“I think it’s weird that he sent us a card,” Pancakes told Pastina as they sat in the school cafeteria prior to rehearsals. The school’s winter show was scheduled for just before their holiday vacation, only two weeks away.
“There’s nothing weird about Christmas cards,” Pastina replied.
“But my family doesn’t even know Vincent. Why’s he sending cards to us? How many fourth graders send Christmas cards?”
“I do,” Pastina said.
“You’re not normal, though,” Pancakes said.
“True,” Pastina said. “I hang out with you.”
“Don’t be like that,” Pancakes said. “You’re an excellent Pastina. But Vincent’s a boy. He’s quiet and weird. He’s not a card-sender.”
Pastina shrugged. “Or maybe he is. He sent a card.”
When the oversized envelope had arrived at her house, Pancakes stood staring at it for several seconds. She opened it and found a large, almost-tasteful Christmas card. The script writing outside read “A Joyous Holiday!” and featured an ornate Victorian winter scene. Inside it read, “Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
“I guess he just assumed we weren’t Jewish,” Pancakes told Pastina later that evening on the phone. Pastina thought about her friend’s shining blond hair and huge blue eyes and said, “Maybe somebody told him.”
Underneath the card’s printed greeting, Vincent had written in loose, uneven cursive letters, “I hope you and your family have a very nice holidays.” But the “a” had been scribbled out in an editorial afterthought. He had signed it, “Best wishes, Vincent Marr”. Pancakes couldn’t at first think of who that was, because she always forgot Vincent’s last name. “Friend of yours?” her father had asked as she stood in the living room and frowned at the card. “Or, um, an enemy?”
She shook her head. “Oh, it’s just Vincent. I think he has a crush on Pastina.”
“So I guess he sent her family an even better card?” Emiliano asked. Pancakes could tell he was using his ironic, bemused voice. She made a face at him and handed him the card. Then she went to call Pastina.
Pastina, it turned out, hadn’t received a card, but she pretended not to mind. “I don’t care. He’s your secret boyfriend,” she said.
“Oh, he is not!” Pancakes shouted. “He’s yours. He looooves you.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t send a card to my house, did he? He’s trying to impress his future in-laws. Mrs. Vincent.”
Pancakes acted outraged by the entire incident, and she didn’t stop mentioning it for days after receiving the card. “Of course, now my mom will want to send him a card,” she said, although Pastina didn’t see why that would be. Lorinda didn’t even know about the card until Pancakes brought it up repeatedly, asking her parents on multiple occasions if it was absolutely necessary to send a card in return. They assured her that it didn’t have to work that way, but that didn’t stop her questions. So finally Emiliano retrieved a spare card, dashed a quick note of greeting inside, and passed it in front of both Lorinda and Pancakes for their individual signatures. Pancakes later explained to Pastina that her father practically forced her to send a card to Vincent just to be nice.
Pastina had quickly gotten bored of the subject, but Pancakes kept reviving the great card debate at least once a day. She insisted that Vincent didn’t really like her, pointing out that he’d eventually given a card to Pastina too. Of course, she ignored the fact that Pastina’s had been a small card stuffed into her locker, not like the large, expensive one he mailed to Pancakes at home. Pancakes continued to protest and rationalize the situation, but that just ensured that no one forgot about it.
“When we get to your house,” Pastina said at last as the two of them waited to be called to join in the winter song chorus, “we should find out once and for all about Vincent.”
“How?”
“Get the Ouija board out,” Pastina said. “It knows everything.” She nodded seriously.
Pancakes looked unsure. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. That thing is weird. Plus, it might lie.”
“Why would it lie?” Pastina asked. “It’s a board. What’s it got to lie about?”
“I don’t know!” Pancakes whispered loudly. “It has its boardy reasons. I don’t trust it.”
Pancakes’s objections made no sense. The Ouija board, as far as Pastina knew, was eerily accurate. Pancakes had said so herself. Sometimes its answers didn’t make sense, but when they did, they were usually right. Just a month earlier, it had led them to buried treasure in Pancakes’s back yard.
“After the pirate treasure, you don’t trust it?” Pastina asked. “It told us exactly where to dig!”
Pancakes waved her arm dismissively. “That wasn’t real treasure,” she said. “That was just a bunch of junk from a birthday party.”
“A pirate birthday party,” Pastina said. “You said they buried that back when you had your pirate birthday party. I didn’t even know you then. And then we just find it all of sudden because the board said so.”
“But it was junk!” Pancakes said.
A nearby teacher shushed her loudly. “If you girls want to sing in the show, you’re going to need to keep it down,” she said.
Pancakes rolled her eyes for Pastina’s benefit. “Yeah,” she whispered, “that makes a lot of sense. ‘Be quiet if you want to sing.’”
Pastina smiled, but she made sure not to be obvious about it. She didn’t want to get in trouble, even if Pancakes didn’t seem to mind it.
“So you want to do the Ouija board later, then?” Pancakes asked. “We can if you want to.”
Pastina nodded.
“Fine, but it’s just going to tell you that Vincent’s a weirdo, plain and simple,” Pancakes said, and then they heard the teacher calling out their names. Pastina flinched. She was sure they were in trouble now. But it turned out it was their turn to join the chorus for “Winter Wonderland.” They opened their mouths and sang.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Sunday, December 18, 2005
strategies for success!
When Pastina found Irene, who had been acting as assistant director on their student film, the high-strung young woman was crying. Not just a few tears of frustration. She was ready for a thick handful of tissues, a liberal dose of eyedrops, maybe even a touch of anti-inflammatory cream for the red puffiness around her eyes. Immediately, Pastina knew what the problem was.
“What is it?” she asked softly, touching Irene’s shoulder. “What did Pancakes say to you?”
Irene tried to get her mild hyperventilation under control. She spoke between sniffles. “She said I had … I had … all the organizational skill … of the Italian postal service.” Irene buried her face in her hands.
Pastina sighed and patted Irene on the arm. “She gets like that sometimes,” she said. “Look, I’m sure you were doing your best. Let’s just show her how good you are. Do you have those call sheets ready for tomorrow?”
“I’ve been too upset.”
Pastina drew back and shook her head. “Well, if you can get that done real quick, then Pancakes won’t have to know anything about it. What do you think?”
Irene smiled a little, then a lot. She nodded and stood. “You’re right. Thanks, Pastina. I’ll have those ready in a little while. Maybe I should come over and give them to you when Pancakes is there.”
“Good thinking!” Pastina said in her best motivational voice.
Irene dashed off to compose schedules for their next shoot. Pastina watched her go with relief. That had been the easiest one yet. Over the past few hours, Pancakes had made five different people cry or work themselves into hysterical states over her harsh criticism. Each time, Pastina had moved in her wake to pick up the pieces and set the person back on track. All in all, Pastina thought their system was all working beautifully.
“We should have done that weeks ago,” Pastina told Pancakes later that evening when they were driving back from location.
“Years,” Pancakes said, her eyes on the road, an sly grin on her face.
“Oh, yeah, years,” Pastina agreed. “It was so great. You broke ‘em down, and I built ‘em up!”
“The classic strategies are the best,” Pancakes said. “There’s a reason they use them even when everybody knows the game.”
“I wonder if anybody else knows about this 'good director/bad director' thing.”
Pancakes made a mock gun of her right hand and pretended to fire into the distance. “Works every time.”
“What is it?” she asked softly, touching Irene’s shoulder. “What did Pancakes say to you?”
Irene tried to get her mild hyperventilation under control. She spoke between sniffles. “She said I had … I had … all the organizational skill … of the Italian postal service.” Irene buried her face in her hands.
Pastina sighed and patted Irene on the arm. “She gets like that sometimes,” she said. “Look, I’m sure you were doing your best. Let’s just show her how good you are. Do you have those call sheets ready for tomorrow?”
“I’ve been too upset.”
Pastina drew back and shook her head. “Well, if you can get that done real quick, then Pancakes won’t have to know anything about it. What do you think?”
Irene smiled a little, then a lot. She nodded and stood. “You’re right. Thanks, Pastina. I’ll have those ready in a little while. Maybe I should come over and give them to you when Pancakes is there.”
“Good thinking!” Pastina said in her best motivational voice.
Irene dashed off to compose schedules for their next shoot. Pastina watched her go with relief. That had been the easiest one yet. Over the past few hours, Pancakes had made five different people cry or work themselves into hysterical states over her harsh criticism. Each time, Pastina had moved in her wake to pick up the pieces and set the person back on track. All in all, Pastina thought their system was all working beautifully.
“We should have done that weeks ago,” Pastina told Pancakes later that evening when they were driving back from location.
“Years,” Pancakes said, her eyes on the road, an sly grin on her face.
“Oh, yeah, years,” Pastina agreed. “It was so great. You broke ‘em down, and I built ‘em up!”
“The classic strategies are the best,” Pancakes said. “There’s a reason they use them even when everybody knows the game.”
“I wonder if anybody else knows about this 'good director/bad director' thing.”
Pancakes made a mock gun of her right hand and pretended to fire into the distance. “Works every time.”
Friday, December 16, 2005
Collaborative
INT. DAY — Me’s Dining Room
Me and Her sit at opposite ends of a long wooden table. Each of them has a pile of papers before her. As they talk, they make notes or refer to various pieces of paper.
ME: Are you ever going to say anything?
HER: What am I supposed to say? There’s nothing here I can respond to in a constructive way.
ME: We have to come up with a compromise. I don’t like this any more than you do.
HER: I’m not so sure about that. I think you might. I mean, look at this. You’ve added a whole song here that we never even discussed. How could you write another song and not tell me?
ME: You don’t like it? I thought we needed to explain why the judge was sentencing the young mother to a gulag for hoarding bread. The text didn’t really explore that.
HER: Whether I like it or not isn't the point. You keep adding this stuff without consulting me. Then all you do later is justify it. You’re shutting me out!
ME: Oh, fine. But you can rewrite almost a whole act? You can revise the whole costume concept so that we have to hold a bake sale to pay for all the extra silver lamé?
HER: I told you about the rewrite. You just weren’t listening. And the costume stuff. I didn’t go sneaking in new stuff and then try to act like it made the whole thing better. Do you just want to write this yourself?
ME: No.
HER: Well, then start working with me.
ME: Why do you think we’re sitting here? We’re supposed to be working. Come on. Let’s do it. You and me. Right now. Come on. We can work it out.
HER: What are you doing? Is this you cheerleading?
ME: Come on.
HER: Um, okay.
ME: We’re going to have a theater full of people.
HER: I know.
ME: All of our classmates will be there.
HER: Yeah, I know.
ME: Your mom is going to be there. My mom.
HER: I’ve thought about this.
ME: So we have to have something to put on that stage. We have to present something, or else everybody’s going to laugh at us.
HER: I agree. But you're going to have to start playing straight or this isn’t going to work.
ME: Okay, fine. I’ve been playing straight, but whatever. I’ll meet you halfway, if that’s what you need.
HER: Call it whatever you want. Just don’t try to squeeze in any more material that we haven’t agreed on.
ME: I would never do that.
HER: No, I’m sure.
ME: So maybe we can run down the song list. You want to start with that?
HER: Okay, I guess we can do that. It's a start.
ME: Good. See? We’re working. Right. So skip the overture and stuff … blah blah blah … first thing up is “It’s a Fine Old Mornin’ for Mass Oppression.”
HER: What about the orphan song?
ME: “Giving Kids the Business”? We moved that to the second act, remember?
HER: Oh, right. Go ahead. What’s next?
ME: Then it’s “The Philanderer’s Song.”
HER: The school board will love it. And after that?
ME: Then it’s the first really big song: “Grains of Hope.” That’s when the woman steals the bread and marmalade.
HER: That’s not that big a song. It’s a plot point song.
ME: But it’s a big plot point.
HER: It doesn’t matter. The big songs don’t have to be the ones that are most important to the plot. The big songs are the ones that become hits.
ME: We’re not writing a Broadway show here. Can we focus? It’s just a majorly important song. That’s all I’m saying.
HER: It just sounded like you were ranking it. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to get off the point.
ME: Okay. So next we move on to “Working Girls Like Pretty Dresses, Too.”
HER: Which is technically the first big song.
ME: Let it go.
HER: I said I let it go. I’m just saying. There’s dancing and stuff with that one.
ME: Fine. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Then off go the prostitutes.
HER: (enthusiastically) One of whom’s the illegitimate daughter of the factory owner!
ME: (pause) Yeah … I still don’t like that.
HER: What? Wait a minute. We’ve been over that a million times.
ME: And wouldn’t you think it’d feel right by now? But it doesn’t. It makes the whole show about heredity and destiny. It undercuts any kind of serious socialistic reading.
HER: Oh, come on. This is supposed to be a musical revue and some skits. We’ve gotten kind of ambitious, but it’s still a school play. Forget about the critics. Other than the school paper, who's going to reveiw this? You're just slowing down the process again!
ME: I’m just telling you what I think. Why are you getting so hostile?
HER: Hello? Have you ever had to work with you?
Me gets up from her chair and walks calmly to the camera. The screen goes dark. A title card appears, reading:
LATER THAT SAME DAY
Me and Her still sit at opposite sides of the same table. They each sit very still, staring at one another. They have their hands folded neatly in front of them. Neither of them blinks for several seconds. Ambient sounds come from other parts of the house.
ME: You’re going to lose. You might as well save yourself the eye strain.
HER: You think you’re so smart. You are, but I still might be able to win this yet.
ME: You’re only saying that because you blinked just then.
HER: (blinking angrily) What? I did not!
ME: No, but you did just then.
HER: You’re a cheat!
ME: And you’re a girl who can’t win a staring contest. Just accept your fate.
Her shoves back her chair and stomps over to the camera. The screen goes dark. A title card appears, reading:
AND EVEN LATER THAT SAME DAY
Me and Her still sit at opposite sides of the same table. Once again they’re shuffling papers and chatting about their collaboration.
HER: The matter of the backstory on the prostitute is now on the official Compromise Committee agenda. Let’s go on with the songs, if that’s okay with you.
ME: That’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.
HER: It’s okay with me.
ME: Then, okay. That’s actually all of act one.
HER: No, there’s one more. The solo by the blind government functionary.
ME: Did we ever come up with a title?
HER: We were just calling it the “I See” song.
ME: We didn’t cut that?
HER: Well, no. That one’s very important for the whole show. You liked it, remember?
ME: Oh, wait! That’s the one that goes, “I see no industrial waste / I see no corruption and greed”?
HER: “I see no fault indeed with the present regime / For at least I have all that I need.”
ME: Right! Man, I love that!
HER: Yeah, I know. You wrote most of it.
ME: Oh, right. So that’s all of act one?
HER: Blessedly, yes. Only two more to go.
Me and Her sit at opposite ends of a long wooden table. Each of them has a pile of papers before her. As they talk, they make notes or refer to various pieces of paper.
ME: Are you ever going to say anything?
HER: What am I supposed to say? There’s nothing here I can respond to in a constructive way.
ME: We have to come up with a compromise. I don’t like this any more than you do.
HER: I’m not so sure about that. I think you might. I mean, look at this. You’ve added a whole song here that we never even discussed. How could you write another song and not tell me?
ME: You don’t like it? I thought we needed to explain why the judge was sentencing the young mother to a gulag for hoarding bread. The text didn’t really explore that.
HER: Whether I like it or not isn't the point. You keep adding this stuff without consulting me. Then all you do later is justify it. You’re shutting me out!
ME: Oh, fine. But you can rewrite almost a whole act? You can revise the whole costume concept so that we have to hold a bake sale to pay for all the extra silver lamé?
