I’m going to keep this one short, because you really ought to be phoning your mothers right about now. And tidying your rooms. And standing up straight. And not talking with your mouths full. And not wasting your money on chewing gum and nosejobs. And not making that face, unless you want it to get stuck that way.
Do you know about Ben Hecht? I only ask because a lot of people don’t, and because as a responsible Purveyor of Fine Information I ought to clue you in, and in the interest of living up to such, I should tell you that Ben Hecht was best known to many as a screenwriter, that the same mind is to be held accountable (in some ways) for Hitchcock’s Notorious, His Girl Friday, Gone with the Wind, and Scarface, although largely in an uncredited stop-the-presses-who-can-fix-this capacity.
Maybe I’m obsessing a little over the idea of tissue cultures, but I can’t help it – it’s my personality. But tissue culture and bedtime stories, of course! It takes me back to when I first discovered I could put the -expensive- mustard on my tofupups: prior to the discovery, it seems inconceivable, then suddenly nothing short of self-evident.
There might be times when you’re reading the newspaper and you sit up straight and say to yourself something exuberantly monologic, such as “HOLD THE PHONE, this is ACTUAL news, I need to remember where I was when I read this, which is RIGHT HERE” and then you take a mental inventory and make sure that twenty or thirty years from now, you’ll remember?
We all have those odd things that happen to us more often than we might owe to nature or coincidence. Some people find themselves on their fourth marriage to a fourth guy named Mario*; it happens. For me, that thing is the ceilings. In my apartments. That seem to have a difficult time staying above my head.
A fable! About thieves and liars and moonlit wishes, fair ladies, conjurations and broken bones. Not your mother’s fable– no talking animals here. (This, a short entry for the same reason as short fable, which I’d post invisibly if you could read my mind, or at least my file structure, and know where to find it. I’m supposed to be in bed!)
I know that I should be wishing some of you happy Passover, others happy Easter, others the goodliest of Fridays. But more importantly, more important than sweet Haroseth and pastel eggs and chocolate covered matzoh shaped as salty rabbits, let us not forget today’s holiday, the one hundredth anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s birth, which is deserving of thrice-leavened gilded eggshells.
I packaged up, compressed, and uploaded today’s episode before discovering that I had inadvertently mentioned the brand name of a popular consumer product in the few introductory seconds before the story starts, so I thought it might be wise for me to insert a little disclaimer, for the sake of my legal hide. Here goes:
From over here, Evie says:
I would like to recommend “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It has to be my favorite short story… no matter how many times I read it it still gives me the chills!
When you listen today, I will disclaim now, you will hear a boxing story. Not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood boxing story, or the other girlie fight boxing story, or the what’s-his-brutish-name-from-New-Zealand-with-the-attitude, not that one either.