Person on the Page

I confess. I was one of the generation of children who got off the school bus in the afternoons and ran home to avoid missing even one second of my favorite TV show, Dark Shadows. 

Airing from 1966 to 1971, the one-of-a-kind gothic soap opera mesmerized millions of kids and hordes of housewives with its debonair male-lead vampire Barnabas Collins and his tantalizingly beautiful nemesis Angelique Bouchard—a witch.

Last week I learned of the death of Lara Parker, the actress who portrayed Angelique. At the risk of being accused of maintaining a para-social relationship with the eighty-four-year-old woman who once embodied what was for me the most riveting character on Dark Shadows, I admit that in the days following the news of her demise I have suffered a heavy sense of loss.

I’m saddened that Lara Parker is no longer among her family and friends, of course, but selfishly I am more saddened by the feeling that she took with her an important part of my past. 

As a child, I was fascinated beyond measure by the high-cheekboned blonde temptress, Angelique, with her impossibly large, chillingly gray-green eyes. I wanted to be her. I wanted to look out at the world through those eyes, to incant mystical spells with that tremulous throaty voice, to glide across a room in one of her glamorous costumes. Unaware of the dim view that my Sunday school teacher undoubtedly would have held of the black arts, and unsupervised by my mother for those thirty minutes every weekday, I idolized a witch.

Two summers ago, I re-watched the entire Dark Shadows series, from its earliest black-and-white episodes to its colorful, futuristic final airing—a feat made possible by Amazon Prime Video. Watching as an adult, I experienced the show as what seemed a parody of what I remembered viewing as a child. 

Since the show was filmed live every weekday, the episodes maintained all of the bloopers that are inevitable when the acting is live.  Barnabas’s sometimes tongue-tied or stammering delivery as he gazed out of the scene toward the camera to read his lines from a teleprompter. A character accidentally knocking over a headstone or a tree as he walks through a staged graveyard. The sounds of people talking offstage in the studio, drowning out the dialogue.  Some episodes were clumsily amateurish, and others were painfully dull to sit through. 

But I learned something about Angelique, something I missed when I admired her as a child.  When the character is introduced in the ongoing series, Barnabas is alive in the 1700s and Angelique arrives as the serving maid of Josette Du Pres, his soon-to-be bride. Barnabas has been having a sexual affair with Angelique, and he tells her that their relationship must end because he is about to marry Josette. 

A misused and spurned woman whose lower-class status makes marriage to Barnabas unlikely at best, Angelique is furious. But she does not accept her compromised condition, she does not stand by and watch as Barnabas and Josette prepare to marry. And she does not conveniently step aside and die in obscurity of tuberculosis or some other such disease that relieves male characters in similar tales of any possible repercussions of their illicit affairs.  Because Angelique is a witch.

She casts a spell that turns Barnabas into a vampire.  Curses him to dwell in darkness forever, confined to a coffin by day and driven to feed on human blood by night.

While I was re-watching the series, I joined a social media group of Dark Shadows fans—all those other kids who got off the bus and ran home to watch.  Group members criticized me for admiring Angelique for exacting her revenge on Barnabas.  That was evil behavior, they said, and the character should be hated, not loved.

But, come on, people.  This is a show about monstrously undead creatures of the night.  Don’t you want your witches to be . . . shall we say . . . witchy?

Angelique didn’t hold still for being treated the way that economically disadvantaged women have been treated for centuries.  She exerted the power that she had to say, in effect, Don’t mess with me!

I know.  Revenge is bad.

I have been mistreated by a few men, both in my personal life and in my career, but I have never sought any kind of revenge. I must admit, though, that I would not be unhappy if there were, eventually, some kind of comeuppance for those men. Perhaps even that thought is bad.

Angelique is a much-loved, much-hated character in the world of Dark Shadows enthusiasts.  I will always love her.  Both because of the influence she had on my childhood and because of the quasi-feminist message her storyline carried in the series. The message I couldn’t recognize until I had lived a while, taken some knocks, and grown to recognize her vexed position.

When Lara Parker first appeared as Angelique, she injected the show with a vitality it had not known before. She was a spitfire of a performer. She had what it took to wholly captivate a child, and later a grown woman rekindling a childhood experience. 

And for that I am grateful.