EXTEMPORANEOUS WRITING - "Untitled"

first comment: a life event - Star Chicaderis - Bar Mitzvah
second comment: a well-known book (hopefully which I know) - Casey Fogle - Green Eggs & Ham
third comment: a cartoon or cartoon character - Bill Duggan - Daffy Duck
fourth comment: a texture - Jim Thompson - stubbly
fifth comment: based on the above, the title of the piece should be: ___________ -(no response)

UNTITLED

-or-

First Train Out of Toyland

 

Dear Grandma,

Hi. How are you? I am fine. It would be much easier and much faster for me to write to you if you had email, but dad keeps saying, “that’s not going to happen,” so I guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. I hope you don’t mind if I type everything rather than writing it out in my own handwriting, but my hand always gets really cramped up if I have to write more than a couple of paragraphs, and besides, my penmanship is so lousy anyway that you probably wouldn’t be able to read a thing. Plus, I am using a really clear font and making it bigger than usual because I know that sometimes you have a hard time seeing things. Dad keeps saying that you‘re “blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other one!” , but I tell him that that’s not funny and besides you can see out of both eyes, just not very well. And I don’t think the glasses you wear look anything like “Coke bottles”, no matter what he says. Your glasses are nice because they make your eyes, which are really pretty, even prettier because they make them look much, much bigger.
Anyway, I wanted to write to you and tell you all about the exciting weekend I just had. I don’t know if you remember my friend Sam from grade school. He used to live at the end of our block on Pleasant Street. Anyway, Sam is Jewish, and it was his Bar Mitzvah last weekend, and I was invited to go. But there’s much more to it than just that, because I got to take the Amtrak down to Washington, DC and everything, all by myself, which was pretty cool.

Sam and I have been really good friends since kindergarten or first grade. His last name begins with “G”, just like ours, so our desks were always right near each other in class, and we were always next to one another in line and stuff like that. The fact that his family is Jewish and our family isn’t never really came up, except that his family celebrated different holidays than we did, and a couple of times Sam missed Cub Scouts if it was on a Friday. Sam always said that his family was “Reform” Jews, which I guess meant that they weren’t too strict about religion. I figured that it was pretty much the same as “fallen” was for Christians, since that’s what Dad always says we are.

Sam and his family moved away though, about a year and a half ago. His dad got some kind of job with the government, so they had to move down to DC. It seems like it’s not that big of a deal; Mom says that Washington is only 50 miles away from us here in Baltimore, but for some reason I haven’t even seen Sam once since they moved. So I was really excited when I got a really fancy invitation in the mail a couple of months ago when they requested the honour of my presence at Sam’s Bar Mitzvah. Mom made some phone calls, and as soon as she heard that I could stay overnight at Sam’s house, she said I could go, and that she was even going to let me make the trip all by myself. I was really excited, but instead of just picking up the phone and calling Sam, which is what I really wanted to do, Mom said I had to fill out the little reply card that was inside the invitation, and check off the part that said I was delighted to attend, and mail it back to “Master Samuel Goldman”. It took forever and it seemed like an awful lot of trouble, but Mom said that was how it was supposed to be done. So I was really happy when Sam finally called like a week later and he said he was glad that I was coming.

The first thing I had to do was find out exactly what a Bar Mitzvah is. I looked on the internet, and I found out that basically it is a ceremony in the Jewish religion that takes place when a boy or girl turns 13. If it is a girl, they call it a “Bat” Mitzvah. Anyway, according to that religion, this is the point when the young person is entering into adulthood. So, it seemed I was going to go and help my friend become a man. Sounded OK to me.

Anyway, Sam’s Bar Mitzvah was on a Saturday, so I got excused from class on Friday so I could take the train down to Washington. When I came home from school on Thursday, Mom told me that she had packed all my clothes for the trip.

“The suitcase is on your bed,” she said. “Go take a look and make sure you have everything you need.”

“OK,” I said, and I took the stairs two at a time because this is my first big trip and I was kind of excited to make sure everything was going to be right. I got to my bedroom and opened the door. There, in the center of my bed, sat my little sister’s Hannah Montana suitcase. My mother had stuck a piece of masking tape over the word “Hannah” and written “Joey G.” on it in magic marker, so at first glance the bag look like it belonged to a teenage girl named Joey G. Montana.

Oh my god, she didn’t really think I was going to get on a real Amtrak train dragging a Hannah Montana suitcase along behind me, did she?

I ran downstairs.

“Mom!” I yelled, “Where’s my suitcase?”
“You don’t have a suitcase, dear,” she said, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong here, “You’ve never been anywhere.”

“Well, neither has Becky!” I answered, as if that would actually make a difference.

“Yes she has,” said Mom, “she went to that Campfire Girl thing last fall. Anyway, it will be fine. Nobody cares what’s on your suitcase.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I said. “Of course they care! I care! There is no way I’m going anywhere with that suitcase.”
“Well, we’ll just have to ask your father when he gets home,” Mom said, in a way which I knew that any further discussion would be pointless. I went upstairs and took everything out of the suitcase anyway, because even if Dad didn’t care, I was not giving in on this one. I would put my clothes in trash bags if I had to.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do that, because here is what happened when Dad got home from work that day:

I was in the den watching TV and I heard Dad come in through the kitchen door. They started having one of their “discussions”. I couldn’t hear the words they were saying but I could hear the tone of their voices and they both sounded a little irritated. Then I heard Dad’s steps as he went up to take a look in my bedroom, so I turned the TV down really low and sat by the door to try to hear what would happen next.

I heard him open my bedroom door, and I heard the little ‘click’ when he turned on the light. Then all I heard was my dad saying something like, “Oh. My. God,” and then busting a gut laughing. As he came back down the stairs, he said something like, “You’ll just never get it, sweetheart,” and he went right out into the garage.

The next thing I knew, Dad was calling me. “Joey!” he said, “Come and get this bag packed!”
The suitcase he had brought in was the one he uses sometimes to go on business trips and stuff. It is humongous; Dad says it’s the biggest size the airlines will allow without being “screwed with baggage fees”, whatever that means. It’s almost as tall as I am, but I don’t really care. It’s got wheels, and anything is better than Hannah Montana.

Anyway, I basically ended up just re-packing everything that Mom had picked out for me. She’s much better at that sort of thing than I am, just not so good at picking out luggage, I guess. I put some comic books and my Ipod in there along with my headphones. I still carry an Ipod, because my cell phone is only an old-fashioned flip phone and Mom and Dad say I can’t get an actual Smart Phone until I’m sixteen and only if I keep my grades up. I packed my cell phone, too; but even with all that stuff I had only filled like a tenth of that gigantic suitcase.

So, the next afternoon, there I was, walking into Penn Station in Baltimore, rolling this huge suitcase along behind me. I didn’t really mind, though. I thought that in a way it made me look kind of important, like people would see me and think, “That young man must be a real go-getter, he’s heading off somewhere for a long time, with that big suitcase,” or something.

Anyway, Mom kept looking at me all weepy-eyed for some reason, and saying stuff like, “Our little man” and “Soon, soon…” Finally, when they announced my train, she made me stop and she took my picture with the giant luggage, and then she burst out crying.

Dad just rolled his eyes. He looked at me and mouthed the words, “Go, Son,” so I turned around and followed the crowd down to the train.

Penn Station is a pretty cool old train station. Dad said that it had been “recently renovated”, but it still looked pretty old to me. The benches were wood instead of plastic and the lights and the doors and fixtures and things all looked like they were from the olden days. I could almost picture people way back, like in the 1920s or 30s, rushing off to their trains in their long coats and their hats and all in black and white.

Once I got on the train, though, there was nothing old-timey about it. I hadn’t really thought about what the inside of a train would look like. I guess I thought it would be kind of old-fashioned like the train station, like trains look in the movies and old reruns of “Wild, Wild West”. But in reality, they are all modern and no-nonsense, just row after row of identical seats and stuff like that. Kind of like a school bus, but with no driver in sight and a lot more plush, like a school bus for an ultra high-tech school for millionaire kids in Japan.