HER: I told you about the rewrite. You just weren’t listening. And the costume stuff. I didn’t go sneaking in new stuff and then try to act like it made the whole thing better. Do you just want to write this yourself?
ME: No.
HER: Well, then start working with me.
ME: Why do you think we’re sitting here? We’re supposed to be working. Come on. Let’s do it. You and me. Right now. Come on. We can work it out.
HER: What are you doing? Is this you cheerleading?
ME: Come on.
HER: Um, okay.
ME: We’re going to have a theater full of people.
HER: I know.
ME: All of our classmates will be there.
HER: Yeah, I know.
ME: Your mom is going to be there. My mom.
HER: I’ve thought about this.
ME: So we have to have something to put on that stage. We have to present something, or else everybody’s going to laugh at us.
HER: I agree. But you're going to have to start playing straight or this isn’t going to work.
ME: Okay, fine. I’ve been playing straight, but whatever. I’ll meet you halfway, if that’s what you need.
HER: Call it whatever you want. Just don’t try to squeeze in any more material that we haven’t agreed on.
ME: I would never do that.
HER: No, I’m sure.
ME: So maybe we can run down the song list. You want to start with that?
HER: Okay, I guess we can do that. It's a start.
ME: Good. See? We’re working. Right. So skip the overture and stuff … blah blah blah … first thing up is “It’s a Fine Old Mornin’ for Mass Oppression.”
HER: What about the orphan song?
ME: “Giving Kids the Business”? We moved that to the second act, remember?
HER: Oh, right. Go ahead. What’s next?
ME: Then it’s “The Philanderer’s Song.”
HER: The school board will love it. And after that?
ME: Then it’s the first really big song: “Grains of Hope.” That’s when the woman steals the bread and marmalade.
HER: That’s not that big a song. It’s a plot point song.
ME: But it’s a big plot point.
HER: It doesn’t matter. The big songs don’t have to be the ones that are most important to the plot. The big songs are the ones that become hits.
ME: We’re not writing a Broadway show here. Can we focus? It’s just a majorly important song. That’s all I’m saying.
HER: It just sounded like you were ranking it. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to get off the point.
ME: Okay. So next we move on to “Working Girls Like Pretty Dresses, Too.”
HER: Which is technically the first big song.
ME: Let it go.
HER: I said I let it go. I’m just saying. There’s dancing and stuff with that one.
ME: Fine. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Then off go the prostitutes.
HER: (enthusiastically) One of whom’s the illegitimate daughter of the factory owner!
ME: (pause) Yeah … I still don’t like that.
HER: What? Wait a minute. We’ve been over that a million times.
ME: And wouldn’t you think it’d feel right by now? But it doesn’t. It makes the whole show about heredity and destiny. It undercuts any kind of serious socialistic reading.
HER: Oh, come on. This is supposed to be a musical revue and some skits. We’ve gotten kind of ambitious, but it’s still a school play. Forget about the critics. Other than the school paper, who's going to reveiw this? You're just slowing down the process again!
ME: I’m just telling you what I think. Why are you getting so hostile?
HER: Hello? Have you ever had to work with you?
Me gets up from her chair and walks calmly to the camera. The screen goes dark. A title card appears, reading:
LATER THAT SAME DAY
Me and Her still sit at opposite sides of the same table. They each sit very still, staring at one another. They have their hands folded neatly in front of them. Neither of them blinks for several seconds. Ambient sounds come from other parts of the house.
ME: You’re going to lose. You might as well save yourself the eye strain.
HER: You think you’re so smart. You are, but I still might be able to win this yet.
ME: You’re only saying that because you blinked just then.
HER: (blinking angrily) What? I did not!
ME: No, but you did just then.
HER: You’re a cheat!
ME: And you’re a girl who can’t win a staring contest. Just accept your fate.
Her shoves back her chair and stomps over to the camera. The screen goes dark. A title card appears, reading:
AND EVEN LATER THAT SAME DAY
Me and Her still sit at opposite sides of the same table. Once again they’re shuffling papers and chatting about their collaboration.
HER: The matter of the backstory on the prostitute is now on the official Compromise Committee agenda. Let’s go on with the songs, if that’s okay with you.
ME: That’s okay with me if it’s okay with you.
HER: It’s okay with me.
ME: Then, okay. That’s actually all of act one.
HER: No, there’s one more. The solo by the blind government functionary.
ME: Did we ever come up with a title?
HER: We were just calling it the “I See” song.
ME: We didn’t cut that?
HER: Well, no. That one’s very important for the whole show. You liked it, remember?
ME: Oh, wait! That’s the one that goes, “I see no industrial waste / I see no corruption and greed”?
HER: “I see no fault indeed with the present regime / For at least I have all that I need.”
ME: Right! Man, I love that!
HER: Yeah, I know. You wrote most of it.
ME: Oh, right. So that’s all of act one?
HER: Blessedly, yes. Only two more to go.
Monday, December 12, 2005
The Most Brilliant Performer in the Whole First Grade
Mrs. Fletcher tried to coax the class to be quiet, but they were beyond all control. Ramon sat up on the makeshift stage in the school library, holding the decorative paper skeleton at arm’s length. He argued with the thing, then shook it violently as he pretended it responded to him. It hardly mattered what they were arguing about, and Ramon knew that. He just said, “No, no. You can’t. You can’t do it! Stop asking me!” And then he shook the skeleton and gave it voice, a high, screechy voice that said nothing intelligible. It sounded like, “Nyih-nyih-nyih! Nyih-nyih-nyih-nyih!” And every time it did so, the assembled group of sixty children erupted in peals of laughter. As far as they were concerned, Ramon was the funniest person alive.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Pancakes Dunst said to Meredith. But Meredith didn’t hear her. She was laughing too much. Up on the stage, Ramon and the skeleton continued arguing, escalating in volume and intensity. For everyone other than Pancakes and Mrs. Fletcher, the moment was pure, undistilled comedy, the very essence of humor. Ramon had gone to the root of all that is funny and presented it to his classmates for their grateful benefit. If Meredith hadn’t been snorting with uncontrollable mirth, she might have offered her opinion that Ramon was, frankly, a genius. The skeleton thing absolutely killed.
Just when the kids were getting used to the idea of Ramon’s arguing with a paper skeleton and began to quiet a bit, he changed up the act. He leapt to his feet, the skeleton outstretched before him in his left hand, and delivered a punch to its grinning skull with his right fist. “Nyih-ihh!” he screeched as the skeleton’s response. The children launched into fresh gales of laughter. He punched it again. The skeleton quivered with rage.
“This is nonsense!” Pancakes said, louder this time. She had a hard time making herself heard over the raucous appreciation of her classmates. She appealed to her teacher. “Mrs. Fletcher, why is this funny to everybody? It’s just stupid.”
The thirty-year-old Mrs. Fletcher, who most of children considered on the verge of her twilight years, looked down to where Pancakes sat on the fuzzy orange carpet. She adjusted her glasses nervously. Talking to Pancakes always made her a little nervous. The girl was so serious sometimes. She was too direct for a seven-year-old. “It doesn’t really appeal to me,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “But a lot of children love slapstick humor.”
“But…” Pancakes began. She faltered, searching for the words to explain what was confounding her. “But there’s no…there’s no, um…there’s no context,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
Mrs. Fletcher sighed inwardly. She taught first grade for many reasons, one which was that her students didn’t tend to engage in debates. She didn’t do well with debates, and she preferred to issue simple instructions and make behavior corrections. She didn’t want to talk about why certain kinds of humor needed context. “Pancakes,” she said, “it’s just a comedy act Ramon came up with. I don’t think he really wanted to give us any kind of message.”
On stage, Ramon had taken to trading blows with the skeleton. Its shaking rage had prompted it to attack him, which he indicated by fluttering the thing in his own face even as he shrank back from it. All the while, he continued to screech the skeleton’s annoyance. The kids couldn’t get enough.
Pancakes frowned. “But it’s a skeleton,” she said. “He’s arguing with it. My dad would say it was…Berman Ex.”
Mrs. Fletcher shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Berman?”
“It’s from the movies. Ingrid Berman?”
Mrs. Fletcher smiled in spite of herself. Pancakes thankfully revealed herself as a child at times. It made her teacher feel more in control of the situation. “I see. Bergmanesque. You’re thinking of Ingmar Bergman, Pancakes.”
“I thought her name was Ingrid. She’s been in a bunch of movies. My mother tries to look like her.”
“There is an Ingrid Bergman. She was a movie actress. But Ingmar Bergman, he was a movie director. Different person.”
“Well, whoever Bergman was, that’s like this.”
Before Mrs. Fletcher could respond, the kids burst out in a boisterous shout of hilarity. Ramon’s fight with his paper nemesis had gone from simple blows to desperate wrestling. The skeleton seemed to bowl him over, and Ramon fell to the floor. Then he tossed the skeleton away and made a comic lunge for it. Back and forth they went, pouncing on one another and rolling around the floor in simulated combat. Both Pancakes and Mrs. Fletcher looked on in terrified fascination as the volume level on the room went from an undulating roar to an outright explosion of amused screams.
Ramon appeared to have no plan for stopping his act. So long as he was getting laughs, he kept wrestling with the paper decoration, which was by now becoming rather tattered in the fight. He pretended to gain the upper hand, and he picked up the heap of paper and cardboard and tossed it into a dark green metal wastebasket on the far side of the small stage. But then he peered intently into the receptacle, and he quickly reached in to yank it out again, making it appear as if the skeleton had come back to life and attacked him anew. The crowd of children stayed with his every move, giggling and cheering and screaming with each new struggle. Mrs. Fletcher decided at last to intervene. The elderly twins who served as the school librarians had been shooting her disapproving looks ever since Ramon’s act first started.
“Okay, class!” Mrs. Fletcher said over the din of the children. “Thank you, Ramon! We need to wrap this up now, please!” The kids initially tried to ignore her, but she resorted to her loud double clap. That always brought the majority of the kids to attention. The volume she could get out of her two small palms was preternaturally loud, like the sharp snaps of high-powered firecrackers. The sound effectively stopped the show, and despite the fact that Ramon still thrashed about with the remains of his paper skeleton, the laughter died away with frightening suddenness. The twin librarians raised their eyebrows in unison. They wondered, also in unison, though of course they couldn’t know that, why Mrs. Fletcher hadn’t taken such remarkable charge much earlier.
Once the laughter died away, Ramon finally looked up from his exertions. He’d ripped one of his short shirt sleeves in his struggles with the skeleton, and the paper Halloween decoration had been reduced to a clump of wrinkled paper and folded cardboard. He grinned at his class. “Ramon and Ellie!” he shouted. He gave no other explanation, and since he hadn’t introduced his act beforehand, everyone assumed that the skeleton had been named Ellie. No one knew why, but then as Pancakes pointed out, no one really knew why anything onstage in the past ten minutes had occurred. Ramon retreated from the stage, but he stood uncertainly beside it and awaited instructions.
“Why ‘Ellie’?” Pancakes asked Ramon.
He shrugged.
“It doesn’t mean anything?” she asked.
“It’s my sister,” he said. “I named the skeleton after my sister. Ellie.”
Pancakes smiled. “Okay,” she said finally. “Then it all makes sense. I wish you’d told me that earlier.”
“What? You don’t know my sister.”
“No. About your act. I get the conflict now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay. I do. That’s all I was worried about.”
Ramon said nothing more. Pancakes made him nervous. She was always saying things that he didn’t get, and then she didn’t explain them when he said he didn’t get them. None of the other girls were like that. But none of the other girls were named after a famous person, so maybe that’s why she was different. Anyway, he didn’t know what to say to her, and she didn’t seem to care.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Pancakes Dunst said to Meredith. But Meredith didn’t hear her. She was laughing too much. Up on the stage, Ramon and the skeleton continued arguing, escalating in volume and intensity. For everyone other than Pancakes and Mrs. Fletcher, the moment was pure, undistilled comedy, the very essence of humor. Ramon had gone to the root of all that is funny and presented it to his classmates for their grateful benefit. If Meredith hadn’t been snorting with uncontrollable mirth, she might have offered her opinion that Ramon was, frankly, a genius. The skeleton thing absolutely killed.
Just when the kids were getting used to the idea of Ramon’s arguing with a paper skeleton and began to quiet a bit, he changed up the act. He leapt to his feet, the skeleton outstretched before him in his left hand, and delivered a punch to its grinning skull with his right fist. “Nyih-ihh!” he screeched as the skeleton’s response. The children launched into fresh gales of laughter. He punched it again. The skeleton quivered with rage.
“This is nonsense!” Pancakes said, louder this time. She had a hard time making herself heard over the raucous appreciation of her classmates. She appealed to her teacher. “Mrs. Fletcher, why is this funny to everybody? It’s just stupid.”
The thirty-year-old Mrs. Fletcher, who most of children considered on the verge of her twilight years, looked down to where Pancakes sat on the fuzzy orange carpet. She adjusted her glasses nervously. Talking to Pancakes always made her a little nervous. The girl was so serious sometimes. She was too direct for a seven-year-old. “It doesn’t really appeal to me,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “But a lot of children love slapstick humor.”
“But…” Pancakes began. She faltered, searching for the words to explain what was confounding her. “But there’s no…there’s no, um…there’s no context,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
Mrs. Fletcher sighed inwardly. She taught first grade for many reasons, one which was that her students didn’t tend to engage in debates. She didn’t do well with debates, and she preferred to issue simple instructions and make behavior corrections. She didn’t want to talk about why certain kinds of humor needed context. “Pancakes,” she said, “it’s just a comedy act Ramon came up with. I don’t think he really wanted to give us any kind of message.”
On stage, Ramon had taken to trading blows with the skeleton. Its shaking rage had prompted it to attack him, which he indicated by fluttering the thing in his own face even as he shrank back from it. All the while, he continued to screech the skeleton’s annoyance. The kids couldn’t get enough.
Pancakes frowned. “But it’s a skeleton,” she said. “He’s arguing with it. My dad would say it was…Berman Ex.”
Mrs. Fletcher shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Berman?”
“It’s from the movies. Ingrid Berman?”
Mrs. Fletcher smiled in spite of herself. Pancakes thankfully revealed herself as a child at times. It made her teacher feel more in control of the situation. “I see. Bergmanesque. You’re thinking of Ingmar Bergman, Pancakes.”
“I thought her name was Ingrid. She’s been in a bunch of movies. My mother tries to look like her.”
“There is an Ingrid Bergman. She was a movie actress. But Ingmar Bergman, he was a movie director. Different person.”
“Well, whoever Bergman was, that’s like this.”
Before Mrs. Fletcher could respond, the kids burst out in a boisterous shout of hilarity. Ramon’s fight with his paper nemesis had gone from simple blows to desperate wrestling. The skeleton seemed to bowl him over, and Ramon fell to the floor. Then he tossed the skeleton away and made a comic lunge for it. Back and forth they went, pouncing on one another and rolling around the floor in simulated combat. Both Pancakes and Mrs. Fletcher looked on in terrified fascination as the volume level on the room went from an undulating roar to an outright explosion of amused screams.
Ramon appeared to have no plan for stopping his act. So long as he was getting laughs, he kept wrestling with the paper decoration, which was by now becoming rather tattered in the fight. He pretended to gain the upper hand, and he picked up the heap of paper and cardboard and tossed it into a dark green metal wastebasket on the far side of the small stage. But then he peered intently into the receptacle, and he quickly reached in to yank it out again, making it appear as if the skeleton had come back to life and attacked him anew. The crowd of children stayed with his every move, giggling and cheering and screaming with each new struggle. Mrs. Fletcher decided at last to intervene. The elderly twins who served as the school librarians had been shooting her disapproving looks ever since Ramon’s act first started.
