Got Ann?

This article appeared in The Official Newsletter of the Heart fan Club, number 3, 1983. This was the first we had heard of Ann’s Halloween parties. The only thing that may have topped this one was the next one Sue wrote about where the surprise entertainment was this power metal trio called “Lady Clergy” – they totally rocked and their one time performance, even for those of us just reading about it, became legendary and they live on today via Harley’s Lady Clergy. I no longer have that issue, so I decided to do this one instead. I would pay large amounts of money (if I had it) to attend one of Ann’s Halloween parties. But if that can’t happen, I hope Ann or any one of the attendee decides to continue to write about them for those of us less fortunate ones.

Take Heart, enjoy

Andrea

The main thing to know about Ann’s annual Halloween party is that it’s very serious. Everybody has to wear a costume and it better show some imagination. You’d never show up at Ann’s dressed like a witch or a ghost or E. T..

Sammy Davis Jr., yes. Reagan, no. It’s a matter of originality and there’s always very tough competition every year for Ann’s Best Costume prize – a really nice bottle of champagne.

This year, there was a great Pope, an incredible Liberace with candelabra and toy poodle who won the prize for Most Elaborate Costume. There was Phylis Diller and a Tom Cruise from “Risky Business” and two unbelievable hippies who brought protest signs, handed out flowers, and even painted their van with day-glo flowers and peace signs.

Ann’s friends really go the distance for her party. And she goes pretty far for them too.

This year, Ann’s costume was Yolo Ono at her most avant garde time (circa1968). She was dressed in white and wore a wig so long and huge you could hardly see her face and her Japanese make-up. She did a pretty wild Yoko impersonation, too. When the hippie guy sang his protest song (“Eve of Destruction”) “Yoko” sat in and demonstrated at his feet with a blanket over her head, now and then piercing the air with a Yoko-wail.

Meanwhile, Nance milled around looking perfect in her red wig as Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. Howie was a strange looking baseball player, and Mark was a very weird tuxedoed monster.



(Thanks phoenix for the photos)

I was shuffling around doing a “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me” dance in my full Boy George drag.

The party was centered in Ann’s ballroom which is like a Rock Shrine. She’s got her valuable rock photo collection on the walls and her 50s jukebox is packed with really good oldies. She doesn’t even make you put quarters in to hear your favorite song.

A lot of people danced and a lot of people wouldn’t leave the refreshment table, but mostly, everyone was waiting for our widely rumored “Secret Entertainment.”

Then at one point, Ann and I disappeared and Alan (Ann’s secretary close friend) quietly tapped six people to follow him. He led them to the kitchen where they had to take off their shoes and put on blindfolds. Suddenly the basement door opened.

They heard funeral organ music and “Yoko” came out dressed in a Dracula cape ad face mask. She claimed a victim by putting a big chain around his waist and then she led him down the dark stairs. They poor victims had to depend on the guides to get them down to the “Basement of Terror” safely since they couldn’t see.

Once they landed, they were put in an “isolation booth” to listen to horrible sounds of people being tortured while I captured the next person in the kitchen. After the isolation booth they, they were sent on their own along a guiding chain to the next room. Along the way, they felt a series of soft (leaves) and hard (raw popcorn) things, even a very hot electric blanket under their bare feet; meanwhile, feathers and grass skirts brushed across their faces suggesting cobwebs and things. Remember, they are still blindfolded.

Then suddenly, a deep voice meets them: “Before you enter the ‘Chamber of Hell’ bless yourself with this holy water!” They reach out and feel into a bowl of something awful. Wet, warm, round/ “Oh, sorry,” says the voice. “Those are the eyeballs.” (Actually, they were peeled grapes.)

Now they are commanded to “Take my hand!” They hold onto an icy hand (a water-filled rubber glove that’s been frozen) and are led to a wall to wait… when the other sorry members of the group are lined up next to him, they are instructed to take off their blindfolds.

Two hulking, hooded figures wield rifles at them, and they realize they’ve been lined up for a firing squad. By this time, everyone’s really getting into our “Basement of Terror” so they start screaming and pretending to be scared (or maybe not pretending). Then the hooded guys (my brother tim and his bud, both bodybuilders) show them around the boiler room.

“Choose your torture!” The room swirls with dry ice but through the fog you can see a huge incinerator – clothes, specs, dentures by the furnace end, ashes and bones at the other. There’s a life-size coffin where “Elvis Presley” lies in state. There’s also an operating table with a body and hints of an operation too raunchy to tell you about… but good for a lot of laughs.

Then “Yoko” called everybody on to the next room labeled “Drug Experimentation, Dr. T. Leary.” She gave each “volunteer” a mock “LSD sugar cube” then everybody sat on the floor for the “acid trip.”

Everyone pretended they were on LSD and I started my special “acid trip” tape, (made with Ann’s help) which is our rendition of what a trip might be like.

Of course, we put in a lot of private jokes especially for Nance, who, of course, understood each one. Everybody really laughed through our 10-minute trip and the Hippie kept saying “Oh, Wow, Man!”

Then we took them to another part of the basement where they saw a “person” who had hung herself from the ceiling pipes in the small red-lit bathroom. There was a bloody ax in a pool of blood outside the wine cellar. Screams of terrorized women came from behind the door. (Ann and I got hoarse making that tape.)

We led them in with flashlights past some ugly piles of raw mean (supposed to be body parts) to a pitch-black room. I slammed the door behind us. Ann shines the flashlight around. In one corner she lit up a headless body. The head, split in two, lay with the sickening brain exposed. A bunch of maggots lay in the mess. (See, we hollowed out a melon, cut it in two and filled the halves with a beef heart, some liver, stage blood, rice for maggots.)

Just as everyone was in the middle of a good gross-out, we heard a massive motor start up. The door tore open and the Texas Chainsaw maniac came in lunging at everyone with a mammoth-sized chainsaw. (It was really just Tim and his chainsaw didn’t have a blade or chain, but I think even the toughest guys at the party got an actual scare at that point..)

It was a pretty peppy ending for our “Basement of Terror” experience. We were ready for the next group of unsuspecting victims. Everybody really had fun, and some thrillseekers went through twice.

Ann, Alan and I thought our “secret party entertainment” was pretty successful. It had been hard to keep under wraps from all our friends, especially Nance. She was so impressed she made me show her through the basement later with all the lights on so she could see how we’d done everything. One of our best friends even went so far as to give our basement a “10” on his Leonard Maltin’s party scale.

There were only two bad things. One was Denny, with his special party talent, couldn’t make it that night. The other was that we think we’ve hit the top with this party. How will we ever beat it next year.