In The Heat of the Hazzard Vampire Darlings

The courthouse in Covington, Georgia. Photo by me, November 2025.

Is it Hazzard County or Mystic Falls or Sparta? This town was all three fictional places about moonshine, rebel flags, Daisy Duke cutoffs, Archie Bunker as a cop and teenage vampires in television shows, but the real place is Covington, Georgia; a town of fourteen thousand residents and filled with fine homes east of Atlanta in Newton County.

 

Get that selfie bro! People wait outside a tour company. Photo by me, November 2025.

The few times I have stopped in Covington and not simply passed through on the back roads to elsewhere I have been surprised at how busy the downtown is with sightseers. I had no idea people were that interested in taking tours of places where television shows and movies were filmed. I was unaware this many people were deeply connected to television shows and that they would track down the real life filming locations and pay for tours. Is it an odd psychological quirk for a hobby I suppose. I might could understand if it were Hollywood, but Covington? I might not understand, but maybe there is good reason for this.

Covington thrives on this piggyback tourist industry and there is even a museum about these television shows and films. Meanwhile, actual filming in Georgia for movies and television has taken a downturn as production companies flock to cheaper locations. The local film business has slowed so much that some of the studio buildings and land on the bypass were purchased in October by the city and will be converted for municipal uses.

One of the more popular shows filmed here was The Vampire Diaries from 2009 to 2017. Covington was the fictional town of Mystic Falls, which sounds like the name of a cheap wine or car air freshener with a musky scent. I can smell it now coming from a Tesla.

Someone I am kind of related to and was an actor was on the show several times as an extra. I have never seen an episode and do not recognize the names of any of the actors. I assume it must be about vampires writing their secrets in little notebooks that they hide under their coffin pillows. 

 

As I walked I was near one of the major filming locations for the series. Teenage girls with heads down stared at themselves on their phones. They blocked the sidewalk and I patiently waited until finally I had to say excuse me like an adult should. The girls were the dreaded phone zombies and not vampires in broad daylight at the corner of College Avenue and East Street. Not to pick on teenagers, but people of all ages too often have lost the basic courtesy that when in public you have to share it with others, that the world does not revolve around you and the faux image of yourself that you present via a smart phone. Real life in public is not your personal television show, a TikTok post or a YouTube channel.

The filming location of Lockwood Mansion. Photo by me, November 2025.

The filming location of Lockwood Mansion. Photo by me, November 2025.

This is Lockwood Mansion, the television den of the Lockwood family of vampires. People were creepily possessive about their spot outside the gates to get their perfect and amazing photos. As is my style, I walked through them, took a few cell phone photos and stayed ten seconds. I felt rather silly about the whole moment, but it was a nice house. 

The county courthouse in Covington as seen in the opening credits of the tv show In The Heat of the Night.

In the 1980s my mother watched In The Heat of the Night so I saw many episodes of that show. Covington served as Sparta, Mississippi. I was not exactly the target demographic for the show, it was okay. Carroll O'Connor was a big name actor, but I never said to myself that one day I was going to track down the shooting locations and take a selfie. And so I did not in 2025.

The General Lee and the Duke Boys being chased around the courthouse square in Covington.

I did watch The Dukes of Hazzard when it premiered in 1979 and for a couple of seasons after until I lost interest. My closest friend at the time, a boy I have written about in my books as the character Robin, could do a perfect “yeehaw” just like Bo Duke. I was jealous. I was six years old so what did I know? How many car chases with a couple of good ole' boys can one watch? Sing it Waylon. Most of my classmates were obsessed with the show, had model versions of the General Lee car, tee shirts, bedroom posters and talked about the show into high school. This was about the same time that Cooter, actor Ben Jones, became a Georgia Congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1988. Among the more impressionable minds of some of my classmates, some are still die hard fans as they refuse to outgrow their childhood tastes well into middle age.

Only the first five episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard were filmed in Covington, Conyers and Atlanta in the fall of 1978. The show thereafter was filmed in California and it never looked the same as the real locations in Georgia. The red clay dirt, dense woods and rural landscapes just cannot be replaced by dusty California. During its seven seasons on CBS, the show was in the top ten for three seasons and peaked at number two in 1980 to 1981. I can still remember how big that show was and how it seemed for a time the show that every kid talked about on the school bus and playground.

