stinky cheese, and offensive jokes.
For atheists, everything in the world is enough and every day is holy. Every day is an atheist holiday. It’s a day that we’re alive.
SOMETIMES A SHEET IS NOT JUST A GHOST
I LIKE THE FEW CHRISTIANS WHO STILL HATE HALLOWEEN because they think it’s a pagan holiday. It shows a commitment to history that mirrors my wife’s dislike of Xmas. To me both holidays are pretty secular. Halloween in the USA is just a big money day for retailers. It’s a chance to sell more superhero shit and let women be slutty and men dress like women and… be slutty. It’s a slutty fucking holiday.
My wife and I used to go to Halloween fetish balls (why do fetish people have such big balls? Because so many of them like to dance). We never officially decided to not to go to them anymore; we just haven’t been in a while. We aren’t worried, as we should be, about embarrassing our children. We just stopped going because our children wake up early in the morning.
The last fetish ball we went to was on the Halloween right after the only Houdini Halloween seance we ever went to. Every year, Sid Radner, the big Houdini expert, used to honor Houdini’s wishes and have a Halloween seance to see if Houdini could come back from the dead. Now Sid is dead, and I guess they still do the seances in hopes that Sid can help Houdini fulfill his promise in case they’re both stuck somewhere in the afterlife.
Houdini said repeatedly that if anyone could come back from the dead, he would. No matter what the cost to his everlasting soul, Houdini would come back and bring the proof to the living. Believers took this to mean that Houdini believed in life after death. Atheists, or at least this atheist, took it to mean, “If there’s a fucking snowball in hell, I’ll be the one to fill it with gravel and throw it at god’s ass.” I don’t know for sure whether Houdini believed in an afterlife, but just to be clear, I don’t.
Sid invited Penn & Teller to the seance, and I took Emily along (I could have said I took my wife, but I don’t remember whether we were married then). We would get to be part of the jive seance and we were going to have a chance to meet Dorothy Young. Ms. Young was the last living person who toured with Houdini. She was seventeen when she started on the road with him as an assistant. She got the job after she danced a Charleston during the audition. Dorothy died in 2011 at 103 years old. I’m so glad I got to meet her. We also met George Hardeen, Houdini’s brother’s grandson. The second half of Houdini’s career was spent busting phony spiritualists (redundant). He would send his crew in disguised, or if he could get a good enough disguise, he would sneak in himself. They would watch the seance, figure out the tricks, and explain how it was done in his show in the same town that night. Houdini was a motherfucker. Some other folks were there, but none with as much of a direct connection to Houdini. Houdini was very straitlaced and uptight about sex. One of the reasons that some of the spiritualists drove Houdini full-on bugnutty was that they did really sexy stuff. Spiritualists were way beyond Halloween slutty. Some of them would do their seances in see-through robes that were left wide open in the front and the “ectoplasm,” gooey manifestations from the other world, came out of their pussies. The sitters would reach in and feel. Yup. No kidding. I certainly could make this shit up, but I’m not. The pure sluttiness of this religion made Harry way uptight. For me, well, it could have made me a believer for a night.
Old Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, may have cheated some of his genetic pea work to make it a little too perfect, but even though we got no evidence of life after death in that seance, we got a lot of anecdotal evidence for genetics. As we milled around, waiting to see if we could contact Harry in the afterworld (much less likely than Godot showing up) and chatted with the other sitters, there was George, the closest living relative to Houdini. George looked a lot like the busts of Great-uncle Houdini that I have all around my home, known as the Slammer.
