Jeff Stone and Eddie Munster join in search for missing Cowsill

It has been 29 days since Barry Cowsill turned up missing after Hurricane Katrina. I’ve been feeling pretty badly about my remarks last week on “Cowsill Chatter” when I suggested that maybe Barry had been medivacked to the Betty Ford Clinic and was going through heroin and cocaine withdrawal. As you may know from an earlier blog, one of his brothers justifiably posted a nasty reply.

So I decided to pitch in and help the family search for their missing brother. I didn’t have far to turn. One of my favorite Web sites – God only knows why - is Paul Petersen’s “A Minor Consideration” advocacy group for current and former child stars. Paul played Donna Reed’s son Jeff on “The Donna Reed Show.” After the show went off the air, Paul had some down years. A lot of down years, which he has faithfully documented in his many gut-wrenching interviews on Larry King, A&E, Geraldo, “True Hollywood Stories” and just about anyone else who’ll listen to his sad tale of celebrity hasbeendom.

Since Paul founded “A Minor Consideration” in 1990, he has pulled more than 500 former child stars out of the toilet and put them back on the road to sobriety. That’s pretty impressive. If it weren’t for Paul Petersen, I never would have found out about Stanley Fafara, who played Beaver’s friend “Whitey Whitney” on “Leave It To Beaver,” becoming a heroin addict, or the many “Little Rascals” tragedies. Now I can’t watch Beaver without thinking about smack.

I’ve whiled away many an afternoon fighting corporate boredom reading Paul’s open letters to MacCauley Culkin and the Olsen twins, imploring them to contact him. So I sent off an e-mail to Paul with links to the Cowsills' "Entertainment Tonight" segment. Yesterday, I received a reply from him agreeing with me that Barry’s story deserved to be spotlighted on the his Web site. Perhaps it was my e-mail pointing out the many similarities between Barry’s struggles as an adult to “Rusty Hamer, Anissa Jones and Dana Plato” – all former child stars who offed themselves – that grabbed Paul's attention.

I immediately sent him the press release that the Cowsills put out about their dickhead father, Bud, who squandered the kids’ money, alienated their business associates and forced them to grow up in a “household of fear,” leaving them with "no life skills for adulthood." It was perfect for “A Minor Consideration.” I also cut and pasted Paul's reply on “Cowsill Chatter” letting all the other fans know that “Flower Girl was on the job.”

Not to be outdone, Anne Marie, who’s been leading the online search for Barry, ignored my triumph after admitting that she couldn’t get through to Petersen’s Web site. She posted a message saying how she had been in contact with Eddie Munster – Butch Patrick – who was “talking to Paul Petersen’s people as we speak.”

Incidentally, I met Butch about 20 years ago at Tut’s in Chicago, where his band Eddie and the Monsters was opening for Peter Tork. I won a T-shirt in the “Eddie Munster Chug-A-Lug” contest by downing seven beers in 90 seconds. It’s sort of like winning a contest for taking the biggest dump, but who cares. I got to meet a celebrity, and Butch really appreciated my bringing up his obscure Disney work.

After the Cowsills’ press release appeared on his Web site, I sent Paul a short e-mail thanking him. So this morning, I got yet another e-mail from him explaining how he was trying to contact the family and that he had some people on the ground searching Houston homeless shelters where a bunch of street people from New Orleans had been evacuated. (Nice work, FEMA.) He also wanted to put the Cowsills in touch with another organization that assists families in searching for missing persons – the same group that helped put Scott Peterson in the can. He told me “A Minor Consideration” wasn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. I could hardly believe that Jeff Stone was e-mailing me – personally.

I was so proud of myself that I could not wait to share this good news on “Cowsill Chatter.” I also called the site’s Web master at 5 a.m. Pacific Time. She was pretty nice about me waking her up and promised to pass the information along to the family. I had second thoughts after I cut and pasted the second e-mail Petersen sent to me on “Cowsill Chatter.” I posted a follow-up message imploring fans not to swamp these organizations with e-mails and calls about Barry. I was really nice about it. The group was sending me “hugs” all day until this bitch named Barb posted a message saying how "Flower Girl" had insulted her and the rest of the diehard fans with my requests to respect the Cowsills’ privacy.

Unfortunately, I think Paul Petersen now believes I’m a former child star. He signed his e-mail, “Fraternally yours, Paul.” Little does he know how I would have loved to have been on television as a kid. I used to beg my mother to let me audition for a TV sitcom. I didn’t care if it was hard, unglamorous work. Even after I overheard young Darby Hinton, who played “Israel” on “Daniel Boone”, having a vicious argument with his mother about how he wanted to be home sleeping and not doing a publicity appearance at some fleabag tourist trap in Cherokee, N.C., where my family was vacationing, I still longed for the television limelight.

While I doubt I could have landed a starring role in a sitcom, I certainly could have nabbed guest spots as a mean and/or dumb fat girl who beat the crap out of Buffy or Cindy Brady; or a female, apple-chomping, Larry Mondello-type talking Chris and Tracey Partridge into pulling off some scam. I certainly would have had a shot at the Pamelyn Ferdin guest roles, the nasally whore.

One of the Cowsills posted a message shortly after my phone call saying they were now working with Paul Petersen’s organization to find Barry. If they do find him, I know they’ll give him all the credit, but I’m proud of the small role I played in the search for Barry Cowsill.

Anyway, I don’t think “Flower Girl” will be posting any more messages on “Cowsill Chatter.” I’m going to go back to my people at kennedyfamily.com. Those broads are probably wondering where I’ve been.