“Okay, class!” Mrs. Fletcher said over the din of the children. “Thank you, Ramon! We need to wrap this up now, please!” The kids initially tried to ignore her, but she resorted to her loud double clap. That always brought the majority of the kids to attention. The volume she could get out of her two small palms was preternaturally loud, like the sharp snaps of high-powered firecrackers. The sound effectively stopped the show, and despite the fact that Ramon still thrashed about with the remains of his paper skeleton, the laughter died away with frightening suddenness. The twin librarians raised their eyebrows in unison. They wondered, also in unison, though of course they couldn’t know that, why Mrs. Fletcher hadn’t taken such remarkable charge much earlier.
Once the laughter died away, Ramon finally looked up from his exertions. He’d ripped one of his short shirt sleeves in his struggles with the skeleton, and the paper Halloween decoration had been reduced to a clump of wrinkled paper and folded cardboard. He grinned at his class. “Ramon and Ellie!” he shouted. He gave no other explanation, and since he hadn’t introduced his act beforehand, everyone assumed that the skeleton had been named Ellie. No one knew why, but then as Pancakes pointed out, no one really knew why anything onstage in the past ten minutes had occurred. Ramon retreated from the stage, but he stood uncertainly beside it and awaited instructions.
“Why ‘Ellie’?” Pancakes asked Ramon.
He shrugged.
“It doesn’t mean anything?” she asked.
“It’s my sister,” he said. “I named the skeleton after my sister. Ellie.”
Pancakes smiled. “Okay,” she said finally. “Then it all makes sense. I wish you’d told me that earlier.”
“What? You don’t know my sister.”
“No. About your act. I get the conflict now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay. I do. That’s all I was worried about.”
Ramon said nothing more. Pancakes made him nervous. She was always saying things that he didn’t get, and then she didn’t explain them when he said he didn’t get them. None of the other girls were like that. But none of the other girls were named after a famous person, so maybe that’s why she was different. Anyway, he didn’t know what to say to her, and she didn’t seem to care.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
The Exclamatory Adventures of Pancakes Dunst
#17
Through a Camera Lens, Darkly
How can the cleverest girl in the world save the planet if she can’t get out of her talk show bookings? Pancakes’s new publicist has filled her calendar with back-to-back TV appearances. If she can’t get more than a couple of minutes alone in the green room, then a crisis of vague but probably very weighty import might have serious but not entirely defined consequences for all humanity, or at least a good portion of it. And for pity’s sake, isn’t it possible for a girl to get some cucumber finger sandwiches and bottled mineral water while she’s in makeup? Is that too much to ask? Pancakes may now face her greatest challenge ever: Fame has gone to her head!
#18
Mass Marketed Plastic Halloween Candy Dish of Doom
“May I offer you a circus peanut?” the old woman asked, holding toward Pancakes a skull-studded plastic bowl full of dusty orange candy. What slender connection could these puffy confections have to the spooky going-on around town? Why are elderly spinsters, creepy merchants, and glassy-eyed housewives offering up handfuls of unwrapped candy? Who are the bicycle-riding prankster vigilantes who keep appearing around town? And what’s the meaning of the unlicensed carnival that’s just encamped on the other side of the county line? Is it all just meaningless imagery concocted to sell a product? Horrors!
#19
Valley Near a Mountain, With a Lake Nearby and Trees … Plus Some Clouds
Max Feldenblum’s cloying landscape paintings, for years consigned to walls along cafeteria lines, gain overnight fame when a wealthy eccentric begins buying his work. The movement his work inspires, Slapdash Expressionism, quickly becomes the toast of the art world and a popular new fad. As dense, oversized art magazines dissect the implications of Feldenblum and his followers, middle-class American families flood understaffed art stores for brushes, canvases, paints, and palettes in order to create their own haute hackwork But Pancakes Dunst sees something in the pictures that looks askew. Are those really “happy little woodland deer” Feldenblum’s painting, or might they be alien satellite receivers?
#20
The Triumphant Return of Happily After All
The reasons may be unknown, but the results are all-too-real for when someone manages to steal the last ten minutes of every big-studio movie in history. Film, magnetic tape, and digital formats worldwide lose any trace of the classic climactic scenes. Large-scale battles, daring car chases, fights to the death, and sweeping acts of romantic love all disappear. A tough-talking group of Midwestern independent filmmakers claims responsibility, but if they can’t even get their own continuity straight, how could they possibly orchestrate a scheme as complicated as this? Pancakes notices that the indie directors are wearing promotional T-shirts for a new, corporate-backed kid’s feature. Why would these auteurs want anything to do with a piece of fluff like Maggie Callow and the Sweaterpants? Even their deep sense of outsider irony can’t account for it.
Through a Camera Lens, Darkly
How can the cleverest girl in the world save the planet if she can’t get out of her talk show bookings? Pancakes’s new publicist has filled her calendar with back-to-back TV appearances. If she can’t get more than a couple of minutes alone in the green room, then a crisis of vague but probably very weighty import might have serious but not entirely defined consequences for all humanity, or at least a good portion of it. And for pity’s sake, isn’t it possible for a girl to get some cucumber finger sandwiches and bottled mineral water while she’s in makeup? Is that too much to ask? Pancakes may now face her greatest challenge ever: Fame has gone to her head!
#18
Mass Marketed Plastic Halloween Candy Dish of Doom
“May I offer you a circus peanut?” the old woman asked, holding toward Pancakes a skull-studded plastic bowl full of dusty orange candy. What slender connection could these puffy confections have to the spooky going-on around town? Why are elderly spinsters, creepy merchants, and glassy-eyed housewives offering up handfuls of unwrapped candy? Who are the bicycle-riding prankster vigilantes who keep appearing around town? And what’s the meaning of the unlicensed carnival that’s just encamped on the other side of the county line? Is it all just meaningless imagery concocted to sell a product? Horrors!
#19
Valley Near a Mountain, With a Lake Nearby and Trees … Plus Some Clouds
Max Feldenblum’s cloying landscape paintings, for years consigned to walls along cafeteria lines, gain overnight fame when a wealthy eccentric begins buying his work. The movement his work inspires, Slapdash Expressionism, quickly becomes the toast of the art world and a popular new fad. As dense, oversized art magazines dissect the implications of Feldenblum and his followers, middle-class American families flood understaffed art stores for brushes, canvases, paints, and palettes in order to create their own haute hackwork But Pancakes Dunst sees something in the pictures that looks askew. Are those really “happy little woodland deer” Feldenblum’s painting, or might they be alien satellite receivers?
#20
The Triumphant Return of Happily After All
The reasons may be unknown, but the results are all-too-real for when someone manages to steal the last ten minutes of every big-studio movie in history. Film, magnetic tape, and digital formats worldwide lose any trace of the classic climactic scenes. Large-scale battles, daring car chases, fights to the death, and sweeping acts of romantic love all disappear. A tough-talking group of Midwestern independent filmmakers claims responsibility, but if they can’t even get their own continuity straight, how could they possibly orchestrate a scheme as complicated as this? Pancakes notices that the indie directors are wearing promotional T-shirts for a new, corporate-backed kid’s feature. Why would these auteurs want anything to do with a piece of fluff like Maggie Callow and the Sweaterpants? Even their deep sense of outsider irony can’t account for it.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Not Part of the Lesson Plan
Well, this was a new one on me.
Have you ever found yourself thrown together with a group that was basically dysfunctional? A bunch of people that collectively was just disruptive? The problems couldn’t be pinned on just a few people. There was something about the way they worked together somehow. Or worked against each other. A sum greater than its parts, in a way. In a bad way.
Yeah, so that’s my afternoon commercial art class. For two hours, five afternoons a week, I help to create a monster. Most of the students are in other classes of mine too, and none of them is reall a problem. And you guys know me. Would you ever think I was part of a bad crowd … other than yourselves I mean. But get the lot of us together, and we flagrantly and regularly break rules, talk out of turn, interrupt lectures, make inane requests, and—always, always, always—“talk with our neighbor.”
Our teacher Mr. Anson gets mad at us almost every day. Sometimes he sends people to the principal. Sometimes he suspends minor privileges or assigns ridiculous assignments in frustration. We never fail to piss him off, and we’ve gotten used to the way his face turns a very dark red when he’s really angry. We recognize what it means when his voice cracks slightly. We’ve become very familiar with the degrees of his anger over the course of this year.
So when we all came in to class at two today, we were surprised that Mr. Anson had planned a kind of “encounter session” for us. We all had to push our work tables to one side and pull up chairs in a big circle. Then he got down to it.
The whole year, he said, had been getting “worse and worse and worse.” We all needed to talk about that. He was going to talk while we listened, and then he would listen while we talked. We would fix this thing together, he said. We had to. It couldn’t go on like it had been, so we were all going to fix it together.
So we did like he said. He went over all the usual problems with our “getting out of hand.” He named a lot of events. Becky and Tonya and Melissa gossiping all the time. Doug and Robert humming heavy metal songs back and forth at each other. That one afternoon when almost everybody asked for special permission to go to the restroom … which we knew was kind of against the rules but that he felt like he had to keep giving into after making a couple of exceptions. Shavonda and Marquita’s way of asking random questions just to break their own boredom during still-life drawing exercises. I was kind of surprised at how many examples there were. I wish I’d been taking notes, because some of them were funnier than I remembered. But after about half an hour, he finally finished and invited us to talk.
After all that, though, nobody really wanted to talk. A couple of people who felt like lesser offenders made some vague comments. I didn’t know what to say. Then some more people started to pipe up about the problems with our teacher-class interaction. Some of what they said was a little stupid (“I just don’t feel like I’m at home, you know what I mean?”), some of it was insensitive (“Like, how are we supposed to get what you’re talking about when you say it the way you say it?”), some of it was almost insightful (“It’s not that we don’t like you. It’s just that you’re the teacher”).
Then things took a really weird turn. I guess what we were saying was more than Mr. Anson had bargained for. He started to look really upset, but not veiny and red the way we’re used to. Before we knew what was happening, his eyes got all watery, and then he suddenly buried his face in his hands. He sobbed, “I’m sorry, kids!” and then got up and ran out of the room. We all just sat there. Robert the metalhead laughed. Deann the cheerleader hissed, “It’s not funny!” and he shut up and looked kind of ashamed.
Mr. Anson eventually came back in about five minutes, and then we proceeded for the rest of the hour. I still doubt it will really help for more than a week or two. That second part of the discussion wasn’t nearly as interesting. Something strange had happened and everybody knew it. The more interesting part was what happened in the time Mr. Anson was gone.
“God, ya’ll, I don’t know,” Deann said. “We should do something for him.” I’m thinking, Yeah, we should be a decent class and stop giving him so much shit all the time. But we don’t know how to do that. We’re not capable of such decency. Because together we’re a mob.
Then people started agreeing with her, even though they couldn’t possibly care that much about Mr. Anson after all the crap they’ve been giving him for months ... that we’ve been giving him, I mean. But now they were talking about getting him flowers or a cake or maybe a cookie bouquet or just a card. They wanted to show how much they cared. But nobody could really agree on the right kind of sentiment after your teacher breaks down. Does Hallmark make a card with the right message? Get Well Soon? It’s Your First Breakdown? Hope the Medication Helps?
Finally we let the thing drop and just sat there. Every once in a while, somebody would wonder out loud what we should do. What would the school expect us to do? How long should we wait before we went to tell someone that our teacher ran out of the room crying?
By the time Mr. Anson came back, we had stopped talking about the idea of getting him a gift. I’m pretty sure we all were thinking “Oh, we’ll just be a better class. What better gift could we give him?” That’s the kind of Hollywood sentiment we’ve all learned to have whenever we don’t have a map for a situation. So we’d try harder. We’d fix this thing. We had to.
So I give us two weeks. Listen closely in the halls of B building in the next couple of months. If you hear a grown man bawling down one of the halls, be nice to him. We’ve been very mean to the poor bastard. And we’re really, really sorry.
Have you ever found yourself thrown together with a group that was basically dysfunctional? A bunch of people that collectively was just disruptive? The problems couldn’t be pinned on just a few people. There was something about the way they worked together somehow. Or worked against each other. A sum greater than its parts, in a way. In a bad way.
Yeah, so that’s my afternoon commercial art class. For two hours, five afternoons a week, I help to create a monster. Most of the students are in other classes of mine too, and none of them is reall a problem. And you guys know me. Would you ever think I was part of a bad crowd … other than yourselves I mean. But get the lot of us together, and we flagrantly and regularly break rules, talk out of turn, interrupt lectures, make inane requests, and—always, always, always—“talk with our neighbor.”
Our teacher Mr. Anson gets mad at us almost every day. Sometimes he sends people to the principal. Sometimes he suspends minor privileges or assigns ridiculous assignments in frustration. We never fail to piss him off, and we’ve gotten used to the way his face turns a very dark red when he’s really angry. We recognize what it means when his voice cracks slightly. We’ve become very familiar with the degrees of his anger over the course of this year.
So when we all came in to class at two today, we were surprised that Mr. Anson had planned a kind of “encounter session” for us. We all had to push our work tables to one side and pull up chairs in a big circle. Then he got down to it.
The whole year, he said, had been getting “worse and worse and worse.” We all needed to talk about that. He was going to talk while we listened, and then he would listen while we talked. We would fix this thing together, he said. We had to. It couldn’t go on like it had been, so we were all going to fix it together.
So we did like he said. He went over all the usual problems with our “getting out of hand.” He named a lot of events. Becky and Tonya and Melissa gossiping all the time. Doug and Robert humming heavy metal songs back and forth at each other. That one afternoon when almost everybody asked for special permission to go to the restroom … which we knew was kind of against the rules but that he felt like he had to keep giving into after making a couple of exceptions. Shavonda and Marquita’s way of asking random questions just to break their own boredom during still-life drawing exercises. I was kind of surprised at how many examples there were. I wish I’d been taking notes, because some of them were funnier than I remembered. But after about half an hour, he finally finished and invited us to talk.
After all that, though, nobody really wanted to talk. A couple of people who felt like lesser offenders made some vague comments. I didn’t know what to say. Then some more people started to pipe up about the problems with our teacher-class interaction. Some of what they said was a little stupid (“I just don’t feel like I’m at home, you know what I mean?”), some of it was insensitive (“Like, how are we supposed to get what you’re talking about when you say it the way you say it?”), some of it was almost insightful (“It’s not that we don’t like you. It’s just that you’re the teacher”).
Then things took a really weird turn. I guess what we were saying was more than Mr. Anson had bargained for. He started to look really upset, but not veiny and red the way we’re used to. Before we knew what was happening, his eyes got all watery, and then he suddenly buried his face in his hands. He sobbed, “I’m sorry, kids!” and then got up and ran out of the room. We all just sat there. Robert the metalhead laughed. Deann the cheerleader hissed, “It’s not funny!” and he shut up and looked kind of ashamed.
Mr. Anson eventually came back in about five minutes, and then we proceeded for the rest of the hour. I still doubt it will really help for more than a week or two. That second part of the discussion wasn’t nearly as interesting. Something strange had happened and everybody knew it. The more interesting part was what happened in the time Mr. Anson was gone.
“God, ya’ll, I don’t know,” Deann said. “We should do something for him.” I’m thinking, Yeah, we should be a decent class and stop giving him so much shit all the time. But we don’t know how to do that. We’re not capable of such decency. Because together we’re a mob.
