3/22/2025

If You’re Not Vincent Price, I Will Not Remember Your Birthday

The hardest part of potentially leaving Facebook after Meta decided people like me have had it "too easy lately" was losing all the birthday reminders. I ultimately couldn’t give up knowing the most important days of people’s lives. I am a coward.

I am also bad at birthdays. Right now, if you held a gun to my mother's head and demanded I say her birthday out loud...I can at least say with certainty when her death day will be.

I can't hold anyone's big day in my head to save my life.

Except one.

Every May 27th and October 29th I try to cook something special and watch Theatre of Blood starring Vincent Price. October because that's my birthday. May because it's his. May 27th, 1911. Died in 1993. I know that because it's tattooed on my forearm. I know it because it's on the back of his picture in my wallet.

I know it because there are still nights where I can't sleep until I listen to his Colorslide Tour of the Louvre.

I know it because if any of my younger friends, God be with them, ever says "Who's Vincent Price?" anywhere I can hear it they will have to cancel their plans because they are about to learn.

Well, he's an actor. And a bi icon. And a certified Scooby Doo special guest star. And a gourmet chef. With his own cooking show. And cookbook (which I own). And an art collector. Who donated his entire collection to Sears for reproduction rights because people, he said, deserve to have fine art in their home for whatever they can afford.

He's also the man who got me into movies. Who taught me to be brave.

When I was ten my whole family moved. It was big, it was scary, and back then I was famous for being scared.

I had to be escorted out of a symphony because "In the Hall of the Mountain King" made me cry and piss my five-at-the-time-year-old pants. I had to be banned from rehearsal when my sister got cast in A Christmas Carol because I couldn't stop screaming after Jacob Marley read his lines one time, in jeans, giving it, in retrospect 20%. The idea of watching a horror movie for fun was like skydiving with my eyeballs.

But then we were moving. And my dad set up the satellite TV first thing so my sister and I didn't drive him or the movers crazy. And it was Vincent Price. And he's about to stab a guy with a spear and he's wearing a scary helmet and he's quoting Shakespeare but something about his smile makes it all seem okay.

And it was.

And suddenly I had nothing to be afraid of.

Not the symphony. Not Christmas ghosts. Not even the older boy next door to my old house. The one who did things to me at a sleepover. The one who gave me a secret and a reason to jump at every little thing.

But we had moved away, and away from him. And Vincent was on the TV saying it was going to be okay. And I believed him. I trusted him. Even after he killed a theater critic's dogs and fed them to him while quoting Titus Andronicus if you HAVEN'T SEEN THEATRE OF BLOOD YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

I let this man reach across time and hold my hand through the horrors of growing up. He's been with me ever since.

Now a lot has changed since I was a ten-year-old boy. I like cauliflower now. I have a job. I'm divorced. Oh, and a woman. But every year it's still me and Vincent.

Every year, twice a year, it's still Theatre of Blood on the couch in the dark as I quietly let go of another 365 days. Every year for my birthday I give myself the gift of that movie, that moment, that quiet unspoken assertion that everything will be okay.

It may feel like a horror movie out there. It may feel like you are a monster running from a village of torches through the wilderness of a black and white night. It may feel like the credits are gonna roll on this thing at any minute.

But it’s there. In the corners of your eyes, curling up like a well-manicured mustache, itching like a new tattoo. As I live amidst every waking nightmare of being alive right now, I know that every birthday he'll be there to remind me I made it this far.

And I better see him again next time because Theatre of Blood is just that good. It’s worth sticking around for.

And so am I. And so are you. So are all of you.

And so is life.

And on your birthday, a gift like that, funny enough.

It's priceless.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B