The Rule of Jenny Pen: A Geri-Horror Masterclass

There is a growing trend within the horror genre in which aging is being employed as a mechanism of terror. Geriatric horror—or, abridged, geri-horror—is taking the inevitably of aging (frightening in its own right) and factors closely associated with growing older (dementia and cognitive decline, physical deterioration, isolation and loneliness, communities for the elderly such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities) and examining them through the context of the horror genre.

Geri-horror is the natural successor to the hagsploitation movement in film of the 1960s and 1970s in which former Hollywood starlets would play deranged old women. The formula was simple: glam it down and camp it up. This subgenre—also known as “hag horror” or “grand dame Guignol"—captured Hollywood's seeming disdain for older women at the time yet, in an ironic, subversive twist, gave some of these actresses the best roles of their later careers. Think Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or Davis (again), Olivia De Haviland, and Agnes Moorehead in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) or Crawford (again) in Straight-Jacket (1964) or Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) or Shelley Winters in both Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and What's the Matter with Helen? (1971).

In geri-horror, expectations that elderly people are kind and harmless are upended. Take Minnie and Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), for example, who turn out not to be frail elderly neighbors but satanic cultists and master manipulators in the plot to bring the Antichrist into being. Keeping with the satanism theme, there’s the entire community of senior citizens in the film The Brotherhood of Satan (1971) who are turning the children of a small California desert town into Satan worshipers or the eccentric Ulmans, played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, in Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009) who lure a young babysitter into a sinister trap. In 1988, The Legend of Hell House director John Hough employs silver screen legends Yvonne DeCarlo and Rod Steiger to play the unhinged parents of a weird, murderous family in the slasher American Gothic. Earlier, Lassie actor Arthur Space and television actress Mary Jackson played deranged proprietors of a sham resort where vacationing college girls were lured, fattened up, and then (literally) served up on platters in the lurid Texas Chainsaw Massacre cannibalism precursor, Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972).

At other times in geri-horror, old age itself is the source of the horror. In the film adaptation of Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story (1981), a group of elderly men calling themselves the Chowder Society are plagued by guilt-ridden nightmares stemming from an impulsive act in their collective past. In the film Late Phases (2014), werewolves preying upon the residents of a retirement community become a metaphor for struggling to relocate a physically challenged parent against their will into a retirement community. This one is stacked with a fantastic over-60 cast that includes Tina Louise (Gilligan’s Island), Rutanya Alda (Mommie Dearest, Girls Nite Out, Amityville II: The Possession, The Dark Half), Caitlin O’Heaney (Savage Weekend, He Knows You’re Alone), Karen Lynn Gorney (Saturday Night Fever), and Tom Noonan (Wolfen, The Monster Squad). In M. Night Shyamalan’s pandemic-era Old (2021), the acclaimed director adapts the French-language graphic novel Sandcastle written by Pierre Oscar Lévy from France and drawn by Frederik Peeters from Switzerland, taking the body horror route to show aging as grotesque and inescapable—much in the way 2024’s The Substance does. Shyamalan’s other geri-horror contribution—2015’s The Visit—offered up a pair of sinister grandparents whose increasingly bizarre and disquieting behavior is cleverly couched within the Alzheimer’s symptom of “sundown syndrome.” Dementia takes centerstage in Relic (2020), an Australian gem of a cinematic metaphor about how the disease not only wreaks havoc on the victim but also on those closest—often caregivers.

In yet other works, aging is a badge of honor—and a weapon in confronting horror. In She Will (2021), Alice Krige plays an aging actress who goes to a healing retreat after a double mastectomy, where she discovers that the process of such surgery opens up questions about her very existence, leading her to start to question and confront past traumas. Likewise, Jamie Lee Curtis stepped back into her iconic role as terrorized babysitter Laurie Strode for David Gordon Green’s trilogy Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2023)—only this time her PTSD has fueled her preparedness, making her an AARP card-carrying survivalist and Final Grandma. This theme of “Don’t Fuck with Old People” is carried out again in Don’t Breathe (2016) and VFW (2019).

