E/R:

The best single season comedy of the 80's.

Hot Potato by Larry Hama

from GI Joe: A Real American Hero #1)

I will never understand why this story has never been reprinted. I think this is where I started to fall in love with the character of Scarlett, she was tough as nails and doesn't play around! She was no little frail to be sure! SHe actually pulls a gun on Snake-Eyes in this story AND makes allusions to committing suicide by saving her 2 last bullets for her and Snake-Eyes if they can't get out of the trouble they're in! On second thought, maybe THAT'S why they never reprinted this! Too adult for the kiddies?!

EVIL DEAD: The Series by Omarsnake

Episode: "Ash to the Infinite Power"

TEASER
FADE IN
as a young man runs from a cabin in the woods.
He is 16 years old, with dark, short-cropped hair and lanky, good-looking features.
And he is screaming for his life.
Behind him, a figure races up to the doorway and stares out at him. It is a husky man wearing a sheriff's uniform. His eyes glow red and black veins zig-zag across his face. "Dead by dawn, boy!" he drawls, taunting the youth, then laughs maniacally.
The young man leaps over the hood of the sheriff's car, marked "Spiegel County Sheriff" with the Tennessee state logo underneath. He throws open the door and dives into the driver's seat.
He looks around frantically, but finds no sign of keys.
At the door of the cabin, the demon-possessed sheriff jingles his keychain. "Lookin' fer these, sonny?" he yells, then swallows the keys.
The young man winces at this. "I shoulda paid more attention to all those movies," he mutters, looking through the car and trying to find a weapon. "They made it look so easy to hotwire a car..."
Something creaks and groans outside the car.
The young man looks up and groans himself. The trees nearby are uprooting themselves and starting to move toward him, their limbs bending in impossible positions to form would-be arms reaching for the car.
The young man throws open the passenger side door and runs.
Bullets hit the ground in front of him, and he pulls to a stop.
The sheriff is on the front porch, cackling as he twirls his revolver on one finger.
Beside him are a red-haired girl and a Japanese-American boy, both about 16 years old, and both with the same glowing-eyed, crazy-faced look of demonic possession about them. One of the Japanese boy's arms is missing and blood flows from the wound, but he doesn't seem to be paying any attention to that.
"Come on, Ashley!" the red-haired girl taunts. "Don't you want to come back in the cabin where it's warm and snuggly?"
"Warm as a steaming corpse," the Japanese boy adds.
"Steaming corpse! Steaming corpse! Steaming corpse!!" the two teens and the possessed sheriff cry out in unison, then turn it into a sing-song cry of "stea---meee-eeng co--ooorpse" over and over.
Ashley looks from them to the trees, which are stomping over and around the sheriff's car and heading toward him.
"Looks pretty grim, kiddo," a voice says.
Ashley spins around, and jumps back.
Standing behind him is an attractive woman clad in a stylish business suit and high heels. Her hair is jet black and long, with small red horns protruding from the hairline; her skin is blood red; and her eyes glow yellow. A demon tail flicks impatiently from side to side behind her.
FADE OUT. OPENING CREDITS ROLL

