Knotts and Pryor Still Cracken-em-up From the Other Side

Don Knotts, Richard Pryor Team Up For Madcap Haunting

May 19, 2006 Issue 42•21 of The Onion


ESCONDIDO, CA—The ghosts of comedy legends Don Knotts and Richard Pryor were embroiled in a madcap misadventure Monday, which involved crooks, a missing diamond, and an old fixer-upper mansion haunted by the late actors.

The escapade, characterized by the ectoplasmic pair as "cockamamie" and "crazy-ass bullshit," began early last month, when the spirits of Knotts and Pryor separately took up residence at the old Mayweather place, a 20-room mansion that sits atop a hill on the edge of town. After a long and protracted episode in which the easily frightened ghosts circled the dining room, continually missing each other by a split-second, they finally came face-to-face, only to mutually scream in horror.

"I yelled out, 'A spook! A spook!'" the ghost of Knotts said. "And Richard said, 'Who you callin' a spook, honky?' So I said, 'But—but—but look at you, you're as pale as a ghost!' And Richard said, 'Now I'm pale? Make up your mind, whitey!'"

Knotts' ghost added: "It went on like that for a while, until I learned not to say things that Richard interpreted as racist."

Over the next several days, the unlikely duo were scared by such innocuous things as shadows cast by coatracks, a billowing curtain, and a mouse.

In mid-April, the Patterson family of Van Nuys, CA, moved into the Mayweather Mansion. Don Patterson, who had inherited the forgotten property from an eccentric and wealthy great-aunt, said that he thought it would be exciting to live in a big house, but soon regretted his decision to move when he saw its dilapidated condition.

"Ever since we moved into this crazy old shack, all kinds of fishy things have been happening," said Patterson, 47, a gruff, pragmatic certified public accountant. "Like the other day, I could have sworn I set a bucket of whitewash on the floor of the parlor, but when I opened the door, the dang thing spilled all over my head. But I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this."

Besides their mischevious antics, the two specters have also had a positive impact. Besides helping Duncan, the bowl-cut-wearing 7-year-old son come out of his shell, they also devised a lighthearted scheme to help daughter Marley, 15, get on the high-school cheerleading squad.

And, most astonishingly, while the terrified Knotts was running from a raccoon through the house's walls, he stumbled upon a glittering, 150-carat stone: the famed Starbright Diamond.

"I tried to grab the diamond, but my hand just went through it," the Ghost of Pryor said. "A brother can't even get ahold of some bread when he's dead!"

Early Monday morning, accused serial burglars Hugo Gross and Bobby Lee Shively, who had the only map detailing the diamond's location, invaded the home to retrieve the precious jewel. Young Duncan happened upon the burglars and was bound and gagged. The Ghosts of Knotts and Pryor, who were awakened by Duncan's muffled screams, snuck up on the criminals and scared them into giving up the diamond.

"One fell right through that trapdoor the father kept forgetting about and falling through earlier, and another one backed up into a hot stove, among numerous other shenanigans," the Ghost of Knotts said.

Finally, a sagging piece of roof caved in and knocked the robbers unconscious, and Escondido police officers soon arrived and arrested them.

The Patterson family now owns the Starbright Diamond, and plans to use money from its sale to renovate the mansion. Yet Patterson refused to believe that ghosts were responsible for stopping the caper.

"I tell you, there's no such thing as ghosts," Patterson said. "And the idea of a dead African-American comedian influencing my behavior is absolutely ridiculous. Why, I probably acquired my new swagger and improved lovemaking abilities from watching the MTV with my daughter."

The Knotts and Pryor Ghosts said they will continue haunting the Mayweather Mansion, and plan to follow up the daffy caper with a sequel, unless their old comedy partners, Tim Conway and Gene Wilder, become ghosts themselves first.

© Copyright 2006, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved.The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

A Response to a Friend

I wrote this in response to the email of a friend. It was maybe more valuable to me to put some of these thoughts about how I face the darkness that pervades the planet. I thought I would share it with you.

It's been a long, long time since I've partied in Central Park (try 1969). Spent the night there on acid, bonfire in the trash can, after Procol Harem and Ainsley Dunbar at the Fillmore East. Some of Ainsley Dunbar were there. We found nothing but love and peace there at that time.

My take on spirituality: Confrontation and force will only cause more destruction. The militarists have armed the planet to the teeth. I blow you up, you blow me up, I blow more of you up, you blow more of me up and on and on.

Ekhart Tolle points out that the growing force of love and light is just as active as the growing forces of darkness. The darkness is just "louder". I believe that the only solution lies in our personal spiritual development. As I become more en-light-end, I have an effect on those I meet and stimulate them to further growth, and they effect the ones they meet and so on and so on. The quantum physicists point out that the speed and intensity with which activity is increasing can only lead to annihilation or a quantum shift in global consciousness. Others look at critical mass. As more and more are en-light-end and develop mindfulness, compassion and the capacity to love, that a point will be reached where the numbers of those in the light will catalyze a shift. As one of my teachers points out, this does not mean sitting around in bliss waiting for this to happen. When we see injustice, we should respond. Being of service to en-light-enment requires compassionate action, both inner and outer.