Then people started agreeing with her, even though they couldn’t possibly care that much about Mr. Anson after all the crap they’ve been giving him for months ... that we’ve been giving him, I mean. But now they were talking about getting him flowers or a cake or maybe a cookie bouquet or just a card. They wanted to show how much they cared. But nobody could really agree on the right kind of sentiment after your teacher breaks down. Does Hallmark make a card with the right message? Get Well Soon? It’s Your First Breakdown? Hope the Medication Helps?
Finally we let the thing drop and just sat there. Every once in a while, somebody would wonder out loud what we should do. What would the school expect us to do? How long should we wait before we went to tell someone that our teacher ran out of the room crying?
By the time Mr. Anson came back, we had stopped talking about the idea of getting him a gift. I’m pretty sure we all were thinking “Oh, we’ll just be a better class. What better gift could we give him?” That’s the kind of Hollywood sentiment we’ve all learned to have whenever we don’t have a map for a situation. So we’d try harder. We’d fix this thing. We had to.
So I give us two weeks. Listen closely in the halls of B building in the next couple of months. If you hear a grown man bawling down one of the halls, be nice to him. We’ve been very mean to the poor bastard. And we’re really, really sorry.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Hindsight
Caitlin hunched forward over the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead as she drove.
“If you tell me ‘I knew that was going to happen,’ I’m going to punch you right in the eye,” she said.
I said nothing. In the rearview mirror, I saw the aftermath in miniature. The pale brown recliner lay shattered on the highway. It seemed to slump to one side, defeated. Its wooden frame poked from its leather covering like broken bones. Cars swerved into other lanes to avoid the obstacle. The mouths of their drivers were animated by silent, angry curses.
I stifled the irritable sigh that was welling up in my chest. I had offered my suggestions. I had expressed my doubts. But Caitlin didn’t think there was any danger of the heavy chair coming loose. She said it was good enough, no need to tie it down. But only twenty minutes later I heard the chair sliding around in the bed of the truck. Then I knew it was beyond saving.
We crested a hill, and the chair winked out of sight.
“If you tell me ‘I knew that was going to happen,’ I’m going to punch you right in the eye,” she said.
I said nothing. In the rearview mirror, I saw the aftermath in miniature. The pale brown recliner lay shattered on the highway. It seemed to slump to one side, defeated. Its wooden frame poked from its leather covering like broken bones. Cars swerved into other lanes to avoid the obstacle. The mouths of their drivers were animated by silent, angry curses.
I stifled the irritable sigh that was welling up in my chest. I had offered my suggestions. I had expressed my doubts. But Caitlin didn’t think there was any danger of the heavy chair coming loose. She said it was good enough, no need to tie it down. But only twenty minutes later I heard the chair sliding around in the bed of the truck. Then I knew it was beyond saving.
We crested a hill, and the chair winked out of sight.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Ms. Direction
This girl I was seeing for a while asked me once if I was ever going to write about her. She was an elusive type, appearing and disappearing all the time. We’d talk on the phone, exchange text messages, or meet for drinks on occasion, and then she’d be completely unresponsive for a week or more. Drove me nuts. I kept trying to assert some direction for us, to move us toward something that more resembled dating. But every time, she sweetly dodged my suggestions. And every time, I let her. It was one of those situations where, looking back, you wonder why you ever thought that would change.
In the time I knew her, I was forever steering the conversation toward defining what we were really doing in spending time together. I wanted to reel her in somehow. So when she asked me if I was ever going to write about her, I said, “Well, if you play your cards right.” I thought that seemed cute and flirty, maybe a little bit provocative. It got the soft, appreciative laugh I’d hoped for. It even seemed to inspire another date, much to my surprise. After all the frustrating silences and delays, it seemed like we were finally moving toward something again.
But then we met and she broke the news about the guy she’d started seeing. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t me. Although for one sliver of a second as she started to tell me that she’d met someone she was really, really interested in, I believed it might be. But, no, it wasn’t me. It was he. I didn’t know or care who he was, actually. I’ve been on the losing end of my fair share of he’s. Doesn’t help to know how you stack up against the competition. By that time you’ve already lost.
I decided right then that I definitely wouldn’t write about her. I mean, why would I? If I did, and then she recognized herself later in my story, that’d just be to her satisfaction. She might get the impression that she was compelling enough, potent enough, to cut a guy loose and still have him wanting her. I couldn’t have that.
Also, if I wrote about her, she’d know that I’d been thinking about her. A lot. Enough to have built a story around her, to have written it, to have rewritten it, to have edited the thing a dozen times, and then to circulate it. That’s a lot of energy and attention to lavish on someone who just told you that they want someone other than you to lavish energy and attention on them.
It’d be obvious in the details I chose too. If I tried to disguise her identity, then I also gave some thought as to whether or not she would ever see the story. I’d have to consider her qualities in detail to decide what to change. Add a few inches to her petite figure? Disguise her cute, crooked smile? Switch her bay-blue eyes to sea green? Make her a brunette? A redhead? Cast her as less klutzy, a better driver, more punctual? No matter how I changed her appearance or mannerisms, it’d be obvious to her and to others that I’d turned this all over in my head for hours and hours. Not that it would surprise them.
At the end of that terminal date, we finished our sincere little hug goodbye and she dashed off to make plans with the new he. I didn’t know why I felt so stunned, because if I had written it all up as a story, that’s probably the way I would have ended things too. She’d let me go as gently as she knew how, and then she’d run toward her exciting, unknowable future. I’d have to let her play Muse to somebody else, somebody who at least got the benefit of her sweet but scattered attention.
I remembered that she’d told me more than once what a difficult person to date she was. I knew I shouldn’t have doubted her. My experience showed it to be true. And I knew from the little she told me about her previous relationships that a few other guys out there knew the same. But I’d heard that warning from others before her. It never works. I never really hear them until it’s too late. Love or infatuation or alarmingly strong attraction—whatever—is blind. And I guess it’s deaf too.
As I wandered off alone across the park and tried not to look back at her, I knew that if I wrote about her, I’d probably want to change a lot of details about what happened. I mean, how great did I look in the situation? We were a dozen years apart. Anybody reading a story that mentioned her being only a couple of years out of college could see what was coming. What other kind of foreshadowing would they need? A young woman facing endless life choices? Meeting new people her own age all the time? Taking endless care of her appearance to present the slimmest, prettiest package to the world? It was only a question of time before she found someone as confused, excited, and appealing as she was. I wouldn’t even know how to start writing a story like that without my character looking foolish and deluded. Probably better not to try.
In the time I knew her, I was forever steering the conversation toward defining what we were really doing in spending time together. I wanted to reel her in somehow. So when she asked me if I was ever going to write about her, I said, “Well, if you play your cards right.” I thought that seemed cute and flirty, maybe a little bit provocative. It got the soft, appreciative laugh I’d hoped for. It even seemed to inspire another date, much to my surprise. After all the frustrating silences and delays, it seemed like we were finally moving toward something again.
But then we met and she broke the news about the guy she’d started seeing. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t me. Although for one sliver of a second as she started to tell me that she’d met someone she was really, really interested in, I believed it might be. But, no, it wasn’t me. It was he. I didn’t know or care who he was, actually. I’ve been on the losing end of my fair share of he’s. Doesn’t help to know how you stack up against the competition. By that time you’ve already lost.
I decided right then that I definitely wouldn’t write about her. I mean, why would I? If I did, and then she recognized herself later in my story, that’d just be to her satisfaction. She might get the impression that she was compelling enough, potent enough, to cut a guy loose and still have him wanting her. I couldn’t have that.
Also, if I wrote about her, she’d know that I’d been thinking about her. A lot. Enough to have built a story around her, to have written it, to have rewritten it, to have edited the thing a dozen times, and then to circulate it. That’s a lot of energy and attention to lavish on someone who just told you that they want someone other than you to lavish energy and attention on them.
It’d be obvious in the details I chose too. If I tried to disguise her identity, then I also gave some thought as to whether or not she would ever see the story. I’d have to consider her qualities in detail to decide what to change. Add a few inches to her petite figure? Disguise her cute, crooked smile? Switch her bay-blue eyes to sea green? Make her a brunette? A redhead? Cast her as less klutzy, a better driver, more punctual? No matter how I changed her appearance or mannerisms, it’d be obvious to her and to others that I’d turned this all over in my head for hours and hours. Not that it would surprise them.
At the end of that terminal date, we finished our sincere little hug goodbye and she dashed off to make plans with the new he. I didn’t know why I felt so stunned, because if I had written it all up as a story, that’s probably the way I would have ended things too. She’d let me go as gently as she knew how, and then she’d run toward her exciting, unknowable future. I’d have to let her play Muse to somebody else, somebody who at least got the benefit of her sweet but scattered attention.
I remembered that she’d told me more than once what a difficult person to date she was. I knew I shouldn’t have doubted her. My experience showed it to be true. And I knew from the little she told me about her previous relationships that a few other guys out there knew the same. But I’d heard that warning from others before her. It never works. I never really hear them until it’s too late. Love or infatuation or alarmingly strong attraction—whatever—is blind. And I guess it’s deaf too.
As I wandered off alone across the park and tried not to look back at her, I knew that if I wrote about her, I’d probably want to change a lot of details about what happened. I mean, how great did I look in the situation? We were a dozen years apart. Anybody reading a story that mentioned her being only a couple of years out of college could see what was coming. What other kind of foreshadowing would they need? A young woman facing endless life choices? Meeting new people her own age all the time? Taking endless care of her appearance to present the slimmest, prettiest package to the world? It was only a question of time before she found someone as confused, excited, and appealing as she was. I wouldn’t even know how to start writing a story like that without my character looking foolish and deluded. Probably better not to try.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Course Selection
“Astronomy seems to be the only thing left,” Megan said. She sounded defeated. The inky pages of her much-abused course catalog looked like they had been run over by a truck more than once in the booklet's short existence.
“No, that’s actually a good one,” I said. “Limited math. Chemical-free labs. Colorfully-named concepts. Like ‘red shift.’ Doesn’t that sound cool?”
“It sounds like science.” She was getting sulky, and I wanted to get her through the course sign-up as quickly and painlessly as possible. If I wasn’t careful, she would get mopey and refuse to go out that night. Academic frustration almost always led her to cancel our dates.
“But some science is okay, Meg. You liked your oceanography class.”
“No, I just liked the word diatom. Everything just kind of fell into place after that.”
I sighed. “I’m still not clear on how that works, but what’s important is that it did work.”
“And even then, I just barely passed.” She made the small, pitiful moan that once-upon-a-time I'd thought of as cute. That had been a few thousand moans ago.
I pressed on, hoping to focus her. “I think you pushed it luck when you kept referring to ‘Gaia’ on your final. Science professors don't always appreciate their subjects getting cross-pollinated that way.”
Megan shrugged and copied down the course ID number on her admissions request, somehow making the simple task heavy with painful resignation. The spring semester was already seeming long to me, and it was still a couple of months away.
“No, that’s actually a good one,” I said. “Limited math. Chemical-free labs. Colorfully-named concepts. Like ‘red shift.’ Doesn’t that sound cool?”
“It sounds like science.” She was getting sulky, and I wanted to get her through the course sign-up as quickly and painlessly as possible. If I wasn’t careful, she would get mopey and refuse to go out that night. Academic frustration almost always led her to cancel our dates.
“But some science is okay, Meg. You liked your oceanography class.”
“No, I just liked the word diatom. Everything just kind of fell into place after that.”
I sighed. “I’m still not clear on how that works, but what’s important is that it did work.”
“And even then, I just barely passed.” She made the small, pitiful moan that once-upon-a-time I'd thought of as cute. That had been a few thousand moans ago.
I pressed on, hoping to focus her. “I think you pushed it luck when you kept referring to ‘Gaia’ on your final. Science professors don't always appreciate their subjects getting cross-pollinated that way.”
Megan shrugged and copied down the course ID number on her admissions request, somehow making the simple task heavy with painful resignation. The spring semester was already seeming long to me, and it was still a couple of months away.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
A Connecticut Yankee in Pope Pius XII's Court
So at Thanksgiving this year, I was talking to my friend’s father about traveling in Europe. He’d had a chance to see a lot of it when he was in the service as a young man. He particularly loved Italy, which from all accounts is particularly lovable. Of course he’s also of Italian descent, and in those cases it seems like one is almost genetically predisposed to love Italy above all other places.
“I got to see the pope too,” he told me. We weren’t sure which one that would be. One of the Piuses, we concluded.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “For mass? Was he addressing a crowd or something?” I remembered all the images I’d ever seen of tiny men on balconies, blessing throngs of the faithful in Vatican City.
“No, I got to meet him,” he said proudly.
“What, like a personal audience?”
He explained to me how they have this whole set-up where they allow people to come into a cathedral or something, and the pope is then conducted through to meet and bless small groups of people. It’s not a one-on-one or anything, but it’s as close as you can get without being a head of state.
“And they had these little areas based on your country where you stood,” he said. “You stand behind these little barriers and he passes by them. So if you’re from Italy, you stand with the Italians. Or Switzerland or France or the United States. Everybody was represented.”
“And then he just comes through?”
“It’s a whole procession. And then each country had something they’d prepared for him. One group recited a poem someone had written for the occasion. Some other group had a gift they’d brought from their home country. Some of them sang songs for him.”
“Really? And what did the Americans do?”
He looked disgusted. “Not a damn thing. Every other group had prepared something to present to the pope. We just stood there and said hi like he was another tourist attraction.”
I nodded and took a drink of wine. “Yeah, that sounds like us,” I said.
“I got to see the pope too,” he told me. We weren’t sure which one that would be. One of the Piuses, we concluded.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “For mass? Was he addressing a crowd or something?” I remembered all the images I’d ever seen of tiny men on balconies, blessing throngs of the faithful in Vatican City.
“No, I got to meet him,” he said proudly.
“What, like a personal audience?”
He explained to me how they have this whole set-up where they allow people to come into a cathedral or something, and the pope is then conducted through to meet and bless small groups of people. It’s not a one-on-one or anything, but it’s as close as you can get without being a head of state.
“And they had these little areas based on your country where you stood,” he said. “You stand behind these little barriers and he passes by them. So if you’re from Italy, you stand with the Italians. Or Switzerland or France or the United States. Everybody was represented.”
“And then he just comes through?”
“It’s a whole procession. And then each country had something they’d prepared for him. One group recited a poem someone had written for the occasion. Some other group had a gift they’d brought from their home country. Some of them sang songs for him.”
“Really? And what did the Americans do?”
He looked disgusted. “Not a damn thing. Every other group had prepared something to present to the pope. We just stood there and said hi like he was another tourist attraction.”
I nodded and took a drink of wine. “Yeah, that sounds like us,” I said.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Ivan, Row the Boat Ashore
It was supposed to be a romantic boat ride under the moonlight. Weren’t boat rides under the moonlight romantic by definition? Yet Ivan was ruining it. He wasn’t talking. He didn’t take the opportunity to brush against her gently with small, playful pretenses of accident. He didn’t succumb to the simple fact of their being alone together in the tight confines of the rowboat. He just rowed, silent and persistent.
Pancakes looked toward the shore. It was impossible to tell if they were making any headway. They were too far out to get a good sense of where they were in relation to the land. Besides, it was dark. Ivan rowed, Pancakes watched, and the boat seemed to sit still.
Should she say something? She really wanted to. But it was his turn. That’s just the way it was. She could speak and relieve the tension, but they both knew how she felt. She didn’t need to keep going on about it.