Won't you be my neighbor?

I’ve had a lot of crazy neighbors over the years. Between 1978 and 2005, I have moved 15 times. I can’t say that my thousands of neighbors have evolved into any lasting friendships. Some of them were okay and amused me with their fobiles and eccentricities. Others made my living space a total hell.

I’ve listened to neighbors beat the crap out of each other in their apartments, mistreat their children and pets, and chant Buddhist incantations at 4 ‘clock in the morning (time to get up everyone!). I’ve had neighbors who cried on my shoulder with their own lunacy and psychosis when I wasn’t exactly the pillar of stability myself; try to saw their doors down when they got locked out of their apartments; botch suicide attempts and turn their homes into crack houses.

My neighbors have fueled some of my best confrontations and fights. There were Tammi and Jose in Rogers Park, who stole my roommate’s and my mail, not thinking we’d notice getting two electric bills or the $673 worth of pay phone calls they made using a bogus phone card they took out in my roommate’s name.

There was Mr. Stain in Des Plaines, who let his dog crap on my lawn and his kid play in our parking lot, who thought he was hot shit because he owned some crappy duplex while we rented. He had a carpet cleaning service and would leave his van parked in front my building.

Once, when I went over to tell him not to let his kid build a sledding hill in our parking lot during a blizzard, we got into it. He told me everyone in the neighborhood thought I was crazy. I told him that I really didn’t care what my white-trash, Christian fundamentalist neighbors thought of me. I called him a pencil-dick and said there were a few carpets that needed cat-piss removed from them. For the rest of the winter I picked up the crap that his his dog left on my lawn and heaved it into his window screens that he left outside propped against the back of his garage. (Happy spring, Mr. Stain!)

My first negative encounter with a neighbor was with Dan Tressler, who lived next door to us when I was growing up. Mr. Tressler was obsessed with his lawn. At first, he was sweet. When I was about four, he’d invite me over to his house where I spent time with him and his family. Then one day he turned on me when I cut across his grass. After that, it was war between him and my father. There was a distinct property line between our houses; his grass mowed to the nub, while ours was long and raggedy with dandelions. We learned not to cross it.

Mr. Tressler called the police whenever we played ball in the street, once ripped a whistle I was blowing out of my mouth, and manhandled various neighborhood kids. Any ball that rolled on to his property he'd confiscate. Everyone on the block hated him. My old man was great at playing subversive mind games with Mr. Tressler. Once my father threw a can of paint against his garage. He'd go out at 2 a.m. and burn crop circles into Mr. Tressler’s lawn with fertilizer. As much as Mr. Tressler tried, he couldn’t figure out why a brown circle kept appearing on his prized front lawn.

My mother would occasionally hire Mr. Tressler’s daughter, Marsha, to baby-sit us. Marsha was a 15-year-old greaser chick with a stiff bouffant and chubby, pimply chipmunk cheeks, much like Lyndie England’s. My most vivid memory of Marsha is her chasing my older brothers to bed while hitting them with a broom handle. It wasn’t uncommon to see Marsha dashing out of her house in a black, leather jacket and jump into a car with some 35-year-old guy. I’ve often looked for Marsha on my high school alumni Web site but it’s as if she's dropped off the face of the earth. I’d love to find out what happened to her.

Eventually we moved out of that neighborhood and lived next door to a wonderful older couple who were thrilled that more children were moving in, because Mr. Rosen couldn’t take his afternoon nap on his back porch in the summers without the sounds of children yelling and screaming or climbing up on the roof high on Romilar cough syrup.

Last week, I received a frantic, early morning phone call from my old neighbor, Rob. I’ve known Rob for years from my first apartment in Des Plaines. We were a small group of self-contained units who lived in adjoining buildings. We’d come home from work and have a few beers in the courtyard and vent our troubles and woes, before retreating to our respective apartments where we would continue enjoying our lives of quiet desperation.

As long as I’ve known Rob, he’s had trouble with the ladies. He’s a good looking guy who just turned 50 and is very popular in the taverns throughout Des Plaines. I can’t say he’s a close friend, but he’s up there as a casual acquaintance. I used to think that Rob had boyfriend-potential until I found out there wasn’t a living brain cell in his head. I just enjoyed his goofiness, the eye-candy, and the occasional excitement of an angry husband who came around looking to kick his ass.

My friend Karol and I used to do surveillance on Rob’s apartment when I lived next door to him. One night after several hours of drinking and smoking pot, we heard Rob screaming into his phone at a neighbor woman with whom he was having an affair. We turned out the lights in my kitchen and crouched beneath my window, listening to him shriek, “YOU GAVE HIM A BLOW JOB, DIDN’T YOU?” He also owns a massive gun collection and shot a Derringer off after the Chicago Bulls won their last NBA championship, which brought the entire Des Plaines SWAT team swarming his building.

A few months ago, my boyfriend and I spent a Saturday afternoon with Rob bar-hopping at various taverns around Des Plaines. It reminded us both why we no longer go to bars in Des Plaines – nicotine smelling, dank caves full of barflies and our idiot peer group from the ‘70s repeating their same old boring stories. We both agreed it was a frightening, expensive foray into Rob’s world.

For the past four or five years Rob had been dating a woman who is actually quite intelligent. We couldn’t figure out what she saw in Rob, other than what was possibly a big penis. Her name was Laura, a fresh divorcee with three teenage sons who hated Rob. I really liked her. She was a marketing manager for a playground equipment company. She inherited quite a bit of money from her parents who both died while she was dating him.