I can't drink one drink to relax because I have the disease of alcoholism. If I have a drink an obsession kicks in for more. We like to put it this way, "One drink is too many and 1,000 drinks is not enough." "Normal" drinkers can apparently do as you said, have a drink to relax at the end of the day then get on with their life. I would suggest to anyone a better alternative to relax: find someone, look into each others eyes, let the picture form in your mind of who you imagine this person to be, then hit the mental "erase" button and let go of that picture. Then look deep into each others eyes and see each other fresh, new and reborn. Try it you'll be amazed.

Love is powerful. It just doesn't get experienced by enough people often enough.

You got me going. Thanks, I needed to hear myself and I hope it gives you something.

Peace Brother.

SpringWind

We Know Somethin' You Don't Know

Ritual, dance, prayer and celebration of life comes in many sizes shapes and colors. We fearful humans tend to get attached to our forms, especially when the other forms seem so strange. What is different in the ritual dance in this video and the ones in the Native American Pow Wow, the Suffi dances and the Christian Praise dancing. The only difference I detect is a different culture and different environment, but the same compassion, the same Love. God doesn't care about appearance and form, (s)he only cares about the heart that motivates the action.

One Love, One God.

Peace,

SpringWind

WE KNOW SOMETHING (DJ Format)

Video Code provided by VideoCodeZone.Com

Sir Jello at "Lost and Clowned"

Here are pics of my clown, Sir Jello, at last weekends performance of "Lost and Clowned". Sir Jello is the one in Black with the hat.

Happy Birthday Wavy (3 days late)

A Quick Sketch of My Thumbnail

From "Something Good For A Change"

by Wavy Gravy

Born: Hugh Romney, May 15, 1936, East Greenbush, New York.
Sign: Slippery when wet.


Education: P.S. 16, Albany, New York. William Hall High School, West Hartford, Connecticut. Volunteered for the military draft in the fall of '54 and was honorably discharged after twenty-two months of service in the United States Army. (I am in no way recommending the military as a career choice. The Korean War had just wound down and I figured it was a reasonable assumption that I could slip in and out before the next little war rolled around. It was a dumb decision on my part but it helped pay for my college education.)

1957: Entered Boston University Theater Department under the Korean G.I. Bill. Started jazz and poetry on the east coast at Pat's Pebble in the Rock on Huntington Avenue in Boston. After a year and a half, defected to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York City. Graduated in 1961.

1958-1962: Attended Neighborhood Playhouse by day, served by night as poetry and entertainment director (with John Brent) at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village. (I went from being a published teen-aged beatnik poet to hip comic tongue dancer right before my very eyes.) Was married to Elizabeth by a blind Harlem Street singer and preacher named Reverend Gary Davis in the Gaslight.

1962: Moved to California at the request of Lenny Bruce, who became my part-time manager. Recorded "Hugh Romney, Third Stream Humor" for World Pacific Records. (I recorded this live when I was the opening act for Thelonious Monk on the night the great Club Renaissance closed its doors forever.)

1963: Joined the Committee, an improvisational theater company in San Francisco. Daughter Sabrina born. Purchased a condo in Marin City and a Packard Caribbean convertible in Hollywood. Tuned in, turned on, and dropped out -- way out. Entered deep space. Left wife, daughter, and stuff and journeyed to northern Arizona to join up with Hopi Indians and await the coming global cataclysm. (The Hopis said I was early but let me hang out anyway and regroup my head.) Connected with interconnectedness of everything and surrendered to Law of Sacred Coincidence.
Returned to Los Angeles and regrouped life. Divorced wife, gave away stuff, and began to float aimlessly on the ocean of one thing after another.

1964: Financed free-floating lifestyle through sale of single ounces of marijuana packaged in decorator bags and containing tiny toys. (The dubious apex of this short-lived profession was when I scored a kilo for the Beatles.) Met Bonnie Jean Beecher at her restaurant, the Fred C. Dobbs. She put peanuts in my hamburger. Together we survived L.A. Acid Tests and in 1965 we married each other. We also married the Hog Farm. The Hog Farm is the name still associated with our expanded family. We acquired it while living rent free on a mountaintop in Sunland, California, in exchange for the caretaking of forty actual hogs. Within a year of moving there, the people engaged in our bizarre communal experiment began to outnumber the pigs. At first we all had separate jobs. I had a grant to teach brain-damaged children improvisation while teaching a similar class to contract players at Columbia Pictures. Harrison Ford was one of my students. My wife Bonnie was a successful television actress. Joining the scene were musicians, a computer programmer, a race-car driver, a telephone company executive, a cinematographer, several mechanics, and a heap of hippies.

