Lolly sits in the
keep of Candy Castle with her candies-in-waiting. On the other side of the
keep, Queen Frostine drinks chocolate milk from a long-stemmed glass. A stern-faced
gingerbread man stands beside her with a jug of Moo Milk. She calls to Lolly.
QUEEN
Come here, my little crumpet. (To the gingerbread man) Pour another
glass.
LOLLY
(She goes to the queen)Yes, my lady?
QUEEN
Sit down. Have a drink.
LOLLY
I’m… not thirsty.
QUEEN
If you were thirsty, I wouldn’t have
offered you milk. Drink.
LOLLY
(Takes a glass from the gingerbread man) Thank you.
QUEEN
I would rather face one thousand armies then be trapped in Candy Castle with these trembling truffles.
LOLLY
But the candies-in-waiting are
under your protection!
QUEEN
I’m just doing what is expected of
me. I can’t just let them melt in the heat of the battle. You will have to live
up to certain expectations, too, if you marry King Jellybean. (She guzzles the rest of the chocolate milk
and hands the glass to the gingerbread man) If my little brother somehow
manages to win the battle, the kingdom will sing songs of my inspiring bravery.
LOLLY
But what if Candy Castle falls?
QUEEN
You would like that, wouldn’t you?
If anyone but Lord Starburst were attacking us, I would appeal to his natural
cravings, so to speak. Are you shocked, my little crumpet? Here’s some advice:
the best weapon is your creamy center. (To
the gingerbread man) Pour Lady Lolly another drink. (To Lolly) If Candy Castle falls, we’re in for a bit of a rape. When
those Wonderballs roll in from battle, even the stalest morsel looks sweet. Why,
you’ll look just like a slice of cake. You can be sure that there will be a
special prize hidden inside of each of these ladies by morning. Then you’ll be
glad for your cordial cherry filling.
Lolly takes a glass
of chocolate milk from the gingerbread man and gulps it down in one shot.
You can read the epic conclusion of the battle here.
Queen Frostine
sits on the Candy-Coated Throne at the end of a long corridor in Candy Castle
while an epic battle rages outside. The young prince sits upon her lap.
THE
QUEEN
Do you want me to tell you a story?
Did I ever tell you about the bite-sized candy bar who lived in the forest with
his mother?
PRINCE
The Candy Cane Forest?
THE
QUEEN
Yes. But there were rotten things
living in the forest, too.
PRINCE
What kind of things?
THE
QUEEN
Lollypops…
PRINCE
But lollypops are delicious!
THE
QUEEN
…And gummy bears. The mother told
the bite-sized candy not to fear, because one day he would become king-sized.
She said that someday he would be the king of the lollypops, the gummy bears, the
peppermints, the Swedish fish in the sea, and the cotton candy in the sky. (She produces a tube of toothpaste labeled “Essence
of Fluoride”) The little candy bar asked if he would be as crunchy and
satisfying as his father, and his mother said he would be. (She uncaps the tube and produces a
toothbrush) Then she told the little candy bar to brush his teeth and go to
sleep. (The Prince tentatively opens his
mouth)
The door bursts
open and several armed gingerbread men enter the room. They all step aside.
Lord Licorice enters.
LORD
LICORICE
It’s all over. We’ve won.
The toothbrush
clatters against the floor and a minty gel dribbles out of the toothpaste tube.
Click here to read another scene from Game of Scones.
“I’ve been learning to drive my whole life.” – Arcade Fire,
“In the Back Seat”
I want to obtain a driver’s license before my five-hour class expires for a third time and, since I haven’t practiced the art of
driving a vehicle in several months, I set out to find a superior driving
instructor. All of the driving schools back home charged $90-120 a lesson, but
here I can get a lesson for $50-60. And how many lessons can I possibly need?
I’ve been practicing since I was seventeen years old and sometimes I can even
parallel park.
I set an appointment at eight in the morning on a Wednesday
to ensure that the lesson would not conflict with my work. At six in the
morning I dragged myself out of bed, got ready for work, and went outside clad
in an over-sized polo and nametag to meet my instructor.
