Peter gave himself up for lost, and shed big tears;
but his sobs were overheard by some friendly sparrows,
who flew to him in great excitement and implored him to exert himself.
Lately I’ve found inspiration from an unlikely source. Care to guess who the Peter in the above quote is?
A plaque thanking all the contributors to the park’s playground for …..humm, what age group could that be?
A mural I’ve never noticed before titled “Bear and Friends.” What’s that in the top right corner?
A house on the hill with an infinity pool and a roof top helicopter pad? Oh my, do you think that might be Bear’s home?
Meanwhile the Starlight Players are getting ready for another production. The last one of their season, LeFanu’s Carmilla.
Check out other #WordlessWednesday posts at Hugh’s place.
I’ve never been a big fan of circuses. I always have visions of the tightrope walker slipping and falling head first into the path of an elephant who’d been whipped into obedience a wee too many times. Or the clown on meth who flips out and decides to randomly fire into the audience. Only with real bullets and not water balloons. And then there’s the evil ringmaster with his Snidley Whiplash mustache!
Luckily my parents much preferred torturing us on the ski slopes or on rocky, dusty trails into the back country. Bears versus demented clowns, hum, I don’t know. Which one would you prefer?
However, many years ago I visited a friend in Las Vegas who was the “queen of props” for Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere and she was able to wrangle us “very special seats” for the midnight show. Despite my fear of clowns, we just couldn’t pass up very special seats to a Vegas show even if it was a circus. I hadn’t seen Jo for many years and was surprised that my brilliant friend, a person so well read and so knowledgeable in so many fields, would find joy and fulfillment dealing with, as she called them, “childish Russian acrobats with garlic tinged breath.” But she did.
Just before midnight, we slipped through a guarded back door and then rode the freight elevator up, up, up to a room which was basically a glass bird cage suspended from the ceiling. There, a team of technicians monitoring the sound and light equipment greeted us with a list of instructions:
Our “seats” were actually a bench that faced a wall of windows sloping dangerously forward. Far, far below we could see the stage and the audience as they trickled in to find their seats. To be in that box as the theater went dark and all you could see were the muted lights on the various instrumental panels was … well I couldn’t breathe. It became even more surreal when several acrobats on swings dropped down from the ceiling, their faces so close to the glass we could see them chewing gum!
Then the beating of the giant taiko drums announced the start of the show. The acrobats flipped over backwards and dropped headfirst down towards the audience as search lights highlighted the startled faces in the audience. The acrobats flew over the audience like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz until this creature appeared.
The story line is impossible to follow as act after act explodes upon the stage, each one more daring and mind-blogging than the one before. If you’ve never seen a Cirque du Soleil performance, it’s hard to believe the acrobats, dancers, contortionists and magicians are really human beings. We were bedazzled, shocked and almost dizzy with excitement as we left the magic lightbox and exited into the now quiet casinos of the Treasure Island Resort.
Jo was dying. I think she lasted another year and it was a rough year. But the cast of Cirque du Soleil all signed a giant Get Well card for their “Queen of Props” which she cherished until the end.
And that’s where I got the idea for Flipka, the psychiatrist who ran away and joined the circus.
Every Friday I will be posting a snippet from the sequel to Flipka. If you’re interested in following along, welcome! All feedback, be it fair or foul, is welcome.
SERGEI SLEPT ON A COT in one of the prop rooms, although never the same cot and never the same prop room. Thus, finding him in that labyrinth of costumes, backdrops and props was nearly impossible but … I knew where he showered every morning.
“Flipka!” He said, emerging from the row of showers in all his hairy-as-a-Russian bear and built-like-a-Polish ox nakedness.
“Haven’t they caught you yet?” I asked as he pulled a clean towel from the bin and began drying off, armpits first.