Anyway, I found a seat for myself. I was lucky, because I found two seats together and I didn’t have to sit next to anyone. The gigantic suitcase was too big to fit in the overhead storage thingy, but I was able to leave it at the front of the car, and I could see it from my seat. Good luck to whoever wanted to steal that thing.

Before long, the conductor came along to take my ticket. He stood there and looked at it for a minute, and then he said, “Unaccompanied minor.”

“Umm, yeah, I suppose,” I said. I mean, I guess that was me.

He stood there and looked at me over his glasses for a minute. It looked like he was trying to memorize me, what I was wearing, what I looked like, everything. Then he handed me an Amtrak card with his name and a cell phone number on it.

“Something happens, find me,” he said.

He really didn’t look like a very nice person and I hoped I would never have to call him, but I tucked the card into my pocket. “Thanks,“ I said. It felt good to know that at least one person on this train had my back, because for the first time in my life Mom and Dad weren’t around, and not even a teacher or babysitter or anything. I was pretty much on my own. At least for the hour-long train ride to DC.

Dad had told me to just “stay in your seat and shut the hell up” for the whole train ride, but after a while I got bored and decided to walk from one end of the train to the other. My seat was pretty far to the back of the train, so I stuck my earphones in my ears, even though they weren’t attached to anything and there was no music or anything. If you have earphones in your ears, you can act like you don’t hear people if they try to talk to you, and then you don’t look rude if you ignore them and walk away.

I walked all the way to the front of the train, and then turned around and walked back. This is when it got interesting, because walking this way, I could actually see the faces of all the people on the train, and what they were wearing, or reading, and who they were talking to, and stuff like that. I took my time as I went. There were people who looked rich and people who looked like they had everything they owned right there with them. There were people who looked happy to be going wherever they were going, and people who looked like they had been crying the whole way. There were families with kids and old people; and people wearing strange and beautiful clothes from places like India and Africa.

As I walked backwards through the train, I began to realize how, well, kind of sheltered my life has been so far, with Mom and Dad and my family. I began to realize exactly how much there is about the world that I don’t know. And I began to think about how once this train stopped and we all got off, how everyone would scatter and go their separate ways and live their lives, but for the moment we were all doing the same thing: riding this train. Africans, Jewish people, Fallen Christians like me, all heading in the same direction and just trying not to bump into one another when the train shifts. I guess in some ways that’s what life in the real world is like, or at least it should be.

Anyway, I got back to my seat eventually and it was only a few more minutes before we were in DC.

I was really relieved to see Sam and his parents in the station, because Union Station in Washington is huge and I really didn’t want to have to call that conductor guy from the train. I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Goldman first. I almost didn’t recognize Sam, because he has actually grown like an inch and a half since the last time I saw him. In a way, though, it doesn’t look quite right, like his arms and legs are growing at a different rate than the rest of his body. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my imagination.

Anyway, we drove out to their house, which isn’t actually in Washington, DC, but in Maryland, in a place called Chevy Chase. I thought that was funny because there is a movie actor whose name is Chevy Chase. I put the giant suitcase away up in Sam’s room, and that night they invited me to join in a huge family dinner they were having with all the aunts and uncles and cousins and everyone who had come in to town for the Bar Mitzvah.

Dinner was really nice. We all sat at one big table, instead of being split into the “kids’ table” and everyone else. I wasn’t sure what to expect, because I had never been to a Jewish family dinner before. But the food was really good, even though I had trouble pronouncing some of the names of what they were. Everyone was laughing and talking really loud, and most of the women were trying to get everyone to eat more food and kept spooning extra helpings onto everyone’s plates. The grown-ups were all hollering at each other from one end of the table to the other one, and most of the kids were either stuffing their faces with food or couldn’t wait until dinner was over. Basically, it was exactly the same as our family dinners, and we’re Italian. I guess people aren’t really all that different from one another, after all.

At one point, Sam’s big sister, Rachel, said something like, “Sam, have you warned Joey about Daffy?”

Mrs. Goldman shot her a look and nobody said a word, but I looked at Sam and saw that he couldn’t suppress a big grin.

Then one of the Aunts or Grandmothers said something like, “Ever been to a Jewish family dinner before, Joe?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, “but it’s been really nice.”

“What religion is your family?” she asked.

“No religion, ma’am. My mom’s family is Unitarian, and Mom just says they believe in everything. Dad was brought up Catholic, but he says he hasn’t been in a church since he was 15.”

“Why is that?” someone asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I’ve heard Dad a few times, saying stuff like, he had ‘issues’ with a priest when he was a teenager, but he won’t say much about it, at least not to me.”

For some reason the room went really quiet at that moment. The adults were all looking at each other and one of the older teenagers started to chuckle under his breath. I hoped I hadn’t said anything I wasn’t supposed to. People can be very touchy about religion.

Fortunately, one of the babies started bawling or something at that point, and everyone was able to go back to laughing and spilling gravy and hollering at one another.

Later that night, after the dinner was over and everyone had left, Sam and I were up in his room, trying to fall asleep. He was in his bed, and I got to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, which was pretty cool. We weren’t all that tired, and we spent a long time just talking to one another. We caught up on what had been going on since the Goldmans moved away, about school and people we knew and stuff like that. Sam told me that he was really, really nervous about the Bar Mitzvah the next day. Turns out he had to go to a special school and everything to get his Bar Mitzvah; he had to practically learn an entire new language and memorize prayers and songs and all these rituals and everything. I tried to reassure him and tell him he was going to be great, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking that if it was me, I’d probably be scared out of my mind and would just want to run and hide and call the whole thing off.

“Especially some of the prayers,” he said. “Sometimes I just forget what I’m supposed to be saying, and when I look down the Hebrew letters just look like nonsense to me.” I could tell he was really nervous about the whole thing. “And then, Daffy-”
“Who is ‘Daffy’?” I jumped in.

Sam looked at me and grinned again. “Oh my god, you cannot react!”

“What do you mean?” I said. “React to what?”
“Our Rabbi looks, acts, and sounds exactly like Daffy Duck.” 
A Rabbi is what Jewish people call a priest.

“You can not laugh when you see him. But you might want an umbrella for when he starts talking.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Every time he says a word with an ‘S’ in it, he sprays.”
“Oh my god. No way.”
“Way,” said Sam. “And I am not saying another word.”

At least I had gotten him to forget how nervous he was.

We talked for a while longer, but we were starting to get a little sleepy. Just before we fell asleep, though, Sam told me that I had actually taught him how to read.

“Yeah,” he said, “we were in kindergarten, in Miss Conway’s class, and she used to have all these books along one wall. One day you grabbed a copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” and we sat down at one of those little tables and you started reading it to me.

I liked it because it had my name in it,” he said, “and every day we would sit down together and you would say the words while I looked at the letters on the page. One day I recognized my name, ‘Sam’, there on the page, and then I figured out what other words were.

So you see, Joey,” he said, “You taught me how to read.”

“That’s cool,” I said, because it is.

A few minutes later, I heard Sam, nearly asleep. “I do not like them Sam, you see.

Not in a house. Not in a box.

Not with a mouse. Not with a fox.

I will not eat them here or there.

I do not like them anywhere!”

“You do not like green eggs and ham?” I answered, smiling.

“I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” he said, and we both drifted off to sleep.

The next day was the actual Bar Mitzvah.

We were rushing through the morning, but at one point, while we were getting ready, Sam called me into the bathroom. He was staring at himself in the mirror, and one hand was rubbing his chin. “Come here,” he said. “Do I feel, I dunno, stubbly- to you?”

I walked over and touched his chin. I guess it felt stubbly. I mean, I’m not really sure what stubbly actually feels like. I’ve felt my dad’s face when he hasn’t shaved for a few days, and Sam’s face didn’t feel anything like that. It might have felt more like my mom’s legs after she hasn’t felt like shaving them for a while.