Rob was distraught when he and Laura began drifting apart. It’s true what they say about money changing people. They’d break up, get back together, and then break up again. All of this was taking a toll on him. Last winter, Rob came over to tell us that he had been thrown out of a fundraiser for Laura’s son’s school when he showed up uninvited. Apparently, Rob drove up and down Milwaukee Avenue perusing the various banquet halls until he spied an outdoor sign advertising the school’s banquet dinner, where Laura was in charge of the silent auction.

He went in drunk and started screaming at her in front of the other parents. Two burly fathers came to Laura’s aid who Rob proceeded shoving. Eventually, some old guy intervened who kindly told Rob that it wasn’t the time or place to air his grievances with Laura. Rob left peacefully, but things were pretty much over between them after that.

He told us he was going counseling for anger management and asked if we thought he and Laura would get back together again. He also turned over his gun collection, which includes a Thompson submachine gun, to a friend to hold for him. We never brought up the subject of his failed relationship, unless Rob brought it up first. We’d ask him how it was going and you could see the guy was in pain. He tried dating other women, including a girl he brought over with Crohn’s disease who stunk up our bathroom. They broke up a week later.

In the last month, we learned that Laura was bringing Rob up on stalking charges. If convicted, Rob faced a ten-year prison sentence. It was pretty serious; even Rob’s attorney was pessimistic that he’d be able to get him off. According to Rob, some of Laura’s neighbors called the police when they found him asleep in his car in front of her house. He claimed he was waiting for her to come home so he could pick up some belongings he’d left at her house.

So last Monday, he called me at 8:30 a.m., screaming that one of his character witness failed to show up at his trial. His attorney told him he needed a female witness to get up on the stand and talk about what a great guy he was. I was on deadline for my fabulous job as a freelance newspaper stringer. But I agreed to go to the Rolling Meadows courthouse and help him out.

His trial was set to start at 9 a.m. I didn’t have time to shower or anything. I put on some professional clothes and jumped into my car. I was literally spitting Listerine out the window on my way there. I was also having a really bizarre bad-hair day. I showed up at court and listened to the dirt that the prosecutors had on Rob.

One of Laura’s neighbors claimed they saw Rob peeping into their windows, which he vehemently denied. I didn’t say anything because once, while I was still living across from Rob, I caught him peeping at me. I had just gotten out of the shower and was sitting on my sofa in my apartment wrapped in a bath towel watching “Siskel and Ebert.” I figured anyone who got off watching my fat ass was pretty desperate. I’m very European and really don’t care who sees me naked.

I didn’t know what I would say if I was called to the stand. If I really thought Rob was a danger to this woman, I wouldn’t have been there at all. I always thought that Laura was stringing him along toward the end and enjoyed being a professional victim. I figured the Holy Spirit would put the right words into my mouth.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to testify. Both attorneys went into the judge’s chambers and worked out a deal after Rob’s lawyer threatened to tear a new asshole into one of Laura’s sons if he took the stand. Rob’s restraining order was extended a year and the judge told him to submit a list of belongings that are still at Laura’s house, which consist mainly of old clothes, to his lawyer. The whole trial took about 90 minutes.

I think Rob learned his lesson. I don’t think he’s going to be bothering Laura any more. He’s happy to be going back to work and having cheap, meaningless encounters with his barflies.

Anyway, I got a million neighbor stories. I can’t believe I live such a tawdry existence and that I know so many nutcases. I’m an educated woman and should be hanging out with a better class of people.

Goin' down with Hurricane Rita

I’m extremely annoyed that Rita turned out to be only a Category 3 hurricane and not the Category 5 monster that the media hysterics were predicting. I was all revved up for a repeat of Katrina in this summer/fall’s hurricane reality show.

The only thing more disappointing than Rita’s anti-climatic landfall is that I still have yet to witness flying debris smack a media personality in the head. Instead, I have to settle for sand whipping into Anderson Cooper’s face.

When I was in fourth grade I wrote a letter to the National Hurricane Center with a list of suggested names for hurricanes that included my own and several of my friends. I’m glad that these many decades later the NHC took up one of my suggestions by naming the most recent storm after my mother, Rita.

It's sad that the only Rita-caused deaths occurred before the storm actually made landfall, when 24 elderly people burned to death after the bus evacuating them out of harm's way caught fire in traffic gridlock. Yellow school buses, oxygen bottles, bedridden old people - nice going, Texas!

My biggest worry was when Rita took a sudden turn away from Galveston and headed toward Port Arthur, Tx., the hometown of Janis Joplin. Pearl once remarked during an interview on "The Dick Cavett Show" that Port Arthur residents’ favorite hobby was “burning crosses on the lawns of Negroes.”

More Janis fun-facts:

- A local developer bought her childhood home on Proctor Street in Port Arthur for his daughter, a Janis fan, to save it from demolition. When his efforts to turn the home into a museum failed, the Port Arthur Housing Department tore it down in 1980. In 1995, bricks from Janis's childhood home went on sale for $40 a pop.

- Janis was voted “Ugliest Man on Campus” while attending the University of Texas in the early ‘60s.

- The original, graffiti-scarred tables from Barney's Beanery, the bar where Janis drank her last screwdriver the evening of Oct. 3, 1970, hang from the ceiling above the present tables in a weird sort of parallel universe.

