that redheaded kid Danny, that plagiarizing ginger ("he had to save Boa," yeah right) with his unheimlich neediness.... and wasn't too crazy about the mom either. With her sister wife collars and androgynous hair, Shirley Jones was like that mom who eavesdrops as you try to pick up her daughter than snidely put you in your place, so that you blush and stammer and run home to sulk with your comic books, and then you never come over again (one would as her name promises, Shirley Jones for Dey to come out). C'mon get happy, yeah right --quit tellin' us what to do. You could tell she was one of those hovering mothers that never questions why she's always grabbing things out of her daughters' hands and lavishing them on Keith, whether he wants them or not. Feeling badly, Keith waits til mom goes off to pray or something, then gives sis back her shit, nice, sweet doomed Keith.

On the other hand, if Mrs. Brady saw you clumsily putting some moves on fair Marcia (in The Brady Bunch), she would probably just call you into the den, give you some hands-on sexual advice and then kick you back downstairs with a strip of condoms in your hand and lipstick on your forehead like a governmental seal of approval. Why? Because unlike Mrs. Partridge , Mrs. Brady got laid, really laid. You could tell, and her sexually satisfied glow kept the decade alight with a special base line magic.

I mention all this to illustrate how the Partridge Family vs. Brady Bunch dichotomy provided parameters for our collective 70s child's Jungian psyche, and maybe that's partially why the idea of a Susan Dey archetype untethered from her prim bitch overprotective mom and ginger brother, running away with a Satan-worshipping boyfriend and winding up on post-Manson LSD and rabid (in 1970's I Drink Your Blood --her first movie role) seemed a natural progression. She could slice off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife and still be an innocent. She's a free spirit cranked to eleven, then the dial breaks, snaps and spins out of control before the amp catches on fire. If you've ever known and partied with the type then you know how rare and intoxicating they are right at the moment before that happens, and how sublimely chilling after.

give the lady a hand

Lowry's wide-eyed beauty is so 'there' in that moment she can make grown men blush and stammer just by watching her on the screen, as if she can see them and is blushing back, but at the same time she seems to be thinking about killing us, if we're lucky. In that moment we're still protective of her, nervous like fauns we are, genteel-like, the gaze of the camera seems to shudder with the realization it's privilege to some special moment in time and person when it gets her all alone in a private thought.

A sweet, sweet Scorpio (born Oct. 15), she's the kind of friendly animal a Pisces like me would let ride on our back as we swim the channel, but I'm too savvy to ask why she'd sting me to death halfway across - it's not even cuz Charlie told her too, or because of acid, it's just her nature. Her long straight hair  like wind-stirred gossamer over a denim jacket picturesquely dabbed in a cop's blood, when Lowry starts slowly laughing at the carnage going on down the hill in The Crazies there's a weird schism that marks a great unexplored middle ground between the sane heroes and the 'changed.' Rather than turn zombie or something where the line is clearly drawn between normal and 'possessed' or us vs. them, Lowry extends the 'in between' in a kind of new contracting and expanding organic breathing. She's already a "little" crazy, so going all the way crazy is no great stretch, nor is it quite clear the extent to which her incestuous dad is a result of Trixie (the virus), or was there before. Eventually she's too crazy to know to hide when the military comes; she wants to know the names of the military unit surrounding her like she's a dangerous maniac even though all she's doing is offering them flowers and singing--she won't heed their warnings but really if you didn't know the backstory she'd seem sane--just another flower child protester with no concern for her own life as she marches towards the bayonets with a flower in her hand, only love, and life, and today, which is all there is, far out.

Like some Innsmouth elder royal Neptune princess

That air elemental aura (she'd make a great Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest), Lowry is both uncanny and inviting, innocent and corrupting, the babysitter from the 70s my little brother and i prayed for as my mom made her round of early evening phone calls. We only got her around 1/3 of the time but when we did our stomachs sank with queasy dread. Whether she'd be in the mood to play her dangerous Go Ask Alice-style games with us (rather than staying on the phone all night or hanging out on the porch with some sketchy boyfriend) was another story. But if Jupiter aligned with Mars and she was ready to focus her loving laser beam attention upon us, then it was like some magic new dimension was opened in the Kuersten house, like she alone had a key to a secret door in the hallway wall that led to where all the cool stuff was.