ACT ONE
TITLE CARD: "Ash to the Infinite Power"
SPECIAL GUEST STAR: Tyra Banks as Debri
FADE IN
As 16-year old Ashley stares at the demonic woman.
"Are you responsible for this?" Ashley asks.
"No," the woman says wearily. "You are."
The trees stop suddenly, and the taunting stops. Ashley looks at the trees and at the three possessed people on the porch; all of them are still, as if caught in freeze-frame. No wind blows, and the outside world makes no sound at all.
"You see, Ashley, you shouldn't have come to this cabin," the demonic woman says. "And you really shouldn't have turned on that tape recorder. Back in 1982, when your parents Ash and Linda came to this cabin with their friends, they started to play the recorder. It scared your aunt Cheryl, and she turned it off...."
"Yeah, I know," Ashley says. "They told me about it. Said this was a spooky place they were afraid to come back to. Wish I'd listened to em."
"There are some realities where the tape recorder was turned back on that night, and the spell recited on it unleashed the demons, who killed your mother and everyone else at the cabin except Ash."
"Killed mom?"
"Don't worry, tiger, your mom's alive and well, because in your reality the recorder wasn't turned back on," the demon woman explains.
The boy takes a few tentative steps back from the woman. "What does this have to do with you?"
"Nothing compared to what it has to do with you," the demon woman says. "So you felt compelled to come here, to the cabin where you were conceived way back in 1982, after your dad gave your mom a locket..."
"Yeah, I guess so," Ashley says. "I just always grew up thinking about the cabin, for some odd reason."
"And you brought your girlfriend Amy and your buddy Kasu along, thinking it would be a fun weekend in the woods."
"Yeah."
"But you played the tape recorder you found in the basement, abandoned for all these years, and now your friends are demons and the sheriff you called for help with your... what's the word?"
"Cell phone," Ashley says, shell-shocked.
"Ah," the demon says. "The sheriff you called for help with your 'cell phone' was possessed as soon as he walked in the cabin to help you."
"Yeah, that's the Cliffs Notes of it all. You still haven't explained why this matters to you."
"You're quite the survivor, Ashley," the demon says. "Just like your father, in those other realities."
"Thanks, I think."
"The boss man is NOT gonna like hearing about this," the demon says. "T.T.F.N., hotshot."
She vanishes in a burst of fire.
Ashley stares at the spot where she vanished. Then, he hears sounds again as everything around him comes back out of freeze frame. Ashley runs for safety as the trees close in and the possessed sheriff continues to take potshots at him.

CUT TO:
The GlobeCo Industries corporate headquarters in New York City.
It is a majestic metallic blue building, 30 stories high, its windows shining in the morning sun.
And somewhere in the basement level of the building, the demonic woman barges through a set of double doors.
Fisk follows closely behind her. "I tried to stop her, boss," he says apologetically.
Inside the darkened room, Lajos Szabo looks up from his copy of the Wall Street Journal.
Debri glances around. "Why's it so friggin' dark in here?"
She hits a panel on the wall, and the room lights up.
Fisk flinches from the sudden brightness.
"An unusual intruder, it seems," Szabo says. Through obnoxiously convenient camera angles, we do not see his face, only his thin, somewhat pale hands, the fingernails of which are immaculately trimmed. He is clad in a Navy blue Armani business suit with black shirt and thin white necktie.
"I don't know who this bozo is, sir, but..." the woman starts to say, then pauses. "What's with the goatee?"
"You don't like?" Szabo asks.
"You don't have," the woman says. Then she groans. "Aw, shit, I'm in the wrong reality! I thought I could find my way home without any problems."
"She's crazy," Fisk says. "Should I throw her out?"
"No," Szabo says. "I'm intrigued."
"Nothing for you to worry about, handsome," the woman says. "You see, I'm---"
"An associate of Lajos Szabo's from some parallel dimension," Szabo says. "And you've been off visiting other realities and were on your way home."
The demonic woman and Fisk exchange glances.
"You're good," the demon says appreciatively.
"I've been around long enough to figure things like this out," Szabo says. "Who are you, and what are you doing?"
"Sorry, fella, that's priviliged information for my boss, and he's in some other dimension."
Szabo walks back to his seat and drops into the leather chair. "Let's see, ten feet from the front doors and about thirteen feet from the south wall," he says, typing on his keyboard.
"Pardon the phrase, but what the Hell are you--" the demon starts to say.
Bright red lights stream out from hidden projectors in the walls of the room. The lights connect at odd angles.
"Containment spell," Szabo explains as the demon tries to walk through the beams of light but cannot.
"I've dealt with enough demons to know how to handle your type."
Seen from above, the beams of light connect to form a large pentagram across the floor of the room, with the demon woman in the center.
"You're VERY good," the demon says.
"Name?" Szabo asks.
The woman sighs. "Debri."
"Purpose?"
"Scouting the multiverse for ways to overcome Ashley J. Williams."
"Indeed?"
"You know I can't lie to you while you've got me contained in this thing," Debri says. "In the reality I'm from, you summoned me to travel the dimensional barriers in search of a world where Ash was defeated and brought under your command."
"And?"
"I've found worlds where he was killed, and worlds where he was driven insane," Debri explains. "But not one single world where you've managed to win."
"Since you're in the containment spell, I hope you don't mind if we chat about this in more detail." Szabo hits a button on his telephone. "Marge, bring in some tea," he says. "And Ms. Debri, what will you be having?"
"Got any goat's blood?"
Szabo smirks. "And Marge," he says, pressing the button again, "also some of jar 32 from my special collection...."
Debri looks at him curiously. "I'm surprised, if you don't have a demon like me in your service why would you have that lying around your cupboard?"
"Like the boy scouts say," Szabo replies, "be prepared."
FADE OUT.

