“Those of you who are under eighteen will be charged with curfew, and those of you over eighteen will be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor for keeping the under eighteens out after curfew.”

“WHAT?”

“At least until we figure out what’s going on.” the Monrovia police officer declared as they loaded us into the back of the squad cars.

“But, we haven’t DONE anything wrong!” I protested.

“We’ll see. Get in. Watch your head.”

It’s hard to sit comfortably in the back seat of a police car when your hands are handcuffed behind your back, but fortunately it was a short drive to the station. I wasn’t really scared because I knew it was all a big misunderstanding, but being charged with “contributing” WAS a big deal. How did it come to this?

It was late summer of 1971, I was only nineteen, and we were just drama students, fresh out of high school, doing a fun “scary tour” for our friends. Performance art al fresco. Literally “taking it on the road” as it were. It was “The Giant of the Canyons; Legend of the Eight Foot Man” landmarks tour. The tour had gotten popular, due to word of mouth among our friends and former classmates, and so we started having two shows a night. After the first performance that fateful night, we all met up by the bank at the corner of Myrtle and Foothill to laugh and share experiences, and then load up the second group into Wayne’s tiny, white Opel Kadett.

Instead the police were loading US into THEIR cars!

I suppose the presence of a gang of young people, some of whom were in scary makeup, hanging around a closed bank at 10:30 at night was kind of a red flag to the arresting officers, but it never occurred to us that this would happen!

We had no idea at the time just how serious it had become or how long they had been watching for us.

Wayne later explained how he came up with the idea to do the tour in the first place.

“Our extended High School Drama Family was mostly home from school, students from four different classes, from ’69 through ’72, including younger siblings, and we were all friends, looking for fun and entertainment. Two of our friends came up with a fun idea. Rick and Paul started a hokey “tour” in which they piled two or three “customers” into the back of Rick’s Chevy Corvair and drove around Sierra Madre after dark, telling the story of “Monk E. Mann”.”

“In the story, which cleverly included a close brush with a very old, secluded monastery in Sierra Madre, a child who had been left on the monastery steps had grown up to be a dangerous psychopath. They told the story of murder and mayhem in the quiet suburban hills around the monastery. During the tour, they used various landmarks and attached stories related to Monk E (for Edward, I think) Mann. It was all great fun, and for a few weeks, most of our Drama Family and their friends had taken the tour. Sadly, as the end of summer neared, they had to stop the “Monk E Mann” tour to prepare for the coming school year.”

“Ever enterprising, still hungry for theatrical fun, and willing to use the coattails of Rick and Paul’s success, a few of us came up with another, strangely similar “tour”. The story we came up with was the “Legend of the ‘Eight Foot Man’ ” or “The Giant of the Canyons”. I knew a secluded area in northeastern Monrovia in the hills above Mountain Avenue, mostly on a winding, hilly road, Norumbega Rd. that would allow for lots of mischief. It had been part of my car paper route a couple of years earlier. Our story was that of an abandoned baby (apparently there were lots of those in the San Gabriel Valley in legendary old times). The baby was awkward and huge. His height made him an outsider, other kids called him names, and he became reclusive. There was a terrific old one-room schoolhouse on Norumbega, and we came up with a story related to that. We decided we would include in the story that he had just disappeared years ago, but there were still stories of sightings.”

Wayne would bring the tour to various dark, remote places, like a park in the foothills or a vacant lot, playing a tape recorder with appropriate music and sound effects as he went, and tell the tales, setting up for various staged segments, such as the rock cairn, a strange pile of rocks that mysteriously kept getting bigger, even when removed, rocks being added by some spectral entity… the ghost of the Giant! While he drew them in with his spooky tale, (probably shining the flashlight up on his face) the rock pile would suddenly collapse, secretly triggered by me pulling a hidden cable, sending the group screaming down the path to the car. In one field, the ghostly figure of a woman, (Shari in a sheet) was seen fluttering into the darkness.

Many of the details of the tour were lost to me, as I was in makeup and costume, lying in a field with tall grass and weeds, in the dark, waiting for them to arrive. I had a huge black cape and ghostly white face with sunken cheeks and ping pong ball eyes, cut in half with iris holes cut out so I could sorta see. Dopey close up but scary from a distance.

