goodbye charlie drake

There was an odd moment a few months back when I popped Jimmy Stewart’s Harvey into the DVD player and saw Charles Drake in role of Stewart’s would be psychiatrist. It was the very same guy I always pictured living out my mostly true, though often uneventful recountings here, and there he was on my television.

During the Blog of Doom’s first couple of weeks, I used my actual picture in my profile. It wasn’t the same one that sits there now, but there was a moustache and worried look involved. Then I came across Charlie Drake wasting away on some B-movie fan site and thought that he represented the exact mix of paranoia,

… intoxicatedness,

…and swank that I was hoping to achieve.

Anyway, it was fun to hide behind him for a year, sometimes even literally. I could always use him to talk about playing around town,

…hosting Hee Haw along side Buck Owens in the seventies and eighties,

…or the time Rory Calhoun misunderstood my poor attempt at a Brokeback Mountain joke on the set of Four Guns to the Border back in 1954. Indeed, it was perhaps a bit too early for those back then.

So, does this mean that I have now achieved the desired level of paranoia and intoxicatedness within myself that Charlie was here to provide?

Sure, it was there all along. However, I could never hope to come close to his swank and machismo.

Gracias, Charles.