Joe Blevins's Blog, page 42

Podcast Tuesday: "The Curse of Rogers Hornsby"

Henry Winkler with a beard on Happy Days.
What was Happy Days going to do without two of its core characters, straight arrow Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and practical joker Ralph Malph (Don Most)? The show had a longer-than-usual time to ponder that question, since an actors' strike delayed the start of the 1980-81 television season. The producers had a twofold solution to their dilemma: bring in some new characters and redefine several of the existing characters.
Some of that restructuring would have happened anyway, even if Ron Howard and Don Most had stayed with the show. The initial focus of Happy Days was on teenagers and high school, a logical choice since the sitcom was aimed at younger viewers. But Richie, Ralph, and their pals had long since aged out of adolescence by Season 8. They, along with Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and Potsie (Anson William), graduated from dear old Jefferson High back in Season 4.
In Season 8, Happy Days introduced some new Jefferson High students and made Fonzie one of their teachers, so he could act as a mentor to the next generation. That starts to kick in with the episode "Live and Learn," in which Fonzie gets off to a rocky start as an auto shop teacher to a gang of wacky misfits, including Eugene (Dennis Mandel) and Bobby (Harris Kal). It's at this point that Happy Days starts to resemble its old Tuesday night neighbor, Welcome Back, Kotter.
This week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast , we talk about "Live and Learn" and the changes that the show was going through in its eighth season. Join us, won't you?

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Paperback Odyssey, Part Eight by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg delves once again into those pesky paperbacks.

angora (noun)(aŋ-ˈgȯr-ə)
1.  the hair of the Angora goat or Angora rabbit 2.  yarn, fabric or a garment made from this hair. 

Ed Wood famously had an angora fetish. If there is something close to a fingerprint in Ed's writing, it's this soft, furry fabric. In fact, angora shows up ubiquitously in many of Ed's known adult paperbacks and is present in the vast majority of them.
Early last year, I began performing fishing expeditions into the world of adult paperbacks, predicated on the notion there are still unknown paperbacks written by Ed out there. One of the biggest challenges in this endeavor is finding the right stream in which to cast my net. I've never seen a total of how many adult paperbacks may have been written and published during the genre's heyday—roughly the early '60s through the early '80s—but it is conservatively in the many tens of thousands.
Late last summer, I was lucky to procure sponsorship for a few episodes of the The Ed Wood Summit Podcast from Triple X Books . While that relationship allowed me to get my hands on plenty of e-books, it unexpectedly resulted in a winnowing process. When I communicated with the proprietor of the site, he was curious about my endeavor to ID unknown works by Ed Wood. He graciously offered to search the entire text database of over 18,000 adult paperbacks offered on the site. Naturally, among the searches performed was the word angora
Not counting any of Ed Wood's known works—just a handful of Ed's verified titles are offered by Triple X—the result totaled a mere 118 paperbacks (roughly 0.65555555555556%) mentioning angora. I have began combing through that list, hoping to find one written by Ed. It's a daunting task, but I'm encouraged by a discovery I made prior to receiving the list:  Raoul Woody's Sex Salvation . This novel validated my gut feeling that there's more Ed out there.
My findings thus far indicate that there were just a handful of writers who used the term angora with any commonality, albeit with nowhere near Ed Wood's frequency. Let's look at a few of them individually.

Podcast Tuesday: "Just Like Starting Over"

Erin Moran and Scott Baio on Happy Days.
For about a year in the early 2000s, I lived at a motel. Sort of. See, I was teaching at a high school in a small, somewhat isolated town in northern Illinois, and apartments were not especially common in this part of the world. The principal suggested that I try the local motel, since it had some apartment units on the property. They were small apartments, to be sure, but extremely cheap. Since I was pretty much broke at the time, this seemed like an acceptable option.
The motel was quite a find, a relic of the 1950s "See the USA in your Chevrolet" era. There was nothing of real interest in this town to make it a destination for travelers, so the motel mainly existed to give families a place to stop on their way to someplace else. But even this type of business had become scarce by the early 2000s. I guess that's why they turned some of the units into apartments. 
My own little one-bedroom bachelor pad had decades-old appliances from companies that didn't exist anymore and genuine shag carpeting that was impossible to keep clean. The actual "motel" part of the motel had developed a somewhat sleazy reputation by the time I lived there, not helped by the fact that its next door neighbors were a pawn shop and a massage parlor that stayed open all night. I kind of loved this place. I'm all about faded glory. Plus, they let me use the pool. Sweet.
Anyway, my memories of motel life were rekindled this week when I reviewed "No Tell Motel," the Season 8 premiere of Happy Days. As the title indicates, the story largely takes place at a sleazy motel. Joanie (Erin Moran) and Chachi (Scott Baio) reluctantly take shelter in such an establishment after their car breaks down, leading to a tense evening. This was the first episode to air after the departure of Ron Howard and Don Most, and it shows the direction the show will take: a whole lotta Joanie and Chachi.
Is it good? Is it bad? Find out when we review "No Tell Motel" on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Written Wood by Greg Dziawer