Requisite history lesson aside, The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)—directed by James Ashcroft and written by Ashcroft and Eli Kent, based on the short story of the same name by Owen Marshall—is the latest, and perhaps most fully realized contribution to the geri-horror subgenre to date. This haunting, malicious New Zealand-lensed psychological tale of elder-on-elder abuse features Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush as Stefan Mortensen, a judge who suffers a stroke, mid-sentencing, from the bench. He finds himself admitted to a nursing home (or “care home” as is the geographic idiom) for rehabilitation. His character, seemingly friendless, is the epitome of an entitled elite—dismissive toward women, caustic, and outright rude at times. The post-stroke wheelchair he finds himself in does little to humble him. Enter multiple Emmy and Tony Award winner and two-time Academy Award nominee John Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a fellow resident who’s as kooky as he is dangerous. Before becoming a resident, Crealy was the longtime handyman at Royale Pine Mews and that familiarity with the facility and its grounds gives him a different type of entitlement. He’s a geriatric bully—commandeering other residents’ food when the well-meaning if inattentive staff isn’t looking, aggressively shoving other residents out of the way during a dance activity, and—worst of all—paying nocturnal visits to his fellow residents’ room in the middle of the night to terrorize them with an eyeless hand puppet he calls Jenny Pen. The scenes in which Lithgow demands a pledge of allegiance to the titular doll that includes “licking its asshole” (thankfully, just the underside of Lithgow’s wrist) are chilling to the bone. Ashcroft wisely uses Lithgow’s towering 6’4” frame to powerfully frame the power dynamic between him and his frail elderly counterparts.

Crealy’s cruelty to the nursing home’s other residents varies from the humiliating (dumping a urinal full of pee onto Mortensen’s crotch while in bed) to the downright sadistic (tugging violently on the newly-inserted catheter of Mortensen’s roommate Tony Garfield (George Henare) or leading a demented woman who spends the majority of her screen time looking for the family about to pick her up and take her home any minute out of the gated grounds where tragedy befalls her). Although Mortensen reports the abuse, the nursing home’s administration does little to investigate, dismissing his concerns as part of his adjustment disorder. As Mortensen’s rehab fails to progress, he gradually loses his voice to the endemic ageism that sees the institutionalized elderly as ignorable. Still, Mortensen is determined to bring Crealy’s reign of terror to an end—using whatever means necessary. The film gradually builds in a tense game of cat-and-mouse before the two geriatric foes finally square off.

Ashcroft and company do a superb job of portraying life in a nursing home—from the near-drowning Mortensen experiences when left unattended in a bathtub when the aide leaves to retrieve towels to the way the center’s staff is portrayed as generally caring more about completing tasks than listening to what their elderly charges try to tell them. There is an intrinsic sadness hanging over Royale Pine Mews even as festive activities take place in the background and the residents’ care needs seem tended to adequately enough. It’s here—in the loneliness and social isolation at the end of one’s life, when autonomy is slowly lost and hope abandoned—that the geri-horror aspects of The Rule of Jenny Pen really kick in. There can be no happy ending because even if the villain is defeated, the audience knows that there is no escape for Mortensen from the decay aging brings.

Circling back to our de facto history lesson at the beginning of this review, The Rule of Jenny Pen is also notable for subverting the rules of the hagsploitation subgenre—here enlisting two Hollywood males of a certain age (Rush, 73 and Lithgow, 79) and placing them in the psycho-biddy cinematic scenario usually reserved for women. Ashcroft ably proves that the horrors of growing old in an ageist society aren't reserved just for women. It’s just another bit of the understated brilliance of this film that will likely go on to have a long shelf life.

Queer Horror Anthologies Make History

From time to time, I’ve been known to share an opinion or two. 

Stop laughing. I’ll wait.

Those opinions usually come from something I feel passionate about and never without factual basis—even if the conclusions drawn are up for debate. Last year around this time, I was publicly lamenting the fact that the Horror Writers Association had once again failed to elevate any queer horror anthologies onto the Bram Stoker Awards® final ballot. Note that when I refer to the Horror Writers Association, I refer to its membership-at-large, not its Board of Trustees, its officers, or the countless volunteers that somehow keep the behemoth venerable writing organization running. Its members—as a whole—failed once again to push through a single queer horror anthology. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“Neither their jury system (put in place largely to balance the popularity contest aspect of the member vote) nor their membership have put a single LGBTQ+/queer horror anthology on the ballot since 2009. Likewise, not a single queer horror anthology has won since that same year. In fact, only one queer horror anthology has been nominated in the history of the category, which originated in 1998. A single queer horror anthology in 26 years. As a queer anthologist, this depresses me to no end. #StokersSoStraight?”