So it was his turn. That much was obvious. Yet in spite of that, he just kept rowing. She couldn’t even see his face very well, although she could hear his labored breathing.
She felt herself getting angry. This was supposed to be their time to breathe a sigh of relief together. They were in this damn boat under the moonlight with a whole cooler of snacks and a couple of bottles of wine because this was a reward for hanging on during the last few weeks. This was supposed to be a giddy celebration after the tense silence of their little pregnancy scare.
So right about now, she thought, we should be laughing. Why the hell aren’t we laughing and drinking and eating cold grapes out of each other’s bellybuttons? Instead, here they were. Pancakes had gotten tired of making jokes and sharing her observations. Ivan’s responses short responses made her feel chastised. Plus, the wine was just making her tired. The whole affair was making her tired.
“I don’t think we are moving,” Ivan said. His tone was conversational, but the comment was so unexpected that Pancakes started as if he had just shouted in her ear.
“What do you mean?” Pancakes asked. “At all?”
He continued in his slow, studied manner. It always made Pancakes aware of the fact that English wasn’t his first language. “It’s taken me some time to make the determination, but I have been observing several different points on the shore. From what I can tell, we’re not making progress.”
Pancakes looked along the shoreline. “I can’t tell at all. What happens if you just stop rowing?”
“How will that help?” Ivan sounded almost petulant.
“Well, if you’re rowing and we’re not getting anywhere, then maybe there’s something moving us in the opposite direction of the way you’re pushing. So if you stop, then we’re not fighting it anymore.”
Ivan stopped rowing. He held the oars out of the water. Pancakes could hear the water dripping from them. “So I just stop? See where it takes us?”
Pancakes peered into the darkness. The moonlight illuminated the area, but the ocean was black, pockmarked by irregular glints of light off its choppy surface. “Unless you think it’s going to take us somewhere bad,” she said. “It might take us out to sea.”
“Or it might take us in to shore.”
Pancakes thought about it a moment. “So we just wait to see what happens?”
“I could continue to row, but that’s not having any effect. I don’t know if it’s better just to stay in one place and hope that things change or to try something new.”
Pancakes didn’t answer. She didn’t know the answer either, but she also felt anxious about making a suggestion in the face of so much obvious symbolism. It was over the top. There was subtext galore. Even though they were both too smart not to see what they were doing, they were still doing it. She felt like anything she said could push them toward some kind of decision they weren’t really ready to make. What could she say about the boat that didn’t sound like a vote yea or nay for the continuation of their relationship?
The boat was jarred by a series of waves created by some distant ship. She looked down. “Oh, shit, I think I got merlot all over this blouse,” she said, righting her plastic wine glass.
Pancakes looked toward the shore. It was impossible to tell if they were making any headway. They were too far out to get a good sense of where they were in relation to the land. Besides, it was dark. Ivan rowed, Pancakes watched, and the boat seemed to sit still.
Should she say something? She really wanted to. But it was his turn. That’s just the way it was. She could speak and relieve the tension, but they both knew how she felt. She didn’t need to keep going on about it.
So it was his turn. That much was obvious. Yet in spite of that, he just kept rowing. She couldn’t even see his face very well, although she could hear his labored breathing.
She felt herself getting angry. This was supposed to be their time to breathe a sigh of relief together. They were in this damn boat under the moonlight with a whole cooler of snacks and a couple of bottles of wine because this was a reward for hanging on during the last few weeks. This was supposed to be a giddy celebration after the tense silence of their little pregnancy scare.
So right about now, she thought, we should be laughing. Why the hell aren’t we laughing and drinking and eating cold grapes out of each other’s bellybuttons? Instead, here they were. Pancakes had gotten tired of making jokes and sharing her observations. Ivan’s responses short responses made her feel chastised. Plus, the wine was just making her tired. The whole affair was making her tired.
“I don’t think we are moving,” Ivan said. His tone was conversational, but the comment was so unexpected that Pancakes started as if he had just shouted in her ear.
“What do you mean?” Pancakes asked. “At all?”
He continued in his slow, studied manner. It always made Pancakes aware of the fact that English wasn’t his first language. “It’s taken me some time to make the determination, but I have been observing several different points on the shore. From what I can tell, we’re not making progress.”
Pancakes looked along the shoreline. “I can’t tell at all. What happens if you just stop rowing?”
“How will that help?” Ivan sounded almost petulant.
“Well, if you’re rowing and we’re not getting anywhere, then maybe there’s something moving us in the opposite direction of the way you’re pushing. So if you stop, then we’re not fighting it anymore.”
Ivan stopped rowing. He held the oars out of the water. Pancakes could hear the water dripping from them. “So I just stop? See where it takes us?”
Pancakes peered into the darkness. The moonlight illuminated the area, but the ocean was black, pockmarked by irregular glints of light off its choppy surface. “Unless you think it’s going to take us somewhere bad,” she said. “It might take us out to sea.”
“Or it might take us in to shore.”
Pancakes thought about it a moment. “So we just wait to see what happens?”
“I could continue to row, but that’s not having any effect. I don’t know if it’s better just to stay in one place and hope that things change or to try something new.”
Pancakes didn’t answer. She didn’t know the answer either, but she also felt anxious about making a suggestion in the face of so much obvious symbolism. It was over the top. There was subtext galore. Even though they were both too smart not to see what they were doing, they were still doing it. She felt like anything she said could push them toward some kind of decision they weren’t really ready to make. What could she say about the boat that didn’t sound like a vote yea or nay for the continuation of their relationship?
The boat was jarred by a series of waves created by some distant ship. She looked down. “Oh, shit, I think I got merlot all over this blouse,” she said, righting her plastic wine glass.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
at the sound of the beep
I’m in love with the girl who records the upcoming events message at the Fox Theatre. I just called to find out if there’s really a Panderers’ reunion show coming up there, and I got to listen to her talking about all the bands coming up for the next few weeks. It was the best two-and-a-half-minute conversation I've had for a while. And I didn't even say anything.
Part of what I like is that she’s a little unsure of herself. A lot of times she mispronounces the band names, and then she laughs whenever she realizes she's doing it. I just heard her say the word “guru” three times in a row, and it has to be one of the most endearing things I've ever heard. Plus, I now have a new fondness for that word.
As if that’s not enough, she has the info on the shows. All I could ever need to know. Plus, she always sounds kind of apologetic about the shows that are 21 and up. Like, I'm really sorry you guys who're younger. It'll be a cool show, and if it were up to me, I'd let you in. See? She cares.
But then the message timed out. I never did get past the next month, so I still don't know what the deal is with the Panderers. But I don't blame her. It sounded to me like she was ready to read the whole bloody list, every single booking from now until Doomsday. But the recorder just couldn’t keep up. She's too much woman for it.
I wonder how I would go about tracking her down? Not really, but how would you ever find some random, wonderful voice like that? I could leave a message, I guess. That's how we'd always meet. I'd call the box office, and then she'd call me back in the middle of the day. Then I’d leave another message for her. Recording responding to recording.
We’d probably never meet in person. Maybe we'd arrange a time to get together for coffee. But by coincidence she’d be at the back of the coffeehouse dialing my number to let me know she'd just gotten there. And I'd arrive and look for her, but I wouldn't see anybody who looked like she was waiting for someone. Especially that girl back there who's ignoring the "no cell phones" sign and probably gabbing with her rock-star boyfriend, I'd think.
I'd go outside to call. Since she'd be on the phone, though, I'd go straight to voicemail, as would she. A freak of bad timing, but that's how star-crossed we'd be. In the end, we’d both give up in disgust and go meet people in the real world. There’s our whole relationship right there. I could show you pictures if we’d ever taken any.
Part of what I like is that she’s a little unsure of herself. A lot of times she mispronounces the band names, and then she laughs whenever she realizes she's doing it. I just heard her say the word “guru” three times in a row, and it has to be one of the most endearing things I've ever heard. Plus, I now have a new fondness for that word.
As if that’s not enough, she has the info on the shows. All I could ever need to know. Plus, she always sounds kind of apologetic about the shows that are 21 and up. Like, I'm really sorry you guys who're younger. It'll be a cool show, and if it were up to me, I'd let you in. See? She cares.
But then the message timed out. I never did get past the next month, so I still don't know what the deal is with the Panderers. But I don't blame her. It sounded to me like she was ready to read the whole bloody list, every single booking from now until Doomsday. But the recorder just couldn’t keep up. She's too much woman for it.
I wonder how I would go about tracking her down? Not really, but how would you ever find some random, wonderful voice like that? I could leave a message, I guess. That's how we'd always meet. I'd call the box office, and then she'd call me back in the middle of the day. Then I’d leave another message for her. Recording responding to recording.
We’d probably never meet in person. Maybe we'd arrange a time to get together for coffee. But by coincidence she’d be at the back of the coffeehouse dialing my number to let me know she'd just gotten there. And I'd arrive and look for her, but I wouldn't see anybody who looked like she was waiting for someone. Especially that girl back there who's ignoring the "no cell phones" sign and probably gabbing with her rock-star boyfriend, I'd think.
I'd go outside to call. Since she'd be on the phone, though, I'd go straight to voicemail, as would she. A freak of bad timing, but that's how star-crossed we'd be. In the end, we’d both give up in disgust and go meet people in the real world. There’s our whole relationship right there. I could show you pictures if we’d ever taken any.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
A Three-Cornered Chair
Scene: A little bistro in a seemingly European city. However, no distinct character is assigned to any set of features. Could be London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin. Hard to say. It’s probably Spain, but no one’s speaking Spanish, that’s for sure. The waiters are middle-aged, sleepy-looking, but still attentive. And to make matters more confusing, people with very particular national and regional dress from all over the world flit through every once in while, passing just in front of or just behind the central table where the four main characters sit. A couple in brightly-colored, contemporary African outfits, a mustachioed man in tweed, a trio of Japanese punks, a Micronesian fisherman, a Canadian mountie, an Australian rugby team, four strapping Swedes, an Indian man in cricket whites, two Inuit in apparent pursuit of prey, eleven backwoods West Virginians carrying shotguns, a Whirling Dervish, Ted Nugent and his son (both of their faces smeared with fresh blood from their bowhunting trip), nine young African-American men straight outta Brooklyn, that guy from that show that used to be on (you know that guy!), a Mexican vaquero astride a pony, an agitated group of Iraqi protesters, a quartet of Tuvans warbling their throat-singing tunes, Emo Phillips. All these and more parade at irregular intervals through the setting.
The four principals of the action sit around a small table in the middle. All of them have large mugs of espresso drinks. Three of them sit on standard-issue wood-and-wrought-iron café chairs. One, MIGUEL, sits on a brushed-aluminum chair which has a design based on triangles: the back rest is a large and elongated triangle, the seat a smaller equilateral one, each of the three legs slender and tapering triangles. Throughout, MIGUEL exhibits signs of discomfort in his chair. None of the others does.
For staging purposes, it doesn’t much matter where exactly the characters sit in relation to one another, just that they’re all around the table in conversation. And MIGUEL has the uncomfortable chair. Don’t forget about that. Otherwise the title has absolutely no relation to the story, and people who’ve sat through this will later return home, wondering what the hell the three-cornered whatever had to do with a damn thing. So the chair’s pretty important. We could even afford to lose a character or two before we lost the chair. We could even lose MIGUEL, as much as that might hurt him to know. But the chair stays.
That established, here are the other three characters:
ALLY
BRAD
KIRAN
All four characters have similar styles of dress. They all obviously come from the same peer group, the same general socioeconomic background. They’re comfortable with one another, get each other’s jokes, and use their eyes a lot in their exchanges. Come to think of it, this would probably all work best if shot on video, so we could get some closeups. I also recommend a lot of jump cuts to refract some of the narrative structure, but only because Paul mentioned that to me when he was reading over my shoulder a few minutes ago. That’s really a question for later, though, so don’t focus too much on the medium right now.
Here’s how it all begins, after a minute or so of general bistro hubub. Consider playing over the action until just before the first lines a scratchy recording of Nirvana’s live performance of “Pennyroyal Tea” on MTV’s Unplugged. Or maybe something else? What about X doing “The Have Nots”? Neil Young with “Sedan Delivery”? The Mekons performing “If They Hang You”? Or, ooh, better: Wire doing “Reuters”!
Well, whatever the final choice, here’s how it all begins:
KIRAN: I can’t believe it took so long to get down here. It seems like half of downtown is totally blocked off.
BRAD: Some of the subway trains aren’t running either. Miguel and I walked more than half the way.
ALLY: If you guys would just move a little closer to the cool area of town, you wouldn’t be having these problems. I walked here in, like, five minutes.
MIGUEL: We can’t all just up and move, Ally. I’ve got a lease. And it’s not like I really want to pay the kind of rent they charge around here.
BRAD: Do you think that guy forgot my biscotti?
KIRAN: I bet he did. It’s not like he wouldn’t have brought it with the coffee. I’d go check.
BRAD: Maybe not. I bet it’s just a minor plot complication. If I wait a few minutes, it’ll probably come.
KIRAN: Uh, okay. Whatever works for you.
ALLY: What are you even talking about?
MIGUEL: He’s just being weird. (To BRAD:) Yeah, man, and do you think if I just wait here I’ll get a complimentary muffin? Will that fit with the plot?
BRAD: Why are you asking me? I’m not composing all this. I just think my biscotti will come soon. Are you guys okay with that? It’s my biscotti. You don’t have to worry about it.
MIGUEL: I’m not worried about it. I just want a free muffin, if that’s possible.
BRAD: Well, maybe it is possible. Let’s see what happens.
KIRAN: Look, whatever, you guys. I’d rather know about what the hell’s going on in the middle of downtown. Was there anything on the radio or TV? I haven’t seen anything.
ALLY: Oh, yeah, I was wondering about that, too, but this guy at the video store was telling me it was just some kind of apocalyptic struggle.
MIGUEL: What?
ALLY: I think it’s going to be on Pay-Per-View. Isn’t that right?
MIGUEL: An apocalyptic struggle? Like literally? This wasn’t just a boxing match? Did they mention anything about Don King?
ALLY: No, I’m serious. It was all some big battle between good and evil. For, like, the redemption of the world or something. But there’s a new Desperate Housewives on tonight, so whatever…
BRAD: That is so weird. Why wasn’t this on CNN.com? I checked it just before I left the apartment.
MIGUEL: I really, really don’t think that can be right.
KIRAN: Wait, I sort of remember something about that. I think that’s the event that Joan and Melissa Rivers were doing the pre-show for on E! This sort of explains why there were such weird celebrities there. And that whole line of theologians. They looked so out of place. Their gowns just couldn’t compare to some of the other ones there. Bjork had on the weirdest thing. All made out of tiny origami animals folded from squares of colored hemp cloth. She looked like a big party favor…
A waiter ambles over to the table, sets down a small plate heaped with biscotti. He puts a bright orange muffin in front of MIGUEL, nods casually, and wanders away again.
BRAD: Okay, that’s more like it.
MIGUEL: How did they know what kind of muffin I wanted?
BRAD: I don’t think anybody did, man. It’s just that you want the one you got.
MIGUEL: No, I remember wanting this kind. Now the guy brings it. I didn’t even order it.
BRAD: Yeah, okay. Eat your muffin. You worry too much.
KIRAN: I just don’t know what the hell Bjork is thinking with those gowns.
ALLY: I like her gowns. They’re daring. But I have to say, I’m also intrigued by the fate of mankind. Is that what’s really going on here?
KIRAN: We both heard it, right?