This week, Greg gives us an overview of Ed Wood's prolific writing career.
Ed Wood the filmmaker. This is how he is commonly remembered today. If you are a casual fan of Eddie, you likely found him through his films, which earned him the title of "The World's Worst Filmmaker." While that is an argument for another day, there is unquestionably a far more prolific avenue of Ed's work and creativity to travel: texts. Many of them, of many kinds. We've shared many in this series. This week, let's delve into a high-level summary of those iterations, both known and speculative.  (Click the hyperlinks below for examples and to dig deeper.)

Podcast Tuesday: "Down in the Malph"

Jack Dodson and Don Most on Happy Days.
One of ABC's more, uh, eccentric decisions in the spring of 1980 was to schedule the episode "Ralph's Family Problem" as the seventh season finale of Happy Days. On some level, it makes sense. Actor Don Most was leaving the long-running sitcom, and the episode highlights his character, jokester Ralph Malph. And the episode's not bad by any means. It's always a pleasure when TV veteran Jack Dodson returns as Ralph's father, zany optometrist Dr. Mickey Malph. This was a classy way for Happy Days to say goodbye to both Ralph Malph (the character) and Don Most (the actor).
On the other hand, "Ralph's Family Problem" is not at all typical for Happy Days and is definitely not the kind of splashy entertainment normally reserved for the end of a TV season. Instead, it's a quietly dramatic, downbeat episode in which Ralph grapples with his parents' imminent divorce. There's a lot of moping and soul-searching in this story, and the episode ends on a quietly ambiguous note. That's not exactly Happy Days' brand. For seven seasons, we've seen Ralph as the inveterate class clown, always making corny jokes. Only rarely do we get the impression that there's a real, vulnerable human being behind the dribble glasses and whoopie cushions.
This week's installment of These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast is a special one, since we're not only reviewing "Ralph's Family Problem" but giving our Top 5 lists for the year. We also give our overall thoughts on the seventh season and the show's future without Ron Howard and Don Most. We hope you'll join us.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 127: 'When the Topic is Sex' (2021)

Just some of the nearly 80 articles contained within this book.

NOTE: This article concludes my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

