(hb; 2021: memoir)
From the inside flap
“On Good Friday in 1953, at only eighteen months old, Casandra Peterson reached for a pot on the stove and doused herself in boiling water, resulting in third degrees burns over 35 percent of her body. She miraculously survived, but burned and scarred, the impact would stay with her and become an obstacle she was determined to overcome. Feeling like a misfit led to her love of horror. While her sisters played with Barbie dolls, Cassandra built model kits of Frankenstein and Dracula, and idolized Vincent Price.
“Casandra left home at fourteen and supported herself as a go-go dancer. By age seventeen, she was performing as the youngest showgirl in Las Vegas, where run-ins with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tom Jones helped her grow up fast. A chance encounter with the ‘King’ himself, Elvis Presley, inspired her to travel to Europe where she worked in film and toured Italy as lead singer of a band. She eventually made her way to Los Angeles, joining the famed improv group, The Groundlings, honing her comedic skills alongside Phil Hartman and Paul ‘Pee-wee’ Reubens.
In 1981, as a struggling
actress considered past her prime, Cassandra auditioned for a local LA station
as a hostess for their late-night horror movies. She got the job as ‘Elvira,’ never
imagining it would lead to fame and a forty-year career.. .”
Review
Yours is a burn-through, smart, timely and entertaining read, sometime humorous, often serious, and charmingly feminist in its subject matter─as far as seriousness goes, Peterson was raped, something that only the darkest-hearted people joke about, and Peterson isn’t that sort of entertainer. The telling of that horror is balanced with practicality, maturity, and balance, one that doesn't tank the levity of much of the rest of the work.
Yours is one of the best, waste-no-words memoirs I’ve read in a long while, one worth owning.
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