“When it comes to the ladies, I never tell,” he winked. Sergei claimed that the male acrobats farted garlic when they showered. He didn’t mind garlic on someone’s breath but expelled via the anus was a different story. And so he had taken up the habit of showering in the dressing rooms used by the showgirls and female acrobats. Generally after all of them had left for the day. When he’d saved enough money by sleeping in the prop rooms, showering with the ladies, and eating throwaways from the all-you-can-eat buffets, Sergei planned to bring his entire family over from Moscow, and then, they were going to take over Vegas. And I believed him because he knew things about the town that no one knew, not even Hyman. He claimed that he’d stumbled upon the real plans for the Strip. The secret passageways and tunnels unknown to any city planner or building inspector. He would never say where he’d found them or where they were hidden because those plans were more valuable to him than all the “gold in the Kremlin.”
“I’ll get right to the point: I need you to get me out of here,” I said.
“I heard you meet with big man.”
“Yes. I may be a little paranoid but —”
“Last year we hear stories of his daughter’s big rescue. See pictures in newspaper. Ha!” Sergei rarely believed anything he read in the newspapers or saw on television. “You think girls in Switzerland … in mountains … yodeling? And big man pays? Ha! Fairy stories. Girls in newspaper … girls they show on television … actors.”
“I didn’t see any of the news coverage. I was —“
“And then we hear our Flipka very sick. We send get well card!” He chuckled. “Everybody sign!”
“Yes I got your card.” The news that a trio of missing teenage girls had been found in the clutches of a polygamist cult had failed to ignite the East Coast media. It was Nevada, after all. Another planet in another solar system. A place where stuff like that happened all the time. Didn’t it? “I wasn’t sick. I was deported. Someone didn’t want me around when the story broke.”
“Hyman?”
“I didn’t think so … although I’m starting to wonder…” What kind of a father would try to profit off a bogus story about his own daughter? What kind of father?
“We have to find new prop lady.” Sergei continued drying his body. After the pits, he dried his hairy arms, then his hairy legs and finally … his considerable groin sac. “I get you out of here, Flipka,” he mumbled tossing the towel into the dirty bin. “I’m thinking afterwards … steak for breakfast. At Steakhouse. With a Stoli. A bottle of Stoli.”
I handed him a couple of twenties. “I didn’t come with a lot of cash —”
“And some cigars …” He added as he pulled on grey slacks and grabbed a plaid shirt.
“You louse! After I helped with the immigration!“
He threw back his head and laughed. “I kid you, little one. You lost sense of humor?”
“Then I’ll take the twenties back …”
“Ha! I have new gaffer at eleven. We have steak at Steakhouse with Stoli then he tell me why is best person for job. Ha! Follow me. We go fast.” he said as he began walking toward one of the prop rooms. “First, we suit up!”
“Suit up?”
I may need to take next week off. We’re having work done around the house and have already had one emergency and one haggle with the contractor … those of you who live in old houses know what I mean!
A description:
Unseen in the branches of a young redwood tree.
Perhaps alone.
Perhaps lonely.
Perhaps a mourning dove.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps
But hoping to be ...
unseen.
Seen,
By the lone lantern,
nearby,
as the sun sets,
and prepares for the hollow moon.
Every Friday I will be posting a snippet from the sequel to Flipka. If you’re interested in following along, welcome! All feedback, be it fair or foul, is welcome.
“Absolutely … Positively … NOT!”
Hyman shrugged and then continued digging into the one meal he allowed himself a day: Breakfast, which always consisted of (if he could be believed) a barely cooked Porterhouse steak, topped with three eggs sunny-side up and washed down with prune juice. We were in the Headliner Room on the top floor of the resort, hardly a cozy spot at seven in morning with the cleaning crew emptying ashtrays and vacuuming the debris from the night before.
“That proves it,” he said between bloody mouthfuls. ‘You’re crazy. I knew it. All shrinks are crazy.”
No wonder he likes to negotiate deals over a steak, I thought. Watching him tear into raw flesh would intimidate the hell out of anyone. “I won’t debate that point but the answer is still no.” I rose to my feet and took one last look around a room generally off-limits to mere mortals. It was smaller than I’d imagined with decadent, red leather booths and high mirrored ceilings. Perfect for intimate concerts. All of the greats played in the Headliner Room, generally to private audiences; audiences consisting of wealthy, powerful people … some had unfathomable fame while others stood in the shadows and quietly controlled Vegas. After a night of schmoozing, they’d left behind a fog of cigar smoke and costly French perfume.