A stuntman lands a plane on the courthouse square of Covington as locals watched as extras in a Hal Needham directed film.

A film that seemed to be in perpetual repeat on HBO in the early 1980s was The Cannonball Run (1981). I saw it in the theater and then had it on in the background many times as a kid while I played with my Hotwheels. I did not know it at the time nor would I have cared then either, but parts of the movie were filmed in Covington. In the scene above a stuntman lands a plane that is supposed to be piloted by Burt Reynolds on the courthouse square. The reason for the unexpected landing was that Burt and Dom DeLuise had run out of beer. 

The film is a comedy car chase that would certainly be less humorous if made today. The Rod McKuen joke, which was quite funny, would not be understood today by younger generations as you had to be alive in that period to fully understand and much of the other humor might also be unappreciated. The bloopers that ran at the end of the film were great. I miss Dom DeLuise's laugh. I miss Burt Reynolds too. 

I remember the late 1970s and early 80s as a very loose, humorous time. Some of my belief resides in the fact I was a kid, but you also see it reflected in the entertainment of the era. It is easy to be misled by people with ulterior motives into believing, especially if you were not there, that the past was some miserable experience. Nor was it perfect either, but people were far less hung up, concerned and socially neutered with bullshit. Compared to the blunt and adversarial categorizations of today, people's sense of place in the world and how to relate to others was more nuanced and also more sophisticated. If you transported anyone under the age of forty today back to 1981 they would be utterly lost as to how to behave, communicate or function; even pumping gas, using a telephone or getting along with people would be problems. People did actually try to get along in public back then at least where I came from. The two greatest losses in my lifetime might be the loss of authentic humor and observing coping skills be supplanted by entitlement. Both of those losses are cross generational.

Twenty minutes east of Covington between there and Madison is Hard Labor Creek State Park. The park was the primary filming location (a few scenes were shot in Atlanta) for the 1980 Paramount Pictures film Little Darlings. The film starred Tatum O'Neal, Kristi McNichol and Matt Dillon. The movie is set at a summer camp and is about two girls, one from a wealthy family and the other from the wrong side of the tracks, who bet to see which one can be the first to lose their virginity. Gasp! Imagine a film like that in 2025, it would offend the sensibilities of the left and the right and would be a box office smash hit as everyone went in secret to watch it.

Top Left: The title sequence. The character who Tatum O'Neal played was supposed to live at The Swan House in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Top Right: The kids are loading up on a parking deck outside the old AJC newspaper HQ in Downtown Atlanta. Second Left: McNichol arrives in Downtown Atlanta. Second Right: Actor Nicolas Coster stands with the now demolished Omni Coliseum behind him and the Omni International which would become the world HQ of CNN known as CNN Center from 1985 until 2023. Bottom: McNichol in Downtown Atlanta. 

I must have watched this film a few dozen times on HBO on repeat as a child. I knew I shared something with McNichol, but I was not sure what at the time. She did some of her best acting in this film.

Camp Little Wolf at Hard Labor Creek State Park. Little Darlings 1980.

There was trouble caused by McNichol during filming of Little Darlings which might have been a glimpse of things ahead for her later in life. 

People Magazine cover March 31, 1980.

In a profile of McNichol in People Magazine during the promotion of the film it was revealed what had happened.

"The movie's crew, as it happened, preferred Tatum's quiet but polite reserve to Kristy's more impatient and sometimes disdainful moods. In one moment of boredom, Kristy gunned her car into nearby Madison, Ga. and, jumping the curb, tore a large "donut" into the grass on the town green. Confronted by angry police, the embarrassed production company later apologized (as did Kristy personally). "I'm just relieved that if my daughter has to be a rebel, she's ruining grass instead of taking drugs," says Carollyn." A Pad of Her Own in People Magazine March 31, 1980 by Karen G. Jakovich 

 

In 1979, when the movie was filmed, I can believe that a seventeen-year-old McNichol could have gotten away without trouble for doing doughnuts in the middle of sleepy Madison. She was rich and famous, American culture was less celebrity obsessed and not as connected with twenty-four hour news and the inescapable internet. Today, Madison caters to an upscale clientele and news of any sort spreads within minutes on social media and there would be videos from twenty different angles. A mention of the incident in 1980 in People Magazine did not even raise an eyebrow at the time.

