Being Angelique

As a tween, I was obsessed with the 1960s soap opera Dark Shadows. In particular, I was fascinated by Angelique, the character played by Lara Parker. Angelique was a witch and a vampire. In particular, she was mysterious and held the main character of the show, Barnabas Collins, under her unyielding spell. I wanted to be her.

But, alas, I was a goofy, and in the current vernacular, nerdy and dorky, kid. I wasn’t clever about much of anything and basically watched television all the time. My neighbor Peter and I once had a Mexican standoff over who knew the most TV commercials. (He won.) So when it came to being like Angelique, I was a bit hopeless.

I wanted so much to be Angelique from Dark Shadows that I made a pair of vampire fangs out of white glow-in-the-dark goop in my Magic Oven with a Creepy Crawlers mold. The rubbery fangs could be positioned under my upper lip and, to me, looked pretty convincing as real teeth. Angelique would call out into the night to her victims, “Come to me.” She would chant the words over and over in an eerie tone as she focused all her energy on her target. “Come to me. Come to me.” The camera would switch back and forth between Angelique in her flowing white gown and the man she was so intently trying to telepathically draw toward her. He would resist knowing his fate if he answered her call, she would redouble her efforts if she felt him fighting her spell. I was captivated. In the end, Angelique always was the conqueror and won her prize. “Oh,” I thought, “to have that kind of power.”

During my Angelique-obsessed phase, my best friend, Evy, had a serious crush on Steve, a boy who lived several streets away. He had curly dark hair, and even at 12 or 13, showed signs of his future athletic physique. In Long Beach, there were pods of kids everywhere. Every street pretty much stuck to its own and didn’t do much intermingling, so seeing Steve outside of school would have been rare. This was especially true in the summer. We just didn’t stray off our streets much until we were closer to being in high school. In the summer of 1971, just before the start of eighth grade, Evy could hardly talk about anyone else but Steve. I could hardly talk about anything else but being Angelique.

In late summer I had an idea. Maybe if Evy and I concentrated hard enough we could summon Steve to us, like Angelique. One early evening I broke off the dried up stalk of a daylily to use as a wand. I waved it around Evy imagining that I was creating a magical aura around her. We then went to the telephone pole at the end of her driveway and pressed the palms of our hands against the splintery wood. We started chanting, “Steve, come to me. Come to me, Steve.” We both focused all our energy and every bit of our attention on his image. As we chanted we thought about him coming out of his house, walking in a sort of trance down Oriole Trail, and then wandering up Berwyn Avenue. We kept this up for a solid ten minutes. And then . . . it happened. Steve came riding his bicycle up our street. Evy and I started screaming.

Steve stopped to find out why we were screaming, which we refused to tell him. He talked to us for a few minutes and then rode off. We tried to summon him again a couple weeks later but to no avail. I couldn’t stopping thinking, though, that for one moment in time, I felt as if I were magic, that I had become Angelique. And Evy thought so, too.

On Halloween that fall, I fixed my hair in ringlets, applied some make-up, dressed up as Angelique, and wore my Creepy Crawlers fangs, so that I could feel the power of being Angelique just one more time.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2014