“Sit Doc. You haven’t been excused. I tell you what. I’ll give you a hour to think on it.”
I slowly sat my bottom back into the chair as ordered. “How good of you but I have to catch a flight at three and I still have packages to ship…”
“I’ve already taken care of your packages. Hell, I even ordered you a limo for the airport.”
“I’ll take a cab, thanks. Last time I got into one of your limos I ended up with a new life and I kind of like the one I have now …”
He looked up from his plate. “ I overestimated you, Butters. I didn’t peg you for the kind of broad to go all Tammy Wynette on me. You know show business. Sex sells. That’s just the way it is.”
“Yeah, that’s me. Tammy Wynette. Listen Mr. Hyman, I don’t understand why you can’t produce this atrocity without me. Get another psychiatrist to act as ⏤ what was it? ⏤ technical advisor?”
“You know all that psychological mumbo-jumbo. Besides I wanna to get my hands dirty on this project.” He motioned to his lawyer who’d been sitting by the stage absorbed in a phone call. The man hung up the phone and walked over carrying a thick notebook. “Just sign the contract. You don’t have to read the damn script,” he said as the lawyer dumped the pile in front of me.
“Bullshit. You know if I put my name on some bogus script that it’ll shut me up forever. But, here’s the thing. I wasn’t planning to say anything, really … as long as the girls are okay who cares what really happened? The government sealed those mines and so their secret is … Wait a minute, you haven’t even told me how Meredith is doing.”
His hooded eyes flickered slightly. “She’s in Switzerland at that fancy psychiatric place. You ever been to that country? It’s boring as shit.”
“But is she okay?”
“Listen, you want more money? Because we can get the mother fuckers to up their offer.” He had no idea how his daughter was doing. Nor did he care. Over the past year I’d often wondered about Hyman. Why had he suddenly shown up in Ely on the day that the girls were “rescued?” And why had he footed the bill for all three girls when he hadn’t even tried to get his daughter’s drug conviction overturned? It just didn’t make sense.
He threw a pristine white napkin into the bloody mess he’d made on the table. ”Simmons!,” he bellowed at the lawyer who was standing a foot away. “Make sure you get the signed contract before she leaves the hotel!”
With that, he plowed out of the room.
Next Friday, August 23: What does Sergei know? Character Study: Sergei … at least what little is known about him.
What’s it? Something you wouldn’t want to fall into.
Every Friday I will be posting a snippet from the sequel to Flipka. If you’re interested in following along, welcome! All feedback, be it fair or foul, is welcome.
BY DAYBREAK I’d whittled my former life down to ten boxes to be shipped to Chapel Hill. The rest was marked for the Goodwill.
Lopinski had chosen to stay home and I didn’t blame him. Even though Hyman had comped me a suite at one of his less seedy resorts, two days of watching me sort through my past would test the strength of any relationship. Besides, it was the beginning of the fall semester and he had classes to prepare for.
“This was a bad idea,” I admitted when he ‘d called the night before to check on me, “I’ve got about hundred boxes to go through and so far, I’ve only opened one. To be honest, it’s the one I should have saved for last.”
“You’re still coming home tomorrow night?”
Home. What a beautiful word that is. Home. “Yes, professor. I will be home.”
During the first few months of my exile I’d fluctuated between rage and shell shock. Logically I knew that staying away from Vegas until things blew over was for the best (and I had been well compensated) but shit! Did they have to treat me and Lopinsky like we were pawns on their goddamn chess board? I still had nightmares of waking up in a decrepit farmhouse in Nebraska with no idea how I’d gotten there. And Lopinsky? I thought he was going to have a heart attack. Why hadn’t they just warned us that things were going to be bat shit crazy after the so-called “story” broke and let us leave on our own?