- Janis left $1,200 in her estate for a post-mortem party. Two hundred guests received invitations to a memorial at Barney's that read "the drinks are on Pearl." The Grateful Dead also performed.

- Janis died in Hollywood at the Landmark Hotel at 7047 Franklin Street in room 105. When she did not show up at the recording studio to finish taping tracks for "Me & Bobby McGee" the next morning, members of her band broke into her hotel room and found her wegded between the bed and nightstand, "bottoms up."

- "Me & Bobby McGee" was Janis' first song to hit No. 1. Unfortunately, it climbed the charts posthumously.

- Strange paranormal activity is said to occur at the Landmark (now Highland Gardens) but only when Janis' name is mentioned: phone lines start ringing simultaneously, lights flicker and celebrity 8X10 glossies fly off the walls. It's the ultimate cosmic giggle.

Seems like everywhere you turn these days some organization is raising money for Hurricane Katrina relief. There are yogathons, danceathons, drinkathons, marathons, moveithons -- how much more can I give?

I'm ashamed to say to that I have yet to donate money to any of these relief efforts, except for several pairs of plus-size Capris pants that I gave to a young neighbor of mine who was collecting items for Chicago Bull Chris Duhon's Standing Tall Foundation to be shipped to Katrina evacuees in the south.

Frankly, I could use a fundraiser for myself. I think the Red Cross has enough money and it still hasn't distributed the funds it collected to families of 9/11 victims. One of the best stories I've heard lately are Katrina victims who are spending their Red Cross vouchers on $800 Louis Vuitton handbags. If you're going to start over again, you might as well get yourself a nice purse.

Barry Cowsill is still MIA. His fans have posted his name on every Katrina missing list on the Internet. With so many of these stress-eating, pudgy broads leaving their own email addresses and phone numbers for him to contact them, the poor bastard is going to get confused. No wonder he's in hiding!

I posted a message as "Flower Girl" on "Cowsill Chatter" suggesting that maybe he was medivacked to a rehab clinic for heroin and cocaine withdrawal, and received a very terse reply from his brother Bob stating that Barry's substance abuse problems were booze - not smack or snow. HEY, GODDAMIT, I WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP!

It's sad because the Cowsills can't even get arrested, let alone muster any media interest in their missing brother. "Entertainment Tonight" ran a segment (see the link below) last Thursday about Barry that was pretty heartbreaking. Still, if or when the Cowsills find him, I think it's going to be fabulous for their careers.

http://www.stellarshowcase.durham.on.ca/ET.html

All hail the Pope of Wicker Park

Thax waxes poetic for indie rock bands

"To me, whether a band is good or sucks is a matter of personal taste. So it's kind of a moral issue not to set myself up in that role." Thax Douglas, The Pope of Wicker Park

There are about 2,000 crazies wearing assorted subversive T-shirts assembled on Wabansia Avenue for the Hideout's annual, end-of-summer cavalcade of Chicago indie rock bands. If they're thinking about their lousy day jobs, nobody shows it.

The 4 o'clock sun shoots down the canyon of industrial warehouses and rows of city Streets and San trucks like a shotgun. If the sun were a bullet, it would hit the City of Chicago's Department of Fleet Management. Behind the stage, the Pope of Wicker Park is scribbling abstract blessings into a red spiral notebook, oblivious to the deadline of the sound check.

"You know," someone says to the large, bearded man in a crinkled baseball cap, deep in concentration. "You ought to get one of those hats like the pope wears."

Eleventh Dream Day, another one of Chicago's many under appreciated rock bands that pre-dates the grunge movement, picks up its instruments. Waiting patiently through the hyped-up band intros, the Pope of Wicker Park strolls shyly to the edge of the stage. Hunched over, he begins his blessing of the mic:

the desert

uses its enormous

stores of sand to

build itself into a

castle ­ -- the castle

itself will be a resource

some day, but the desert

can't imagine

for what, having

used its excess

sand for building.

The crowd roars its approval. The mic is blessed. The show goes on.

Despite a teenage "cry for attention" suicide attempt during "The MaryTyler Moore Show" in the 1970s, Thax Douglas, the Pope of Wicker Park, has been more than happy to share the spotlight, and, more happily, let it shine on others. In fact, Douglas has been turning the indie rock world on with his smile for over a decade.

With a published book of poems, "Tragic Faggot Syndrome," a CD of spoken word stylings and the subject of an upcoming film documentary, Douglas has left his blessings on all the undiscovered talent and misfits that have crossed his path. With his belief that anybody can shine on stage with a little blessing and encouragement, Douglas has found himself on the receiving end of respect, reverence and awe by the city's adoring music underground. What more could any pope ask for?

"There's a hiphop term called 'blessing the mic.' I try not to exploit the fact that some bands consider it a rite of passage for me to write a poem for them," Douglas says, eating pie and killing time at the Hollywood Grill on North and Ashland, before heading off to see the Brian Jonestown Massacre at the Metro. "I think well of myself, but I just don't like the idea of being a tastemaker. To me, whether a band is good or sucks is a matter of personal taste. So it's kind of a moral issue not to set myself up in that role."

For Douglas, who's 47, "thinking well of himself" has been a hard-fought battle. An only child, Douglas grew up a lonely, smart kid in Woodridge, one of the many isolated cornfield subdivisions that dotted Chicago's suburban landscape during the 1950s and 1960s, where he skipped several grades of elementary school.

