Meeting the Monster

I’ve been meaning to post this picture for several weeks now, but due to a glitch, it’s been stuck on my phone.

That’s me and Doug Jones, the actor behind the makeup of such film creatures as The Faun and The Pale Man from Pan’s Labryinth, the Silver Surfer from the second Fantastic Four, and Abe Sapien from the Hellboy movies. I met him at Cornerstone Music Festival this summer in a complete fluke. I’d cashed in my vacation hours and headed out of town for a week. I spent the first half of my vacation in Joplin with a group from my church doing tornado relief, and then I headed the opposite direction to Bushnell, Illinios for Cornerstone.

I’d heard about the festival for years from friends who went every summer during my college years, but I’d never been. Now it seemed like the perfect place to get away from it all. I went all by myself, with very little knowledge of any of the bands or events happening that week.

When I arrived, I parked my car on the grass beside everyone else’s and went walking. There were lines and lines of tents, holding musical acts as diverse as old people playing folk music to angry kids playing thrash metal. There were busy crowds of Christian hippies, punks, goths, and God-knows what else camping and signing and milling about. There were fire dancers in the road and golf carts packed to the tipping point with youth group teenagers driving by and slapping high-fives with anyone who met them.

And I felt completely lost.

I’d had visions of meeting cool people and making random new friends as I drove down, but I’m a hardwired introvert by nature, and the whole place overwhelmed me. At home, I’m the quirky artist dude. In the middle of all these strange, fantastic people, I felt like the odd one out, like the “normal” Marilyn to their Munsters.

Heck, I don’t even have a tattoo, or anything pierced.

Meanwhile, If you’ve read my Lemonade story, you know that I lost my keys the first night of the Festival. I also built up a massive collection of blisters on both feet, also on the first night, that only got worse each day and made walking at anything faster than a shuffle impossible.

Plus, I was having a hard time finding music I liked. I seriously considered going home early after just the first night. Tough to do, though, without any car keys.

Then I found the Imaginarium, a tent devoted to movies, film criticism, and general play and creativity. My kind of place. I met Jim Tudor, a film critic from St. Louis, and his wife Sylwyn (sp?), who happened to be an old classmate of mine from college a long time ago. And when I finally cracked open my program, I discovered that “An Evening With Doug Jones” was scheduled for Friday night.

Every geek bone in my body thrilled with anticipation. I planned my evening very carefully, as my Mummy-like gait meant I would need extra time to get back to the tent in time for his appearance.

At about 7pm, all gangly six-feet-three-inches of Doug Jones arrived at the Imaginarium to crazy applause. I got in line to meet him, but I hadn’t brought anything for him to sign, since I’d only found out about the event a few hours ago. I handed my cell phone to the kid in line next to me and asked him to take a picture.

I stepped up and held out my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Mr. Jones, I heard you last year on Battleship Pretension and More Than One Lesson, and it was really inspiring!”

I’m not sure how much of that got out of my mouth, because Doug interrupted me with, “Aw, come here!” and suddenly pulled me in and hugged me. Apparently, he’s known for his “Dougie Hugs,” even among people he’s working with professionally. And let me tell you, for a six-foot-three lanky dude, he’s really strong.

The event was scheduled to go for a couple of hours, but it went twice that. Doug never lost energy all evening. He perched atop the back of a wobbly plastic folding chair during the Q&A and assured us that if he fell it would be funny. We watched his reel, including his big break in a McDonald’s commercial that—dear God, I’m old—I remembered from my childhood…

…and a couple of really great short films.

Sudden Death! Trailer

The Butterfly Circus (bring a tissue to watch this film)

Last year, when I first discovered Doug Jones on Tyler Smith’s More Than One Lesson podcast, I wrote a review of Legion, a movie he appeared in where God was the bad guy. To the average Christian, Doug has a lot of ‘splaining to do for the choices he’s made. He often plays monsters and grotesque creatures, and this particular crowd, being full of geeks, was pretty cool with that. But still the question was raised: how do you justify the parts you play?

And Doug related his history of being a gawky tall kid, with a passion for performing, but no real chance of playing the leading man. It wasn’t till he started playing costumed characters that he found his career and his calling. “We all feel like freaks at some point in our lives,” he said, “but God loves the monsters.”

At the end of the night, I got up and hobbled back to my car, carrying my red lantern like Old Man Lancaster, the villain from the ghost stories we told at summer camp when I was kid. I lurched slowly down the gravel road, which was fine because I could only see a couple steps ahead of me at a time anyway, like the verse in Psalms (chapter 119, verse 105). Those few steps were all I’d needed, though, to get me to Cornerstone at the right time to encounter a faithful, working artist who gave me a hug and the creative shot in the arm I’d skipped town to find.

The next day, I twisted my ankle helping to take down the equipment at the Imaginarium.

The day after that, on the last night of the festival, someone found my keys.

The tattoo tent next to the fire dancers had packed up, so I settled for a Henna tattoo of a skeleton key on my arm. I smeared it before it finished drying, so it kind of looked more like a birthmark. But between the tattoo and my complex limp, I brought home reminders that God finds what is lost.

(Oh, and I did finally find music I liked, too. I’m planning another post on that, since, let’s face it, good Christian music that isn’t either theologically or artistically compromised is hard to find. Meanwhile, to hear more of Doug’s story, and why he took roles such as the Ice Cream Man in Legion, listen to his episode of More Than One Lesson.)

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