1966: We performed light shows and energy games at the Shrine Exposition Hall in Los Angeles with Cream, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead. The Shrine holds ten thousand people. On Sunday afternoons we had free happenings on our mountaintop. Maybe a hundred people in open celebration.

1967: We scored a couple of old school buses with funds earned as extras in Otto Preminger's movie, Skidoo, and outfitted them for our exodus. I underwent my first spinal surgery and joined the caravan of Hog Farmers in New Mexico.

1968: Summer Solstice. Accompanying our extensive entourage was Pigasus Pig, the first female black-and-white hog candidate for president. We debuted our traveling road show at the Los Alamos proving grounds and set off cross-country to share our open celebration with the rest of the free world. (Driver! The United State of America! And step on it!) We were a light show, a rock band, a painting, a poem, an anti-war rally, an anthem for freedom and change. Mostly we were a palette for the audience to blast off from, and the audience was also the spaceship and the star. Bought twelve-acre farm in Llano, New Mexico.

1969: Served as chief of the Please Force at the Woodstock music festival, where the Hog Farm administered the free kitchen and bad-trip/freak-out tent. Was captured in the movie "Woodstock" and propelled into the world press. Became good-humored peacemaker and purveyor of life support at major rock festivals and political demonstrations of the sixties and seventies. Changed name to Wavy Gravy at the Texas Pop Festival. Experienced spinal fusion and acquired all-star cast.

1970: Helped initiate an experiment of buying back the earth and deeding it back to itself. Purchased 590 acres in northern Vermont and called it Earth People's Park. Made a movie, Medicine Ball Caravan, for Warner Brothers, which ended up in England.

1971: Journeyed with two buses filled with food, medical supplies, and forty-two people from seventeen countries, to Pakistan and the Himalayas. Returned to United States and captured record for having the largest number of active diseases in a single human being at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. Upon my release, I dictated my book The Hog Farm and Friends and traveled to the west coast.

1972: Third and final spinal fusion. The surgery left me in my cast of thousands, firmly ensconced at Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz mountains. This is a center for alternative education rented by David Crosby for me to recuperate at with the whole Hog Farm. Bonnie Jean gave birth to 'Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk truckstop Romney' at the Tomahawk Truckstop in Boulder, Colorado. (he has since simplified the name to: Jordan Romney). We helped the Zippies run a rock for president and a roll for vice president (so you can always eat the vice president); I lose the rock in a New York taxicab. We traveled to Sweden for the United Nations Conference on HumanEnvironment with a contingent of eco-freaks, indigenous Americans, poets, scientists, and Margaret Mead.

1973: Blanko.

1974: The largest teaching hospital in Southeast Asia was destroyed by U. S. bombers on Christmas Day. I joined others in effort to rebuild Bach Mai hospital. Camp Winnarainbow founded in the Mendocino woodlands.

1975: Woolsey Street house purchased by the Hog Farm, followed soon thereafter by the founding of the Babylon Telephone Answering Service on the front porch. I attended the World Survival Symposium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and started a new world religion in San Francisco called The First Church of Fun. Wife Bonnie Jean takes Sufi name, "Jahanara."

1976: American bicentennial and birth of the Birthday Party, which nominated Nobody for president. I journeyed to Kansas and the Republican convention, where I was advised by state and federal agents, "Get out of here. You're too weird to arrest." Tenth wedding anniversary. Bill Graham produces The Last Waltz. I told him, "Bill, you shouldn't have."

1977: More blanko.

1978: Temporarily died in Berkeley and was later resurrected in Boulder Creek and Boston.

1979: Purchased the Henry Street house and sold Woolsey Street house, with the exception of the front porch, where we continued to maintain our answering service. The Seva Foundation founded in Heartlands, Michigan.

1980: "Nobody for President" tours cross-country in the family Greyhound, which is temporarily dubbed "The Nobody One."

1982: Began purchase of land in Laytonville, California, called Black Oak Ranch.

1983: Moved Camp Winnarainbow to Laytonville.

l984: Toured in Greyhound bus with Unreal Band for Nobody. Seva "Sing Out for Sight" concert held outside Toronto with The Band and the Grateful Dead.

1986: Turn fifty. Had mind blown publicly by family and friends at massive Berkeley benefit.

1987: Jerry Garcia, with acoustic and electric bands, inaugurated our annual fundraiser to help pay for Black Oak Ranch. Produced in cahoots with Bill Graham, it is called "Electric on the Eel."

1988: Nobody IV tour, with the rock band Vicious Hippies. We went from sea to shining sea. Busted with the homeless in Washington, D.C. Help produce Home Aid Concert for The Seva Foundation in New York City at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

1989: Woodstock twenty-year anniversary.

1990: Hog Farm twenty-five-year reunion. Ran for Berkeley City Council with slogan "Let's elect a real clown for a change." Lost election, but kept marbles, mind, mittens, and sense of humor.

1992: Became ice-cream flavor for Ben & Jerry's.

1994: Master of Ceremonies at Woodstock 2.




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