Old King Brady Was A Merry Old Soul

Race Car Ricky

Naomi would practically bite her nails down to the quick when each Saturday presented itself. Saturdays were the days Ricky went off to the tracks. Not the Aqueduct, Ricky didn't know nothing about the ponies. Ingrained in his memory was that incident Ricky chooses to forget that occurred at the Happy Mornings Dude Ranch when an angry palomino that didn't get his breakfast oats took out his low-blood sugar issues on little Ricky, no one ever asked him about the blatant scar above his left eyebrow and Ricky never divulged to anyone just how said scar scarred him. No, Ricky raced cars.  He was what one might consider a race car driver, of sorts, if they were to consider him anything at all.  Ricky wasn't the zippiest or the fastest or the savviest little driver on the tracks, he liked to savor these Saturday moments behind the wheel on those precarious asphalts.And if savoring meant ten MPH maximum driven, then so have been that. Albeit, it was the fates looking after Ricky that these quicker cars at the track didn't overtake him. To the gratefulness of Naomi, Ricky came home Saturday evenings in the same condition, sometimes even cleverer than the states he left in those Saturday Mornings for his Saturdays at the Races. No,  it was good enough for Ricky that he was  doing what he loved most. Racing Cars. Racing cars and coming in last. Winning was not everything to him. Except that one time, Bobby Mack suddenly came down with the worst summer cold, Race Car Ricky finished five seconds before Bobby Mack. He treasured his triumph. Ricky studied the sport for a good while before partaking in it,  a few years before he got behind the wheel himself, Ricky spent a king's ransom to be able to attend the 1929 Monte Carlo Rally.

And though Race Car Ricky was hardly the hare , there or everywhere - who vied with the tortoise, Naomi was ever a bundle of nerves, she was kept apprised of the dangers of automobiles and she was certainly no stranger to the weekly accident blotter section in The Halatoochie Crier.

Of the incidents she perused :

INJURED CRANKING AUTO

Cranking his automobile at Hudson ave. and York st., Abraham 

WEINSTEIN, 40, of 71 Spricket Street, sustained a fracture of the right wrist 

when the engine backfired. WEINSTEIN was treated at Cumberland Hospital. 

AUTOS COLLIDE, MAN HURT

Lacerations were suffered by Benjamin KRAUS,21, of 12 Hubbard st., 

when he was riding in an automobile which was in a collision with a taxicab 

at King Avenue and North 10th. st The youth had his injuries dressed and 

left for home. The taxicab was driven by Patrick COSGROVE, of `876 Grove Street. Connecticut.

and

HAS SKULL INJURED

Jacob COHEN, 52, of 19 Baker St., was taken to St. Bernadette's 

Hospital suffering from a possible fracture of the skull. He was crossing 

Blake Road near Jack Street., when he was struck by an automobile driven by 

Samuel GOLDENBURG, of 320 Wyoming St.

And knowing of those that were maimed and harmed as the result of automobile accidents she shuddered at the very thought of Ricky being yet another of these statistics. Naomi paced every inch of their three-thousand and five hundred square-foot Craftsman style home waiting to at last hear the squeaking of the front porch door that was direly in need of attention from a can of  3-In-One oil. On this one particularly inclement Saturday evening, the clock had gone 10:30 PM which was a good hour later than the time that Ricky usually walked through that door (and later than he ever came home to his girl) where he would find his relieved sweetheart after his long hard day at the races. 

Where. oh where was Ricky? Minutes bleeding into hours, time was passing so that Naomi grew more frantic. She phoned each and every area hospital before dialing up the police who informed her that Ricky needed to be missing a minimum of forty-eight hours before they would commence any such investigation. Saturday beget Sunday and Sunday beget Monday. The newspaper arrived on Naomi's doorstep at 8 oclock in the morning. And there it was in black-and-white in Monday's accident section :

SUSTAINS BRUISES. MIRACULOUSLY SURVIVES
Richard STEWARD, known to friends and loved ones as 'Racecar Ricky' 29, of 300 Deacon st., sustained bruises of the head 
when struck by an automobile driven by fellow racing car enthusiast Martin LIEFE of 770 North 3rd. ave who accelerated his vehicle to 110 MPH. The 
accident occurred on Saturday at the Speed Devil Park in downtown Halatoochie.