MIGUEL: Well, we didn’t hear anything. Don’t you think this would rate top-story status? Wouldn’t this have been pretty hard to miss? God, especially if they’re going through all the trouble to organize for it and to show it on TV.
ALLY: Pay-Per-View.
MIGUEL: Whatever. That’s even more complicated.
BRAD: I don’t really like the Pay-Per-View thing. Every time I’ve done that, I’ve spent about half an hour on the phone, trying to get the cable company to verify that I should be seeing the thing I paid for. There was this one Mike Tyson bout where I missed the whole thing because it was over in, like, 91 seconds.
KIRAN: Well, I think we should probably watch it. This is bigger than the Olympics or anything. I’m kinda surprised there hasn’t been more marketing.
MIGUEL: That’s not what Burger King was giving away those collector glasses for, was it?
KIRAN: No, that was the Winter X-Games, I think.
MIGUEL: Oh, yeah. I’ve got two glasses with the same snowboarder guy on them.
KIRAN: That’s because one of them’s mine.
ALLY: Well, hey, we can watch it over at my place if you want. I’m nearby and everything.
BRAD: Maybe. I almost kind of wonder if we shouldn’t maybe go down there.
KIRAN: Oh, they’re totally sold out by now, Brad.
BRAD: I know that. It’s just so monumental, though. It seems like it should be a bigger event than you’d want to watch on TV.
ALLY: What do you mean?
BRAD: Well, if I remember it right, it’s supposed to be the end of the world. Apocalypse? The fight between good and evil? Mankind’s redemption? This isn’t just some show. The outcome matters to us all.
ALLY: I don’t see how that’s different from a show, but fine. You want to go down there?
MIGUEL: Aw, but if we can’t even get in. I still don’t think this is right. This can’t be the way the final days of the world go. And I don’t want to go hang out in the street just to find out everyone was watching a heavyweight bout.
KIRAN: I don’t know what to think, but we should at least watch.
MIGUEL: Yeah, watching’s okay. I just don’t want to stand around outside for hours.
BRAD: Okay, I guess. Fine with me.
ALLY: Yeah, then we better get out of here soon so I can order the show. I think the apocalypse starts at, like, eight o’clock.
MIGUEL: Fine with me. (suddenly frustrated) God! This chair is the most uncomfortable piece of furniture I’ve ever encountered. Who designs like that?
The four principals of the action sit around a small table in the middle. All of them have large mugs of espresso drinks. Three of them sit on standard-issue wood-and-wrought-iron café chairs. One, MIGUEL, sits on a brushed-aluminum chair which has a design based on triangles: the back rest is a large and elongated triangle, the seat a smaller equilateral one, each of the three legs slender and tapering triangles. Throughout, MIGUEL exhibits signs of discomfort in his chair. None of the others does.
For staging purposes, it doesn’t much matter where exactly the characters sit in relation to one another, just that they’re all around the table in conversation. And MIGUEL has the uncomfortable chair. Don’t forget about that. Otherwise the title has absolutely no relation to the story, and people who’ve sat through this will later return home, wondering what the hell the three-cornered whatever had to do with a damn thing. So the chair’s pretty important. We could even afford to lose a character or two before we lost the chair. We could even lose MIGUEL, as much as that might hurt him to know. But the chair stays.
That established, here are the other three characters:
ALLY
BRAD
KIRAN
All four characters have similar styles of dress. They all obviously come from the same peer group, the same general socioeconomic background. They’re comfortable with one another, get each other’s jokes, and use their eyes a lot in their exchanges. Come to think of it, this would probably all work best if shot on video, so we could get some closeups. I also recommend a lot of jump cuts to refract some of the narrative structure, but only because Paul mentioned that to me when he was reading over my shoulder a few minutes ago. That’s really a question for later, though, so don’t focus too much on the medium right now.
Here’s how it all begins, after a minute or so of general bistro hubub. Consider playing over the action until just before the first lines a scratchy recording of Nirvana’s live performance of “Pennyroyal Tea” on MTV’s Unplugged. Or maybe something else? What about X doing “The Have Nots”? Neil Young with “Sedan Delivery”? The Mekons performing “If They Hang You”? Or, ooh, better: Wire doing “Reuters”!
Well, whatever the final choice, here’s how it all begins:
KIRAN: I can’t believe it took so long to get down here. It seems like half of downtown is totally blocked off.
BRAD: Some of the subway trains aren’t running either. Miguel and I walked more than half the way.
ALLY: If you guys would just move a little closer to the cool area of town, you wouldn’t be having these problems. I walked here in, like, five minutes.
MIGUEL: We can’t all just up and move, Ally. I’ve got a lease. And it’s not like I really want to pay the kind of rent they charge around here.
BRAD: Do you think that guy forgot my biscotti?
KIRAN: I bet he did. It’s not like he wouldn’t have brought it with the coffee. I’d go check.
BRAD: Maybe not. I bet it’s just a minor plot complication. If I wait a few minutes, it’ll probably come.
KIRAN: Uh, okay. Whatever works for you.
ALLY: What are you even talking about?
MIGUEL: He’s just being weird. (To BRAD:) Yeah, man, and do you think if I just wait here I’ll get a complimentary muffin? Will that fit with the plot?
BRAD: Why are you asking me? I’m not composing all this. I just think my biscotti will come soon. Are you guys okay with that? It’s my biscotti. You don’t have to worry about it.
MIGUEL: I’m not worried about it. I just want a free muffin, if that’s possible.
BRAD: Well, maybe it is possible. Let’s see what happens.
KIRAN: Look, whatever, you guys. I’d rather know about what the hell’s going on in the middle of downtown. Was there anything on the radio or TV? I haven’t seen anything.
ALLY: Oh, yeah, I was wondering about that, too, but this guy at the video store was telling me it was just some kind of apocalyptic struggle.
MIGUEL: What?
ALLY: I think it’s going to be on Pay-Per-View. Isn’t that right?
MIGUEL: An apocalyptic struggle? Like literally? This wasn’t just a boxing match? Did they mention anything about Don King?
ALLY: No, I’m serious. It was all some big battle between good and evil. For, like, the redemption of the world or something. But there’s a new Desperate Housewives on tonight, so whatever…
BRAD: That is so weird. Why wasn’t this on CNN.com? I checked it just before I left the apartment.
MIGUEL: I really, really don’t think that can be right.
KIRAN: Wait, I sort of remember something about that. I think that’s the event that Joan and Melissa Rivers were doing the pre-show for on E! This sort of explains why there were such weird celebrities there. And that whole line of theologians. They looked so out of place. Their gowns just couldn’t compare to some of the other ones there. Bjork had on the weirdest thing. All made out of tiny origami animals folded from squares of colored hemp cloth. She looked like a big party favor…
A waiter ambles over to the table, sets down a small plate heaped with biscotti. He puts a bright orange muffin in front of MIGUEL, nods casually, and wanders away again.
BRAD: Okay, that’s more like it.
MIGUEL: How did they know what kind of muffin I wanted?
BRAD: I don’t think anybody did, man. It’s just that you want the one you got.
MIGUEL: No, I remember wanting this kind. Now the guy brings it. I didn’t even order it.
BRAD: Yeah, okay. Eat your muffin. You worry too much.
KIRAN: I just don’t know what the hell Bjork is thinking with those gowns.
ALLY: I like her gowns. They’re daring. But I have to say, I’m also intrigued by the fate of mankind. Is that what’s really going on here?
KIRAN: We both heard it, right?
MIGUEL: Well, we didn’t hear anything. Don’t you think this would rate top-story status? Wouldn’t this have been pretty hard to miss? God, especially if they’re going through all the trouble to organize for it and to show it on TV.
ALLY: Pay-Per-View.
MIGUEL: Whatever. That’s even more complicated.
BRAD: I don’t really like the Pay-Per-View thing. Every time I’ve done that, I’ve spent about half an hour on the phone, trying to get the cable company to verify that I should be seeing the thing I paid for. There was this one Mike Tyson bout where I missed the whole thing because it was over in, like, 91 seconds.
KIRAN: Well, I think we should probably watch it. This is bigger than the Olympics or anything. I’m kinda surprised there hasn’t been more marketing.
MIGUEL: That’s not what Burger King was giving away those collector glasses for, was it?
KIRAN: No, that was the Winter X-Games, I think.
MIGUEL: Oh, yeah. I’ve got two glasses with the same snowboarder guy on them.
KIRAN: That’s because one of them’s mine.
ALLY: Well, hey, we can watch it over at my place if you want. I’m nearby and everything.
BRAD: Maybe. I almost kind of wonder if we shouldn’t maybe go down there.
KIRAN: Oh, they’re totally sold out by now, Brad.
BRAD: I know that. It’s just so monumental, though. It seems like it should be a bigger event than you’d want to watch on TV.
ALLY: What do you mean?
BRAD: Well, if I remember it right, it’s supposed to be the end of the world. Apocalypse? The fight between good and evil? Mankind’s redemption? This isn’t just some show. The outcome matters to us all.
ALLY: I don’t see how that’s different from a show, but fine. You want to go down there?
MIGUEL: Aw, but if we can’t even get in. I still don’t think this is right. This can’t be the way the final days of the world go. And I don’t want to go hang out in the street just to find out everyone was watching a heavyweight bout.
KIRAN: I don’t know what to think, but we should at least watch.
MIGUEL: Yeah, watching’s okay. I just don’t want to stand around outside for hours.
BRAD: Okay, I guess. Fine with me.
ALLY: Yeah, then we better get out of here soon so I can order the show. I think the apocalypse starts at, like, eight o’clock.
MIGUEL: Fine with me. (suddenly frustrated) God! This chair is the most uncomfortable piece of furniture I’ve ever encountered. Who designs like that?
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
A Very Pancakes Thanksgiving
Emiliano looked up as Pastina pushed open the swinging door from the kitchen and came into the living room where he sat near the fireplace. Her arms were crossed defensively, and she had left the kitchen in such a hurry that she still wore the full apron protecting her holiday dress against the messes involved in helping prepare the holiday meal. The girl looked annoyed, and Emiliano knew, as he often did, that his daughter Pancakes was the cause. “What’s she saying?” he asked.
“She’s on the phone with them right now,” Pastina said. She shook her head. “I had to walk in here before I hit her with a meat tenderizer.”
“She really told them not to come?”
Pastina’s blue eyes widened in momentary exasperation. “Not exactly. I think she knows better. You don’t just tell somebody they’re uninvited for Thanksgiving.”
“So how did she put it?”
Pastina adopted a mock-pleasant tone in imitation of her friend. “Well, they’re perfectly welcome to come to dinner, but she can’t promise there’ll be anything for them to eat.”
“What?” Emiliano knew that his daughter was opinionated and headstrong and sometimes a little bit self-righteous. Plus, she was fifteen now, and she often let her emotions get the best of her. But he liked to believe that she knew better than to be rude. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what she said! ‘I just can’t promise there’ll be anything to eat.’ As if there’s a shortage. As if we’re having to use up ration tickets.” Pastina sat heavily in an armchair and hunched down in passive defiance. It was all too much for her. Pastina’s sense of hospitality was, once again, being trumped by Pancakes’s sense of outraged personal justice. She wondered why she didn’t find herself a new best friend.
“But … but why wouldn’t there be enough to eat? We have plenty of food here.”
“It’s a technicality she came up with. Since she decided she’s mad at Will and doesn’t want him and his friends to come over, she got a couple of the others to agree with her. So now she thinks she’s doing right by everybody.”
Emiliano stepped over to the kitchen door and listened. He could hear Pancakes’s voice. The words weren’t clear, but he recognized the tone. It sounded remarkably like her mother’s when she was mad about something but didn’t want to admit it.
Pastina continued. “I think Pancakes does kind of want Will to come over, but who can tell? They break up so much that I never know if I’m supposed to like him or not. Anyway, the situation in the kitchen is out of control. Thanks to Pancakes, Emily’s decided all of a sudden that she has a backbone. And the first issue she decided to use it on is this holiday stinginess.”
“Emily? What happened to the neurotic we knew?”
Pastina shrugged. “New meds? I don’t know. Even when she’s her normal self, I don’t get her. Or any of Pancakes’s friends from the reading group, really. They’re like her little cheerleaders or something. And now they’ve got Vincent siding with them.” Pastina shook her fist. “Sometimes I just want to punch him in the eye. “He’s the lamest boyfriend on the planet.”
Emiliano tried to think of something fatherly to say, but he came up empty. His daughter was spreading bad holiday cheer, the kitchen was full of Pancakes’s oddball friends, Pastina was uncharacteristically angry and sarcastic, and somewhere in the house his mother-in-law was clucking over the fiasco that the Dunst Thanksgiving was becoming.
Suddenly Pancakes came out of the kitchen, the swinging door nearly hitting Emiliano in the shoulder. She still held the mobile phone loosely in one hand. “I told them that it wasn’t going to happen,” she announced to them both, “so that’s three fewer places we’ll have to set.” She looked at both of them in turn, as if expecting a response. “And I don’t want anybody bugging me about it anymore, okay? I swear, if Torvald in there doesn’t shut up, I’m sending him home without any turkey at all.”
Emiliano adopted his sad-dad look and put a reassuring hand on Pancakes’s shoulder. “Honey, you didn’t really tell those boys not to come over, did you?”
“Dad!” Pancakes yelled, brushing his hand away. “In the first place, I only invited Will! Then last week he said, no, he had these other guys he was hanging out with for Thanksgiving, so fine. And then yesterday they suddenly leave me this message, asking when they should be here. We didn’t plan on their coming.”
“But has there ever been any Thanksgiving meal in your memory where we didn’t have twice as much food as we really wanted?”
Pastina rolled her eyes upward toward the vaulted ceiling. “Does ‘Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown’ mean nothing anymore?”
Pancakes looked at both of them in disbelief. “What? Are you telling me that I’m wrong? I should just let anybody crash our party?”
Emiliano looked troubled. He didn’t want to arbitrate this. He’d told Pancakes she could host Thanksgiving this year. He should have expected a few bumps. “Pancakes,” he said at last, “I’m just saying that it’s Thanksgiving. You’ve seen the TV specials. It’s supposed to be kind of a free-for-all.”
“God, Dad, whatever!” Pancakes yelled, turning on her heels and heading back into the kitchen. “I’m just trying to make everybody happy!”
“Congratulations,” Pastina muttered as the door swung shut.
Emiliano sat down again and picked up his book. “I’m just going to stay out of this,” he said. “There’s no winning with this today. I guess at least we can be thankful that her mother’s not here this year, or then my precious daughter might start throwing giblets at people.”
“The night’s still young,” Pastina said. She stood up reluctantly and followed Pancakes into the kitchen.
“She’s on the phone with them right now,” Pastina said. She shook her head. “I had to walk in here before I hit her with a meat tenderizer.”
“She really told them not to come?”
Pastina’s blue eyes widened in momentary exasperation. “Not exactly. I think she knows better. You don’t just tell somebody they’re uninvited for Thanksgiving.”
“So how did she put it?”
Pastina adopted a mock-pleasant tone in imitation of her friend. “Well, they’re perfectly welcome to come to dinner, but she can’t promise there’ll be anything for them to eat.”
“What?” Emiliano knew that his daughter was opinionated and headstrong and sometimes a little bit self-righteous. Plus, she was fifteen now, and she often let her emotions get the best of her. But he liked to believe that she knew better than to be rude. “What does that mean?”
“That’s what she said! ‘I just can’t promise there’ll be anything to eat.’ As if there’s a shortage. As if we’re having to use up ration tickets.” Pastina sat heavily in an armchair and hunched down in passive defiance. It was all too much for her. Pastina’s sense of hospitality was, once again, being trumped by Pancakes’s sense of outraged personal justice. She wondered why she didn’t find herself a new best friend.
