Seen the ads for Season 2 of Showtime’s anthology series Masters of Horror?  They’re everywhere… Internet banners, magazine ads, billboards big as The Ritz.  But seeing these particular milky zombie eyes leering at me from the commercial space above my Netflix queue wasn’t the worst part of this nightmare … You see, I know this zombie.  His name is Ken.

Ken Triwush, to be precise.  From the evidence at hand, Ken would seem to fit the zombie profile but he’s really a trained song-and-dance man, with many hours spent on Broadway stages and many miles logged in regional theatre and European tours.  He played Buddy Holly at The Shubert in New York and in North Carolina was, by his own admission, “the biggest damn Hedwig you’ve ever seen.”  I met Ken in 1989, when I joined the service crew of the Off-Broadway play Tamara: The Living Movie, performed at Manhattan’s castle-like Park Avenue Armory.  Elke Sommer starred and Judith Roberts (from David Lynch’s Eraserhead) and Ted Sorel (from Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond) costarred in this murder mystery in which audience members laid down $100 a head for the privilege of shadowing the play’s roster of usual suspects, so they could compare notes at the intermezzo about who the murderer might be.

Ken and I were part of a collection of starving artist hirelings brought in to serve food catered by Le Cirque and to clean up the dirty dishes afterwards.  In addition to us, there was Julie, who had a small speaking role in John Sayles’ Eight Men Out (1988) and Todd, who had been the hero of the frat house fright film Pledge Night (1988).  Amelia was the daughter of Barney Miller star Hal Linden, while Ramona was an actress of exquisite beauty cursed by her size to play juveniles past the age of 30.  Company kook Kendall chided us for eating meat even though she wore a leather biker jacket and Charlie was another writer who chipped heroin for the experience and died in the bathroom of his apartment near Columbia.  We worked our tails off on that show and got to know one another too well; we laughed and argued, got sweaty and stained in our butler and maid costumes, and all got undressed and dressed and undressed and dressed again in front of one another.  When the show ended, we blew our separate ways.  I still can’t go anywhere near curried chicken and I have no clue who the murderer was.

We’re all in our 40s now and most of us are still working the dream we had when we were 25 with some variations.  Come May of next year, I’ll be a father of two, Ramona is a movie costumer here in LA, Julie travels abroad like I go to Target, Kendall lives in Italy… and Ken, among his many accomplishments, is a zombie.  Depending on the billboard, he may just be the biggest damn zombie you’ve ever seen.