“I don’t know,” I said to him. “I guess so.”

“I’m going to shave today, Joey,” he told me. “Part of becoming a man.”

He held up a razor which he had found in the shower. It was bright pink and decorated with flowers.

“Umm, do you know how to shave?” I asked him.

“Technically, no,” he said, “ but I’ve seen tons of guys shaving on TV and in commercials and stuff.”

“OK,” I said.

“I do feel stubbly,” he said, turning back to the mirror.

When he came out of the bathroom, half an hour later, he was pale, and he had about fifteen little pieces of tissue stuck all over his face. He was smiling from ear to ear.

We had to go to the church, which they call a synagogue. The Goldmans were all really nervous and running around shaking hands and saying hi to everybody and stuff. So, Mrs. Goldman introduced me to this girl named Mary Margaret O’Shaugnessy, probably because neither one of us if Jewish, and I guess she just expected the two of us to entertain ourselves and figure everything out.

I never really understood what people meant when they said things like somebody “looks Jewish.” I mean, how do you look like a religion? But when I met Mary Margaret, I finally understood, because Mary Margaret looks about as un-Jewish as anyone can look. She is fair, with pale red hair and freckles everywhere, and she wore this dress and these little white gloves that made her look like she had just come from Sunday school or First Communion. She was pretty nice, at least, and the two of us ended up getting a seat in the very back of the synagogue, along with some younger kids and some grown-ups who didn’t really “look Jewish” either, but who did look a little awkward and out of place. I had to wear a yarmulke, which is a tiny little hat that Jewish men wear. They had a big box to pick from if you didn’t have your own, so Mary Margaret helped pick one out for me that she said matched my tie, and then she had to pin it onto my head with a bobby pin. I liked wearing the yarmulke in a way, because even though it was just a little piece of cloth bobby pinned to my hair, it reminded me that I was in the presence of God and that I needed to be respectful and reverent, even though I had no idea what was happening around me.

The ceremony began, and I found it harder to be respectful and reverent as I began to realize who “Daffy” was. Even underneath his fancy robes and everything, I could see it. He was really skinny, and dressed all in black. He had huge feet which stuck out from beneath his robes in bright, almost yellow shoes. He had three locks of black hair which stood up from the top of his head like feathers. He had heavy-lidded, shifty eyes; and a protruding upper lip and a smirk which made him look as if he were up to, well, something. And when he started to speak- well, let’s just say that I found out that there are just as many ‘S’ words in the Jewish language as there are in English, and every once in a while, Sam had to stop and try to wipe off his face with his prayer shawl.

“Oh my god,” Mary Margaret said to me. “It’s…”

“I know,” I said to her, elbowing her in her ribs. “We cannot react. If we do, he might not allow Sam to enter adultery.”

“Okay,” she said, but every once in a while one or the other of us would start giggling.

Sam was doing really well up there, I guess, and I was really proud of him. He had to carry this huge scroll around and had to read prayers in Hebrew and chant and everything. Mary Margaret and I weren’t paying too much attention because neither one of us really knew exactly what was going on. At one point, though, while Sam was reading something in Hebrew from one of the giant scrolls, everything had gone quiet. Sam, it seems, had forgotten exactly what he was supposed to be saying, and looking down at the Hebrew alphabet wasn’t helping at all. I saw him looking around the room, looking, I guess, for some kind of help. There was still one piece of blood-soaked toilet paper stuck on his chin. He saw me, and we looked each other in the eye for a split second. He shrugged at me, and all I could do was shrug back, and smile.

“So I will eat them in a house,” Sam said, so quietly that he could barely be heard.

“And I will eat them with a mouse.”

He looked up now, and his voice was getting a little louder. “And I will eat them here and there. Say! I will eat them anywhere!”

Now he was looking right at me and smiling, while Daffy Duck shifted and tried to figure out what was happening. “I do so like green eggs and ham!”

I jumped right up from my seat. “Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!” I shouted.

I had forgotten to be respectful and reverent. Rabbi Daffy looked like he was going to have a fit and Mrs. Goldman kept hiding her face in her hands like people you see on the news on “perp walks”. I didn’t know what to expect. But you know what happened, Grandma? People laughed. They laughed, and some of them clapped, and everybody looked like a huge weight had just been lifted off of their shoulders and relaxed a little bit. The Rabbi got Sam back on track with his prayers, which were just about over anyway. People realized that it’s not always the words and the prayers that are important, it’s everybody being together and seeing each other through all the different stages in their lives, and laughing at the stuff that's actually funny, even if it is inside a church or a synagogue or whatever.

After the synagogue we all got together for a party. It reminded me a lot of Aunt Peggy’s wedding: everybody was laughing and dancing and catching up on old times, and all the old people kept saying things like “Look how tall you are!” and “The last time I saw you, you were only this big!”. Except instead of a bride and a groom, there was Sam. I watched him for a while, as people shook his hand and gave him presents and stuff, and as I did, I thought to myself that yes, I could see it. My friend Sam was becoming a man. I wondered if I was, too.

So, I took the train home to Baltimore the next day, but by then I had done that already and the novelty had sort of worn off. By then it was just a boring, hour-long train ride, and I was glad I had brought my Ipod along for real this time.

Mom and Dad met me at the train station and we went home and life pretty much went back to normal after that. But not completely normal. In some small way, I feel like I took a step myself that weekend. Maybe a step closer to “becoming a man”, whatever that means.

But for now, I think I’ll just work on being 13. That seems to be enough.

Love you Grandma.

Love,
Joey



 



 

Q&A

Q&A

Georgia Gearhead asks: Ford or Chevy?
Dear Gearhead: You have managed to ask me a question which I, more than most, am completely unequipped to answer. Despite my advanced age, and the fact that I was born right here in America, I have never driven a car in my entire lifetime. Not even once. A friend of mine even handed me his keys once, and asked me just to go and start the car in the driveway, so that it would have time to warm up, and I could only look at him, helpless, clueless, unable to do even that.
I suppose that there must be a reason for this anachronism. My mother never drove, either, so perhaps there’s something in the genes. Perhaps I have some deep-seated fear of driving, I don’t know. That seems more like the topic for an entire essay at some point (or perhaps an entire self-effacing book. Or six months of therapy). Suffice to say that for me, sitting in the driver’s seat of a moving automobile is somewhat akin to being handed the controls of a 747 and being told, “Just point this at the runway, OK?”
So, I must answer your question from the only point of view which I have: my own. That is, the point of view of the perpetual passenger, who knows absolutely nothing about cars, except maybe which ones are pretty.
My answer to your question would have to be “Chevy,” and there are three main reasons why:
1) I have heard that Henry Ford was a complete bigot and Anti-Semite. If World War II had gone differently, we’d probably be driving around in the “Adolf Hatchback” or the “Ford Übermensch”
2) I knew a guy once who rearranged the letters across the hood of his Ford pickup so that they said “DORF” instead of “FORD”. This would be nearly impossible to do with a Chevrolet.
3) When I think of cool cars, I think ‘57 Chevy. It’s that simple.