There has never been a better time to be an Ed Wood fan than right now. For one thing, more of Eddie's movies are available on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming than ever before. When I was first getting into Ed Wood back in the early 1990s, I had trouble even finding the biggies—Glen or Glenda (1953), Bride of the Monster (1955) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)—on VHS or airing on television. Now I'm fairly drowning in Ed's movies, spanning from his earliest days in Hollywood (1948's  Range Revenge )  to the very end of his life (1978's Hot Ice ). And, I assure you, more of them are coming.
One of Ed Wood's many magazine articles.Wood scholarship has also exploded in the new millennium. Thirty years ago, Rudolph Grey's groundbreaking Nightmare of Ecstasy was the only full-length book about Ed Wood's life and career. In the years since, however, we've had Ed Wood, Mad Genius (2009) by Rob Craig, The Cinematic Misadventures of Ed Wood (2015) by Andrew J. Rausch and Charles Pratt, Jr., Scripts from the Crypt: Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster (2019) by Gary D. Rhodes and Tom Weaver, Ed Wood and the Lost Lugosi Scripts (2019) by Rhodes and Weaver, and The Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2017) by James Pontolillo.
Arguably, though, the most essential Ed Wood books to emerge in recent years have been the collections of Wood's own short stories, Blood Splatters Quickly (2014) and Angora Fever (2019), both curated by superfan Bob Blackburn. In the 1960s and '70s, Eddie wrote dozens of short stories for adult publisher Bernie Bloom, who used them as filler in his X-rated magazines like Body & Soul, Swap, Garter Girls, Two Plus Two, Young Beavers and many more. With Eddie's full-length novels and sex manuals largely out of print and out of the price range of most people, these compilations are the best way for fans to experience what Eddie was like as an author. 
But Ed Wood's magazine work was not confined to those wonderfully delirious short stories. Not by the tail feathers of a cockatoo. With his nimble typing fingers and ability to generate reams of text in a small amount of time, Eddie was Bernie Bloom's go-to writer for any number of assignments, including editorials and photo captions. Above all, from roughly the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Eddie wrote innumerable nonfiction articles on topics ranging from the sexual revolution to witchcraft to politics. On rare occasions, he used his own name for these stories, but he was more likely to write under a pseudonym like "Dick Trent" or "Ann Gora" or go uncredited altogether.
At last, Bob Blackburn has assembled a massive compilation—the biggest yet—of Ed Wood's nonfiction magazine work from this era. When the Topic is Sex contains nearly 80 articles, nearly all of them taken from Bernie Bloom's magazines. Make no mistake, this is a tome: 544 pages of Wood's whiskey-soaked ramblings from the Richard Nixon years. It is not the kind of thing you read in one sitting, unless you are incredibly dedicated to your Wood-ian studies. You may want to bring it with you when you travel. Or, better yet, keep a copy in the privy. I can think of few books more appropriate for that particular room of the house.
Indeed, some readers may see When the Topic is Sex as an imposing, impenetrable block of text. I'd recommend they start with the more manageable Blood Splatters Quickly—a mere 33 stories, including what I'd call Eddie's best and most accessible work as a writer. For the real sickos, the ones who watch Plan 9 with a remote control in hand so they can freeze the frame at any given second, When the Topic is Sex is a godsend. Bob Blackburn assembled this book by buying these magazines himself, one by one, on the secondary market. Trust me, you don't have the time, money, or patience necessary to do this. Bob's done the tough part; all you have to do is buy a copy and read the darned thing.
Realizing that this much Ed Wood could be overwhelming, Bob has mercifully organized this material into 11 themed chapters. There are sections about cross dressing, lesbianism, social issues, etc. Probably due to Bob's long career in radio, each of these chapters is named after a popular song. The lesbian section of the book, for instance, is called "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," while the section about cross-dressing is "Dude Looks Like a Lady." Other sections include "Society's Child," "What the World Needs Now," and "Hot for Teacher."
I referred to the contents of When the Topic is Sex as nonfiction, but that's an ambiguous term when discussing the work of Ed Wood. There are at least three distinct levels of reality in this book. It really depends on how much research Ed did for a particular piece. In some articles ("More Oddities in the News," ""Yes or No—The Candidates on Busing"), Ed relies almost solely on quotes gleaned from actual newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and books. When Ed Wood was in his research-heavy mode, he occasionally found himself writing articles about other people's articles. "A Tax on Sex?" is a good example of that. At the complete opposite end of the scale are Ed's many fake "interviews" ("College Interview," "Interview with the Man on the Street About Censorship") in which he pretends to talk to nonexistent people about some controversial or taboo subject. Somewhere in the middle—in the vast gulf between "totally researched-based" and "totally made up"—are articles like "The Changing Woman" in which Eddie quotes some legitimate sources but supplements that information with his own opinions and memories.For as long as I've been doing this series, I've tried to find common ground with Eddie, i.e. ways he and I are similar. But that's been tough. I don't drink. I don't cross dress. I don't make movies. I wasn't in the Marines. I have (almost) all my own teeth. I don't have an angora fetish. I've never lived in Hollywood or pursued a career in show business. The Great Depression and World War II were before my time. Ed Wood and I have simply not shared many experiences. Our lives only overlapped for three years.
But I do know what it's like to churn out a lot of articles in a short amount of time, many of them simply piggybacking off other people's work. From 2014 to 2017, I wrote for a fairly large pop culture website that covers films, TV, music, video games, etc. Most of my articles could be classified as filler material or clickbait: brief writeups about movie trailers and viral videos. The turnaround time was extremely brief. Once I took an assignment, I had only about an hour to write it, proofread it, select an appropriate header image, and submit it to an editor. Ed Wood's articles for Bernie Bloom could likewise be considered filler, and I'm sure Eddie churned them out quickly, one after another.
Furthermore, just like Ed Wood, a surprising number of my articles were about other people's articles. Basically, I'd summarize a recent noteworthy article that had been published somewhere online, tell people why they should read it, and provide a link to it. My pay for doing this was $15 per story. That was the going rate for all the clickbait articles I did back then, regardless of what they were about. The only way to make a go of it financially was to write 5-7 stories per day, every day. Like Eddie, I prioritized quantity over quality. It was the most fun job I ever had, and I was heartbroken to lose it. I'll never know what it was like to be Edward D. Wood, Jr., but I have some inkling of what his relationship with Bernie Bloom was like.
When the Topic is Sex sheds a light on an aspect of Ed Wood's life that had previously been hidden in darkness. People who only know Plan 9 or Glenda may not even be aware that Ed wrote anything besides screenplays. Others may have heard of his novels or short stories, thanks to Nightmare of Ecstasy or some of the Wood documentaries. But how many fans have plunged into his nonfiction work? Those who do will find that all of Ed's usual quirks and obsessions are on display here but in a form you may not have expected. You wanna know Ed—what fascinated him, what haunted him, what worried him, what motivated him? Get a copy of this book and spend some time with the man.