Lowry has that same vibe, an open book of forbidden but benign ambivalence that puts her past our reach even while making her as accessible as all outdoors; she can dive merrily into the depths of depravity and horror and escape unscathed, like Daniel in the lion's den. As long as we don't try to pull her out of it, no harm will come to either of us. If we step in, we'll get scathed.

She's so much, man, so much like my old babysitter, who I wonder about today, if she's still alive. She was too pretty and too damaged, without a house or a home, the kind of freedom we all envy until we see that bloom begin to fade and wither, then we turn up our collars and rush home, half-ashamed and dehydrated, unable to swallow, terrified of water. (fire is cold, knives are like fire, and water is like a hard razor wire cat o'nine tails).

Shivers - during the transformation from sexually available but professional nurse to uninhibited maenad orgiast.

Toots, my darling, I was only eight years-old and didn't understand but I still hated the implied ascension to older man leering implied in the your acceptance of a quasi-derogatory nickname (I was always trying to come up with a different one) clearly given by a much older man, like a pissed off patron of a table she's waiting on at a roadside diner. Toots, I hated having to say that name to address you, my froggy voice stringy anchored by sublime pre-genital rapture. I still recoil from that same 'ewa' vowel sound in words, like "food" - couldn't even watch Blue Velvet because Frank calls  Isabella "Tits." Took me years, man. Years...

Mom stopped volunteering at that runaway shelter when we moved to NJ in 1980, a fitting analogy. I was 13, so bye-bye cool wild flower power kiss you on the mouth babysitters and hello slasher craze sober virgin final girls making sure we did all our homework and went to bed on time and then we lay  awake, and terrified anyway. The early 80s: devil worship wasn't 'fun' anymore, but the province of icky child molesters at day care centers (big difference between the special love I had for T---s). By then the slasher craze had even us once louche grade school swingers afraid even to go upstairs alone unless mom was already up there. Only WW2 saved me from that fear.

Was it some kind of EC/DC House of Secrets/Tales from the Crypt, post-code/pre-code comic book comeuppance? It didn't matter which side of the censorship barrier, what was once shag carpet and wood panelling vivid, once Seth snake cult decadent was now just postage stamp size color pictures in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and John Buscemi Conan the Barbarian reprints. And that was how I wanted it. Whether the one led to the other, in grand macabre twist payback paperback style I don't know. But if both sides want a thing, at least on some level, and if no one else is involved or hurt, can it still be evil?


It might depend who you ask, but frankly I'd trust Baudelaire as a babysitter over Cardinal Richelieu any day, for he who writes his evil needn't express it. Either way, whether we felt it was evil or not, the fall-out was the same. We may wonder what happened in that Tenderloin peep both to poor Dee Wallace that caused her to repress the werewolf memory of it all. Did that Fiona Apple "Criminal" MTV video cause me to revert back to savagery in the early 90s? Maybe, but by then I was an adult, strung out on a melancholy from never being able to get that delirious first MDMA peak high moment back again.

We'll never remember if those days were really that deranged, but there's magic and power in the wicked but sweet, terrifying but absolving smile of Lowry. Whether succumbing to the mad slavering ecstasy-overdose insane group orgy hysteria of Shivers or giggling in progressive waves of insanity in The Crazies or playing with an electric carving knife in I Drink Your Blood, this strange wondrous actress evokes that 70s post-Manson 'girl next door' anxiety with a flair unrivaled. Some girls are just never far enough away from the fire to know they're burning. Bless them for that, and even as following them drowns you in cop bullets, hitting you like scorpion knife flicker stinging flames of razor wire cat o'nine tails water, how can you keep from singing? Tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....

FURTHER LOWRY READINGS:
"That's how you play 'Get the Guests'" SCORE!
SHIVERS! (capsule review)