Kurious in Killeen wonders: Why?
Dear Kurious: To be honest, when I started this exchange, I was expecting more small, insignificant questions, such as, “How do I get Midori stains out of taffeta?” or “Are open-toed shoes appropriate at a May cotillion?” But, I suppose it was inevitable that the Big Questions would eventually be thrown my way; questions like this one, or “What is the meaning of Life?” or “Why, exactly, are the Kardashians famous?” I am going to attempt a reply, but I feel that I must consult the Oracle first.
(there is half an Oracle in the ashtray.)
…
Well, the Oracle seems to think that I could really go for a chocolate shake and some cheese fries right now, but that’s neither here nor there.
There are many different ideas and beliefs on exactly what it is which separates us, as human beings, from “the animals”. Some people think it’s our opposable thumbs, our self-awareness, or our ability to use tools and solve problems. Others say it is our ability to laugh, some say to cry, and according to Olympia Dukakis in “Steel Magnolias”, the only thing which separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.
Perhaps we should add this question to the list of things which separate us from the animals. We tend to wonder ‘why?’. The dog doesn’t wonder why the tennis ball is so irresistible, he just chases after it. The cat doesn’t wonder why you are reading the newspaper, she just lies down on top of it. The oyster doesn’t wonder why… well, whatever the hell it is oysters wonder about.
The point is that it is profoundly human to wonder ‘why’. Sometimes the answer is knowable: When Nancy Kerrigan was clutching her knee in that ice rink all those years ago, pathetically whining, “Why? Why?”, the answer was obvious: Because Tanya Harding is one crazy-assed white trash bitch. But sometimes the answer is far more elusive.
Anyone who has ever had a conversation with a 4 year-old can also tell you that the question, “Why?” is never really answered.
“Why is Duke scratching?”
“Because he’s itchy.”
“Why?”
“Because he has fleas.”
“Why?”
“Because fleas like dogs.”
“Why?”
“Go ask your mother.”
“Why?”
“Because shut up.”
And on and on. So it seems that no matter how much we want to know why, we never can. Perhaps we’d be better off following the example of the dog and the cat, and simply chase the ball because it’s fun and lie down wherever we want.

Pedigreed in Provincetown ponders: Where did the tipping of ones hat to a woman stem from?
Dear Pedigreed: Way back in the Dark Ages, after King Arthur but before the Battle of Hastings, there was a small middle-European kingdom run by a powerful queen named Queen Leona. She had been born into privilege and was used to getting her own way. At a time when life was cheap, she was quite fond of using phrases such as, “Off with her head!” and “To the snake pit!” and so on. Leona became known far and wide as “The Queen of Mean Queens.”
One of Queen Leona’s knights was called Sir Jeffery Whitebread, fairly wet behind the ears and wholly unsuited for the job. Sir Jeffery’s wife, Lady Myrtle, was one of the Queen’s Ladies in Waiting, and was still on the job despite being 8½ months pregnant.
One day Sir Jeffery was summoned to the Great Hall, where the Queen and her entourage had gathered. In those days, when in the presence of Her Majesty, the knights were required to wear full battle armor, including a pike, a shield, and a panache of feathers on their helmets. Jeffery, who was small-boned, skinny and meek, struggled into the Great Hall, despite the fact that his helmet and visor prevented him from seeing anyone above the mid-chest.
He saw his wife’s shoes and thought he smelled her perfume as his eyes traveled upward, admiring the fine brocades and rich silk of her dress, the full ripeness of her rounded, fecund belly, heavy with child. He reached out and patted her good-naturedly. “We’re going to have that baby one day, eh, darlin’?”
The Queen, who stood before Sir Jeffery, horrified and fuming, removed his hand from her ample belly. “Off with his head!” she bellowed, with no small amount of delight.
The hooded executioner held up Sir Jeffery’s head by the hair so he could face the circle of onlookers around him. “Any last words?” he asked.
“Aye,” said Sir Jeffery. “Gents, always lift your visors when addressing a lady. It could mean your life.”
Over the years, as helmets became hats, the custom became one of tipping one’s hat as a sign of respect for a lady.
Or something like that.

Testing in Truro writes: How many natural archipelagos exist in Europe?
Dear Testing: I wonder about this question. Why would you ask such a question? Are you studying for the SAT’s? If so, I would simply ignore this one, take a wild guess or just answer ‘C’. It’s just one question so it won’t affect your score too much.
Then I thought that maybe you were testing me, to see if I even knew what an archipelago was. Well, guess what: I do know, so there. My mom was very politically-minded, so when she brought home a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” in the 70s, I looked up both of those words in the dictionary. A gulag, in case you don’t know, is a prison camp.
Actually, I have no idea how many natural archipelagos exist in Europe, but then again, I doubt that anyone does. You could count gigantic archipelagos, such as the British Isles, or little tiny ones, such as a small group of islands in a Finnish lake somewhere. And by ‘Europe’, are you including non-EU countries?
I have been to one archipelago in Europe personally. It was Venice, Italy. The food there was awesome and it has a really nice casino. But I suppose there could be some debate about how “natural” it is.
So, I hope I have answered your question by not answering it. This is the same talent which got me through most of my high school midterms, by the way.
If you really do need an answer to this question, I suggest you a) consult a knowledgeable cartographer, b) consider a career change, or c) acquire a hobby. I hear batik is fun.

Elegant in the East End wonders: Where does the saying "Dressed to the Nines" come from and what does it mean? Don't we all strive to be a Ten?
Dear Elegant: Our usage of the term “dressed to the nines” comes from the fact that the beauty pageant predates the introduction of the concept of ‘zero’ into Europe by a few hundred years. The idea of ‘zero’ was brought to Europe by the so-called “lesser” cultures of Arabia, China and India, sometime around the twelfth century, whereas various “Miss Hovel” and “Beetroot Queen" pageants were known to have been held since sometime in the 700’s. The earliest known reference to a pageant in written history is in a ninth century manuscript, which tells the story of a Miss Windsor, who set the bar quite high when, for the talent portion of her pageant, she sang “Greensleeves” while twirling a flaming baton and playing an Irish harp with her feet.
So, until the introduction of ‘zero’, a ‘nine’ was the highest score possible. After that came ‘nine and one more’, but contestants complained that ‘nine and one more’ made them sound “fat”, so scoring topped off at ‘nine’.
Beauty pageants have always had a very deep and profound effect on our culture. Wars have been fought, ships launched and sunk, lives forever altered because of who won a tiara or who tripped over their own dress during Evening Gown. One of these lasting effects is our usage of the phrase “dressed to the nines” to mean “dressed as nicely as possible”.
As far as everyone striving to “be a Ten”, as you ask, I have my doubts about that. Some days, I only strive to get out of bed and make it through the day without harming myself or those around me, much less striving to “be a Ten.” But then again, I’m no pageant queen. At least, not any more.

EXTEMPORANEOUS WRITING: On the Passage of Time -or- The Raven and the Writing Desk

first comment: a fictional character (has to be one that I know - and preferably human)- Kevin Doherty - The Mad Hatter
second comment: a type of food or specific dish - Star Chicaderis - Veggie Puttanesca
third comment: an old saying or cliché - Heidi Cappadonna - "The early bird gets the worm"
fourth comment: a mode of transportation - Cindy Hannah-White - riverboat
fifth comment: a type of pet - Alice Warmouth - turtle

On the Passage of Time

-or-

The Raven and the Writing Desk

The soft, dark, slumbering cocoon of my bedroom was shattered, almost literally, by the sound of something smashing against the tile floor of the kitchen. I opened my eyes. My first thought was, “What the fuck was that?” My second thought was, “What time is it?”

It was 6:30 in the morning.

Still groggy, I stumbled my way into the kitchen, where I was greeted by the sight of Charlie, my roommate, wearing a pair of threadbare gym shorts and an ancient, faded T-shirt which declared “I’m a Pepper”. He was sweeping shards of what was once a coffee mug into a dustpan.

“Jesus Christ, Charlie, what the hell are you doing up at this hour?” I asked him.

“The early bird gets the worm!” he answered.

I replied with only a grunt, wondering to myself what the hell kind of worm he could possibly be after, since he worked at the Store 24 at the gas station and his shift didn’t actually start until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. That’s how Charlie was, though. It seemed that nearly everything he said sometimes was some sort of a cliché or slogan, as if he had learned English by reading greeting cards or the insides of fortune cookies.

He breezed past me, and deposited the broken crockery into the trash can. “Coffee?” he said. “It’s good to the last drop!”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “I’m probably not going to be getting back to sleep anyway.”
Charlie wasn’t too bad of a guy, as far as roommates go. He had moved into the apartment almost a year before, after my last roommate, Brie (“Like the cheese, just not as runny!” she would always say with a little twitter and a wink. I hated when she said that.) had met the love of her life at a karaoke bar and moved out a week later. He overheard me telling my friend Gary about it one night at the Store 24 when we were buying some chips and some Coke.