McNichol, most known at the time for her role as Buddy in the 1970s television series Family, was no stranger to Georgia. She filmed the 1978 made-for-TV movie, Summer of My German Soldier in Crawfordville and Madison. Her 1981 film costarring Dennis Quaid and Mark Hamill, The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia was shot on location in northwest Georgia and Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

Jimmy Carter as Georgia Governor in the 1970s.

It also probably did not hurt that Georgia was beginning to emerge as a welcome place for filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. Burt Reynolds deserved some of the credit behind the push to film movies in the state. He had starred in Deliverance (1972) filmed in the Georgia mountains and advocated for more movies to be made here. Credit also belongs to then Governor Jimmy Carter who had the foresight to create the Georgia Film Office in 1973. 

During this time, Georgia was used for Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), Sharky's Machine (1981), The Cannonball Run (1981), Swamp Girl (1971), Together For Days (1972), The Greatest Gift (1974), Buster & Billie starring a very hot Jan-Michael Vincent (1974), The Longest Yard (1974), Conrack (1974), Cockfighter (1974), Poor Pretty Eddie (1975), Return to Macon County (1975), Moonrunners (1975), Squirm (1976), Gator (1976), Greased Lightning (1977), The Farmer (1977), Scalpel (1977), The Great Bank Hoax (1978), Our Winning Season (1978), John Huston's Wise Blood (1979), Moon In Taurus (1980), City of the Living Dead (1980), The Long Riders (1980), Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980), Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), Breaking Away the television series starring the adorable Shaun Cassidy filmed in Athens (1980), Madhouse (1981), The Four Seasons (1981), Coward of the County (1981), Six Pack which was partly filmed where I grew up in Georgia (1982), The Sender (1982), The Slayer (1982), Murder In Coweta County (1983), The Slugger's Wife (1985), Summer Rental (1985), A Killing Affair (1986), As Summers Die (1986), Manhunter (1986), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), The Mosquito Coast starring Harrison Ford and River Phoenix and partially filmed near where I grew up (1986), Foxfire (1987), Made in Heaven (1987), Funland (1987), From A Whisper to a Scream (1987), Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988), Your Mother Wears Combat Boots (1989), Driving Miss Daisy (1989) among others.

 

Movies and television shows would continue to be made in Georgia in the 1990s. It would be after 2000 when production exploded that Georgia became the Hollywood of the South. In 2016 Georgia had more feature films made here than California. Though Georgia's entertainment industry has begun to wane again in recent years.

Kristi McNichol canoes with Matt Dillon in Little Darlings.

I doubt Little Darlings is part of the film location tour circuit, but the park and its lake where Camp Little Wolf was located still exists. You can get a selfie by the lake, maybe hotwire a bus and sing along to One Way or Another by Blondie.

Standard Time

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Radiohead's Daydreaming from A Moon Shaped Pool played as we headed west out of Dawsonville, Georgia en-route to Ellijay. We were on a mission to buy apples and cider doughnuts, look at the mountain foliage and maybe, if the weather held, enjoy a hike. I craved the trails and the smell of fall. It was not looking good for the weather, light rain was on the radar to the west and clouds were banking up against the Appalachians. The weather models had said not to worry that the weather would hold until evening, but reality was not looking so favorable. The trees were putting on their best show, much better than last weekend when we were up here and the leaves were weak with color that looked like dried pea soup.

I was digging my head out of reading David Foster Wallace essays. People have made so many moral judgments about him since his suicide in 2008 and one-sided details of his personal life were revealed that his writing has fallen out of favor. People put others on pedestals and realize that they should not have done so and topple them. Or could it be they learned that people are complicated and imperfect? The time had changed or fallen back one hour. Standard time arrived and it is my preferred time with early sunsets and longer nights when daylight no longer needs to be saved. Standard time should be permanent time.

Decks Dark played.