Podcast Tuesday: "The Decade That Roared"

Lynda Goodfriend, AnsonWilliams, Ron Howard, and Don Most on Happy Days.
When That '70s Show premiered on Fox in 1998, the very first episode was set in the year 1976. I always thought that was a shortsighted decision on the part of the producers. They could have started the series in 1970, but I guess they were impatient to get to late '70s stuff like Star Wars, leisure suits, and disco dancing. The nostalgic sitcom ran for eight seasons and 200 episodes, but it only managed to cover about three and a half years in the lives of its characters. What choice did they have? If time had progressed naturally on That '70s Show, the final season would have been taking place in the year 1984!
Happy Days had a similar dilemma, but they handled it somewhat more gracefully. In its early days, the show's raison d'être was pure 1950s nostalgia: sock hops, hula hoops, jukeboxes, malt shops, and plenty of early rock music (Bill Haley, Fats Domino). The scripts are often deliberately vague when it comes to mentioning years, but judging by the pop culture references in the dialogue, the first season of Happy Days seems to take place in the mid-1950s.
Over the course of its eleven seasons, the series covers about a decade in the characters' lives: 1955 to 1965. The changeover from the 1950s to the 1960s happens sometime in the sixth season, though it's barely acknowledged in the dialogue. In the later seasons, nostalgia becomes much less important to the show. Apart from Fonzie's leather jacket and the occasional oldie on the soundtrack, you could be watching any 1980s family sitcom.
Maybe the writers of Happy Days got bored with the 1950s and '60s occasionally. I mean, how many jokes about Dwight Eisenhower can you do? During the seventh season, which takes place circa 1961-62, the show abandoned its usual format for an episode called "The Roaring Twenties." Legendary actor Pat O'Brien (of Angels with Dirty Faces fame) guest stars as Uncle Joe, a garrulous old coot with fond memories of speakeasies, jazz music, and gangsters. This sets up a long flashback sequence with all the Happy Days actors playing 1920s versions of themselves.
Does this little experiment work? Find out when we review "The Roaring Twenties" on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast .

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (1971)

This is always how my driver's license photo turns out. (Photo from Gold Diggers)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Originally published in Gold Diggers (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 1, January/February 1971. Credited to "Shirlee Lane."
Excerpt: "The best way for a certain type of female to be seen, or so she believes, is to commit a crime. There certainly she will have taken out some of the steam or revenge and all the world will know about it in one quick sweep. She has won some kind of a psychological point."
A phrase that haunted Ed Wood.Reflections: How appropriate that When the Topic is Sex should end with an article called "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" That title comes from a 19th century English nursery rhyme that has been attributed to poet Robert Southey. In case you've forgotten, it goes like this:

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails and puppy dog tails
That's what little boys are made of

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice
That's what little girls are made of