Thank goodness tomorrow was only Tuesday.

The Boiled Egg Factory

 

It all started with a story about a Scottish guy sort of telling an English guy off, for not putting the egg timer on, after they had put a couple of eggs on the boil, in a small milk pan, disregarding the misnomer. Since that was actually the egg timer's most specific function, it seemed absurd and irritating to the Scot that an item that lay idle during all the times when an egg wasn't being boiled, should remain so during the very process it was designed for.

Late into the dialogue they realized they would cease to exist if they didn't give themselves names. They realized that without names, the author would not remember them  - like those stories where the characters in the story are aware that they are characters in a story. So they settled on Hamish, though due to time being limited, a surname was never established for him, and Rodney. Rodney Bacon. Rodney didn't want to be called Rodney, but he was okay about Bacon. The English guy said that just because he was Scottish sounding, Hamish didn't necessarily have to have a stereotypical Scottish name, but in fact, Hamish was happy with Hamish. Time was running out at that point, so Rodney had to accept Rodney, and besides,  he was banking on being referred to by his surname mostly anyway.

Of course during most of the original conversation, names weren't mentioned up until toward the end. However in the retelling, names were employed pretty much from the get-go. Eggs were a big factor throughout though.

The whole dialogue from the point where Hamish had reprimanded Bacon for not setting the egg timer led up to them realizing they were characters, because it became apparent that something didn't makes sense. Because  at first it subliminally seemed to be that they were two guys living together, that was, until Hamish had pointed out that in fact this was a boiled egg factory, and if Bacon went through that door, he would see the conveyor belts, with all the guys packing boiled eggs into boxes. And he'd see all the other 'kitchens', the doors to them, lining the long wall on the same side of the factory floor as their door, each with another pair of guys also boiling two eggs in a pan just like he and Hamish were. And he'd see the faded red painted steel shutters over on the far right, with the loading bay where the eggs were packed into the vans for transporting far and wide.

Subliminally, the implication prior to the idea that it was a boiled egg factory, was that Bacon had always assumed that the door Hamish was referring to, was just a normal door to some ordinary room. In fact Bacon was scared to open it and see the white-hatted, white-coated egg packers, as if it would drive him mad. As if he had been very secure in thinking that they simply shared this apartment they were in. He thought he and Hamish had just been two regular guys who shared living quarters. 

Meanwhile, Hamish is talking like he can't believe Bacon wasn't aware they lived in a boiled egg factory and 'even if he hadnae seen the other employees packing the boiled eggs into boxes, surely he mustae seen the red and yellow vans with the 'McTavish's Eggs' signs around the town at least?' though that was not really how he spoke at all. It was a much more naturalistic accent than the author was able to relay.

There were discussions about what businesses the eggs would be supplying, and that turned out to be such concerns as pickled eggs in jars makers and Scotch egg makers and mayonnaise makers - and there was a debate about the way mayonnaise was made. 

Hamish insisted that some mayonnaise makers preferred to crush boiled eggs rather than the usual technique Bacon believed was likely to be the case, that uncooked eggs were used, probably just the whites. The transparents.

'And why only boil two eggs at a time?' Bacon wondered. Hamish said that any more in the pan and the eggs just start smashing into each other, whereas only two tend to just dance around each other. And their customers preferred unbroken boiled eggs. 

And don't bother pursuing the line of inquiry about huge pans, or vats of eggs, hundreds, all boiling together tightly packed.

Bacon was skeptical about the whole thing. Surely pickled eggs in jars makers would simply boil their own eggs? And why hadn't this come up before? It all seemed rather haphazard this apartment they lived in actually really being part of a boiled egg factory.

And the raison d'etre behind the Scot's irritation that something rarely used was lying fallow during a process it was made for, had now been undermined by this boiled egg factory development, since no doubt, eggs were on the go constantly, and egg timers were routinely activated now this wasn't simply an apartment. Now, the Scot's irritation had to be rationalized as being over a co-worker's neglect of a repeated part of the factory process.

