At the beginning of last week, I was a Twilight Zone virgin. I'd never seen an episode and never even been friends with anyone who was a Twilight Zone fan. I was pretty much clueless. This weekend changed that. I got the chance to watch a few episodes, but more importantly, I'm pretty sure I entered the Twilight Zone on Friday night.

I showed up at Park Auditorium expecting to hear the keynote speaker for the Rod Serling conference. Instead, I'm pretty sure I got transported to a fifth dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. George Clayton Johnson, introduced by the co-chair of the conference as a "legend in the television writing business," may be a legend, but he's also, in his own words, "not your ordinary bear."

Clayton Johnson, writer of approximately seven Twilight Zone episodes, has had an eventful life to say the least. He grew up in Wyoming, failed the 6th grade, dropped out of the 8th grade, and, with his mother's permission, ran away at 15. He joined the army at 17 and learned to be a cartographer, but ended up painting murals in mess halls for a large portion of his time there. He then got a job as an architectural draftsman, worked nine-to-five for a while, and quit in order to pursue his "fantastic love" of science fiction and become a science fiction writer. Obviously that worked out for him, but along the way I think George entered a twilight zone of his own. His speech, while informative and often interesting, wandered from his childhood, to his beginnings as a writer in 1959, to Rod Serling, to Ray Bradbury, to the state of the country in 1959, to his belief that one day there will be telepathic people, to how sick of watching TV shows about autopsies he is, and back, always, to 1959. (Ed.: He might be on to something -- I'm sick of perpetual autopsies on TV as well. And anything involving those folks who perfectly straddle the idiocy/vanity axis, which is pretty much everything not involving autopsies, I suppose.)

I learned a few things about Rod Serling, but mostly I just sat there and tried to follow Clayton Johnson's thought process. His back-and-forth speech was entertaining and out there, but I was a little disappointed not to learn more about Serling and his epic TV show. “The minute Rod bought my first story I went to a permanent search for the imaginary,” George Clayton Johnson informed his audience. I get that. I'm a fan of the imaginary. But in this case, it would have been nice to hear a little bit more about reality.

I went home a bit confused and and somewhat let down, and spent the rest of the weekend doing homework and watching Twilight Zone episodes. In case you hadn't figured it out by now, that show is trippy! It's beautifully shot, well written, and often totally weird. After a couple of episodes, I forgave Clayton Johnson for his rambling speech. Who cares whether or not the man can orate? He wrote the intensely creepy story that the Twilight Zone episode "Execution" is based on, and six other episodes. That's good enough for this newly minted fan.

***As of 3:30 p.m., this event has been canceled due to illness (the presenter, not Rod Serling or the Simpson family -- he passed away 34 years ago and they don't actually exist).***

Straight up, The Twilight Zone always creeped me the hell out.

I always found the subtly off-kilter parallel universe it illustrated far more haunting and worrisome than the more out-there slasher flicks and other ghoulish fare, possibly because it seemed considerably more likely to actually take place. When I was a kid the nightly news was rife with stories of "the disappeared" and other seemingly paranormal flights of freakishness that were in fact just products of brutal sadism masquerading as geopolitics, so Rod Serling's vision of a dark reality just around the corner from our own was tangibly terrifying.

I saw the movie version when I was 12, though I can't entirely remember why, since I had actively avoided the endless reruns of the original TV show at a time when at least four of the dozen terrestrial channels we got back then showed them seven days a week. The fact that Vic Morrow and two child actors died in a gruesome helicopter accident during production of the film further convinced me that the whole damned enterprise was simply a standing invitation for Evil itself to waltz in at any moment and thump the everloving bejeezus out of all that was good in the world. Yet there I sat at the old State Theater, enduring the madness with school chums gleeful at the notion of a gremlin ripping the wings off a flying airplane.

Never really trusted my friends after that.

Anyway, fast forward far too many years to mention here, and I confess I'm actually considering attending some events at this year's Rod Serling conference (he taught here up until his death in 1975, further unnerving your humble fraidycat reporter). There's a marathon of classic episodes Saturday night, but that's not really my thing. No, I'm not quite ready for that level of commitment. I need to find neutral ground between my brave new initiative and the timidity of my youth.

Which is why I'll be attending Diana DePasquale's "From Serling to Simpson" this afternoon at 3:30 in Emerson Suites (that's Homer, by the way, not OJ, who wouldn't be any less scary than TZ itself). I always knew The Simpsons frequently used elements from what Homer once called "that show about that twilighty zone," but apparently the connection is even stronger than I thought.

Anyway, you should be there (and at a bunch of the other events too, since so many are free and open to the public). In the meantime, check out my fave Twilight Zone homage, from one of those "Treehouse of Horror" episodes they do after Halloween every year. Submitted for your approval, natch.