Lopinsky would have left Nevada happily. He had all the materials he needed to work on his book and, the fact that he secured a publishing contract so soon after we arrived in Chapel Hill, instantly removed any anxiety he had about those missing hours of his life or the manner in which he’d been ejected from that state. The book! The book! All that mattered was the book, assembling the photos, researching his sources, creating an outline — all day long and well into the night. He needed me if for no other reason than I made sure he got some fresh air. I must admit, working on his book had been a hoot but, would it have been my choice to go into exile?
Someone knew that it would not. Someone knew that I wouldn’t willingly leave without knowing the truth. Someone knew I’d never go along with the cockamamie coverup. And I had my suspicions about who that someone might be.
I was in the process of labeling the boxes when there was a knock at the door.
“Room service?” I asked. I’d ordered a huge breakfast hoping it would keep me going through a long day of travel after a sleepless night.
There was silence. “Room service?” I asked again
The door opened and in sauntered the man who’d upended my life, the last man on earth I wanted to see: Douglas Hyman, de facto King of Vegas or, to the Russian acrobats, Satana. He scanned the boxes piled on the bed, the floor, and the desk. Basically on any flat surface. “That looks like a shitload of books!”
“Our deal was you’d ship out whatever the hell I wanted —-“
“Put your shoes on, Doc. We’re going to breakfast.”
“You’re taking me to the rodeo?”
He was dressed like a wealthy rancher. Pricey cowboy boots; dark Levis, crispy white shirt and a Bolo tie.
“Ha,” He gave me the once over. “Hey, you’re looking pretty good. You probably could lose a few more pounds ⏤ but with your hair long at least guys can tell you’re a dame and not some kind of dyke.”
“Charming as usual. Why don’t you just tell me what you want.”
“I like to negotiate deals over a good steak.”
“I already ordered my breakfast.”
“And I already cancelled that order.”
“I know this is your hotel but I don’t work for you anymore and —“
He spotted the lavender envelope on the nightstand behind me and edged towards it. Perhaps drawn by the archaic script and Wiccan symbols Antionette always used on her “correspondence.” I grabbed the letter and put it into my pocket. He didn’t need to know all my secrets.
“Butters, I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
“And if I refuse I’m gonna find a horse head in my bed?”
Apparently I’d slipped into that alternate universe where no one dared joke with Lord God Hyman. “Still have that mouth I see. I’m amazed it hasn’t gotten you killed. Just hear me out. What do you have to lose?”
“Let’s see. Because of you I lost a job. A home. My —”
“Some job, some home …”
“Yeah, well it was my home and my job … however humble.”
“I know your history, Butters. You can play a crappy hand better than most, heck, almost better than me. But this is not a crappy hand. This time you’re holding all the aces.”
“Okay, I’ll hear you out but only because I’m like a cat. Too curious for my own good. Besides I’d like to eat.”
Next Friday, August 16th: Hollywood Comes Knocking. Character Study: Meredith Hyman
We probably have 500 vinyl record albums stored in a closet in the hall, maybe more. God help our beneficiaries, I don’t think any of them will ever be collector’s items. But you never know…
Okay – fess up. How many of you would give anything to own this rare and priceless record? I have nothing against Julie Andrews but … I’d rather be dipped in butterscotch than listen to her sing Joy to the World.
Now BIng Crosby, I do not like at all. His movies make me cringe. But who knows – perhaps this album is a classic (for Satan worshipers).
I wonder if my mother-in-law (or her husband) bought this album in the Adults Only section of their music store. Naughty, naughty. I’m sure the guy on the left with the huge box of chocolates tucked under his arm is hoping to have a “conversation” with the lady in red. It all depends on you. Yeah, I bet it does!
Oh my, if Perry Como dressed like your grandpa and leaning on an obviously fake fence doesn’t knock your socks off, than what’s wrong with you? I can almost smell the Old Spice. Can you?
On the other hand, these four lads from Liverpool wrote some of the most romantic songs ever recorded. But will my grandchildren be able to get beyond this cover? Doubtful! I can hear them now “Look at the album that turned Granny on! I told you she was strange.”
Dear me – we can’t say weird anymore, now can we?
Saying nothing in particular 