Unless my instructor was a fourteen-year-old boy in a
backpack, a middle-aged man with a lawnmower, or a sentient parked vehicle
eager to impart its wisdom, there was no driving instructor to be seen. I checked
the mail. I gazed into the eyes of the figure of a plastic owl in a nearby
tree. I waited. No instructor.
I went back inside and tried to call the driving school to
no avail. It seemed safe to assume that there would be no driving lesson and I
was free to waste the next hour per usual. I checked my e-mail. I ate a bowl of
delicious lentils. I read a passage of Lolita.
Suddenly the phone rang. I
picked it up.
“Hi, Brittany? I’m outside of the country club but I can’t
seem to find your house.”
It was the instructor. From this first sentence, I believed
she might be more neurotic than I am. I wondered if she was like that all the
time or only when losing a potential customer.
“I don’t think I live near a country club,” I explained.
“I’m near a cluster of Chinese take-out restaurants.”
“Oh, I don’t know where that is. I looked your address up on
MapQuest and I just can’t seem to find your house, but I’m really close.”
“You used MapQuest?
Actually, I have to leave for work really soon. It’s been forty minutes and I
assumed you weren’t coming…”
“No, I’m coming! I’m really close now,” she said.
“I work at nine-thirty…”
“Well, maybe we could go for a half hour?”
I considered.
“Would a shorter lesson cost less than an hour?”
“Oh, yeah, you only pay for how much time we drive. So we’ll
just go for forty minutes and I’ll drop you off at wherever you work.”
“I think I’d rather just reschedule.”
“But I’m so close!”
And then the call dropped. Now I’m reconsidering whether I want
to reschedule my lesson with this instructor. The last thing I need is another
neurotic person in the car. And do I really want to take lessons from someone
who talks on their cell phone while driving? Reflecting on this morning, I'm rather happy that I didn't spend the fifty dollars.
A snowy-haired father is dying in his bed, surrounded by three
sons. There are cats walking on the headboard, on the dressers, on the carpet.
The father coughs and waves over his eldest son.
ELDEST SON: What is it, father?
FATHER: I have something for you…
The father extends his closed hand and the oldest son puts
his hand out tentatively.
ELDEST SON: What… is it?
FATHER: It’s a Petco savings card. Don’t lose it. The cats
are your responsibility now…
The oldest son takes the savings card.
FATHER: Buy the Science Diet. It’s still on sale….
The father dies. The eldest son clutches the savings card to
his heart with a dutiful expression.
ELDEST SON: I love you, Dad.
Fade to black. On the screen, the following appears:
The bacterial city within our gallon-sized glass jar continued to multiply over a
three week period.
Conception.
Age: 2 weeks.
A scoby is born.
What began as a rural community of
God-fearing microbes in uncharted beverage territory became increasingly more
populated, enjoyed the cerebral stimulation of the Enlightenment, experienced rapid
industrialization, endured a bloody revolution, and became a full-fledged scoby
ready for fermenting a gallon of white tea into kombucha.
We brewed a large sauce pot full of white tea for our first
batch of kombucha. Dave courageously reached into the jar, extracted the slimy disc with his
bare hands and relocated it to a large glass bowl with a quarter of the jar’s
contents. The rest of the jar was emptied into the sink and carefully cleaned.
The slightest smear of soap can annihilate a bacterial civilization.
By the time the pot of tea cooled, Dave realized that we didn't add
a cup of sugar to the tea, a blunder that would have spurred the slow starvation
of our sweet-toothed scoby. Dave reheated the saucepot of tea as the clock
struck 11:00 pm and the scoby dozed under a fresh white towel.
Once the second pot of tea came to room temperature – with ample
assistance from the freezer – we poured the tea into the jar and released the
scoby into the depths of the tea. Then we covered it with a towel secured
with a rubber band.
Now we wait.
Many questions occur to me. Did we grow the scoby correctly? Does the scoby know that I'm thinking about it? Can it feel human emotions like love and anguish? Will the resulting kombucha make us blind like bathtub gin? These questions and more will be answered when the kombucha is unveiled.
My mother is having a difficult time with her new cell
phone. The keyboard makes too much noise, texting quickly is complicated with the
buttons in different places, and the icons have moved around only to spite her.