The single queer horror anthology that was nominated and won for Superior Achievement in an Anthology in 2009 was the first I’d edited (with Chad Helder) in the Unspeakable Horror anthology series—Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (Dark Scribe Press, 2008). I remember returning to my Burbank hotel room after the awards ceremony and being overwhelmed by the congratulatory words and sentiments from LGBTQ writers from across the globe on social media. I felt as if I’d broken some invisible lavender ceiling that night and that its shattering would open the door to other queer anthologists and their queerly curated collections. Alas, the opposite would happen. It had taken 11 years for a single queer horror anthology to make its mark upon the Stokers anthology category; sadly, it would take 16 additional years after that nomination and win before another queer horror anthology made the final ballot. 

My criticism last year made the rounds—was cheered by some, frowned upon by others. Many stayed silent. Whatever the immediate reaction, I’d like to believe that my rebuke found its way into a few hearts and minds. Whether the HWA membership read a little more widely this year or the anthology jury placed some greater emphasis on diversity in its picks, I was positively thrilled yesterday when the final ballot was announced, and two queer horror anthologies were named finalists in the Superior Achievement in an Anthology category! Both Rob Costello’s We Mostly Come Out at Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures (Running Press Kids, 2024) and Sofia Ajram’s Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror (Ghoulish Books, 2024) are in the running for the prestigious award this year. They have now made history as only the second and third, respectively, expressly LGBTQ+ horror anthologies to be nominated in the 27 years since the category originated. And should one of them win on the evening of June 14th, it will become only the second queer horror anthology to ever do so. Even better is the fact that these two queer horror anthologies are spectacularly dissimilar in tone and audience, demonstrating the breadth of queer horror. 

Representation in the genre I’ve loved since I was a kid old enough to watch Karen Black run around her apartment terrorized by that nasty little Zuni fetish doll has been a subject that’s near and dear to my heart for decades. Having once criticized the Horror Writers Association’s membership and jury for not including queer horror anthologies in its Bram Stoker Awards® final ballot, I want to publicly praise both for their inclusiveness in doing so this year—twice! And, lastly, just like I was inspired by fearless queer editors like Michael Rowe and his seminal Queer Fear duo of anthologies in crafting what has become the longest-running anthology series of original queer horror, I hope fledgling anthologists will, too, take inspiration from editors Costello and Ajram and dream up their own collections of queer horror and smash through even higher lavender ceilings. 

Elevating queer voices is more important, more vital than ever before.

The Case for Anthologists

Discussion has cropped up on the Internet regarding anthologies and the editors who curate them and the writers who contribute stories to them. An open letter to the varies bodies that administer speculative fiction awards has been circulating that calls for Best Anthology awards to be awarded to each contributor of the anthology, as well as the editor(s). The proposal calls for an “equal share of the award” for each contributor. Part of the justification for this is that the editors “have not contributed a single story” to the anthology.

First, and foremost, I appreciate the discussion and the civility that has ensued despite differing opinions. I did not immediately weigh in on the issue, preferring instead to sit back and listen to the opinions of others—of those on both sides of this discussion—for a bit on various social media sites. But in some of the responses, loaded words like “injustice” and “inequity” and “unfair” have been introduced into the discourse.

Speaking specifically from the horror-side of the equation, as a point of clarification, the Shirley Jackson Awards have 6 categories—five are exclusively for writers, one for editors (the Edited Anthology category). The Bram Stoker Awards have 13 categories—eleven are exclusively for writers with one solely for editors (Superior Achievement in an Anthology) and a second (Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction) that could be won by either a writer or an editor. Are 2 to 3 editor-eligible awards out of 19 really an "injustice" or constitute "inequity" as has been characterized elsewhere? Neither one of these award bodies have a "Best Editor" award. So, at least in the cases of these two genre awards, an 85/15 split for writers and editors seems more than equitable.