They would pull up and get out of the car and he would start to tell a story about the Giant sightings, shining his flashlight around the field as he spoke. When his light swept past, I would stand up from my concealment, prone under the black cape, suddenly “appearing” as he swept back. I would start toward them menacingly, and when the screams started, he would jostle the flashlight. I would then flop on the ground again, hidden, so when the light came back I had “vanished”! Still screaming…in fun, of course, they all piled into the car and careened down the hill around a hairpin turn, only to discover the SAME monster coming up the road. (Jon, dressed the same with ping pong ball eyes.) So they’d squeal a U-turn back up the hill, only to encounter me coming down the road. I could hear the screaming from inside the car as they screeched another hard U-turn and headed out a different way. The scary thing for me at that point was, with the darkness and ping pong ball eyes that didn’t allow me to wear my glasses, I had to just step out into the path of whatever car was coming, assuming (hoping) that it was them, here on this rural road.

Apparently not rural enough, as we learned some time after we arrived at the police station.

First they separated us into groups. We had to empty our pockets while they checked for contraband. I had a pocketful of rubber bands from a playful exchange with my boss on the job earlier in the day, which was a little hard to explain. Then they took the two of us in makeup and a third guy, Evans, a junior in high school and an innocent bystander who unfortunately happened to take the tour that night, and took us through a heavy metal door to a holding cell where they made us strip naked and left with our clothes!

Meanwhile Wayne was searched, questioned, and then held alone in a tiny cubicle.

“I was told by an officer that we were separated so they could get a statement or story from each of us before they put us back together. They told me that when I complained about being in a broom closet instead of a cell with my friends. Once there, I started to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in my best Lou Rawls impression, hoping the others could hear, wherever they were.”

After awhile, Wayne needed to pee and asked to use the bathroom. Perhaps fed up with his complaining and Lou Rawls impression, they chose to bring him to our cell instead, to use the cold stainless steel seatless unit. By then we had our basic clothes back, sans shoes or belts. (Lest we hang ourselves, I guess?) We were all in surprisingly good spirits, bolstered by the knowledge that we hadn’t done anything wrong, and Wayne led us in a chorus of “Jailhouse Rock” while we waited.

Another friend of ours, one who was not involved with the tour, was also arrested. He knew about the tour but hadn’t been on it yet. Paul decided that he’d try to scare us by being an unscheduled performer and jump out to scare us all at the right moment. He followed us to the first site, the rock cairn, and sneaked around in the dark. His pale blonde hair would have given his presence away, so he wore a reversible skull cap that tied under the chin. It was from a childhood costume and was leopard spotted with cute little ears, but reversible to be a black stealth cap. He lost us in the course of things and had shown up on the corner to join in when we all got busted.

The leopard cap with cute little ears in his pocket was also hard to explain.

They made him drop his pants and bend over and spread ’em while the cop checked for contraband and commented, “I see more assholes this way.” Then they brought him to the cell the rest of us were in.

Meanwhile, as the police were loading us into the cars, another friend, Jack, was just arriving for the “late show”, and hurried up to my house to tell my mom that I’d been arrested. I think she called Wayne’s folks and the word spread, so, by this time there were several parents and relatives in the waiting room while the police tried to figure out just what they had on their hands. Fortunately, Wayne’s father was an attorney and was intervening on our behalf.

Apparently the police had been getting reports of screams and speeding cars, but every time they went out to check, we were long gone. One guy, whose house abutted the field where I did my scene, had heard and seen enough to be convinced that there were real vampires infesting his field, and he was going to shoot one to prove it. Fortunately, his son, an LAPD officer, decided to do a stake out during his off-duty hours to catch us, mainly to placate his perhaps delusional dad and keep him from shooting up the place. But our performance schedule was so irregular that he missed us every time. Luckily we got arrested before his dad had a chance to shoot ME with a silver bullet. (Or whatever! Yikes!)

Wayne later said, “According to my Dad, the police told him (somewhat apologizing for hauling in a bunch of “nice kids”) that someone in the neighborhood was afraid there was another Manson Family in the hills.”

My mom overheard them talking about fearing that they had another “Red Light Killer” on their hands, a guy who would pull people over with a red light, as if he was a cop, and then do them in. She also saw them goofing around behind the counter, jumping around with the cape on, saying, “Oooh. I’m a VAMPIRE!” and the like. Fortunately they saw the humor of the situation and we were released without further ado, albeit at 4 am…on a work night…er, morning. Wayne’s dad persuaded them to change the charge from “contributing” to “detained for questioning”, otherwise we’d all still have a stain on our records for being convincing performers.

Sadly, two of those involved faced serious repercussions from angry relatives, but the rest of us were unscathed, with understanding, stage-door parents who were once playful teens themselves. We DID learn some lessons from the experience, though. Like, don’t meet in front of a bank on a busy corner in the middle of the night wearing monster makeup….that sort of thing.

And…for sure, I don’t want to do the jail thing ever again, despite the fun story.