"In 1961, it was rural," Douglas says. "I could literally walk to Downers Grove through fields. To me, the suburbs are really lonely, there are only houses and cars and not many places where people can go and gather. I wasn't able to connect with other kids in any serious way. It was devastating being two years younger than my classmates. I wish I had been one of those smart kids that went into the city."

At age 10, Douglas discovered classical music, particularly the avant-garde composers of the 20th century. "I kind of dropped out early. I only listened to classical music for seven years, so I retreated into that," he says. "I had a collection of45s, like the Beatles. That was my way of retreating from the world."

Playing the role of Murray the cop in his high school's production of"The Odd Couple," was about the only highlight of his years at Downers Grove South High School. He was known more for hanging out at the school's jazz band rehearsals, where he'd imagine he was watching one of his own compositions that mimicked a true-to-life rehearsal, complete with false starts and dropped sheets of music.

"Of course, all these people thought I was really into the jazz band, but I never went to any of the concerts, only the rehearsals," he laughs. "It was one of those artistic conceits inspired by the avant-garde composers."

It was during his first stint in college where the "smart kid" started succumbing to a then, undiagnosed condition known as "cerebral allergies" that led to Douglas's first and only suicide attempt during an episode of"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" on Oct. 26, 1974.

"Even though my parents didn't have any money, they were willing to send me to Centenary College in Shreveport, La.," he explains. "That's where it all started. I was allergic to 80 percent of all foods. All I did was listen to classical records for half a year. I never went to class. I kind of ground to a halt and then that's where I did the suicide attempt. I'd like to find out which episode of 'Mary Tyler Moore' that it was during. I can probably find it on the 'net."

In 1988, Douglas finally broke free of the suburbs where he had discovered the Top 40 while working as a newspaper distributor, dropping off bundles of papers at news carriers' homes. After moving to the city, he began going to performance art shows at the fabled Lower Links, then Links Hall. When Lower Links closed, he moved on to Lincoln Park's Lounge Ax, another legendary club that has since been shuttered. There, he began staging a variety show called "Thax After Dark," that featured a mishmash of angry standup comics, Rod McKuen crooners, Funk-Accordion acts, contortionists, bitter divorcees, and the occasional Loretta Lynn drag acts. Douglas, who emceed the shows, would keep the variety show moving and breakup the controlled chaos with his poetry.

"The big thing then was variety shows. That's how I got started," Douglas says. "People would do weird stuff, poets, local eccentrics who'd get up and babble for 14 minutes. I started doing my band poems the summer of 1997. A band would always be the last act and I started doing it as a novelty and that's the way it stayed. Gradually, I found out it suited my aesthetic needs as a poet."

Today, Douglas has written about 1,200 band poems that he's read blessing the mic for acts at the Hideout and Empty Bottle in Wicker Park, which serve as his main bases of operation, not counting the ones he lost prior to 2001 before he started recording them in spiral notebooks.

"I really love 20th century Russian poetry and writing band poems is a good way to write in that style," Douglas says. "I knew somebody who always wrote poems about her garden, so a poem would be called 'Morning, March 14.' This is the same thing, except my garden is bands instead of flowers. I write them spontaneously and thenI read them from paper. I like the instant gratification of writing a poem and reading it before an audience. I really prefer it this way than to submitting a poem to a publisher."

Chicago-based Red Walls, one of the country's hottest indie rock bands, was so grateful to Douglas that they recently flew him and recovering band groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster, known for her plaster casts of famous rock stars' male anatomy, to Hollywood to be in one of its music videos.

"It was really glamorous to be flown out on Southwest Airlines and hang out in L.A. for a few days. Unfortunately, the video wasn't any good because the director was a hack. It's just [Red Walls] doing their song and me and Cynthia and all these extras bobbing our heads," he laughs. "But I'm always grateful to Red Walls. I haven't worked a regular job for eight years. People say it's a real accomplishment but I don't feel that way because I'm so poor. Fortunately, my rent's real cheap."

Although various small, indie publishers have expressed interest in publishing a book of his band poems, the offers have yet to pan out. Douglas says he winces when he reads his first collection of poetry, "TragicFaggot Syndrome." He wishes he had published a book of his band poems instead of the self-confessional stuff that dwells on the low points of his life, circa 1987 to 1991, when cerebral allergies often forced him to lie down on the floors of L cars with migraines.

"That's so not me anymore, I wince when I read it now. People come up to me and say, 'were you just trying to be offensive,'" Douglas says. "I'm a lot happier now and less insecure and self-hating. I worked hard during the '90s to make myself a more emotionally secure person. I've felt very lonely most of my life and if you don't mind my saying so, now that I'm a celebrity in Chicago, people come up to me all the time."

For more information about Thax Douglas, visit www.thaxdouglas.com.

The story above appeared in Pioneer Press' Wicker Park Booster, Sept. 21, 2005.

Another Dumbo Drop

My father recently decided that it would be a good idea for him to become an alcoholic at age 79. You can’t really blame him for wanting to anesthetize himself. My mother is in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease and last year we had to put her into a nursing home.

My parents have been married for 57 years. My father shows up faithfully at the home every day to feed my mother her pureed lunch. My poor mother has been lost to us since August 2003. In the months before, when she was still cognizant, she begged to die as she was slipping in the netherworld.

Last year when Ronald Reagan died, I never thought I would find myself sympathizing with the Reagan family, but I had to chuckle at Ron Jr.’s and Patti Davis’s macabre stories about their own experiences caring for a parent afflicted with some ass-fucking neurological disease. Like the Reagan children, I had developed a black humor about the whole thing. You have too, because the only other alternative is to curl up in bed in a fetal position and bawl your eyes out. I will save the big cry for when my mother passes away, which will be a blessing.

