The Green Dress Vampires

One would have to be blind and deaf not to notice the reading and viewing public's fixation on vampires. With a short pause for breath, this has been true since Anne Rice first published Interview With The Vampire (help me out with the year here). I really enjoyed that book, and it translated quite well to the screen. I also enjoyed the second book, The Vampire Lestat, and then the series went into a downward spiral of increasingly implausible material. None of these went to the screen. However, after the pause for breath, the teens and "tweens" got on the vampire bandwagon, as did the small-screen audience, and off we went. Vampires are now once again the top draw with the "Twilight" series on the big screen, where chicken-chested adolescent boy vampires take their shirts off to the squeal of millions of young girls, and on the small screen, with programs like "True Blood", which I must confess I have never seen.

Be it known here that Count Dracula, in his many iterations, never once took his shirt off. In fact, he wore that high-collared cape so much that we rarely got to even see the shirt.

Anyway, I digress. What I am getting at is that it occurred to me that if I ever want to turn "The Green Dress Diaries" into anything that will sell, I might do well to put a vampire slant on it and call it "The Green Dress Vampires". The green dress would lend itself beautifully to a running-around-in-the-mist scene, like you always see outside the castle or the mansion or the mausoleum in vampire movies. It would even look great on one of those Fabio-type paperback covers that people read on the beach.

what really made me think of the cast of "The Green Dress Diaries" as vampires is the fact that The Wet Rag is the most perfect vampire ever. Here are several things to support this:

1. He seems to turn up out of nowhere, as if he can just dissolve into mist and flow through walls. Every single time I have visited Siss, he has materialized within minutes, ready to join the group

2. He is brooding and silent. What a creep!! I can never figure out why he joins us or whether or not he really wants to be there. Like Count Dracula, maybe he is just there to watch our necks for future reference. Whatever his purpose, he always just sits there like a stone, contributing nothing. When he does say something, everyone jumps a mile.

3. He often leaves the group and goes off by himself for long periods of "alone time". He either goes home (his coffin is probably upstairs there) or wanders off as he did at our picnic. Siss says that he goes running by himself for long distances. This is strange, because he does not look like he is in any kind of shape, and even has rounded shoulders and a sort of hunched back. Not exactly a hump, but like the beginnings of osteoporosis.

4. He is an energy leech, who descends on the group like a black hole and sucks everyone dry of energy. You know the type. Without saying a word, he brings the group to its energetic knees, and dominates the conversation with his silence.

So, The Wet Rag would be the vampire of mystery, the heavy, creepy element, the base around whom the story line(s) would be built. You see that I have left room for a sequel or sequels. They always beat these things to a pulp before they bury the series. Casting The Wet Rag is a brilliant idea. No one would initially suspect him to be a vampire. He is sort of short and puny and stringy, with a bald spot on the back of his head. He has a perpetual stoop and kind of a sunken chest. I realize that I am describing more of a Quasimodo than someone with the charisma of Dracula or Lestat, but disguise would be the beauty of his entire persona. I am really at a loss to remember how he dresses or anything I have ever seen him wearing, but the color gray seems to leap to my mind. Gray T-shirts? Gray running shoes? Maybe it's just that The Rag is so lacking in color. He has a black-and-white persona. Just as Pigpen in the "Peanuts" comic strip walked around with a cloud of dust and dirt around him, The Rag is always surrounded by a gray fog. This is a great vampire thing; colorless, joyless, devoid of life.

Now we are getting somewhere!!

Next installment....Siss as the damsel in distress who does NOT get rescued but gets her neck bitten but good by The Rag Vampire and turns into a vampire herself.