That simple little verse had a major impact on Ed Wood, probably from his early childhood when he was still forming his ideas about masculinity and femininity. When little Eddie was a boy, he didn't want to be associated with "snips and snails and puppy dog tails," especially not when he could be made of "sugar and spice and everything nice." (What the hell is a snip, anyway?) 
Ed worked through some of these gender confusion issues in his directorial debut, Glen or Glenda (1953). There, Bela Lugosi's godlike character, The Spirit, repeatedly talks of "puppy dog tails and big fat snails." And during the film's extended dream sequence, the cross-dressing Glen (played by Wood himself) is taunted by an unseen little girl who makes this speech:

I'm a girl. I'm nice. You're a boy. A puppy dog tail. Ha ha ha. Everything nice. Puppy dogs' tails. Puppy dogs' tails. Puppy dogs' tails. I'm a girl. I'm nice. Everything nice, everything nice. Ha ha ha. Puppy dogs' tails.

Eighteen years after Glen or Glenda, Ed Wood was still thinking about that pesky English nursery rhyme. Under the pseudonym "Shirlee Lane," a variation on Ed's own drag name, he penned the 1971 article "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" for Gold Diggers magazine. The premise of the article is rather outrageous. The women's liberation movement, it states with apparent sincerity, is causing women to become criminals! That's right. Men and women are switching roles in our society. Men are becoming more effeminate and wearing their hair long, while women are become more masculine and are stealing cars... and worse! Ed writes with obvious alarm:

A pistol or a rifle in the hands of a woman can be just as dangerous as if held in the hands of a male . . . and just as deadly as if the weapons were being held on target by the best weapons expert.

Female criminality is another classic Wood-ian motif. It's at the center of his scripts for The Violent Years (1956) and Fugitive Girls (1974), plus his novels Devil Girls (1967) and Hell Chicks (1968). The tough, snarly female characters in these stories often act and talk like men. The distaff delinquents in The Violent Years even have masculine-sounding names like Paula, Geraldine, Georgia, and Phyllis (variations on Paul, Gerald, George, and Phil, respectively). Basically, this article suggests that giving women the vote in 1920 eventually led to a generation of female supercriminals. (And, yes, just as in "The Changing Woman," he specifically points to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.)
Does Ed Wood have any sources for the bold claims made in this article? Yes, surprisingly. He quotes Professor Herman Venter, head of the criminology department at the University of Pretoria. According to Venter, South Africa is witnessing a dramatic increase in female criminality as a direct result of "the emancipation drive." He also states that "men throughout the world are losing their fiber and are becoming more and more effeminate." I cannot verify these particular quotes, but Professor Venter was quite real . Wood also quotes a psychiatrist named Dr. John Levy, who also seems legit .
However, Ed Wood's main source for "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" was an article in The Los Angeles Herald Examiner by columnist Phyllis Battelle. Ms. Battelle was a prominent writer from at least the 1950s to the 1970s, and writing a book about the Karen Ann Quinlan "right to die" case in 1977. Apparently, Ed Wood saw Battelle's article in the Herald Examiner, thought it was interesting, and decided to piggyback off her research. He even ends "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" with a passage directly from Battelle:

However in closing this article which was inspired by Phyllis Battelle's column it is only right in using her own closing words: "So in the long run the liberation movement, may prove to be healthy after all. If only we can restrain the female sex from carrying their aggressive privileges too far."

In a sense, then, we can say that When the Topic is Sex ends with Eddie borrowing another writer's words. This, too, is entirely appropriate. Many of the articles in the book were written this way, with Ed casting about for ideas and appropriating the work of other authors.
  But there's still plenty of room for Ed Wood to be Ed Wood in this article! He even mentions his beloved angora sweaters, suggesting that the newly-effeminate males are now wearing them, along with "velvets, satins, nylons and laces." And "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" contains plenty of Ed's trademark tortured syntax. For example, he begins this piece with a long, rambling paragraph about mischievous schoolboys dipping girls' pigtails in inkwells.

We can't help but wonder that if the ball point pen and the automatic Flair pen were not invented and each desk in the schoolroom still had the open inkwell if certain aspects of school life might have reversed itself in that at one time little boys were always dunking the little girl's hair in the inkwell. The little girls didn't have a chance to reciprocate in kind, when those open inkwells were in style few little boys ever had long hair. We wonder if those open inkwells would find the girls of today dunking in the long hair of the boys.

Good god, Ed. That is the longest, most confusing way to phrase your idea. Just try diagramming one of those sentences. It'll kill ya. And Ed keeps the awkwardness going in the next paragraph:

Retaliation devices are in the making if the Women's Liberation puts their demands completely to the foreground.