I have both edited anthologies and contributed original works to others. When the editors of anthologies to which I've contributed have been nominated for an award, I celebrate them. I understand that my role was to write a story (or submit something already finished) and cash the check for said story. On occasion, that may include a few hours of research. Even after this business transaction, I still try to be a good cheerleader for the anthology's success. As a contributor, those were my obligations. As an editor, I'm responsible for developing the concept/theme, developing the pitch that sells the anthology to a publisher or convinces an agent of its potential to sell, negotiating an advance that ensures I can pay contributors at or above the prevailing professional rate (or bankrolling that portion myself in advance), reading through hundreds of slush pile submissions, notifying each author who submits of their story's acceptance or rejection, preparing author contracts/agreements, sending them out, and tracking their return. As the editor, I'm editing each one of the stories and working with the contributors on revisions, deciding on the TOC order, proofreading each story in the manuscript at least twice (usually more), pulling the manuscript together into one document, writing the introduction, working with the publisher on the cover concept and art, and proofreading the manuscript after it's been formatted. As the editor, I'm engaged in the pre-release marketing—email interviews, virtual interviews and podcasts, social media boosts—keeping the contributors updated on reviews and award nominations. For Other Terrors, my co-editor purchased and mailed each contributor a t-shirt with the anthology's cover on it at her own expense in celebration of the anthology and everyone who contributed to it.

So, respectfully, no, I do not believe that an award nomination or win for an edited anthology should be equally shared, as has been proposed. Each one of contributing writers has opportunities to be recognized for their work as a contributor to an anthology in one of several short fiction categories in those same awards. So why the call to dilute the anthologist’s single opportunity to be recognized within either of these awards bodies? Using Other Terrors, as an example, one of our contributors—the magnificent Tananarive Due—was recognized for her contribution to the anthology with a Locus Award nomination for her superb closer “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge” in the Novelette category. The anthology itself was not nominated. Should Rena and I—as editors of that story in our anthology—also been recognized as Locus nominees because (under the proposal’s logic) anthologies are a group effort? Of course not—that’s ludicrous. Likewise, it’s ludicrous to equate the amount of labor, time, and creativity that an anthologist pours into curating a 100k-word collection with the writer’s (inarguably valuable) single story contribution for which they have ample opportunity for awards recognition on their own. Again, with an 85/15 split between writers and editors in terms of awards eligibility in both the Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Awards, there is hardly a case that can be made for inequity.

Using an analogy from another art form, let’s take movies to illustrate the point here. Like an anthology, it takes numerous artists of various kinds to create a film. There is the film’s director, the actors, the producers, the screenwriter, the costume and set designers, the cameraman, the publicists, and countless others—many individuals who contribute to the success of a film. When a film is nominated for and wins an Academy Award for Best Picture, the producers win the actual award. The actors and everyone else involved in the film get bragging rights to having been featured in/worked on an Oscar-winning film, but the honor is bestowed upon the producer(s) (i.e., the person(s) who oversees the film’s production, the person(s) who plans and coordinates various aspects of the film’s creation, such as selecting the script, coordinating writing, directing, editing, and arranging financing).

As someone who strives to be a good and professional anthologist, I think the contributors should always be acknowledged and thanked in public forums; when I won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology in 2009, I named each contributor in my acceptance speech. If OTHER TERRORS was to win the SJA, the same would occur. Throughout the process for OTHER TERRORS and my latest anthology, contributors were repeatedly tagged in each and every social media post highlighting a starred review or notable mention. I even asked the art department at Harper Collins to design a graphic celebrating the anthology's SJA nomination (which they happily did) and I immediately emailed every contributor to thank them for being a part of the anthology and to offer them the graphic to share. I think only 4 out of 20+ contributors actually did.

That all said, while I still hold to the idea that it's the editor(s) who is credited with the nomination or award for an edited anthology, I see absolutely no harm in a certificate being bestowed upon the contributors acknowledging that their story was included in an anthology that was nominated and/or won the <insert award name here> award. As was said elsewhere, contributors still get bragging rights for being included in said anthology, on top of being paid for their work (hopefully at or above the prevailing per word rate, as they should).

First Love and Loss (or For Jimmy)

I was 18 the first time I fell in love. Not the love-is-patient-love-is-kind sort of love, but the kind of love that one—if you’re lucky—experiences at the cusp of adulthood when the emotions are adult, but the emotional processing mechanisms haven’t quite caught up. That frantic, desperate, one-minute-you’re happy/the-next-minute-you’re-an-emotional-mess kind of love. Messy, passionate, all-consuming, and ultimately doomed. That was the way it was for me with Jimmy, who I met at the first nursing home I ever worked in—the inevitably named Foothill Acres. Jimmy worked in the kitchen; I worked as an orderly. (These were in the pre-certification days when the girls were nurses aides, and the boys were orderlies.) Our fellow crew on the 3 pm to 11 pm shift of building 1 was largely comprised of high schoolers—there was my best friend at the time, Greg, a fellow Immaculatan, Sharon and Denise and Chrissy who all attended Hillsborough High, and then there was Jimmy, who attended Somerville High School.  There was another guy, too, whose image blips at the periphery of my memory—Bruce maybe?