ACT TWO
FADE IN
On Ashley J. Williams, tugging fiercely at his restraints. He is in an asylum, and a large, unpleasant-looking female nurse eyes him warily.
Several inmates, including an oily-looking man and a hulking American Indian, watch from the sidelines.
"You might want to calm down a tad," the oily-looking man says in a low, weaselly voice, "Nurse Ratchet is gonna call the goons if you don't...."
Ash stares up at the nurse, his eyes blazing with anger. "Kill them all," he growls, "must kill them all..."

PULL BACK to reveal that this image is being seen inside of a three-foot wide sphere that floats in mid-air.
Debri, the demoness, sits to one side of the sphere, sipping on a cup of red liquid.
Lajos Szabo sits at his desk, sipping tea, (though we continue not to see his face, owing to convenient camera angles). Fisk and Oracle, a painfully thin, elegantly dressed blonde woman with dark glasses, stand on either side of his chair.
"This is Ash of what I've arbitrarily dubbed 'Earth 3'," Debri explains. "He went out to the cabin with his college friends and his younger sister Cheryl, when Ash was just starting his sophomore year. His friends were massacred, his sister was raped by the local foliage and then possessed by the Evil Dead herself, and Ash was left certifiably insane."
"But not controllable, it seems," Szabo says.
"Less so than a sane -- so to speak -- Ash is," Debri replies. "Now, here's the interesting thing... no matter what time he goes to the cabin, it seems, that is when the professor has just completed his translations and been killed."
"Impossible," Fisk says.
"Improbable," Oracle replies evenly.
"The book involved varies," Debri adds. "In some realities, it is the Naturum Demonto, in others the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, in still others the Tome of Vile Shadows..."
"Fine works, all," Szabo says off-handedly. "Any of which contain demon resurrection passages that could prove troubling."
Oracle casts a curious glance in Szabo's direction. We do not, of course, see his face or any sign of a reply.
"Watch this one," Debri says, and she snaps her fingers. The sphere vanishes, replaced by another one.
In it, we see Ash with a chainsaw hand and a white streak in his hair, screaming "No!!" as Medieval soldiers kneel to salute him as their champion.
"In this reality... Earth 8... Ash went to the cabin a few years later than before, with a girlfriend named Linda as his only companion.... a different Linda than the one who accompanied him the first time around, mind you..."
"And what happened?" Szabo asks.
"He was tossed back in time where the people of Kandar accepted him as a savior from the heavens. He led them against the armies of darkness and won, destroying the Necronomicon Ex Mortis in the process."
"Destroyed it?" Szabo gasps.
Debri nods. "Then he was crowned King of Kandar and settled down with a beautiful maiden there. Their descendants caused untold havoc to the forces of darkness..."
Debri snaps her fingers. "Moving on to Earth-12," she says.
"Why not take them in order?" Fisk asks.
Debri rolls her eyes. "Some earths, the variations are too subtle to make a difference. Sometimes he had to cut off his left hand instead of his right, and sometimes he winds up with his teeth kicked out. I'm getting at the big divergences here. On Earth-12, Ash goes to the cabin even later than before, with another different girlfriend named Linda..."
"What is that, a fetish?" Fisk asks.
"He likes Lindas, I suppose," Debri says with a shrug.
The sphere shows Ash emerging from a dark cave and screaming in disbelief as he looks out at a post-apocalyptic world.
"Earth-12, you see, is almost identical to yours right up until he tries to return to his home time period," Debri says. "He goes back to Kandar, fights the deadites, woos a maiden, causes the army of the dead to arise, and beats them. But this time, instead of coming back to the present with an incorrectly recited spell that allows the deadites to follow him, he takes a sleeping spell and oversleeps, waking up after a nuclear holocaust."
Debri snaps her fingers again. "Earth 13, that's your world."
We see Ash stocking shelves at S-Mart.
"You know all the nuances of that one." She snaps her fingers. "On to the Earth-18 Ash, a real wild card..."
We see a new image: Ash is dressed in Old Western clothes, dueling against a deadite gunslinger. Ash has a golden cybernetic leg, a mechanical hand like usual, and an eyepatch. His opponent is dressed in black with a handlebar mustache and grey mottled skin; a decaying Wyatt Earp-type zombie.
Nearby, a pretty, young dark-haired woman watches the duel, holding her breath; beside her are Brisco County Jr. and Lord Bowler, two 19th-century bounty hunters.
"On Earth 18, you never stopped your attacks on Ash, so by modern day he had become even more unhinged than usual. He also lost a leg during a side-trip to post-Apocalyptic Moscow, met a vampire slayer --- that young woman you see near him --- in ancient Greece, and had a final duel with the vampire lord Usumgal in the Old West."