Radiohead has been one of my favorite bands since the magical period of music in the early 1990s. I first saw Thom Yorke on MTV in Creep with his short, bleached hair and looking oddly sexy. He smoldered. My desire for him was like Cobain in that I could never tell if I only found him attractive from certain angles or if my attraction was fooled by the hairstyle. Yorke's physical beauty has not aged well since and “sexy” would not be a word I would apply to him in his late fifties. He is five years older than me, but I never had sexiness to lose and I was also never a rockstar.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The countryside unfurled on the twisty Georgia Highway 52 that is married to the southern border of the Chattahoochee National Forest. The first raindrops smacked the windshield as we passed the sunflower farm that we visited five years ago when COVID-19 was still the threat du jour and people were masked outdoors. It felt silly even then to be outdoors in a mask, but I was pragmatic, responsible as adults should be and fearful. I would not even eat inside a restaurant until the summer of 2022. It feels so much longer than only three years ago.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Clouds rolled over the mountains. We passed the turn to Mt. Oglethorpe. I was still hopeful about the weather. Three years ago in a mask felt more distant than the clouds atop the mountain and the early 90s. Getting older and standard time is the past disordered, out of sync, scattered memories mixed up on the floor and leaves on the ground. Life is a straight line, but the human mind is nonlinear.

Ful Stop played.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

We stopped at the first apple place we saw. It was comically painted red, white and blue. It was photogenic in the drizzle and temperatures in the upper forties. Gray weather and gray times. In the gravel lot in my Columbia fleece, Mexican made Levi's jeans and American made Brooks running shoes I tried to connect apples to the American flag theme. No signal in my head and I shrugged it off. The rain kept the crowds low or back closer to Atlanta in the exposed bulb lit food halls selling craft beer and noodles. We went inside for apples. This was not our regular place that we visit every fall, but new things were needed. Piles of apples looked at us and the disappointment was simultaneous between us. We were of one mind and turned and left without apples. We would buy them down the road. 

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The sky sagged. It was loaded with rain. A model failure and the rain unleashed on us. Knobs were adjusted to warm the car. Rain streaked windows and the hope for a hike drained. The cold and dim world closed in around our capsule of warmth. At least the leaves were pretty and we had apples. The Cartecay River appeared out of the trees next to the car. Someone told me once it had the cleanest water in the state, but I do not know if that is true. What is the truth from a stranger's mouth and what is false? It is okay to not know everything and it is okay not to believe everything too.

The Numbers played.

When will the next Radiohead album be released? A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016. It is not that fans will forget the band or that I imagine the band being worried that they need to release an album to stay relevant, but I would like to hear some new music from them. They challenge my ears, stimulate me, sometimes depress me and they never have bored me.

They are the only rock band that I do not mind maintaining an active, albeit slower, career into their older years. I do not see them as an embarrassment to still be on stage on a tour around the world. The band is not a cashing in, nostalgia act like the Rolling Stones or those other bands from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Radiohead's music always seems to stay new and maybe that is because the music has been ahead of everyone else their entire career and we still have not caught up.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Present Tense played.

Internet rumors are out there that a new album is coming, sometime, possibly in 2026. The band is beginning a limited European tour this month going into December. The shows are sold out. I am ready for new music from the band who is possibly the only band who would excite me to hear a new album. Nine years in my mixed-up memories have passed since the band's last album. I was younger, still not sexy, was spending a lot of time in Grant Park, hiking, swimming, dancing and buying apples in the mountains.

Ellijay, cradled by the ridges, sat in the pouring rain. We circled downtown. Tourists dashed for doors and warm tables. We debated whether to eat or leave in the early mountain darkness. I said something about the 80s and coming through here when it was nothing. I noticed that I am saying stuff like that too often the older I get. “When it was nothing” or “when it was cheaper” or “when it was different” and sometimes “when it was better.” My mother smiled in my mind around 1990 and took a bite of an apple behind her big sunglasses. I held the camera into 1991. Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway was fun with the windows down.  My mother was funny, easy to be around and I missed her. The present or the past, the carousel of memories was the same on standard time. We retraced our miles home down the highway in the falling leaves.

 

True Love Waits played. 

Me in the fall of 1990 around Ellijay. I am glad I gave up on the mustache.

The Old Gay Heart

 

Gay Pride marchers on Peachtree Street in the Atlanta Gay Pride parade in 2013. Photo by me, October 2013.

Little did I know that Atlanta Gay Pride was this weekend. I knew it was coming up this month, but it sneaked up on me. Every year since the 90s the question has been, will I go or not? Since the festivities were moved to October, from the traditional June several years ago, I have attended the festival and parade fewer times.