“But … but why wouldn’t there be enough to eat? We have plenty of food here.”
“It’s a technicality she came up with. Since she decided she’s mad at Will and doesn’t want him and his friends to come over, she got a couple of the others to agree with her. So now she thinks she’s doing right by everybody.”
Emiliano stepped over to the kitchen door and listened. He could hear Pancakes’s voice. The words weren’t clear, but he recognized the tone. It sounded remarkably like her mother’s when she was mad about something but didn’t want to admit it.
Pastina continued. “I think Pancakes does kind of want Will to come over, but who can tell? They break up so much that I never know if I’m supposed to like him or not. Anyway, the situation in the kitchen is out of control. Thanks to Pancakes, Emily’s decided all of a sudden that she has a backbone. And the first issue she decided to use it on is this holiday stinginess.”
“Emily? What happened to the neurotic we knew?”
Pastina shrugged. “New meds? I don’t know. Even when she’s her normal self, I don’t get her. Or any of Pancakes’s friends from the reading group, really. They’re like her little cheerleaders or something. And now they’ve got Vincent siding with them.” Pastina shook her fist. “Sometimes I just want to punch him in the eye. “He’s the lamest boyfriend on the planet.”
Emiliano tried to think of something fatherly to say, but he came up empty. His daughter was spreading bad holiday cheer, the kitchen was full of Pancakes’s oddball friends, Pastina was uncharacteristically angry and sarcastic, and somewhere in the house his mother-in-law was clucking over the fiasco that the Dunst Thanksgiving was becoming.
Suddenly Pancakes came out of the kitchen, the swinging door nearly hitting Emiliano in the shoulder. She still held the mobile phone loosely in one hand. “I told them that it wasn’t going to happen,” she announced to them both, “so that’s three fewer places we’ll have to set.” She looked at both of them in turn, as if expecting a response. “And I don’t want anybody bugging me about it anymore, okay? I swear, if Torvald in there doesn’t shut up, I’m sending him home without any turkey at all.”
Emiliano adopted his sad-dad look and put a reassuring hand on Pancakes’s shoulder. “Honey, you didn’t really tell those boys not to come over, did you?”
“Dad!” Pancakes yelled, brushing his hand away. “In the first place, I only invited Will! Then last week he said, no, he had these other guys he was hanging out with for Thanksgiving, so fine. And then yesterday they suddenly leave me this message, asking when they should be here. We didn’t plan on their coming.”
“But has there ever been any Thanksgiving meal in your memory where we didn’t have twice as much food as we really wanted?”
Pastina rolled her eyes upward toward the vaulted ceiling. “Does ‘Happy Thanksgiving, Charlie Brown’ mean nothing anymore?”
Pancakes looked at both of them in disbelief. “What? Are you telling me that I’m wrong? I should just let anybody crash our party?”
Emiliano looked troubled. He didn’t want to arbitrate this. He’d told Pancakes she could host Thanksgiving this year. He should have expected a few bumps. “Pancakes,” he said at last, “I’m just saying that it’s Thanksgiving. You’ve seen the TV specials. It’s supposed to be kind of a free-for-all.”
“God, Dad, whatever!” Pancakes yelled, turning on her heels and heading back into the kitchen. “I’m just trying to make everybody happy!”
“Congratulations,” Pastina muttered as the door swung shut.
Emiliano sat down again and picked up his book. “I’m just going to stay out of this,” he said. “There’s no winning with this today. I guess at least we can be thankful that her mother’s not here this year, or then my precious daughter might start throwing giblets at people.”
“The night’s still young,” Pastina said. She stood up reluctantly and followed Pancakes into the kitchen.
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Hair-Raising Adventures of Pancakes Dunst!
#13
Midnight Clambake on Rich Boy Island
During the America's Cup races, Pancakes and crew are blown wildly off course to a remote island. But instead of teeming with noble natives or tacky tourists, the place is populated by wealthy young white men! What is the secret behind their late-night beer busts, their dismissive comments about world affairs, and their primitive wargames? Pancakes vows to learn the truth. If only she's in time to save the bookish boy the other swaggering heirs call Piggy!
#14
Win a Dream Date with John Updike!
At the Norman Mailer Invitational, fighting young novelists meet to match their muscular prose against the toughest literary competitors in the world. Covering the event for the school paper, Pancakes Dunst falls in with a reporter from a glossy teen magazine. Soon she's barred from the event for helping to organize an unsanctioned swimsuit competition between some of the most gifted wordsmiths of the day. Yet when controversy breaks out over the authorship of a prize-winning novella, only Pancakes Dunst, the cleverest girl in the world, can cut through the Gordian knot. If only someone hadn’t stolen it from the trophy case!
#15
Alright, Mr. Rajagopal, I’m Ready for My Closeup
Asked to appear in a new film by director Sanjay Anil Rajagopal, Pancakes travels to Nova Scotia to try her hand at acting. But soon emergency meetings on the General Agreement on Tariff and Trades have led to angry strikes by fishermen worldwide. While the shortage of smoked salmon at the catering tables creates panic on the set, an escalation in fish piracy threatens to destabilize global seafood markets. Pancakes Dunst likes a good shrimp cocktail as much as the next cleverest girl in the world, but what to do? Mediate a divisive trade issue to end the immediate crisis, or get her screentime while allowing the market to find its own economic balance? No matter what she chooses, one thing is clear: Craft services will continue to use that stringy imitation crab meat she hates.
#16
Pancakes Dunst vs. the Sense of Detached Irony
Markets are plummeting! International tensions are rising! The environment hovers on the brink of disaster, political abuses run rampant, and all the summer movies are blatant vehicles for branding and merchandising! Yet the world’s population seems resigned to it all. Can Pancakes Dunst raise the level of discourse? Will the dark humor and exaggerated understatement finally cease? Might she divert global catastrophes by waking up the world’s leaders to the mess they’ve made? And what does it all matter—I mean, ultimately?
Midnight Clambake on Rich Boy Island
During the America's Cup races, Pancakes and crew are blown wildly off course to a remote island. But instead of teeming with noble natives or tacky tourists, the place is populated by wealthy young white men! What is the secret behind their late-night beer busts, their dismissive comments about world affairs, and their primitive wargames? Pancakes vows to learn the truth. If only she's in time to save the bookish boy the other swaggering heirs call Piggy!
#14
Win a Dream Date with John Updike!
At the Norman Mailer Invitational, fighting young novelists meet to match their muscular prose against the toughest literary competitors in the world. Covering the event for the school paper, Pancakes Dunst falls in with a reporter from a glossy teen magazine. Soon she's barred from the event for helping to organize an unsanctioned swimsuit competition between some of the most gifted wordsmiths of the day. Yet when controversy breaks out over the authorship of a prize-winning novella, only Pancakes Dunst, the cleverest girl in the world, can cut through the Gordian knot. If only someone hadn’t stolen it from the trophy case!
#15
Alright, Mr. Rajagopal, I’m Ready for My Closeup
Asked to appear in a new film by director Sanjay Anil Rajagopal, Pancakes travels to Nova Scotia to try her hand at acting. But soon emergency meetings on the General Agreement on Tariff and Trades have led to angry strikes by fishermen worldwide. While the shortage of smoked salmon at the catering tables creates panic on the set, an escalation in fish piracy threatens to destabilize global seafood markets. Pancakes Dunst likes a good shrimp cocktail as much as the next cleverest girl in the world, but what to do? Mediate a divisive trade issue to end the immediate crisis, or get her screentime while allowing the market to find its own economic balance? No matter what she chooses, one thing is clear: Craft services will continue to use that stringy imitation crab meat she hates.
#16
Pancakes Dunst vs. the Sense of Detached Irony
Markets are plummeting! International tensions are rising! The environment hovers on the brink of disaster, political abuses run rampant, and all the summer movies are blatant vehicles for branding and merchandising! Yet the world’s population seems resigned to it all. Can Pancakes Dunst raise the level of discourse? Will the dark humor and exaggerated understatement finally cease? Might she divert global catastrophes by waking up the world’s leaders to the mess they’ve made? And what does it all matter—I mean, ultimately?
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Many Several Thousand Words
I have this whole series of pictures from the year I was four. They map out the story of the big stuff that happened in my life around that time. Not that there weren’t pictures from earlier times or pictures from later times. We’re a modern family. There have always been way, way too many pictures.
But that seems to be a time when my dad went kind of shutter happy, in part because he was secretly freaking out about my mother leaving her domestic life and going back onstage. I don’t know why he ever thought she'd be satisfied sticking around the homefront and playing happy homemaker. From what I can tell, no one else ever really bought it, even Mom. It just wasn’t in her nature. It’s like if I tried to be a diplomat or something. It’s not like I wouldn’t know how to begin, but it’s just not how I’m wired. International incidents would ensue.
Of all these pictures, my very favorite one is from our Easter party. Dad got Mom to help him plan it, and they went all out: a full lawn party with tents and ribbons and balloons. I don’t even know where all the kids they invited came from. Most of their faces are unfamiliar to me now. But there in the middle of the proceedings is me, hoarding a basket of toys and candy about three times bigger than I was.
But that’s not even the best part. The best part was our Easter bunny.
Mom had hired one of the actors from her show to come out for the day and mingle with the kids while dressed in a fuzzy bunny costume. He didn’t just run in and get us all excited, the way people in funny animal costumes usually do. It was an immersive experience. He hung out and played with us and told stories. He even helped us hunt for the harder-to-find eggs, because excited little kids have absolutely no attention span. I remember us finding brightly colored, rotting eggs in the yard all summer.
Since the bunny was there most of the day, just like the other adults he had access to the open bar on the patio. Most actors I've known can't turn down good alcohol. I think they’re afraid they’ll never be able to afford it themselves. The Easter bunny was no different, and he got pretty tipsy. Plus, it was an unusually warm spring that year, and those big fuzzy costumes get really, really hot. Sometime around two o’clock, it finally all got too much for him. The bunny fell over and passed out.
That would have been freakish enough for most kids, seeing the Easter bunny collapse. You can see just how much so on the faces of the kids who were in the immediate area when he went over, because Dad kept snapping pictures of the whole thing. This series contains one of my very favorite pictures ever: Seconds after the actor inside the rabbit costume collapsed, the huge, fuzzy animal head popped off and and rolled down the gentle slope of the lawn. Its oversized eyes stared in wonder, its toothy smile remained fixed. It was amazing and surreal. And how often do you get those kinds of pure moments? Okay, maybe when you're four you get them all the time, but this one was still special. Plus I have the pictures.
There are a few things that year's pictures don’t show, however. Those are probably as important—or more important—than what they do show. The main thing they don’t show is much of my mom. She’s there occasionally. For the Easter party, for some other big holiday events. But she’s a guest star, not part of the regular cast. I’m in there, the star. And Dad, his assistant, family friends, the household staff. When you look over the whole collection of shots, it's clear that Mom appears less often than, say, our cook.
Mom had taken a new role in a small musical. She'd been away from the stage for a couple of years, and she'd started showing signs of depression. So a new project seemed like it would be a good distraction. But the thing really took off, and she ended up being away from home more than expected. The commute got to be a problem, and more and more often she ended up staying at her old apartement in the city. The show’s run kept getting extended. “Just a couple of months” became “just another month or so” until a whole year had gone by Mom became a stranger in the house.
I’m sure this was all very good for Mom. She was born to the stage, I've been told. I’m not going to contradict public opinion by suggesting otherwise. But I was a four-year-old who only knew that whatever was going on in the city was a lot more interesting to my mother than I was. I don’t remember feeling that way, but I have some evidence that's what was going on. Some people have memories of their feelings at that age. I have pictures and stories.
Besides the remarkable absence of my mother in the hundreds of photos chronicling that year, what also stands out are the stories about my animal hallucinations. In hindsight, it seems obvious that I was so young that I wasn't able to distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. But I know from what little I do recall that I wasn't making things up. I might have a vivid imagination, but I've never been one not to take credit for it. So even though I know for sure that these things couldn’t have happened, they still seem pretty real to me.
First there was the time that I was playing out on our lawn. We had these huge patches of tiny white flowers that kept popping up all over the lawn during that spring. I liked playing in them, but they attracted a lot of bees. One afternoon when some of my friends were over playing, someone got the idea of capturing some bees so we could make a bee village. We’d stomp bees when they landed on the flowers, and then someone would scoop them up with a cup and take them to some trenches we'd dug out in the sandbox. The injured bees would crawl around the trenches, providing our village with citizens. Kids are so cruel.
Eventually I stomped a bee when no one was around to help me. When I looked down to where my white canvas tennis shoe was flattening the grass and flowers, all of a sudden I saw the bee reach around the edges of my rubber sole and pull himself out! The bee didn't wriggle its way out from under my shoe the way you might imagine. I saw these two cartoon-like black arms, all muscley, reach out from under the shoe. The bee pulled himself free, and then he flew right at me, superhero-style, and stung me on the cheek. When I told the adults about it, but they thought I was just upset. I could hear them laughing when they told the story later.
A month later we were staying at the family beach house. I’m pretty sure Mom was supposed to come stay out there with us, but the pictures don’t lie. She wasn’t there. And it’s not like Dad ever forgot to point the camera at her. Next to me, she was his favorite subject, but the the photos of those weeks at the beach show only a smiling little girl, her doting father, and a few friends swimming, building sand castles, and clustering around bonfires.
One afternoon I was playing in the upstairs playroom. All the windows in the house were open to catch the ocean breeze, and a lot of flies had been getting in. Dad had repeatedly warned me to be careful of the horseflies, because they might bite. I'd been keeping an eye on every fly that came my way, watching for the dreaded horsefly. Then I saw a particularly large fly land on the window sill, and I knew I'd finally seen it. It had a fat, shiny fly's body, six thin hairy legs, and transparent wings, but its huge compound eyes were poking out of a narrow horse's face on a long neck. It wouldn't have seemed any weirder if it whinnied. I ran downstairs as fast as I could to tell Dad. I’ve ever really completely forgiven him for laughing so hard.
Everyone thought these were isolated incidents, and they made for good stories. But then I had two more hallucinations a few months later as my mom's absence from home went on and on. One night, I woke up suddenly and had the feeling that something was in the room with me. It was very dark, and I couldn't see much, but I was convinced that a bear had gotten into my bedroom. Its huge, broad shape shifted uneasily in the corner near the door. It sniffed the air, trying to get the scent of my fear. If it sensed my moving, it would kill me. But if I didn't escape, it would also kill me. I spent what felt like hours slowly inching my way off the bed, breathing shallowly and shaking as I made my way out the window and onto the balcony. I was out there for at least an hour before Dad found me shivering outside in the cold.
At that point Dad began to see a pattern. The bear thing came up shortly after my parents had had a big argument, and he knew I’d witnessed some of that. He made an appointment with a child psychologist and told my mom that he thought she'd been away for long enough. I don't know how she felt about the whole thing, but she showed up at the house that weekend. There's no way she could have been there if she hadn't turned her role over to someone else, so I guess she was convinced my problems were pretty serious.
Both my parents wanted to be there to take me to the doctor. We spent a couple of days together while we waited for my appointment, but despite how normal they wanted to make things, that's not how it seemed. Mom was back, but mostly out of guilt. And Dad was as happy as always to have her around, but he could always sense her desire to get away and resented it. We had some marathon icy silences around the house in those days, and those don't get filled in just because the cartoons on TV are turned up too loud.