"A 'final' duel?" Szabo asks. "A vampire as old as Usumgal would be no easy target..."
Debri smirks. "Through clever trickery, Usumgal was killed retroactively, a few days after this duel with one of Usumgal's henchmen..."
"Retroactively?" Oracle asks.
"Long story," Debri replies.
"What makes this Ash a wild card?" Fisk asks.
"He travelled through time, more often than usual," Debri says. "I can't be sure he hasn't done more damage in other time periods. And the nature of time travel is troubling in a multiverse sort of way. Say reality is an ever-forking road. Each decision and random event leads it to branch out further."
"Like on Star Trek," Fisk says, then smiles sheepishly in Szabo's direction, obviously under a withering stare we cannot see.
"When you travel back in time, you are moving backwards on that road," Debri continues. "Which means, conceivably, in travelling forward you could end up in a different reality than the one you left. It's entirely possible that the Ash of Earth-18 could show up in my reality or yours, and wreak havoc on all concerned."
"Two Ashes, no waiting," Oracle says quietly.
Debri snaps her fingers again.
"There are also Ashes who were much younger when they first faced the Evil Dead, such as this one who stumbled across the cabin while on a fishing trip with his family..."
We see Ash, age 7, running through the woods with a deadite flying after him. He leaps up to grab a limb from a sapling tree and pulls it back, letting it snap so it hits the deadite in the face. This does not hurt the deadite, but confuses it long enough to give the boy a head start.
"Offspring of Ash who faced the Deadites in his stead..."
We see a shot of Ash Jr. from earlier in this episode.
"Better trained Ashes..."
We see Ash in clerical robes, with a crossbow holding silver arrows in one hand and a combination crucifix-dagger in the other, dodging as a hideous vampiric beastie lunges at him.
"Ashes of different temperaments..."
We see Ash with his hair died dark blue and cut into a mohawk; he wears a torn T-shirt with the "Anarchy" symbol on it and black leather pants, and he is wrestling with a squid-like demonoid creature.
Then, we see a bookish Ash clad in tweed and wearing glasses; he is in a library, dodging lightning bolts flung by a creature that looks like a bipedal skinned panther with glowing yellow eyes.
"Zombie-possessed Ashes..."
We see Ash, eyes bulging out of their sockets and dangling partway down his face, chasing a young woman around in the cabin.
"Ash-parallels from worlds where a different sperm resulted in a different person..."
We see a woman (special cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis) laughing maniacally as all the objects in the cabin around her come to life, all possessed by demonic spirits.
"Or where reality itself was sufficiently different for... er... different results..."
In a more log cabin-designed place, we see a bipedal Golden Retriever Ash as he faces off against an obese St. Bernard, the demon-possessed Henrietta that emerges from a trap door in the floor.
"The list goes on, and on," Debri says finally, snapping her fingers and making the sphere vanish.
Szabo strums his fingers on the desk. "So, what you're telling me is, no matter which world you've been to, he has never fallen in line with my desires?"
"Absotively," Debri replies.
"So your whole quest to find a way to beat him was a failure?"
"I wouldn't say that," Debri replies.
"And why not?"
"Because it's not for me to say, big guy," Debri explains. "It's for you... or, rather, the 'you' from my home reality."
"Agreed."
Szabo flicks a switch and the laser-light pentagram vanishes. "On your way, then. But if you DO ever find a way to beat him, I would appreciate it if you shared this information with me, as well as the 'Szabo' of your reality."
Debri salutes, then vanishes in a column of fire.
Szabo, Oracle, and Fisk watch this.
"Oracle, be a dear and document all the information we just heard," Szabo says.
Oracle nods and departs the room.
"So, does this mean we're gonna give up?" Fisk asks.
"Bite your tongue," Szabo replies. "Unless you'd rather I bit it out for you."
Fisk gulps.
"Somewhere, in the entire multiverse, there has to be a world where I am able to conquer Ash Williams' combination of fierce willpower, dumb luck, durability and pain resistance..." Szabo says, taking a long sip of his tea. "And I intend for that somewhere to be here."
Fisk's eyebrows lift, but he says nothing.
"You see, before this I was just competing against my own agenda," Szabo says. "And now, I have other... MEs... to compete with.. so I can defeat him before they do...."
Szabo finishes his tea off and flicks the empty cup into Fisk's hands.
"So nice to finally have worthy adversaries," Szabo says with a sinister chuckle.
FADE OUT.