As my mother was slipping in and out of the dementia that would eventually claim her brilliant mind, she was convinced that my father was having an affair with the woman who cuts his hair at Bo-Rics. She almost had me convinced of it, and when I offered to confront the harlot, she begged me not too. My father was extremely hurt by these accusations and would make grand proclamations about how he had been faithful throughout their half-century-plus marriage. It was about this time, that he started hitting the Old Milwaukee and his current favorite, vodka in a water bottle stashed in the glove box of his Chrysler.

It was not a smooth transition into the nursing home. My mother was a breeze – I was relieved that I would get my life back and would no longer have to spend my weekends cleaning up poo – but the old man was a handful. My dad is not the most cerebral guy in the world. He is a lifetime member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. A good part of his career was spent as an electrician working on huge construction projects in downtown Chicago. Riding into the city on the Kennedy Expressway, eight of the buildings he helped build rise from the Chicago skyline.

My father, who served in the Navy during World War II, is still bitterly angry at the Japanese. It’s not uncommon for him to start loudly talking about “the dirty Japs” in restaurants or other public places where there are large numbers of Asians. Another one of his favorite stories, shouted to us in a crowded restaurant, is how he once emptied a bucket of piss off the top of the Equitable Building and laughed as it splashed the other construction workers working on the lower floors.

When my mother first moved into the nursing home, the staff thought my father was adorable. I knew it would last for only a few weeks and soon enough, we began getting calls from them telling us what a huge pain in the ass he had become. Shortly after we had admitted my mother, I got a frantic call early one Sunday morning from the nursing home. The nurses were demanding that we come get my father immediately.

According to my father, one of the Alzheimer patients had wheeled into my mother’s room while he was there visiting and was about to crash into my mother’s shins. My father grabbed the patient’s wheelchair and sent the woman careening down the hall like a Mack truck.

We had to send my father to counseling, which went in one ear and out the other, as well as meet with the nursing home’s social worker. During this meeting, I also learned that my father had been eating other residents’ unfinished lunches and was grabbing food off the food line. He was put on probation and could only visit during certain hours. If he violated the terms of his probation, we were told, my father’s visits to my mother would have to be supervised by one of his adult children. None of us wanted this to happen so we told my father we would kick his ass if there were any more incidents.

Since then, things have been going smoothly between my father and the nursing home staff. We have received only one other call, last winter, from one the CNAs who said that my father had shown up drunk and stinking of alcohol. The CNA was concerned about my father driving home. The call came during a huge snowstorm and my brother and I had to jump in our cars with our respective cell phones and go out looking for him.

We found my father waiting for us at the nursing home. He told us the reason he smelled like booze was because he had spilled Windex all over himself while cleaning his car windows earlier that day. We drove him home, but found out later that he had coerced a neighbor into driving him back to the nursing home so he could pick up his car.

We have come to refer these crises with my father as “Dumbo drops.” Lately, there have been a lot of alcohol-related “Dumbo drops.” Apparently, there was some incident at my brother’s house a few nights ago. My brother found a fifth of vodka lying on the front seat of my father’s car. My father claimed that someone from the Chrysler dealership must have put it there. It was a big mess.

For the past few days, I have been badgered with apologetic phone calls from my father. This morning, he told me he wants to stop drinking. He’s tried lately, but can’t stop. I have been on the phone all morning calling AA, trying to set him up with meetings, other alchys to talk to, etc. He told me he couldn’t go an AA meeting tonight because of severe thunderstorm forecasts.

Since my mother’s illness, it has been every man for himself in my family. It has dredged up all kinds of dysfunctional family shit from the ‘70s between me and my brothers, shit that I’ve spent thousands of dollars in psychotherapy trying to recover from. Other friends are going through similar situations with their own aging parents and I tell them it’s normal.

My father is still the foreman and the boss.

I gave him some numbers to call and he just got off the phone with a guy named Bill. He claims he’s going to an AA meeting tonight at 8 p.m. We’ll see if that happens.

The Monthly Obit List

One of my favorite stops on the 'net these days is the monthly obit list on my high school alumni website, which is Maine West High School. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the monthly obit list, but I check it every day to see which faculty members and classmates have recently died.

I guess I just enjoy the shock value. It's hard to believe that these people from my youth are gone. Their faces are forever frozen in my mind as adolescents with their bad '70s hair and clothing. I dread the day when my own senior year picture shows up in the monthly obits, before it is consigned to the lost "Warriors" page for the class of '75, mainly because my picture is so incredibly dorky. It's not quite as dorky as my friend David's senior year picture, who looks like Ernie Douglas from "My Three Sons."

I was incredibly hung over when that picture was taken one bright summer morning in 1974. I had a big gash on the bridge of my nose from passing out the night before caused by resting my head on top of a glass when it broke. My mother was furious with me the next morning, and I told her that I got clipped in the face by someone's fingernail while dancing -- not because I injured myself passing out. The photo studio was able to touch it up. On the large 8X10 portrait, there is a large blob of flesh colored paint over the gash. This was in the days before PhotoShop. My senior year picture is the last professional studio portrait that was ever taken of me. A few years ago, I had an offer for a free studio sitting, but I used it for my dog in instead.

Still, I remember the days as adolescents when we all thought we were immortal.

