Back in the summer of ’77 when we hepcats were making that awkward transition from lobbing Molotov cocktails to burning our way across the dance floors of disco, David Berkowitz – aka the Son of Sam – killed 6 people and wounded several others. As far as serial killing goes, this paltry total can’t compare to the number of victims dispatched by Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or South Carolina’s own Peewee Gaskins; however, Berkowitz PRed his way to the top of the nation’s serial killing charts by leaving a series of cryptic notes like this ditty:

What narcissistic nonsense.  Of course, alley cats are going to mate and sparrows sing – if the feline and avian survivors of Chernobyl don’t let a cataclysmic environmental disaster affect their reproductive compulsions, certainly a couple of gunshots ringing out in a Brooklyn night ain’t going to affect their behavior.*

Of course, the media didn’t pay as much attention to Peewee as they did to David.**   Peewee was no poet, and if he had been, his poems would have sounded something like this:

Whose corpse this is I ought to know

cause I’m the one what kilt it so.

I hope nobody come ‘round here

to watch me in the lake it throw.

*This from National Geographic’s website: On the other hand, Mousseau admits that some birds have thrived [at Chernobyl]: drab, non-migratory birds seem to be doing very well, “possibly because they have no competitors,” he said. These birds don’t use up their carotenoids, which are powerful antioxidants, to create colorful plumage, and they don’t need to spend extra energy on long migrations, so their immune systems may be stronger, Mousseau theorized.

** How many serial killers are you on a first name basis with?

At any rate, during the Son of Sam’s spree, while bartending at the Golden Spur, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea: to form a comedy terrorist group called “The Lighter Side of the Son of Sam.” These slapstick desperadoes would attack obnoxious celebrities like Tom Snyder of the Tomorrow Show and make him perform demeaning acts on camera, stuff like, you know, like making out with one of Liberace’s exes while David Jones of the Monkees sang “Day Dream Believer” at gunpoint. Nobody would get seriously hurt, and the madcap band of practical jokers would always somehow get away to punk some other obnoxito in the unforeseeable future.

This idea returned to me after I watched the second episode of the Bravo reality show Southern Charm. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some latter day version of the Lighter Side of the Son of Sam could infiltrate the filming and wreck some boomerang karma on the vapidiots appearing on the show? Let’s see. How to punish Shep? I got it! How about updating Sartre with a little No Exit action by locking up Shep, Rosie McDonnell, and Dennis Rodman in a Motel 6 room for forty days and forty nights? [cue demonic laughter]

Rosie and Dennis could entertain Shep by performing a two man/woman show of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf or entertain him by wrestling for the remote that operates a TV that gets only the Lifetime Network and the Shopping Channel.

Just some good old fashioned retributive fun brought to you by that band of lovable losers, the Lighter Side of the Son of Sam!