END

Cracked Magazine's "Army of Dorkness" - An Spoof of Army of Darkness

My Wife's Journey to find her Birth family

My beautiful wife had her story RE: tracking down her biological mother/family published on the Daily Beast.

How I Used DNA To Find My Birth Family

My adoption records were sealed and I had few clues to my birth family’s identity. How a DNA kit broke my search wide open.

Last January, I sat cross-legged with the box in my hands, something inside me tilting and swaying, rising and catching in my throat.

“Ancestry DNA,” the box was marked—so official, so scientific, with little molecules dotting the cover.

This was IT. This bounty was going to be the end to a lifelong struggle that had consumed me for as long as I could remember. Inside the slick, sterile packaging lay the answers to the biggest questions I’d ever asked. My whole world was going to change now, in ways that I’d imagined in a thousand different scenarios.

I had always known I was adopted. I had also known I didn’t have a place to belong, people to whom to belong, or a soft place to land. I was raised by a J&B scotch bottle and a bottomless tumbler glass brimming with vodka-soda on the rocks. Containers of alcohol don’t love, don’t nurture, and don’t protect little girls, and under such conditions, said little girls grow like a badly-set broken arm.

I had no place and no people. Where was my birth mother? Where was my big brother? Did they know where my father was? Did I look like them? Did they have the same close-set, saucer eyes I had?

Do I have her eyes?

Alongside my mother and brother, my straggly long brown hair, pasty-white skin and big hollow eyes would match. If I matched, I wouldn’t be mismatched, and therefore, couldn’t be as ugly and inconsequential as I saw myself. People who belonged together could not be ugly, I mused in my misshapen logic, because only ugly people had no people. We somehow weren’t worthy, like the sock that loses its partner in the wash and is thrown into the mismatched sock bin until the other can be found—a pair made, good enough to return to the drawer with the regular socks. I was just a sock-bin sock.

I began to realize if hadn’t yet been found, I needed to set out to do the finding. I began to post flyers on poles in New York City. I asked random people in the subway who bore any resemblance to me if perhaps I couldn’t be theirs? Some Saturdays, I dragged a folding table all the way to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a small tape recorder and my “Annie” cassette, and belted out the songs and held a sign asking if anyone had lost a baby girl in 1971. Surely someone would recognize my eyes, that my face was her face, too.

