Story Inspired by Rocky J. Colavito Out on Alien Buddha

By lornawoodauthor on June 25, 2026

The Alien Buddha After the Alien Buddha, with Chicago and Lake Michigan in the background. Taken by me, 19 June, 2026.

Back in the spring of 2025, I believe, this volume came out. I was deep in moving prep and didn’t get my hands on a copy until after we’d relocated, by which time I was deep in Victor Hugo work. So now I’m writing about it. Red Focks, the editor for Alien Buddha Press, put out a call for people who had published with the press to write pieces inspired by other authors who had done the same. I was assigned J. Rocky Colavito‘s quirky mystery stories about Vinnie Dark, the actor who plays LunkHead, the dumb guy in a low-budget version of the Annette Funicello-type beach party movies. He’s smart and solves mysteries, and Colavito’s Seeks on the Beach collects several of them.

Although I thought Red might have given me this to try to get some cross-genre energy going, since my publication in this project is a poetry collection, I kept wanting his characters to interact with my small-town Kansas detective, Sherri Holmes Hudson, who solved The Case of the Careless Cat with the help of her cat, Watson. So I wrote an update on the world of Vinnie Dark. In my story, set in the present day, Sherri finds that her signature LunkHead bucket hat from his film, Bikini Magic has been replaced with a forgery. She and her nephew Baker, a beach party movie fan, must find out who took it and why.

The backstory of the hat is that Sherri’s mother went out to Hollywood before marrying Mr. Holmes, hoping to be a starlet. She boarded with Vinnie Dark’s grade school teacher, Miss Lassiter (a Colavito character), who was strict, but had a heart of gold and a loving admiration for her former star student, Vinnie. After helping Sherri’s mother realize she really wanted to go back home to Kansas and teach school, which led to Sherri’s existence, Miss Lassiter was tragically murdered, which you can read about in Seeks on the Beach. In her will, she bequeathed her treasured hat to Sherri’s mother, whose children revered it, Miss Lassiter, and LunkHead.

Also involved in my story are Sherri’s high school boyfriend Garth Streeter, the police detective in Wynton, Kansas, where Sherri lives, and the Inspector Lestrade to Sherri’s Sherlock. A beach movie film festival is coming to the Wynton Library auditorium, and glamorous impresario Anna Giovanese has come from Hollywood to present it, in the process captivating the impressionable Streeter. She is also trying to revive her father’s Italian restaurant, a location for a scene in Seeks on the Beach. It had movie memorabilia on the walls, and Anna has put up an entire collection of LunkHead hats on the walls of her new restaurant. Just FYI for any cat-lovers out there who may be wondering, Watson also appears in this story, interacting with this femme fatale and watching a cat in a beach party movie.

Suspicion falls on Sherri’s house painter, Luis Gonzalez, who was painting the house while Sherri was out of town, but Sherri isn’t buying it. She and Baker solve the mystery in time for the opening of the festival, and Vinnie Dark assists, even appearing to help introduce the beach movies–though online, due to his advanced age.

That is “The Many Hats of Vinnie Dark: A Sherri Hudson Mystery” in a nutshell. I had a lot of fun writing it. I liked extrapolating from the details and characterizations in Colavito’s work, and I enjoyed having Baker use teenage slang gleaned from my son, who teaches high school. Also, I sometimes think I might do a whole book of quickie Sherri Hudson mysteries. I love her. (Okay, she’s a bit of a Mary Sue. So what?) I did have to cut the story a lot to fit the word limit, and I would edit it if I put it out again somewhere, but J. Rocky Colavito friended me on Facebook and told me he loved it, so mission accomplished.

I want to thank Red Focks for giving me this opportunity and also say that Alex Shenstone was spot-on in his own poetic take on fascism, humanity, and the natural world, written in response to my collection, The Great Garbage Patch. I believe The Alien Buddha after the Alien Buddha is an ongoing project, so keep an eye out for more.

Finally, whereas Dennis Kam‘s work tied in nicely with my poem about the elephant who listens to classical music in a nature preserve, the work of David Maslanka has nothing to do with beach party movies or mystery stories. Also, I have gone on long enough. I will try to fit my discussion of Maslanka’s award-winning compositions in next time.