“I gotta find someone, soon, Gary,” I said as we stood at the counter. Gary was toying with the idea of buying, and perhaps actually eating, a Slim Jim. “$950 a month is way too much for me to afford by myself, and the first of the month is only like two weeks away!” Gary wisely decided to pass on the Slim Jim.

“You need a roommate, man?” Charlie said from behind the cash register. “Well, I’m looking for a place to live! Why don’t we let one hand wash the other? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!”

After an exhaustive vetting process which consisted of waiting five days for his check to clear the bank, Charlie had moved in, along with his pet Turtle, Mr. Wizard.

Charlie, I have since learned, is an on-again, off-again Recovering Alcoholic. At the time he moved in to the apartment, he was sober, and he had been on the wagon for a couple of months. He seemed like a decent enough roommate: cleaned up after himself, came and went quietly, and helped out with the groceries and the cable bill. Plus, he had pretty good taste in music and an awesome DVD collection.

All of that changed, though, a couple of months later when he started drinking. First he didn’t come home for two or three nights, but I didn’t really think too much about that because he sometimes worked the graveyard shift at the convenience store, and he was, after all, a grown man. Maybe he met a girl or something, I thought. But then when he finally did come home, looking like he had spent the last few days getting hammered on cheap booze and sleeping in his car, which, as it turned out, is exactly what he had been doing, I figured out that Charlie had not only fallen off the wagon, but had dived off of it head first.

I didn’t say anything to him at first, because, as I said before, he is a grown man, and as long as he paid the rent and didn’t puke all over the furniture, I didn’t really feel like it was much of my business. But then one night I was jolted from a dead sleep by what sounded like somebody torturing a cat in the living room, and I found Charlie sitting in front of the stereo in his underwear with a can of Milwaukee’s Best in his hand and some horrendous Yoko Ono album playing full blast. I walked over to the stereo, turned the “music” way down and took the beer out of his hand.

“What’d you do that for, man?” Charlie slurred. “I was watching that!”

“Go to bed, Charlie,” I said, and he did.

Two days later I got up in the morning and found Charlie in the living room again, this time without his underwear, and passed out on the sofa. There was a scrawny, stringy-haired prostitute sitting next to him. She was just putting her crack pipe back into her Hello Kitty handbag as I walked into the room. “Hey baby,” she said to me, “got a Marlboro?”

I told her I didn’t, gave her $40 which I had fished out of Charlie’s jeans, and directions to the closest bus stop.

The next morning Charlie was at an AA meeting and back on the road to recovery.

The cycle has repeated itself a few times since then, but I’ve learned to spot the warning signs and I’ve been able to get him sobered up and back into meetings within a day or two. It’s gotten to the point where I can actually tell if Charlie’s been drinking just by smelling him. When he’s off the wagon his sweat gives off this acrid, sickeningly sweet smell, like Jasmine mixed with cheap drugstore perfume.

Today he only smelled like unwashed laundry and day-old Brut. He was sober.

“I’m worried about Mr. Wizard, Ben,” he said to me, setting two cups of coffee down on the kitchen table. “He hasn’t been eating much and he looks really depressed.”
“Really?” I replied, looking over at Mr. Wizard in his usual spot on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. “He looks fine to me.” I wondered how Charlie could tell that his turtle was depressed. I mean, he moved so slowly that sometimes it hardly seemed like he was moving at all, and it’s not like he had a tail that he could either wag or tuck between his legs; and his eyes had that inscrutable, reptilian quality which always looked to me like he was struggling to stay awake. It took him five minutes to blink, for Christ’s sake.

“I offered him a grasshopper yesterday,” Charlie said, “and he didn’t even touch it. And grasshoppers are his favorite!”
All I could do was wonder to myself how the hell you figure out what the favorite food is for an animal who eats breakfast on Monday and lunch on Thursday.

“I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe he’s bored.” This was the best advice I could muster on two sips of coffee at 6:30 in the morning.

“I think I’m gonna have to take him to the vet. If it ain‘t one thing, it‘s another!” said Charlie. He left the kitchen and made his way to the bathroom for what I knew from experience would be at least an hour of morning ablutions. I always wondered what he was doing in there all that time, since he usually came out looking pretty much the way he did when he went in, just with wet hair and a fresh coat of Brut 33.

“What’s up, Mr. Wizard?” I asked, more to myself and the air around me than to the enigmatic reptile in the corner. As I sipped my coffee and stared blankly at the melancholy terrapin, I found myself wondering what the world must look like from his point of view. Did it look like everything was whizzing by at warp speed, the way hummingbirds and houseflies look to us? I began to envy him a little. With time so stretched out, so decelerated, the trials and tribulations of everyday human life seemed to take on less and less significance, like listening to Italian opera at 78rpm. That interminable hour and a half stuck in traffic seems like no more than a heartbeat; the week in bed with the flu becomes a mid-afternoon catnap. How nice it must be, I thought, to always take the long view of things; indeed, to be unable to look at things any other way.

I was shaken from my reverie by the sound of Charlie in the bathroom, singing “Lady Marmalade”, off-key, in the midst of his 45 minute shower.

“Snap out of it, buddy,” I said to Mr. Wizard. “Have a grasshopper.”

I finished my coffee and went back into my bedroom. I sat down on the edge of my bed, grabbed my guitar and the pages of a song that I’d been working on for the past few days. It was turning out OK, a real gut-wrencher about a guy who can’t work up the nerve to say hello to a girl he’s been in love with for years, a girl he sees every single day at the Starbucks in the lobby of his office building. I’ve tentatively titled the song “Venti Latte”, but there’s a key change in the third verse that’s just not working and I can’t seem to get the words in the refrain to mean exactly what I want them to. I worked on “Latte” for a few minutes, but my mind kept wandering back to Mr. Wizard and the whole slowed-down-sped-up time thing and suddenly I got this music in my head which seemed to capture the whole thing perfectly. No lyrics yet, but within an hour or two I had scribbled down five pages of music with almost no corrections or eraser marks. I had read somewhere that Mozart’s manuscripts were like that. There were no corrections or cross-outs because the music was already finished, written inside his head, and he was just copying it down onto paper.

Writing music has always been my dream. Ever since my parents took me to a concert in the park one night, when the Biloxi Symphony Orchestra was performing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. I was only about eight years old at the time, but I sat there spellbound, amazed by the way music can paint a picture with sound. I learned how to play the piano, and then the guitar, and I’ve spent who knows how many hours writing songs about my life and stuff I’ve seen in the world around me. I would love to actually make my living writing songs. I don’t even have to be the one singing them; I don’t even want the spotlight, really. Just let me spend my days in a quiet room with my guitar and my thoughts, writing it all down in a way that will paint a picture for the people who hear it, so that they’ll actually hear what it is I’m feeling, and maybe even feel the same thing for themselves. Man, to spend my life doing that would be totally awesome, but it’s hard, really hard, to chase a dream like that when you’re just a regular, ordinary guy from the Mississippi suburbs and you have to worry about things like gas money and paying the rent and punching a time clock at some lame-ass job.

I scrawled a title at the top of page one: “Themes on the Passage of Time”, and tossed the pages on the top of the pile on my desk.

The rest of the morning was spent with the usual: laundry, housework, a couple of phone calls, and my daily 30-minute date with Drew Carey and “The Price is Right”. By 3:30 I was grabbing my keys and heading out the door for my shift at the casino.

I work at the Huck Finn Riverboat Casino here in Biloxi, as a waiter at the Mark Twain Restaurant. It’s billed as the Huck Finn’s “upscale” dining room, but in reality all the food on the boat comes from the same kitchen, so the $8 “Steak-n-Fries” at Injun Joe’s Grille is actually exactly the same as the $24 New York Strip at the Twain, just on different china. It’s not a bad gig, usually, nothing more than slinging hash and kissing ass for bus tours full of blue-haired old ladies and the occasional “big winner” who just hit a $400 jackpot on the nickel slots and who’s determined to have it all spent before stepping off the riverboat.