People stopped, curious, wished me luck. Several times I tied notes to the strings of balloons and let them fly out of my bedroom window, telling my birth mother and my older brother she’d had before me where to find me. The balloon had to land somewhere. I wrote on dollar bills and put them into circulation: “Melodye, born on [my birthday] in NYC…I am here. 212-xxx-xxxx.”

I was utterly plagued.

As I matured into a teen, my searching prowess developed.

I delved into the non-identifying information provided by my adoption agency, wrote letters, dialed random people I found in the White Pages across three Southern states, harassed the agency to help me beyond what was allowed by law.

When the Internet became a thing, my pleas were splattered everywhere a person could post. My words mingled with thousands of others whose postings all started in the same vein as mine: “I was born March xx ... in Bellevue Hospital. Seeking any member of my birth family…” This was followed by the small amount of details I knew about my mother’s family.

I was astounded by the number of other adoptees and birthparents who were out there, posting the same messages. I had never dreamed there were so many of us. I joined local and national adoption support groups, registered with every mutual consent registry I could find, sent letters to my agency to keep on file should my family come back for me there. When I was surreptitiously slipped the contact information for a fleabag “investigator” who was somewhat known in the New York adoption circle to have connections and ways to obtain information illegally, such as original birth certificates and other records, I gave him a call. He wanted $2,000 to find my mother and brother. I wanted proof that he knew what he was doing. He wanted to meet me in a seedy part of town to “try to work something out.” I told him in detail where he could shove it.

By then, I was living in a girls’ home in Newark, which severely hampered my search efforts for awhile, though I was able to go back and forth to the city from time to time. As I moved through young adulthood, I wrote to television talk shows, was called back by several, and was even lucky enough to have a private meeting with the producer of The Montel Williams Show, who tried to help in my search. But, as gracious as they all were, everyone hit a brick wall. There was just not enough information, and without the information, there was no show.

I began to realize if hadn’t yet been found, I needed to set out to do the finding.

Around 1996, I once got drunk and dialed a psychic hotline. The seer told me I would not find my family for 10 more years. “You’re a liar,” I slurred, followed by a string of expletives in the kind of spiritless desperation that comes from a drunk girl aware that she was a drunk girl trying to gain traction in her search with a dial-a-psychic.

Who was I?

I was raised to believe I had no right to know. My birth records were sealed by New York law, and I was assigned a new birth certificate and identity when I was 3 years old. I was told my birth mother had the choice to keep me as any mother had, but she chose not to, and therefore my rights to know anything more were relinquished with her signature, on papers I would never have the right to see.

I stumbled around for years, gathering minuscule pieces of information, sporadically outwitting people in the know to give me more knowledge than I had before. I learned my mother’s name was Diana. Her name was the first piece of information that gave her a definitive shape, like an out-of-focus photograph I couldn’t quite make out, but knew was her all the same. Her name was something I could hold.

Who was she?

When I was small, the image of my mother mirrored “Ma Ingalls” from Little House on the Prairie. As I got older, it diminished into less of a vision and more of a hope that she’d be found alive, and would even want to talk to me. My brother never changed from the image I had as a little girl. Right into adulthood, I imagined he’d love me, be protective of me in some way, have sentiments all his own unscathed by our shared history. He’d tell me we were innocents, and that the decisions others made for us had nothing to do with who we would be to each other. This seemed a reasonable dream, through the decades of collected maps, folders stuffed with notes, and records printed and photocopied year after year. Puzzle pieces.

This is how I found myself sitting as a middle-aged woman with that DNA box in my lap, feeling like that scrap of a girl again, filled with emotions I could not decipher. I opened the box carefully, and found the process simple. I filled a little tube with my saliva, capped it, mailed it off and waited six weeks for my life to change.