So it was around this time that it started to dawn on them that it seemed Hamish knew a lot more about what their existence was about, and Bacon seemed almost like an amnesic,  which was when they'd begun to realize they were simply ciphers for a weird script about boiled eggs. All underscored by the egg timer ticking ticking ticking.

Bacon asked if they were in fact a couple, and Hamish said that they weren't, and as this was going on they realized that even though Hamish seemed to know more, in fact neither of them knew very much about themselves or their lives at all. It was questioning that,  that led them to realize that they barely existed at all, and were in fact in danger of ceasing to exist completely very promptly. 

There was a brief discussion concerning some attempt at blackmail, but that turned out to be a dead end. Other possible ways to finagle the author into giving them an existence beyond the egg timer's bell were all proposals that were easily quashed with simple logic. Pay him off? Threaten him? Appeal to his mercy and compassion? That was, until they hit upon the name idea.

By inventing names for themselves they would stand a better chance of ensuring that the author would remember them and they would therefore continue to exist. There wasn't much time however. They could see how close the ticker was to zero.  So they set about making names for themselves. Well in fact it was more Hamish that did the making there. Bacon did more of the complaining. He didn't think 'Hamish' worked because of the pronunciation, but Hamish insisted people would 'get it, nae worry,' though he didn't quite put it like that. The ticking somehow seemed louder. Bacon was satisfied with Bacon in good time. Well he had no choice really.

So the egg timer's alarm? It finally rang. And by the time those eggs had boiled, and the author had eaten one of them with some soldiers, saving the other egg for later,  Hamish and Bacon had firmly established themselves as fictional characters.

Marina And Bradley

Marina never danced with anyone if she wasn't dancing with Bradley. There was a certain contract that the pair, though they never signed any official papers, were to be honor bound together. Marina and Bradley always partnered together. It was gospel. It was the way it was and never wasn't. At the Night Star Ballroom. All the couples that came to wiggle their pins to such routines as the Lindy Hop, The Balboa and The Carolina Shag would come over envious green as they watched this inimitable pair. Marina and Bradley, oh they were fashionable, with the times and the nines were the only way they would come clad but what made them stand apart from the other hoofers was that they devised their own dance steps. And these steps were nothing if they were not elaborate. Eyes would always widen and just about everyone stopped to marvel at such a display as this. 

Someday In The Future....

The Coffee Clutch Conundrum

Richard Ferrum had everything you could ask for, by the time he was the tender age of sixteen, at the same time his school chums were fretting over which gal they were going to take to the Martinwood High School formal, or how they will explain all those C's in Geometry and Earth Science, young Richard was by now acquiring major shares of his family's nationwide Iron Works business. Richard would not have to don any such cap or gown to be in like Flynn and to sit pretty on luxury's lap;  one of the plethora of perks of being born into money, old money, blue-collar money but it was $$ alright. At the time of his seventeenth birthday, Richard was about to inherit this veritable family empire. And although Richard would never have to get his hands or any part of his person dirty and the fact that you would never find a solitary bead of perspiration atop his brow, he did have the arduous responsibility of dropping off his company's takings at the local bank. The parking was just terrible. How much can a mere mortal endure? Richard owned both underpants and  cars that represented each day of the week - Tuesdays were  faithfully assigned to taupe colored y-fronts and a 1934 Ford Window 3 Coupe. How he just j'adored that Ford - which was practically a jalopy in comparison to his other more extravagant vehicles that he would sport Mondays. Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

In the autumn of 1940, a great influenza epidemic was spreading furious and fast, a local plague infecting all of the employees at the local Ferrum and Sons branch who in turn would take sick leave en masse and now young Richard who was in his latter Twenties now, unmarried but in contention with a couple of gals he had on the go. A murder investigation commenced the summer before when Richard's father Alfredo was found dead of a questionable overdose. Alfredo was discovered by his faithful maid of thirty years, Beatrice Johnson, slumped over his morning coffee on June 3, 1939. There was nobody at the office to brew a pot at the time of the great flu epidemic. Richard at last realized the value of a good cup of coffee. 

In Theatres Now...