Anyway, the shift was going along OK. The people were nice and I had been making decent money. Then at one point, the hostess, Marla, came over and asked me to put some tables together for a party of eight. “They’re from New York,” she said to me, in a way which I knew meant, “They’re pushy, loud, and obnoxious.”

That’s when it all started to go to Hell in a handbag.

I was in the kitchen when Marla brought them in, so they had already arranged themselves at the table when I saw them. There was one person at each end, and the remaining six had divided themselves by gender and sat staring at one another, like the beginning of a chess match or the line of scrimmage in a football game.

The women, one Society Blonde, one Blood Orange, and one Blue Black, were probably in their sixties, but it was impossible to know for sure because they were so Botox’ed and collagen’ed that they could barely move their faces. Their eyebrows were stretched so high on their foreheads that, along with their permanently flared nostrils and downturned mouths, they gave the impression that they were perpetually watching a really gruesome horror flick. Their outfits were nice enough; I mean, I’m sure they were The Latest and everything, but they were just a little too flashy and a little too colorful, and the women came off looking like they had just filmed a commercial for Stein Mart. Their jewelry, I’m sure, was all real, but somehow it looked just as tacky as the $3.99 stuff the girls at work buy at the mall, especially when worn in such copious amounts. As I walked behind them, their perfumes, when taken together, reminded me of a Kahlua cheesecake that had been left out in the sun for three days.

Across the table sat the men, completely indistinguishable from one another and totally interchangeable. Probably mid-fifties, well maintained, nice watches and bespoke suits from Barney’s- the kind of guys you’ll see driving a perfectly nice, totally unremarkable $75,000 Acura.

At the foot of the table sat a guy who I quickly came to think of as the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. He was dressed in this absolutely ridiculous suit which probably cost more than I make in two weeks. I don’t even remember what color it was, just that it was very, very shiny; and he had so many accessories: cufflinks, pocket square, necktie, tie tack, lapel pin, and on and on- he looked like he belonged in a community theater production of “Guys and Dolls”. At any rate, he kept looking down at himself and fiddling with his outfit so much I could tell he suspected that he looked like a complete asshole. He would not stay in his seat, but kept flitting around the table and appearing at the shoulders of his companions, spouting non-sequiturs and asking inane rhetorical questions like, “What would we call this place if we opened one just like it in Chelsea?”, “You don’t think my shoes are too much, do you?”. All he was missing was an oversized top hat.

If he was the Hatter, then at the head of the table sat the Red Queen, although she looked nothing like the brutish battle-axe from Lewis Carroll. She looked more as if someone had chopped off Liz Taylor’s head (fat, old, over-the-hill Liz, that is) and stuck it on a stake, and then hung a Chanel suit over the stake. Her hair was enormous and exactly the color of a nice Napa Valley Merlot. Her face looked as if she had gotten a good old-fashioned facelift back in the 1970s and simply let it go since then, so she has actually had the chance to grow old and wrinkly twice. Her hands reminded me of the Crypt Keeper from TV, if the Crypt Keeper had long, blood-red, razor-sharp nails. In keeping with the old tradition of no diamonds before sunset, she wore only gold, seemingly enough to sink the Atocha. She was such a cadaver, albeit a nicely embalmed one, that the weight of her jewelry must have doubled her overall mass.

I learned that her name was Isadora by hearing the others at the table address her as such. Usually, if someone has a name with that many syllables and people address them with the whole thing, without ever shortening it or using an endearment, it’s because they are either respected, loved, or feared; and I had a strong suspicion it wasn’t love or respect.

When she opened her mouth to speak, I wasn’t sure whether to expect a booming, commanding contralto like an Empress Dowager, or a croaking, barely audible old woman. When I heard her, in reality sounding like a cocktail waitress from a sports bar on Flatbush Avenue, I had to stop myself from smirking or rolling my eyes.

I had not even gotten water on the table before they already had me at my wit’s end. I was previously unaware of so many variations on A Glass of Water: with lemon, without lemon, with ice and lemon, with lemon no ice, not too hot, not too cold; and the Mad Hatter kept protesting that the water in Mississippi was giving him constipation. It took me ten minutes to get the water situation under control and I had yet to attempt to get an actual drink order from them. And naturally, not a single glass of water was touched for the remainder of the meal.

I started the drink order with the Society Blonde.

“I’ll have mine with no ice.”

“Your what, ma’am?”

“My drink.”

“What would you like to drink, ma’am?”
“A Diet! I told you! With no ice.”

“Very good. A Diet, no ice.”
“With lemon.”
“Lemon.”

“No, wait - do you have iced tea?”
And on and on. And this was just the first of eight customers.

By the time I was finished with the drink order, the only thing I was actually writing down on my pad were the words “I hate you. I hate you.” over and over again.

By some minor miracle, I finally got the cocktail situation in hand. I took a minute and got an espresso from Billy at the bar before facing the Herculean task of obtaining a food order.

A full twenty minutes later, I had gotten food orders from seven of the eight people, a process which would have taken considerably less time if every single one of them didn’t keep asking me how long it was going to take. It seemed like hours since I had heard the words “please” or “thank you”; and of course, the Hatter kept having to jump in, with stuff like, “Don’t you want the sauce on the side with that, Trish?” and “I had that last month at that new place on 59^th! It was awful!”

So, by the time I finally got around to Queen Isadora, my nerves were completely jangled and I was nearly shaking. The menu lay unopened on the table, and she was rooting around in a Coach handbag big enough to hold a small pony.

“I can’t find my goddam glasses,” she said. She looked blindly up at me. “What do youse recommend?”

“The moment I saw you, ma’am,” I said to her, “I immediately thought of the Pasta Puttanesca.”

“That’s because it means “pasta for the whore”, you old hag,” I thought quietly to myself.

“I’ll have that,” she pronounced, dropping the Coach handbag at her feet with a thud.

I was able to escape for a few minutes then. I had to turn in the food order and I had some other tables to finish up. Tranh the busboy, who is Cambodian, took care of the salads and when he saw me in the walk-in, he just looked at me and rolled his eyes and said, “Crajee.” He was saying “crazy”, but that’s only because he hadn’t learned the word “obnoxious”.

Before long, I was putting the main course down on the table. There were so many special orders and modifications and things on the side, I knew there was almost no chance of getting away without at least one issue. So, it was no surprise as I walked away, perhaps halfway to the relative sanctity of the waiters’ station, when I heard someone snapping their fingers. “Hey, waiter!” they said.

It was Isadora, the Red Queen.

I stopped, froze for a fraction of a second, and closed my eyes. Then, I exhaled, bowed my head a little, and turned around to face my tormentor.

“What is your name?” she asked, squinting at me.

“Benjamin, ma’am,” I answered, checking to make sure my name tag was still there.

“Well, Benny,“ she hissed. “What the hell is this crap?”

“That is the Pasta Puttanesca, which you ordered, ma’am,” I answered, flatly.

“I hate it. Take it away,” she said.

I picked up the plate. “Would madame care for something else?” I said, switching into my completely fake Waitron voice.

“You’re just going to have to bring me a menu and read it to me,” she said.

I turned. I walked. The fork on the plate rattled just enough that I was the only one to hear it as I was starting to shake with rage. Then he said it.

It was the Hatter. “What an idiot,” he said.

Once again, I stopped and froze for a fraction of a second. Suddenly the room around me seemed to have gone completely quiet. I could still see people moving their mouths, and clinking their wine glasses together and stuff, but to me the world went dead silent. I was calm.

I walked over to the Mad Hatter.

“What is your name?” I asked, expertly mocking the Red Queen at the head of the table.

“Why… my name is Duncan,” he answered, somewhat nonplussed.

“Well, Dunky,” I said, “Eat this.”

I dumped the contents of Isadora’s uneaten Pasta Puttanesca down the front of his Oscar de Pretentia suit.