When my results were released, the start of the life that visited me only in dreams began. The results were only the beginning. I bounced off of the highs and lows, suffered tremendous disappointment from cousins (mostly distant) who refused to help, some even declining to speak to me at all. The lows smarted, and often far outweighed the warmth of the highs.

I glimpsed the girl I was when I was young: Ugly. Small. Invisible.

All I wanted now was to know. I wanted to know that my brother was okay. I wanted to know if my mother had ever gotten to see me the day I was born. I wanted to know if she held me. I don’t think I had ever been held as a child, or at least, could not remember a time when I was. If she had held me, I’d have that knowledge. It would be mine, and no one could ever say I wasn’t entitled to it or take it from me.

I wanted to see my mother’s eyes, to see if there was a message within them just for me. I needed to have a picture of her. I wanted so little by then. There were so many false leads, so many twists and turns.

And then I found a search angel by pure coincidence. I had befriended David’s wife, Shirley, on a Facebook ancestry group. Shirley took me home like a stray cat to her husband, who was a whiz at reading DNA and scientifically matching the possibilities to the ancestral “tree” we began to build for me. Among a host of moderately distant cousins matches (3rd or 4th cousins or greater), my DNA results yielded one “Close Family” and two “2nd Cousin” matches, the Holy Grail for an adoptee whose best hope was usually 3rd cousin matches or more distant.

I wanted to know if my mother had ever gotten to see me the day I was born. I wanted to know if she held me.

But these matches weren’t answering my emails. In fact, the matches took several months and a trick or two to track them down, and as we inched along, Dave spent hours and weeks and months working to rule people out, manipulating the DNA results to find where I belonged on my own tree. Shirley always stayed close by. For my part, I worked as obsessively as Dave did, sorting out the possibilities and the genealogy, building out maps of families and potential relatives who warranted a closer look. I never gave up, though I wanted to, because Dave and Shirley and our small group of supporters never gave up—including my husband, Dino. He went many nights with no dinner and spent a lot of time on his own during my search. He never complained and held me when I cried and soothed me. He is my best friend.

One day, I heard from the “Close Family” match. He was a younger brother, also adopted, with little information about our mother and family. We have been chatting ever since. He is beautiful, strapping, strong, and smart, and has given me two perfect little nieces and a sister-in-law. Then I met cousin after cousin. More doors opened, slammed shut, opened again, and Dave helped me weave through groupings of cousins and do-gooders who kept pointing us in the right direction. I started with just me on my own ancestral tree—a little box that bore my name but connected to empty boxes above that remained empty and nameless. Dave helped me grow it with our research to over 900 people related to me in one way or another. The boxes closest to me still remained empty, but the ones beyond those began to fill up.

I found several first cousins with receptive and engaging hearts, and myriad other relatives who can’t wait to meet me. I found and spoke to two younger sisters, and I finally found my big brother, the one I sought for 30 years, and he is what I had hoped: the kind who would watch you as you went down the street to make sure no one snatched your purse or bonked you on the head, the kind whose eyes would mist as he took in the sight of his little sister and heard of her arduous, decades-long search for him. More than I hoped, he is as lovely as my four other siblings.

My mother, Diana, died two years ago in 2013. I wasn’t leveled by this news, but cried for her when I was alone and able to process the loss and the “I’ll never get to’s...” It is, however, impossible to dwell long in this headspace. I have been ready to accept whatever was given, in whatever way the universe saw fit to give it. Everyone who knew her told me about my mother, regaled me with stories of her soft, blue-gray eyes, how she liked to help bathe her baby sister, how generous and kind she was.

I eventually got the picture of her I needed. I am now a part of the picture.

Because I do, indeed, have her eyes.

Freddy Krueger's Glove in "Evil Dead 2"

   Many a sharp-eyed fan has noticed that Freddy's glove appears in Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2" due to the in-joke history between Wes Craven and Sam Raimi, but how many of you knew it was in the filme TWICE?!

   The first time is above the door in the workshed.

   Next, it's in the basement when Ash goes to get the pages good, old, reliable Jake threw down there.

   Isn't that awesome?!

Just a lil meme I created!