Why do I have busts of Houdini all over my house? James Randi is my hero. James Randi is the modern Houdini except better. Okay, Houdini was born in Budapest and Randi was born in Canada and Randi never got quite as famous, but Randi does the busting of psychics, faith healers, mind readers and other assholes better than Houdini. Maybe Randi is able to bust a little more bullshit because he’s able to smell it from Houdini’s giant shoulders. If it weren’t for Randi, there would be no Penn & Teller. Randi taught us that you could spend your life studying how to lie and use that to tell the truth. That’s our goal. Teller and I were down visiting Randi in Florida at the James Randi Educational Foundation, and as he was giving us a tour of the library he showed us his bust of Houdini, in a sealed case. Randi bragged that this was the only bust in existence. It was a copy of the original bust from the Houdini museum in Niagara Falls. Randi had sneakily made a copy of it and then the Houdini museum burned down (Randi’s alibi checks out). Randi was so proud of this unique bust that we had to fuck with him. After Randi went home that night, Teller and I went through the Yellow Pages at our hotel (this was a long time ago) and found someone in South Florida who did plaster casting (Cindy,
Morning broke, we ushered out our hired guns, cleaned up, put the bust back in the case, sealed everything up, and met Randi for breakfast. We mentioned nothing. Randi didn’t notice we hadn’t slept—we were tired from 1986 through the end of the century anyway. Teller and I got the cast secretly shipped back to Vegas and had copies made. A few years later when Randi visited us, both our houses were filled with exact copies of his unique bust. We had dozens of them all over. We didn’t say a word about them, waiting for Randi to notice. Randi never said a word. I couldn’t wait for him to ask where we got them so I could say, “Oh, those old things? They’re nothing special, you can buy them at any cheap-shit shop.” But Randi never asked. He never said a word about the busts. Never. You don’t fuck with Shady, ’cause Shady will fucking kill you. I will never beat Randi at anything.
George Hardeen looked just like that bust of Houdini, straitlaced like his great-uncle. George had no date. George was standing alone, wearing a suit and tie. He spoke of the legal work he was doing with his charity for Native Americans. He is a good man. He would have been offended if a spiritualist had stripped naked and shot ectoplasm out of her pussy. Not me. I come from different stock.
Houdini didn’t show up at the seance. Emily and I left the Houdini seance and went directly to our last fetish party to date. It seemed that the slutty dead spiritualists were more likely to show up and spew their ectoplasm at the fetish ball than Houdini was to show up at the seance, but neither happened.
Shortly after that, and not directly related to that fetish party, we had children. In the years before children seize the Halloween slutty, the holiday is all about candy, superheroes, kitty cats, and princesses. There’s a picture that news stories sometimes use for Penn & Teller where Teller is smiling like a Vegas headliner and I’m wearing kitty-cat ears and painted-on whiskers. It was taken at a red carpet at the opening of Criss Angel’s Vegas dance show. I didn’t want to go, I wanted to continue trick-or-treating with my family, but my job was to go to this press opening. I kept my kitty-cat outfit on in protest of Criss and to show solidarity with my family. Because of the pictures taken that night, some people think Teller works with the drummer from Kiss.
I liked that our family were all kitty cats. I liked that we just drew on whiskers and had little kitty-ear headbands. I liked that our whole family matched. I love dressing alike. I like it in the Penn & Teller show and I love it in families. Our children are different sexes and eleven months apart. If we had had twins of the same sex, child services would have me in custody, because unless restrained, I would force my twins to dress alike. I want our whole family to dress alike. When I went to London once, I brought back matching hats for my whole family, but I couldn’t get us all to wear them at the same time. Before I was married, after any steady girlfriend had bugged me enough to take a vacation with her, I would fly us to Hawaii, have a big fight and leave her there while I came home and got back to work. It’s a good way to break up—it’s over, she’s in Hawaii, and I’m working. Everyone is happy. Before I started the fight and got ready to split, I would always buy myself a Hawaiian shirt and my girlfriend a matching sexy muumuu (I’ve had girlfriends who could look sexy even in a muumuu) and try to get her to wear it out with me so we’d be matching. I love matching Hawaiian tourist clothes on couples. I go to Disneyland and Disney World mostly to watch my children have fun. The only other enjoyment I get is seeing the foreign tourist families all dressed alike. Fuck, I love that.
The kitty-cat year was the only year that I got my way. After that the children wanted different costumes for