We forged a tight bond that often led to extracurricular outings after our shift—I distinctly remember late night trips to Denny’s on the Somerville Circle as one of them. There were parties at various houses when the parents were away, and then there was the one night we all hung out at a park in Neshanic Station, near Jimmy’s old house on Pearl Street. Now, I knew I was gay from a very young age, but this was the mid-1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic when the word “gay” was synonymous in the minds of many with the disease. So, I did what many young gay kids did back then, which was to “date” girls. I was pretty confident in who I was and the type of life ahead of me, less so in those years about how to execute said life. So, I played the role that was expected of me.

But that night in that little park in Neshanic Station changed my life forever. Our group had all been hanging out, drinking, laughing. As the hours wore on, members of the group left one-by-one or in pairs until it was just Jimmy and me, alone, under the most star-filled sky on a temperate night. I believe it was late June because I had just graduated high school. There had been no discernible flirtation or obvious attraction between us that I could recall, but that night we connected in the most beautiful and gentlest of ways. The only way I can describe the experience all these years later is that it felt organic. Don’t ask me who made the first move or how a blanket or sleeping bag suddenly appeared—because I remember so few of the details, only the feelings of the experience. And it was beautiful.

That summer was the best summer of my young life. I understood my own truth more than ever. Jimmy and I were inseparable for those months—except for an agonizing week when he flew to Seattle with his family. I still remember sending him off with a mix tape (I can only remember that Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love” was on the playlist) and a letter professing my feelings. Otherwise, we slept at each other’s houses where the biggest worry was making too much noise, or we would hop in his ’67 green Mustang and head down to the Jersey shore where we’d get a motel room for the night. There were even one or two make-out sessions in the back seat of that old Mustang, engine idling, parked down some dark, old dirt road when neither of our family homes were accommodating. It was an intense summer during which my feelings only deepened—and I never missed an opportunity to express them to Jimmy, who was far less forthcoming with what was going on inside his head and heart. Our nursing home group of friends knew on some level that there was something more than a close friendship between us, but again, those conversations didn’t really readily flow naturally back in those days. We acted out the roles prescribed to us by society.

September came and Jimmy began his senior year at Somerville High School. That was the beginning of the end for our torrid summer romance. In the end, I think I’ve always been an old soul—knowing what I wanted, which was stability and companionship…yes, even at that age. Jimmy still wanted to experience all that lay before him. I didn’t handle any of it well back in those days before I could recognize that love had turned into infatuation. I know I made a lot of mistakes and hurt Jimmy, who was doing nothing more than trying to be a high school senior. Wisely, he eventually cut me off. I remember the intensity of those emotions and feeling alone and frantic for an unrequited love. Relationships with friends suffered and I acted like a fool, culminating in a stupid act of desperation in a last-ditch effort to get his attention. Ultimately, he graduated from high school and went away to college in Syracuse without looking back. Reluctantly, I eventually found a way to move on with mine. Time has the best way of soothing over the jagged edges of painful memories.

Flashforward 20 years later and through the wonder of the Internet and social media, Jimmy—who was now going by “CJ”—and I reconnected back in 2010. We caught up and stayed connected all these years. We made peace with our shared past. Apologies were exchanged and accepted. In 2011, we met up again for the first time since we were teenagers. Jimmy met me at my weekend place in Manhattan. He treated me to a lovely Italian dinner at ViceVersa on West 51^st Street, and then I treated him to the theater to see the limited engagement (and Broadway debut) of The Normal Heart at the Golden Theater. That teenage love we shared briefly over that magical summer of ’86 was far back in both of our rearview mirrors, but the act of coming together again was a long overdue closure in some weird but comforting way.

That was the last time I saw Jimmy. We’ve stayed in touch regularly via text and Facebook. We’d message during his mother’s chemotherapy appointments a few years back, or I’d try to cheer him during one of his own unsettling cardiac procedures, and there was the one time—honest to God—that he saw on Facebook that Brian and I were about to meet Chita Rivera in her dressing room following a performance of Terrence McNally’s The Visit at the Lyceum Theatre and texted me a message to give to her. I did as directed, and she lit up! Jimmy last sent me a message on March 16^th with a link to an interview about how Jamie Lee Curtis met and married her husband. His sarcasm and naughty sense of humor was ever present in those exchanges and never failed to make me smile.