You might well wonder what the hell "retaliation devices" are. I couldn't tell you. I doubt Ed Wood could have told you in 1971. It was just a phrase that popped into his head. And if it was in his head, it damned sure wound up on the page. That's just how he worked. And this marvelous passage is followed by one in which Eddie states that girls are becoming "just as much of a slob as the boy." That's the magic of Ed Wood. Reading When the Topic is Sex is like being able to download the contents of a man's mind.
Next: My concluding thoughts on When the Topic is Sex

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "Trucking's a Ball" (1974)

Ed Wood wrote about truckers? That's a 10-4, good buddy.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "Trucking's a Ball." Also known as "Truckin's a Ball." Originally published in Fantastic Annual (Pendulum Publishing), 1974. Credited to "Dick Trent."
Excerpt: "The girls will stick out a thumb on the highway, but it will not be directed at the comforts of some late model automobile with the neatly dressed, freshly shaved driver behind the wheel. In fact, the girls won't even put a thumb out to those men. It is only when the roar of the truck comes along that their thighs begin to quiver and their titties begin to rise and fall rapidly under their sweaters or blouses."
Only in the 1970s: C.W. McCall.Reflections: Are you old enough to remember trucker-mania? In the 1970s, the long-haul trucker briefly became a pop culture icon in America, inspiring movies, TV shows, toys, and even pop songs. When else could "Convoy" by C.W. McCall have topped the charts? The timing of this phenomenon actually makes some sense, if you put it into its proper historical context. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, we Americans were deeply distrustful of authority, and truckers seemed like antiestablishment heroes we could root for. They lived by their own rules, often enraging the cops in the process, but they weren't wimpy, peace-loving hippies. They were rough, tough dudes who could handle themselves in a fight.
It's only natural that Ed Wood wrote an article about truckers, but as usual, he had his own particular spin on the subject. "Trucking's a Ball" is not really about truckers, per se, but about the women who obsessively follow truckers around for sexual reasons. Ed has given this matter a lot of thought and pinpointed the exact reason that the ladies love trucker drivers: the smell. As he writes: "It's the man smell. The tough, rough man smell that seems to come off to them as all male . . . and these girls want only that . . . all male." This is one of those days when I'm glad When the Topic is Sex isn't a scratch-and-sniff book.
There's an odd double standard at play here when it comes to personal cleanliness. Ed had nothing but contempt for hippies and wrote often about how filthy they were, both in their clothing and their bodily hygiene. (It's almost never a good sign when a character in one of his novels is wearing dirty jeans.) But he lionizes those same exact qualities in truckers, even pointing out that truckers will wear "the same underwear" for days on end. Why is it okay for truckers to be slobs but not hippies? Maybe it's because truckers are at least contributing to the economy, while hippies probably aren't.
Going into more detail than anyone might want, Ed writes that a tucker's feet "are encased with grime in the heavy socks and boots he's worn for hours on end." That reminded me of a line from Glen or Glenda (1953). "His feet encased in the same, thick, tight-fitting leather that his shoes are made of." That must be one of Ed Wood's weirdest motifs: "encased" feet. 
Speaking of motifs, Ed Wood often used the curious term "pink clouds" to describe the pleasurable sensations that a woman might experience while having sex or taking drugs (or both). I first encountered it while reading his 1967 novel Devil Girls. He uses it here, too, in a passage about what it's like to have sex in a truck while it's actually in motion! Naturally, this requires two truckers: one to make love, another to drive. Ed's imagery is almost hallucinogenic: 

And as they will tell it, this is one of the really great sensations of intercourse . . . when the roar, the throb, the rhythm of the motor comes tearing through every fibre of their bodies, that's when they have intercoursed themselves right up onto pink cloud number nine . . . and it is strange when you hear all these girls telling about the smelling man, the worst of the lot, they have had, yet at all times when they speak of reaching their climax they refer to it as some sort of pink . . . cloud . . . heaven . . .blanket . . . surf . . .always pink . . . and pink in any other terms might be thought of as all the clean things in the world.