At that point, the silence in my head was replaced by the most amazing music I had ever imagined. I began to feel a bit like Charlie’s turtle, experiencing time on my own plane while those around me appeared frozen, slack-jawed. I heard that music the whole time as I took off my apron, walked out of the Huck Finn Riverboat Casino, said goodbye to Tony at security, and got into my car.

I remember every note of that music. I’m going to go back to my apartment and finishing “Themes on the Passage of Time”. And then I’m going to figure out how I can start living the life that I really want to live.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Charlie will probably quip; or, “When God closes a window, He opens a door.” And Mr. Wizard will look at me and blink slowly, and remind me that life is actually going by at warp speed.

“I know it is, buddy. I know,” I’ll say. “Let’s have a grasshopper.”



Q&A

In The Garden of Good & Evil writes: If a camera lens is round, why do pictures come out square or rectangular?
Dear Evil: This is an amazing and ponderous question, and one which I have never imagined before. There is an answer to every question, though, but at the moment the answer to this question seems beyond our reach, and not for lack of trying.
Allow me to explain. As I ran through my exhaustive Rolodex
(readers over the age of 40 will know what a Rolodex is…), calling everyone I knew with the knowledge and expertise to answer your question, it became abundantly clear that none of them had any intention of doing so. My very first call, to Dr. Sheldon Kildare, PhD., of the Princeton University department of Photographic Science, was answered only by an indignant, “What?!” and a dial tone. Subsequent replies ranged from, “Who is this?” to, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,” to one guy, a research assistant at Berkeley, who came right out and called me an asshole.
If the greatest minds in the country either cannot, or will not answer your question, I am afraid it will have to go unanswered, for now. Along with “Who shot JFK?” and “Geno’s or Pat’s?”

The Rosemaster asks: When is the Screamgirls reunion?
Dear Rosemaster: A ScreamGirls reunion seems about as likely as a reunion of the Beatles, at this point, even if the Fab Four were all still alive. The reason is not bad blood, or lack of interest, or anything of that nature. The problem is that at any given time, only two of the three “ladies” seem to be available for a comeback.
The first to drop from view was Stella (Stella Estelle Steenburg-Steinberg-Steinsteen-Bloom), shortly after their last public appearance at an opening of a Winn-Dixie in Loxahatchee, Florida late in 1996. No one other than Stella herself knows what happened in the four years which followed, and she ain’t saying. She resurfaced in July, 2000, when Lila spotted her asleep in the back of a Timeshare seminar she had been compelled to attend to get a free weekend in the Caymans. Stella had a deep tan, a hat with a veil, and a tattoo on her ass which was later found to be the Mandarin character for “No Use MSG.” During those years, both Lila and Svetlana had been approached by promoters with big plans for a show, but, unable to find Stella, they were forced to decline.
Stella and Lila hurriedly began making plans for a Comeback Spectacular, perhaps something at Mall of America or Heritage, USA! The cell phone number they had for Svetlana (Svetlana Zulu Falana Stalin), however, went right to voicemail, and all their letters were returned marked “unknown”.
Little did they know that Svetlana had been taken away in the middle of the night by former agents of the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. Certain she was headed for hard labor in the gulag for one of her many Crimes Against the State, Svetlana was somewhat relieved to find that the agents had been hired by Romanian fashion designer Vlad Vladimirescu, who is both insane and insanely rich, to kidnap her and bring her to Vlad for a life of forced supermodeling. Svetlana resisted at first, but before long she became used to the long hours being photographed, the endless manicures and minions constantly fussing with her hair. Plus, they brought her a steady diet of cute Norwegian backpackers every week or so and all the Ouzo she could drink.
Svetlana returned to the U.S. in 2006 after Vlad Vladimirescu had died in his Bucharest atelier from an overdose of Red Bull and Zima. The first call she made was to Stella, who by then was living in Paramus, New Jersey with husband #5, a retired actuary who had recently been awarded $14million in a slip-and-fall at a Golden Corral buffet. “Stelle, baby, I’m back, and I have a great idea for a show!” Svetlana made her way as quickly as she could from L.A. to Paramus, which took a while, as she was hitchhiking rides the whole way from 18-wheelers. By the time she arrived, though, sticky, Stella had to tell her that Lila had dropped from the radar screen.
Lila (Delilah Crayola Jewels) had remained married to a nice Jewish dentist in St. Pete from the time of their last gig in ‘96 until 2004, when she made a surprise visit to the office to find that her husband had been deceiving her the entire time. He wasn’t even a dentist! He was nothing more than a common drug dealer, who had been moving enormous amounts of cocaine from Central America through Florida. “Do you mean,” she thought to herself, “that I could have had all the cocaine I could have possibly wanted this whole entire time? For eight years it’s been “dinner at the Henderson’s” or “Sadie Hawkins Day at the Club” and I could have been in South Beach dancing with my tits out?”
At that point, Lila took a baseball bat to her husband’s Acura before grabbing the first Trailways out of St. Petersburg to Miami, where she proceeded to dance with her tits out as a dancer at a “gentlemen’s club” called “Sure Things”. Unfortunately, Lila had a run-in with the law in 2006 and earned herself a three year stay in the Miami-Dade County Penitentiary for Wayward Girls for punching a police officer in the crotch when he said she had a big butt. After three years eating macaroni and cheese, corn bread and other prison staples, Lila was released into the world weighing 386 pounds and with no self esteem. She was the perfect target for a cult, and a van full of cult members just happened to be driving past the penitentiary as Lila was waddling out, wondering how far she could get on the $20 they had given her and is the 6-piece McNuggets still on the Dollar Menu? They picked her up in their van, blissfully singing “99 Bottles of Beer” and telling Lila how pretty she looked. It wasn’t long before Lila had risen to the highest levels of the cult, known as “The Church of the Redundant Reborn Born-Again Savior Redeemer”, and it was led by their “Savior Redeemer”, a guy named Mike from Cincinnati. Lila shed all her prison weight and had regrown nearly all her hair by the time the cult was disbanded in 2011, when the government indicted Mike under the You Can’t Just Start Your Own Religion Act of 1993.
Lila got to Paramus as soon as she had been deprogrammed, and found her dear sister Svetlana working at a nail salon in a mall in Hackensack. Finally, the Comeback Extravaganza could happen! Stella’s Skype account had been closed though; and her mobile number disconnected. Emails were answered only by an auto-reply: “Either I’m out of the office or I have no interest in you.”
Stella’s whereabouts remain a mystery to this day, although there were rumours of her being spotted at a retirement home in Phoenix asking, “which one’s got a foot in the grave?”; and her distinctive “Evening in Pittsburgh” cologne and body splash was reportedly smelled at the scene of that recent $24million diamond heist in Cannes.
So, for now, we must wait. The saga continues…

Award Winning Musician wonders: How is your morning?
Dear Musician: My morning, so far, has been fine, thank you. The larger picture here, though, is that I have, at this point of my life, become a Morning Person.
Now, I have not become the sort of Morning Person who bounds out of bed, eyes wide, breath minty, and throws open the curtains, chirping, “Outta bed, Sleepyhead!” to my husband.
As a matter of fact, I don’t think there is a time of day at all when I am that perky. I have become, however, the kind of person who will wake up between 5:00am and 8:00am with or without an alarm clock, even though it still takes copious amounts of coffee to bring me up to functioning levels. This is remarkable because for the first 40 years or so of my life, I was the complete opposite: a Night Person for whom life began at 11:00pm and for whom 8:00am was little more than a myth or a cruel joke.
Until about 2004, I worked in restaurants, and usually at night, when my shift would begin at 4 or 5 in the evening. Sleeping until noon or 1pm wasn’t unusual, and basically anything before 10:30 was unheard of. Shortly after that came career changes, work became something that actually happened during the daylight. I got a dog, which back then was the gay equivalent of having children. (nowadays, having children is actually the gay equivalent of having children.) All those things conspired to shift my internal clock. I began enjoying seeing the world just before sunrise. I have become the sort of person who feels half the day is gone when I look up to see the clock read 11:30. Time was, at 11:30, I’d be sitting on the couch in my pajamas, smoking cigarettes and bong hits and considering going back to bed.
Funny how life is.