Yesterday, I received word from our dear mutual friend, Sharon, that Jimmy died on Wednesday afternoon. He laid down for a nap and never woke up. I immediately cried and the memories flooded back as their liable to do in times of the worst news possible. I’m eternally grateful for our first shared experience with love and the lessons it taught us—and even more so that we eventually made it out the other side, neither of us worse for the wear and probably better people for it. I’m glad Jimmy got to live the life he wanted, to experience love and heartbreak, to do things on his terms. Some of the stories he shared were so colorful, and I remember being nothing but happy that he got to experience life so fully, even if it’s been tragically cut short at the age of 54.

As I wrote this blog, I stopped and searched through the shoebox I keep of old photos. I was saddened but not surprised to realize that I don’t have a single photo of Jimmy and me together from 1986. We didn’t even take one together when we met up in 2011. This left me momentarily heartbroken, but then I realized that maybe we were so busy living those moments, present and engaged with each other, that we never thought to memorialize our time together. Instead, I’ve chosen Henry Scott Tuke’s beautiful painting, “Aquamarine,” to accompany and capture my sentiments here.

Fly high, Jimmy. You will always and forever hold a very special and indelible place in my heart, even as it breaks today over your loss.

xoxo Vince

A Tribute in Pen and Ink

When my Dad passed away this past December, I wanted to do something special with a portion of the estate proceeds—something that would have significant personal meaning. I’ve mentioned before how my Dad would take me to the movies every Saturday as part of our weekend “buddy days” when I was a kid. They were usually Irwin Allen disaster flicks or movies with a lot of car chases, but then a little film called Jaws was released. I was eight years old and can still feel the knot in my stomach the first time I heard the first notes of the film’s now-legendary theme music. I think I only made up to the point when poor skinny-dipping Chrissie gets slammed into the buoy before I pleaded with my Dad to leave. It would take three subsequent tries before I could make it through the entire film, each time making it a little further into the film before my ever-patient father heard the desperation of the “Please, Daddy…can we leave now?” in my voice. But 1978 was a game changer for ten-year-old me—on the cusp of adolescence—with the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. If Jaws hooked me, Halloween reeled me in and cemented what would become a lifelong adoration of both slasher films and a certain actress named Jamie Lee Curtis. It therefore seemed fitting to incorporate the themes of movies and JLC into my tribute and that something special to have created in memory of my wonderful, loving father.

 

I’ve long been a fan of illustrator and famed caricaturist Ken Fallin, who first came to prominence in 1983 doing the posters and advertising for the popular satirical revue Forbidden Broadway in the style of the famous pen and ink drawings of the legendary Al Hirschfeld—a concept in homage to the great theatrical caricaturist. He’s since gone on to illustrate roughly 500 notable people for the Wall Street Journal and has contributed countless other illustrations to The Boston Herald, The New Yorker Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Playbill (among others). Private collectors of Ken’s work include Angela Lansbury, Warren Buffett, Barbra Streisand, Sarah Jessica Parker, Darren Criss, Bernadette Peters, Sarah Paulson, Bradley Cooper, and Sir Patrick Stewart. Fallin did a lovely caricature of the cast of 2014’s Broadway production of Harvey Fierstein’s Casa Valentina, which I saw with my friend James and loved. I reached out to Ken and purchased a print of the drawing, which hangs today in one of our guest rooms. 

So, the idea came to me: To commission an original caricature of Jamie Lee Curtis, in character, from some of her most notable film roles—in honor of my Dad and the love of movies that he endowed in me. I reached out to Ken who, despite being in the process of undergoing radiation therapy at the time, graciously agreed to accept the commission. Flash forward six-plus months later, and my original, hand-drawn caricature collage of Jamie Lee Curtis arrived yesterday. Featured are her characters from Trading Places, Blue Steel, Freaky Friday, True Lies, Knives Out, Scream Queens, and Halloween II—all surrounding a lovely portrait of her taken at last year’s Venice Film Festival. There will also be a colorized print version on its way to me shortly. To say that I’m beyond thrilled with it would be an understatement.

Once properly framed, this exquisite and one-of-a-kind piece of art will hang proudly somewhere where I’ll see it every day and think of my beloved Dad and our “buddy days” at the movies all those years ago. 

Speechless with gratitude. Thank you, Ken.