Along with those references to pink clouds, Ed makes sure to mention the odor of the truckers, too. He really thought this was a major selling point for women. Maybe there should have been a cologne for men who wanted to smell like a trucker. Eau de Diesel Fuel or something.
Incidentally, "Trucking's a Ball" is yet another article that I had already reviewed on this blog. I first discussed this article back in 2020 , just weeks before the pandemic began. And now here we are, finally emerging from the shadow of COVID-19 after two brutal years, and I'm still writing about this  ridiculous Ed Wood trucker article. The more things change, huh?
Next: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (1971)

Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "The Changing Woman" (1971)

Women are changing, according to Ed Wood. (Photo from Two Plus Two)

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "The Changing Woman." Originally published in Two Plus Two (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 3,  no. 3, September/October 1971. No author credited.
Excerpt: "Many social critics have explained the turbulence of modern times in terms of the seize-the-day life-style of the Atomic Age. Bedroom troubles can often be traced to the same source. Why should a young woman live out the best years of her life, the years of her youth and beauty, with a man who has not begun to tap her pleasure resources?"
Was Ed responding to this book?Reflections: Ed Wood, feminist? You're correct to be skeptical. If you've read Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), specifically the parts detailing Ed's marriage to Kathy Wood, you know that he was not exactly an ally to the women's rights movement. He had more of a caveman mentality in that department. But for an article called "The Changing Woman" in 1971, he at least tried to look at sex and marriage from a woman's perspective. The title, I'm sure, is meant to evoke The Sensuous Woman (1969), the groundbreaking book by Terry Garrity (credited only as "J") that told women it was healthy and normal to enjoy sexuality.
In "The Changing Woman," Ed Wood basically furthers the message of The Sensuous Woman, although, unlike that book, he does not focus on female masturbation. Instead, he focuses on women demanding and receiving satisfaction while having sex with their husbands. Women can't be denied pleasure anymore, says Ed. They've read the findings of Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and have thus become more knowledgeable about sex. The days of them being submissive slaves to their husbands are over. Ed presents this as a step forward for humanity, but maybe there's a touch of fear in it, too, as if some powerful force has been unleashed on the world and now cannot be controlled.
Eddie also launches what must be his most scathing attack on the institution of marriage. I was actually a little taken aback by this passage:

The relation of the sexes in marriage in this country provides one of the greatest mysteries of our culture: how has the institution of matrimony managed to survive such an absurd, unequal, humiliating, exasperating arrangement? We all know the misconceptions involved. The man is the master—sexually as well as authoritatively and economically. The husband takes, the wife gives, submits, yields, and likes it. 

Yes, Ed Wood refers to marriage as "absurd, unequal, humiliating" and "exasperating." Perhaps he was too much in denial to realize that he embodied all the worst sexist stereotypes described in his own article! Or perhaps he did feel guilty about his treatment of Kathy, and this article was his way of atoning for past sins. Only the infinity of a man's mind can really tell the story.
Eddie also writes a lot about the long-running "cold war" between men and women and seems to believe (or worry?) that women will be the ultimate victors. It's interesting that Ed's pal Criswell espoused similar views on his 1970 album The Legendary Criswell Predicts Your Incredible Future. It's my pet theory that Ed ghostwrote at least part of that astonishing LP. In one telling excerpt from the album, Criswell intones:

I predict that man will truly be the slave of woman. You women now control 93% of the wealth and spend 87 cents out of every dollar, so what are we poor men to do? Personally, I welcome it, because we men have made such a mess of things, you women must naturally come to our rescue and do better.

I can very easily imagine Eddie and Cris getting drunk on cheap wine and talking about all of these issues. When it comes to the advancement of women in the 20th century, Ed sees two major milestones: the 19th amendment and the invention of the pill.
By the way, I should mention that Ed Wood finds a comfortable balance between research and improvisation in "The Changing Woman." When discussing female orgasms, he quotes specific, scholarly passages from Human Sexual Response (1966) by Masters and Johnson. So the article has some scientific validity. For the most part, though, this is just Eddie philosophizing off the top of his head. That's good, because it leads to wonderfully incoherent passages like this one:

Selflessness and the ability to give are as important in sex as they are in life. Unfortunately, many women still take to bed with them the old attitude that they are doing their mates a favor just by letting them have their way. They still harbor the old notion that it is more than enough that a man should be allowed to touch their nudity, let alone penetrate them. 

"Touch their nudity"? Okay, Ed, whatever you say.
Next: "Trucking's a Ball" (1974)