Happy Halloween! Nothing will ever be as spooky as the choices made by members of the entertainment industry during the 1980s. For instance, the video above, which is a 27-minute operetta about a haunted laundromat that somehow stars the great Patti LuPone as a vengeful ghost who emerges from a sinister dryer. She preens like a sudsy Eva Peron! She yells about bleach! She turns somewhat invisible thanks to some cutting-edge effects work! We have the The New Yorker to thank for digging up “Love Cycle: A Soap Operetta,†which was made in 1984 for a PBS series that was to be called Hip Pocket Musicals but never aired, for somewhat obvious reasons.
We also have The New Yorker to thank for asking LuPone herself (who believes in ghosts, by the way) about it. “For some reason, I’m haunting this laundromat, and I’m stealing everybody’s socks,†she says. “Yeah, this is a real piece of art.†She is being sarcastic, but she’s also not wrong.