The last time I went to Pride other than to celebrate in a club or bar was twelve years ago. Not since 2013 have I stood at the corner of Tenth and Peachtree Streets, my once usual spot, and watched the parade of rainbow flags, corporate floats and “the community” make the turn. I have not even done the bar celebration tour since 2016.

Aging out of the scene at forty-three years old, combined with everyone I regularly hung out with having moved to the far corners of the world, seemed like the perfect time to exit. Hangovers and squeezing into Heretic and Blake's until three in the morning are not indulgences to be proud of at fifty-two. Let others have it and have their fun.

A gay pride logo or the Today Show?

This year's slogan, according to the official organizers, is “Rooted In Resistance.” The companion logo is another raised fist again this year and it has the added bonus of what appears to be long green fingernails overlaying a rising sun or the NBC Today Show logo. What would Bryant Gumble, Jane Pauley and Willard Scott say about that? Oh sorry, wrong decade.

I cannot identify with the slogan or the logo that is stamped on a community event by the official organization. The messaging and image has a violence to it that does not resonate with me. Where is the rainbow? Pride seems to no longer officially represent me as being part of the community. So many letters have been added to the community that the G for gay has gone from being shoved to the side to being shoved over the cliff.

A truly terrible photo of me at Atlanta Gay Pride in Piedmont Park in 1998 when it meant something to me.  One of too many film photos in my lifetime with my eyes closed. 

If Gay Pride was born in anything, it was in being proud of who we were, who we loved and not being ashamed of it. “Rooted” and “resistance” are meaningless words of the modern activist lexicon that leaves this red-blooded, rainbow-beating gay heart cold. Gay Pride needs to bring back the G, the original rainbow flag and the celebration of love in a world sorely needing it.

On The Sixth Day

 

Cover art by Jean-François Octave

Sweeping up leaves on the driveway, I realized there were only six days until Christmas. I tugged at my fleece pullover and wondered where had the time gone. It seems like the other day it was October and the leaves were only beginning to change and we were on the eve of deciding whether democracy lived or died. Wherever the times goes, to the land of lost socks, the forgotten news bin of people in New Jersey mistaking planes for alien drones or the recycle bin of my desktop – I suppose it does not matter.

I found new Christmas music between cleaning out the garage, painting a room and browsing online sales that were rather lackluster this year. My soundtrack for much of the last month has been the double album Ghosts of Christmas Past (Remake) released in 2015 by the Belgian record label Les Disques du Crepuscule.

It is a mix of thirty-five tracks of offbeat, eclectic, amusing new wave and post punk Christmas songs. The artists on it include Aztec Camera, Tuxedomoon, The Durutti Column, Michael Nyman, Isolation Ward, Ultramarine and others. It is the type of album that holds your attention and takes surprising turns down streets unfamiliar. I think of it as wearing Raybans on an overcast day because why not?

It sure as hell beats another suffering through of Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You. That song makes me think of the kind of person such as an ex who was so shallow that he would sing that song to himself and point at a mirror or any shiny reflective surface.

Some of my favorites on the album are:

Isolation Ward's Lamina Christus

The Wake's Jesus From The Block

Winston Tong's Twelve Days of Christmas. Who doesn't want seven Arab houseboys?


Swinging Buildings' Praying for a Cheaper Christmas

Marsheaux's We Met Bernard Sumner at a Christmas Party Last Night. The title alone makes it a favorite.

 

Those are only a few of my favorites, I have enjoyed listening to the album from beginning to end over and over. There is only one song that I dislike, The Arcadians' Write Your Letter. It stands out from the rest of the album as it sounds as if it is straight out of the 1960s. I hear it and think I should put a flower behind one ear, a feather behind the other, wear a fringe vest and hitchhike barefoot through Laurel Canyon.

 

My world is like a cloudy day of gauzy memories, the evening is fading, the lights are just coming on to battle against the night and anything is possible. I brush the bangs out of my eyes and finger the hole in my wool sweater listening to this album and it reminds me of my ghosts of Christmas past.

My old Nissan 200SX in the falling snow Christmas morning 1993. 

For a minute I am in the early nineties walking out the door of my mother's house on a dim Christmas morning. Snow showers are gushing flakes and I am there with my video camera recording all of it. I am twenty years old turning to look at the stickers for Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund and 99X on the back of my car. The earthy scent of the fallen pin oak leaves is overpowering and my hands are cold. Where has the time really gone?