Nurse Nancy from New York asks: Why do people smoke cigarettes?
Dear Nancy: I cannot speak for millions of cigarette smokers the world over. I can, however, speak for myself, as I myself was a pack-a-day cigarette smoker for over 16 years. Even worse, I smoked menthols.
What started me smoking was actually an anti-smoking commercial on television.
The commercial showed a young kid, probably around my age at the time, locked in the bathroom and watching himself in the mirror as he lit a cigarette and tried to smoke it. He starts coughing, a deep, dry cough that sounds as if he’s only a couple of puffs away from spitting up blood. And yet, the young kid takes another drag, and coughs some more. The voiceover says, “Maybe your body is trying to tell you something.”
All I thought was, “I bet I can do that without coughing.”
It wasn’t long before I was locked in the bathroom with a pack of matches and one of my mother’s cigarettes. My mother, by the way, was Old School, and smoked Chesterfield Kings with no filter, so I was jumping right in with both feet. I was able to puff away without coughing, but of course I was actually doing it wrong. The first time I actually inhaled the smoke, a week or so later, I coughed like a consumptive, but by then it was too late. I had already ridden my bike to the Laundromat at Woodmoor Plaza and bought my first pack of Salem Lights out of the cigarette machine for 50¢, and my long and illustrious career as a Menthol Smoker had begun.
I beat the Demon Weed by setting a date and going Cold Turkey, 16 years later. If I smoked one cigarette tomorrow, I would probably be up to a pack a day within six months.
So, I guess, the answer to your question is that everybody has their reasons for smoking. Now that I look at it, I guess my reason was because someone told me not to.

 

Photoflash asks: When will I see you again?
Dear Photoflash: I’m sorry, but when I read your question, I can not even think of an answer. Maybe it’s my Inner Drag Queen, but when someone asks me, “When will I see you again?”, I can only think of one thing. And that is The Three Degrees and the groovy year of 1974. I was 12 years old in 1974. I used to carry a gigantic plastic comb in my back ...pocket back then which was just one step away from being an Afro Pick. Let’s just say, I’m sure that plastic comb got plenty of use as a stand-in for a microphone as I lip-synched along with Helen, Valerie & Freddie along with my best Vegas Doo-Wop Girl moves. Thank God that was long before YouTube.

 Wondrin' in Hudson wonders: Ever been to Hudson?
Dear Wondrin': As a matter of fact, I have. It was back in 2000, and I had been working for a couple of months as a roadie for a startup band here in Provincetown called The Bodily Fluids, sort of a synth-grunge-New Wave band whose hook was an accordion and a lead singer who yodeled. We had just finished playing an awesome gig in Manhattan one night at an underground club in Hell’s Kitchen called Vomit, when this “chick” walked into the dressing room. She said her name was “Musty- Musty Chiffon” as she offered a bejeweled, gloved hand to each of us in turn. I didn’t notice her face at first because she had the most enormous, bouncy breasts I had ever seen. When she walked by, I could have sworn I heard the slosh of liquid, like water balloons or those bladder-balls they used to use in junior high. Anyway, she invited all of us out to Hudson for a huge party that night, and she even had her own Checker Cab to drive us there in!
Turns out that Musty and her husband, whose name I can’t quite remember, had made a small fortune as child actors in a traveling production of “The King and I”, and had parlayed that into a very lucrative “Escort Service” in Muncie, Indiana. Eventually they bought an entire block of Warren Street, the main street in Hudson, and converted the buildings into one, enormous, private dwelling.
What can I tell you about Hudson, NY? It looked nice at 3:00am from the windows of that Checker Cab as we pulled into town. We were met by midget footmen at Musty’s house, and escorted into the ballroom. There, I felt as if I had stepped into a Fellini movie. There were men who looked like women, women who looked like men, clowns, birds, and one naked guy who was either asleep or dead on the bar. Nobody seemed to notice.
The next thing I remember, Musty’s husband, What’s-his-name, was handing me a glass of clear liquid. It was delicious.
That is the sum total of my memory of Hudson, NY.
Nice town.

Barbara in Akron writes: What about Naomi!
Dear Barbara: What about Naomi, Barbara? What about her? That’s all it’s ever been with you, Barbara, for the past seventeen years: “What about Naomi, Harold? What about Naomi?”
When I had a chance to transfer to the Cincinnati branch, you said, “What about Naomi?” so we stayed here in Akron.
When we had the chance to buy that nice house over on Oak Street, you said, “But Harold, what about Naomi?” so we stayed here in this crappy house on Maple Drive.
When Archie over at the office had those tickets for that nice cruise to the Bahamas, it was, “What about Naomi?” so we stayed home and played Chinese Checkers for a week.
It’s a fish, Barbara, a god damned goldfish. The next time, I swear, the very next time I hear you say, “What about Naomi, Harold?” I am going to flush that god damned goldfish down the toilet.

Philia asks: What about Bob?
Dear Philia: "What About Bob?" is a 1991 comedy film starring Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss.

 

Vague in Virginia asks: How about the weather today?
Dear Vague: Well, the weather today is just fine, thank you. Warm, for the time of year, I believe is the proper next line.
However, I am disturbed by your question as I feel it belies the fact that you would a) rather be talking about something else, or b) have nothing to talk about at all.
For example, a conversation might go like this, ...between a mother-in-law and her daughter’s husband:
“And where exactly was this “business trip” you’ve been on, Ira?”
“Errr, Cleveland.”
“Oh, really? I simply adore Cleveland. Been there dozens of times. Which part of town, Ira?”
And Ira might smile weakly, wipe the tiny beads of sweat from his brow, and answer, “How about that weather, hmmm? Warm for the time of year.”
Or, you could answer the telephone one night, when you happened to be alone in the house, wondering what might have been if only you’d gotten that lacrosse scholarship to Johns Hopkins. And that girl- Julie? Julia? Juliet? - she had wanted to run away and live on Catalina. And the phone might ring, and it would be Julie, and she had just been thinking about you and googled your name and decided to call you. And you would find out that she was married and had three kids and was a dental hygienist at an Aspen Dental in Ft. Wayne. And you would tell her that you were recently divorced and working as a customer service rep at a call center for Discover Card. And then there would be a minute of awkward silence, and for a second you’ll wonder whether she’s even still on the line. And then one of you will say, “Man, how about that weather?” and hate yourself for saying it, even before it comes out of your mouth.

Inquisitive in Imperial Beach asks: Why are we asking you questions????
Dear Imperial: So that they may be answered.

Moving to Truro wonders: What causes the northern lights?
Dear Moving: Any quick inquiry on this question will immediately bring you to any number of long, boring, incomprehensible explanations, full of scientific claptrap about electrically charged particles being hurled from the sun into our atmosphere, earth’s magnetic poles, and blah blah blah. That may all be true, but it certainly lacks poetry.
When I was a kid, and it was thundering and lightning-ing outside, my mother would say the same thing, apparently, which her mother had said to her: “The angels are bowling.”
In that spirit, here is my answer to your question:
We see the beautiful, wondrous Northern Lights when the angels are watching old videos of Iron Butterfly concerts.

Footie in Kauai wonders: How many fish are in the sea?
Aloha Footie: As with so many questions, there seems to be more than one answer to this one. For instance, if you had just broken up with your lover and you were having Pumpkin Lattes with your best girlfriend, she might say to you that there were “plenty of fish in the sea.” But, ask a commercial fisherman who is trying to feed his family, and he might tell you that there are never enough fish in the sea.
Ask this question to a marine biologist, and they might answer, “Define ‘fish'.”
Ask a respected attorney, and they might reply, “Define ‘sea’.”
So, in order to get a clear, concise answer to your question, I turned to Jeffery, the 8 year-old kid of my neighbor down the street.
The answer is nineteen twelve thousand hundred million billion kajillion.