For example, there is my friend Linda from junior high. I was really sad to see her show up on the list. In seventh grade she often talked about wanting to get a sex change operation.

There is my friend Steve, who I went to see the Rolling Stones' Some Girls Tour at Soldier Field with in 1978. Steve picked me up in his freak van, along with four of his guy friends. I remember my father chasing Steve's van down the street demanding that I get out the van NOW because there were no other girls going. I told Steve to floor it. We slept on the sidewalk all night in front of Soldier Field. Our little group was quite popular with the other freaks because Steve's friend Rudy opened everyone's beer bottles with his teeth. This was in the days before twist tops.

The girl who started the trend of calling me "Baby Huey" is also dead. I have to admit, I was kind of glad to see her name and dorky senior year picture appear on the list. I'm sure she had some 'splainin' to do to God about her cruelty as a teenager. I was a sensitive kid, but I should have kicked her ass in art class. If I had it to do over again, I would retailiate and not be so intimidated by my childhood enemies and their ridicule.

But as a friend of mine recently said, these people will never again enjoy a greasy burger, a power dump, or a beautiful sunset over the Wal-Mart parking lot.

A few weeks ago, I saw another guy of whom I have less than pleasant childhood memories about show up on the list. I'll call him Keith X. The Xs lived down the street from us in our isolated cornfield subdivision during the late '50s and '60s. The Xs had five kids who all went to Catholic school. My parents, lapsed Lutherans, couldn't stand the family and thought they were snotty, stuckup Catholics.

Warren, the father, was nuts. He was full of pompous lies and delusions of his own greatness. My parents used to laugh at Warren when he'd walk down the sidewalk wearing his English derby and twirling his umbrella, with the five X kids trailing behind in order of age, his wife, Pat, bringing up the rear, on their way home from mass.

Pat X, the mother, was a gorgeous woman. She used to take the garbage out to the curb wearing a short teddy and would bend over, exposing her butt crack and boobs to the garbage men. All of the neighborhoo women to whom pregnancy had not been so kind, my mother included, thought she was a slut.

My oldest brother, Marty, was good friends with Bryant, the oldest of the X kids. My mother used to compare Bryant to Eddie Haskell, who was forever complimenting my mother on her attractive house dress and Keds. Bryant was following in the bullshit footsteps of his old man, Warren. Warren was a machinist and blamed Bryant's colic as a baby for his flunking the bar exam. Warren told everyone he was a lawyer, anyway. The meanest thing Bryant ever did to me was push me into the deep end of the YMCA pool when I didn't know how to swim. Thank God, my brother was there to pull me out of the water.

Warren X never wore a shirt on hot days and would strut around his driveway in a Speedo. He was a sex maniac and had the hots for the beautiful 17-year-old redhead who lived across the street from with Xs with her parents, Rusty. Anyway, it's pretty certain that Warren and Rusty had an affair. One evening, my parents were coming home late from a movie and saw Warren and Rusty strolling hand-in-hand through the subdivision. In another scandal, one of our neighbors said she saw the Xs at a Maine West football game. Pat and the kids were sitting in one row bleachers, while Warren and Rusty were cuddled up under a blanket in the row behind them, right in front of Pat and kids.

The X kids were all pretty arrogant. I always imagined that the Kennedys were a lot like the X kids growing up. Keith was a year older than me and used to beat me up all the time. He'd sit on my face and make me smell his balls. By high school, he was a hotshot and in the upper echelons of high school popularity, with his rock star hair. I hated him.

My brother told me that a few years ago, Keith X had a kidney transplant. Like most kids who grew up in the '70s, he was a huge partyer, so I don't know if his kidney problems were caused by substance abuse or natural causes.

But all was not well in the X household. Over the years, my brother has told me some horrifying stories about incest in the X family. Once, when he was about 14, Bryant X called him into the basement and showed my brother his penis, which he had proudly wrapped in black electrical tape. According to my brother, Bryant talked of fooling around with his sister, Debbie, the only girl in the X family. Debbie was precociously beautiful and not much else is known about her. The Xs lived in a three-bedroom house and my brother said that whenever he went over there, Warren was usually walking around in his underwear.

Anyway, I have lot more empathy and understanding of Keith, and why he probably acted the way he did. I'm sure all the Xs, with the exception of Bryant, grew up to be decent human beings. Even that chick who called me Baby Huey.

Eventually, the Xs got divorced and Warren spent some time in a mental hospital. My brother says he runs into Warren occasionally, and he's still as nuts and psychotic as ever.

The Rain, The Park & Missing Cowsills

Since the 24/7 Hurricane Katrina coverage, it's hard to keep up on the stories that matter -- like the Robert Blake Civil Trial. Or Phil Spector's murder trial! I have to admit, I haven't been on the CourtTV website since the Michael Jackson Trial ended.

But today, out of boredom, I did a Yahoo news search for "The Cowsills." I know that one of the singing family members - Bill - has been sick for a long time, and I wanted to see if he died. I didn't feel like wading through the Cowsills' mess of a website.

I was amazed to learn that Barry Cowsill is missing in New Orleans.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Cowsills, they were a family musical group that hit the Top 40 in 1968. They had a few snappy years up until the early '70s, when the band broke up. There was Barbara, who had a short dykey haircut that the kids called "Mini Mom" because she was so hip; some ugly older brothers Bill and Bob; Paul, the family roadie; Barry, who was a hottie; John, also a hottie; and cute little Susan Cowsill. They also had another brother, Dick, who was serving in Viet Nam. The family was managed by the old man - Bud Cowsill - who from what I have read was kind of a dick. Apparently, he refused to let Dick perform with the family because he supposedly had no musical talent, so he was exiled to Viet Nam.