The day before my appointment, I was watching afternoon kid's shows. The local station added a lot of between-show filler, kind of a Kid’s Show Helper, including a fake news report about an escape at the local zoo. Animals were everywhere, they said, and they instructed kids to be on the lookout for wild animals outside their windows for the rest of the day. It kept me at the window on animal watch all afternoon. Every once in a while they’d interrupt the shows with updates about the capture of some of the animals. But there was a lone kangaroo who had bounced so far away, they said, that they might not ever catch him.
I was completely convinced about the rogue kangaroo. They showed maps on TV of where he had been spotted, and even though there’s no way I would have been able to read a map, I was sure he was heading my way. Every minute or so I’d go over to the third-story window of the playroom to see. I was sure I’d be the one to catch him. I just had to keep looking.
Then while I was staring out the window into the distance, all of a sudden there he was! Not some little figure in the distance. No, instantly I found myself staring straight into the kangaroo’s eyes. He'd leapt straight up from the ground, bobbed into view for just a split second, and then disappeared again. All I knew about kangaroos was that they jumped really high and far. The whole thing made perfect sense to me. Of course a kangaroo could jump thirty feet in the air.
And of course a kangaroo could hop away so fast that you couldn't even see him go. I kept staring out the window, looking as far as I could see, but the kangaroo was gone. There was no sign of him, as if he'd never even been there. It made me very sad, and I decided not to tell my parents about it. Even now I remember how bewildered that kangaroo looked when he stared me in the face. The poor thing didn’t know where to go, but he knew for sure that he didn’t want to be caged anymore.
But that seems to be a time when my dad went kind of shutter happy, in part because he was secretly freaking out about my mother leaving her domestic life and going back onstage. I don’t know why he ever thought she'd be satisfied sticking around the homefront and playing happy homemaker. From what I can tell, no one else ever really bought it, even Mom. It just wasn’t in her nature. It’s like if I tried to be a diplomat or something. It’s not like I wouldn’t know how to begin, but it’s just not how I’m wired. International incidents would ensue.
Of all these pictures, my very favorite one is from our Easter party. Dad got Mom to help him plan it, and they went all out: a full lawn party with tents and ribbons and balloons. I don’t even know where all the kids they invited came from. Most of their faces are unfamiliar to me now. But there in the middle of the proceedings is me, hoarding a basket of toys and candy about three times bigger than I was.
But that’s not even the best part. The best part was our Easter bunny.
Mom had hired one of the actors from her show to come out for the day and mingle with the kids while dressed in a fuzzy bunny costume. He didn’t just run in and get us all excited, the way people in funny animal costumes usually do. It was an immersive experience. He hung out and played with us and told stories. He even helped us hunt for the harder-to-find eggs, because excited little kids have absolutely no attention span. I remember us finding brightly colored, rotting eggs in the yard all summer.
Since the bunny was there most of the day, just like the other adults he had access to the open bar on the patio. Most actors I've known can't turn down good alcohol. I think they’re afraid they’ll never be able to afford it themselves. The Easter bunny was no different, and he got pretty tipsy. Plus, it was an unusually warm spring that year, and those big fuzzy costumes get really, really hot. Sometime around two o’clock, it finally all got too much for him. The bunny fell over and passed out.
That would have been freakish enough for most kids, seeing the Easter bunny collapse. You can see just how much so on the faces of the kids who were in the immediate area when he went over, because Dad kept snapping pictures of the whole thing. This series contains one of my very favorite pictures ever: Seconds after the actor inside the rabbit costume collapsed, the huge, fuzzy animal head popped off and and rolled down the gentle slope of the lawn. Its oversized eyes stared in wonder, its toothy smile remained fixed. It was amazing and surreal. And how often do you get those kinds of pure moments? Okay, maybe when you're four you get them all the time, but this one was still special. Plus I have the pictures.
There are a few things that year's pictures don’t show, however. Those are probably as important—or more important—than what they do show. The main thing they don’t show is much of my mom. She’s there occasionally. For the Easter party, for some other big holiday events. But she’s a guest star, not part of the regular cast. I’m in there, the star. And Dad, his assistant, family friends, the household staff. When you look over the whole collection of shots, it's clear that Mom appears less often than, say, our cook.
Mom had taken a new role in a small musical. She'd been away from the stage for a couple of years, and she'd started showing signs of depression. So a new project seemed like it would be a good distraction. But the thing really took off, and she ended up being away from home more than expected. The commute got to be a problem, and more and more often she ended up staying at her old apartement in the city. The show’s run kept getting extended. “Just a couple of months” became “just another month or so” until a whole year had gone by Mom became a stranger in the house.
I’m sure this was all very good for Mom. She was born to the stage, I've been told. I’m not going to contradict public opinion by suggesting otherwise. But I was a four-year-old who only knew that whatever was going on in the city was a lot more interesting to my mother than I was. I don’t remember feeling that way, but I have some evidence that's what was going on. Some people have memories of their feelings at that age. I have pictures and stories.
Besides the remarkable absence of my mother in the hundreds of photos chronicling that year, what also stands out are the stories about my animal hallucinations. In hindsight, it seems obvious that I was so young that I wasn't able to distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t. But I know from what little I do recall that I wasn't making things up. I might have a vivid imagination, but I've never been one not to take credit for it. So even though I know for sure that these things couldn’t have happened, they still seem pretty real to me.
First there was the time that I was playing out on our lawn. We had these huge patches of tiny white flowers that kept popping up all over the lawn during that spring. I liked playing in them, but they attracted a lot of bees. One afternoon when some of my friends were over playing, someone got the idea of capturing some bees so we could make a bee village. We’d stomp bees when they landed on the flowers, and then someone would scoop them up with a cup and take them to some trenches we'd dug out in the sandbox. The injured bees would crawl around the trenches, providing our village with citizens. Kids are so cruel.
Eventually I stomped a bee when no one was around to help me. When I looked down to where my white canvas tennis shoe was flattening the grass and flowers, all of a sudden I saw the bee reach around the edges of my rubber sole and pull himself out! The bee didn't wriggle its way out from under my shoe the way you might imagine. I saw these two cartoon-like black arms, all muscley, reach out from under the shoe. The bee pulled himself free, and then he flew right at me, superhero-style, and stung me on the cheek. When I told the adults about it, but they thought I was just upset. I could hear them laughing when they told the story later.
A month later we were staying at the family beach house. I’m pretty sure Mom was supposed to come stay out there with us, but the pictures don’t lie. She wasn’t there. And it’s not like Dad ever forgot to point the camera at her. Next to me, she was his favorite subject, but the the photos of those weeks at the beach show only a smiling little girl, her doting father, and a few friends swimming, building sand castles, and clustering around bonfires.
One afternoon I was playing in the upstairs playroom. All the windows in the house were open to catch the ocean breeze, and a lot of flies had been getting in. Dad had repeatedly warned me to be careful of the horseflies, because they might bite. I'd been keeping an eye on every fly that came my way, watching for the dreaded horsefly. Then I saw a particularly large fly land on the window sill, and I knew I'd finally seen it. It had a fat, shiny fly's body, six thin hairy legs, and transparent wings, but its huge compound eyes were poking out of a narrow horse's face on a long neck. It wouldn't have seemed any weirder if it whinnied. I ran downstairs as fast as I could to tell Dad. I’ve ever really completely forgiven him for laughing so hard.
Everyone thought these were isolated incidents, and they made for good stories. But then I had two more hallucinations a few months later as my mom's absence from home went on and on. One night, I woke up suddenly and had the feeling that something was in the room with me. It was very dark, and I couldn't see much, but I was convinced that a bear had gotten into my bedroom. Its huge, broad shape shifted uneasily in the corner near the door. It sniffed the air, trying to get the scent of my fear. If it sensed my moving, it would kill me. But if I didn't escape, it would also kill me. I spent what felt like hours slowly inching my way off the bed, breathing shallowly and shaking as I made my way out the window and onto the balcony. I was out there for at least an hour before Dad found me shivering outside in the cold.
At that point Dad began to see a pattern. The bear thing came up shortly after my parents had had a big argument, and he knew I’d witnessed some of that. He made an appointment with a child psychologist and told my mom that he thought she'd been away for long enough. I don't know how she felt about the whole thing, but she showed up at the house that weekend. There's no way she could have been there if she hadn't turned her role over to someone else, so I guess she was convinced my problems were pretty serious.
Both my parents wanted to be there to take me to the doctor. We spent a couple of days together while we waited for my appointment, but despite how normal they wanted to make things, that's not how it seemed. Mom was back, but mostly out of guilt. And Dad was as happy as always to have her around, but he could always sense her desire to get away and resented it. We had some marathon icy silences around the house in those days, and those don't get filled in just because the cartoons on TV are turned up too loud.
The day before my appointment, I was watching afternoon kid's shows. The local station added a lot of between-show filler, kind of a Kid’s Show Helper, including a fake news report about an escape at the local zoo. Animals were everywhere, they said, and they instructed kids to be on the lookout for wild animals outside their windows for the rest of the day. It kept me at the window on animal watch all afternoon. Every once in a while they’d interrupt the shows with updates about the capture of some of the animals. But there was a lone kangaroo who had bounced so far away, they said, that they might not ever catch him.
I was completely convinced about the rogue kangaroo. They showed maps on TV of where he had been spotted, and even though there’s no way I would have been able to read a map, I was sure he was heading my way. Every minute or so I’d go over to the third-story window of the playroom to see. I was sure I’d be the one to catch him. I just had to keep looking.
Then while I was staring out the window into the distance, all of a sudden there he was! Not some little figure in the distance. No, instantly I found myself staring straight into the kangaroo’s eyes. He'd leapt straight up from the ground, bobbed into view for just a split second, and then disappeared again. All I knew about kangaroos was that they jumped really high and far. The whole thing made perfect sense to me. Of course a kangaroo could jump thirty feet in the air.
And of course a kangaroo could hop away so fast that you couldn't even see him go. I kept staring out the window, looking as far as I could see, but the kangaroo was gone. There was no sign of him, as if he'd never even been there. It made me very sad, and I decided not to tell my parents about it. Even now I remember how bewildered that kangaroo looked when he stared me in the face. The poor thing didn’t know where to go, but he knew for sure that he didn’t want to be caged anymore.
Monday, November 14, 2005
A Quick Personal Favor
[podcast play for two voices]
Sally: Hey there!
Tom: Hey! I haven’t heard from you in a while.
Sally: So, so busy! I’m really sorry I fell off the face of the earth there. You know how it is.
Tom: Yeah. I was wondering about you …
Sally: Wonder no more!
Tom: So how you been?
Sally: [sighing] Oh, you don’t even want to know. One thing after the other …
Tom: That’s how things happen. In sequence like that.
Sally: [laughing] Tell me about it!
Tom: It’s been crazy here too.
Sally: I bet. God, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. But, look, I really have to ask a favor.
Tom: Sure, no problem. Whatever.
Sally: I can’t explain why or anything, but I need you to do something for me.
Tom: You know I will. What is it?
Sally: It’s going to sound weird, but trust me, okay?
Tom: When have I not?
Sally: [laughing again, this time a little forced] True, true! I guess I know who to call, huh?
Tom: I should hope.
Sally: Yeah …
Tom: So?
Sally: Okay, I won’t keep beating around the bush. It’s just that I need you to … well, bascially, I need you to set yourself on fire.
Tom: … uh …
Sally: I know, I know! I totally wouldn’t ask if there were any other way. I swear I wouldn’t! But this is the only thing left. Please?
Tom: Set myself on fire?
Sally: Just for a little while.
Tom: My whole self?
Sally: Well, yeah. But not like a total self-immolation or anything. I mean, that’s just crazy …
Tom: And this is what?
Sally: [sighing wistfully] A favor for me?
Tom: Well …
Sally: I swear I won’t ask you for anything else for the whole rest of the year! I swear I won’t. But I really need you to do this, okay? You’re the only one I can trust.
Tom: I … guess. I guess I can do it. For you.
Sally: [clapping] Yay! You are the best!
Tom: Hold on a sec.
Sally: Sure, of course.
[Liquid splashes unevenly to the floor. A match strikes.]
Tom: [tortured, anguished screams as flames crackle]
Sally: Oh, not now, not now! I meant later!
Tom: [voice quavering in pain] Not … now?
Sally: No, sorry I wasn’t clear. I meant tonight. Can you do it again tonight?
Sally: Hey there!
Tom: Hey! I haven’t heard from you in a while.
Sally: So, so busy! I’m really sorry I fell off the face of the earth there. You know how it is.
Tom: Yeah. I was wondering about you …
Sally: Wonder no more!
Tom: So how you been?
Sally: [sighing] Oh, you don’t even want to know. One thing after the other …
Tom: That’s how things happen. In sequence like that.
Sally: [laughing] Tell me about it!
Tom: It’s been crazy here too.
Sally: I bet. God, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. But, look, I really have to ask a favor.
Tom: Sure, no problem. Whatever.
Sally: I can’t explain why or anything, but I need you to do something for me.
Tom: You know I will. What is it?
Sally: It’s going to sound weird, but trust me, okay?
Tom: When have I not?
Sally: [laughing again, this time a little forced] True, true! I guess I know who to call, huh?
Tom: I should hope.
Sally: Yeah …
Tom: So?
Sally: Okay, I won’t keep beating around the bush. It’s just that I need you to … well, bascially, I need you to set yourself on fire.
Tom: … uh …
Sally: I know, I know! I totally wouldn’t ask if there were any other way. I swear I wouldn’t! But this is the only thing left. Please?
Tom: Set myself on fire?
Sally: Just for a little while.
Tom: My whole self?
Sally: Well, yeah. But not like a total self-immolation or anything. I mean, that’s just crazy …
Tom: And this is what?
Sally: [sighing wistfully] A favor for me?
Tom: Well …
Sally: I swear I won’t ask you for anything else for the whole rest of the year! I swear I won’t. But I really need you to do this, okay? You’re the only one I can trust.
Tom: I … guess. I guess I can do it. For you.
Sally: [clapping] Yay! You are the best!
Tom: Hold on a sec.
Sally: Sure, of course.
[Liquid splashes unevenly to the floor. A match strikes.]
Tom: [tortured, anguished screams as flames crackle]
Sally: Oh, not now, not now! I meant later!
Tom: [voice quavering in pain] Not … now?
Sally: No, sorry I wasn’t clear. I meant tonight. Can you do it again tonight?
Sunday, November 13, 2005
update: the deal with Pancakes
People ask me questions. One of these questions is in essence this:
So what's the deal with Pancakes?
Yeah, the deal ...
In all honesty, it's probably not worth figuring out at this point. Pancakes is a character, yes. She's also a character in a story within another story about a girl named Pancakes. And she's kind of a ubiquitous concept in a lot of the writing I've been producing over the last few years. Hence her gracing this blog with her weird little name.
At this point, all you really need to know is that Pancakes is more of a she than an it (or a they). Don't think about it too hard. I promise I'm not. But I do know what I'm doing. Kind of.
Okay, you can all go back to work now. That's all we have time for.
So what's the deal with Pancakes?
Yeah, the deal ...
In all honesty, it's probably not worth figuring out at this point. Pancakes is a character, yes. She's also a character in a story within another story about a girl named Pancakes. And she's kind of a ubiquitous concept in a lot of the writing I've been producing over the last few years. Hence her gracing this blog with her weird little name.
At this point, all you really need to know is that Pancakes is more of a she than an it (or a they). Don't think about it too hard. I promise I'm not. But I do know what I'm doing. Kind of.
Okay, you can all go back to work now. That's all we have time for.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