I liked Barry and John because they didn't have bad teeth like their older brothers. Susan and Mini Mom were non-entities to me. I was 11 when the Cowsills debuted in 16 Magazine, and Barry and John were just a few years older. I read 16 Magazine voraciously as a preteen, mainly for stories about The Monkees and Dino, Desi & Billy.

The Cowsills were a three-hit wonder band. Their big hits were "The Rain, the Park & Other Things," "Hair" and "Indian Lake." I owned all three 45s. I never purchased their albums. Anyway, my friend Sherry Mammina and I used to make fun of the Cowsills. One fine summer day in 1970 on Sherry's front porch, we cut out like 80 pictures of Barry Cowsill's head and pasted them on poster board. We drew weird bodies on all the heads and gave each one a name that started with the letter "B" - Buriel, Biff, Bozo, Bunky, Borraine - I think you get the gist of our hilarious 7th grade humor. We weren't even stoned and we were laughing our asses off.

I guess we thought the Cowsills were conceited because they thought they were hot shit. I was secretly fascinated by any child actor or performer back then. I liked the Cowsills' lush melodies and harmonies. They were all pretty talented and I was just an untalented fat girl growing up in Des Plaines, Ill.

The Cowsills made a lot of money and their rags-to-riches story was often re-told in 16 Magazine. They were originally from Newport, R.I. and were down to their last penny before "The Rain, the Park & Other Things" became a huge hit on the Top 40. They had leigons of horny preteen fans like myself. I remember listening to "The Rain, the Park & Other Things" when I was supposed to be doing my math homework, thinking unpure thoughts.

But like most suddenly famous teeny bopper groups, the Cowsills fell out of favor. In addition to their three hit songs, the Cowsills are perhaps best known for making one of the worst career decisions in the history of show biz, when they turned down a deal to do their own TV sitcom, which eventually became "The Partridge Family."

The Cowsills became poor again, and through the years, they would occassionally turn up on those pathetic "Where are they now" features. Mini Mom and Bud got divorced, and both parents died of smoking-related diseases.

But thanks to the magic of the Internet, the Cowsills have created their own website, with a million pages and pix. They have a huge following of middle-aged female fans who communicate with each other on the "Cowsill Chatter" boards.

The Cowsills are always begging for money from their fans to finance their CD projects or one of Bill's hip replacements. The only Cowsill who's been able to make a decent living at being a professional musician is John, who sings the Carl Wilson vocals in the Beach Boys' touring band. I saw John last summer at a Beach Boys concert, and have to admit, he was damn good. Not that I'm crazy about the Beach Boys. I went because the tickets were free.

God bless, the Cowsills, though, you have to give all of them credit for playing their hearts out at flea markets and other dinky club gigs. As long as they're playing other people's songs, they're all right. I listened to some samples of John's music on their website, and it was some overproduced Jesus freak crap.

I have to say, when I saw that Barry Cowsill was missing in New Orleans, I wasn't surprised. If it wasn't a hurricane, it would have been something else. He seems to be the most disassociated with the family's website. His page hasn't been updated in like five years. What scant, new biographical information that's available about him alludes to problems with booze, pills and suicide attempts.

According to Susan Cowsill, who had moved to New Orleans six weeks before Hurricane Katrina (shit this family has bad luck), she last heard from Barry on Sept. 1, who had ridden out the storm on the secocnd floor of a warehouse in the French Quarter. The threads on Cowsill Chatter are like a million miles long, but apparently he called from a pay phone at the Convention Center. God help him. He said he didn't want to get on a bus with "murderers and dredges of society" to be evacuated out of that poor, sorry, toxic fish bowl.

Now his family and fans are frantickly looking for him. One of their fans has organized a telephone search party, with fans calling shelters, hospitals and various businesses in the French Quarter. There are numerous messages posted on the Cowsill chatter boards, about contacting someone named Anne Marie for lists of places to call in Texas, fans who can't sleep at night knowing that Barry is missing, etc. Anne Marie has been on the computer non-stop for the past three weeks trying to help the family. (Don't these broads have jobs?)

Susan went to view her apartment in NOLA, which was demolished, but did manage to find her cat. She also checked out Barry's apartment in the French Quarter and all the bars, knowing those are the first places he'd head to, but he's still a no show.

His name is posted annonymously on a "found" site, but I think it's a hoax. The dude is probably wandering through the sledge looking for some junk to shoot up, drowned or was murdered. Or he just doesn't give a fuck about contacting his family. Probably the latter.

It's always a drama with the Cowsills. They thrive on it. On top of Barry being MIA, Bill, feeling left out, had to go and break his good hip. I think the Cowsills are excitement addicts.

I do hope they find Barry, though. It's amazing to me that "True Hollywood Stories" never did a show on the Cowsills, because I think their story is perfect. I'm sure they have some horrible stories to tell about their old man squandering all their money.

For those of you who are Cowsill fans and want to post nasty comments, I think it's time to move forward. This group hasn't had a hit in 35 years, so get over it!

But I promise to keep all you updated on the whereabouts of Barry Cowsill, and if he's found. I only hope the family has some of his DNA in case they have to identify a corpse. I'd like to know what happened to him. I don't think they're going to find him for awhile, if ever.