She covets my antiquated phone of yore in all of its low-battery glory. She wants
to trade her sparkling new phone for my elderly one.
Will lose all my pictures in the process of switching? Just
in case, here are a few masterpieces worth preserving, save some snapshots of pointy
men’s shoes and expensive upholstery fabrics. I’ll also spare you the site of
me waking up from my wisdom teeth surgery, still high on laughing gas with
gauze bulging from my tingling lips.
The Lunchables of the Jewish community, now available at your local Italian grocer. I will eat it in a box and I will eat it with a fox.
Inspiration for a fan fiction I would like to write.
This is the commemorative cookie cake of my senior year of college. It tasted like yellow dye and accomplishment.
Speaking of hairy dogs, Rene Magritte and I have the same taste. (Pomeranians are delicious.)
A frisky Native American in front of my grandfather's grave. Perhaps someday I, too, will be inhumed behind his enormous erection.
One day in the land of my ancestors (Whitehall) I found the grave of my great great great great great great great great grandfather, a general in the Revolutionary War, on a secluded hill. It was sort of obscured by a bush.
Perhaps my great great great great great great great great grandfather would look like this debonair actor from the Last of the Mohicans in casual attire.
This assesses the damage done to my bike after I ran over a bottle of Gatorade, fell onto the blacktop, and nearly got flattened by a car full of old people.
Golf outfits are just as silly now as they were one hundred years ago.
My senior project is becoming an ugly comic book. During my last senior project meeting, my adviser suggested that I draw an image for the cover. "I'll get to work on some stick figures," I said. "Whatever you want," she said. After advising me for several months and watching me turn my original project into an extensive series of sex jokes, she no longer expects me to be serious. This is for the best.
The following cartoons are illustrations,from my short story collection (with one dramatic work), "Grownups." Once again, I have resorted to the impressive technology of photographing them with my digital camera and shamelessly posting them on the internet. Please talk me out of using them.
Cover?
The Diary of Stanley Amadeus Pope
Babymaking
Magic Tricks
Grownups (The play)
or
or...
Perhaps I won't be an illustrator when I grow up after all.
I’m doing a bit of travelling in the US. I spent the weekend in Boston with a few good friends, eating our way through the city and holding our potbellies off the ground. This is the essence of Boston:
Graveyards.
Sad trees.
Old people.
Dinosaurs.
How could I not like it?
We began the first day in the Boston Commons. The park was full of knobby, gnarled trees and shaggy willows. There were statues of famous American people like Paul Revere, riding his bronze horse. My friends and I came across the Freedom Trail at the far side of the park – a long, red line that weaves through Boston and connects the historical sights.
At least half of my pictures from Boston are of headstones in graveyards. I zigzagged through the Granary Burying Ground, the third oldest cemetery, noticing such Bostonians as John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and the victims of the Boston Massacre. The headstones were decorated with winged cherubs or winged skulls. One displayed a skull and crossbones, which caused me to suspect that I was on the grave of a landlocked pirate. The more famous people had piles of pennies tossed before their gravestones to spend in the slot machines of the afterlife.
At the King’s Chapel, we found none of the ghosts that supposedly haunt the grounds, merely a well-stocked cemetery. The chapel’s burial ground is the oldest in Boston. Signs around the path requested that people stay off of the grass and refrain from “grave rubbing.” There are some strange people in Boston.
We could have gone to the meeting house where the Boston Tea Party was planned, but we were too hungry to be good Americans, so my fellow travelers and I headed to the North End. Veering off from the main street of Italian restaurants, we found small place called Dino’s. I had some tasty pumpkin tortellini, which I don’t recommend in combination with cranberry juice.
Later we found a place to sit by the ocean and calmly watched the passing nuns. I realized when I finally tried to stand up that I had unknowingly sat in melted ice cream and my pants were glued to the bench.
The next day I set off again in a different pair of pants. My companions stopped at Quincy Market for lunch where I adventurously ingested a Greek salad. For dessert, we went back to the North End to stop at Mike’s Pastry. All through Boston I observed people towing white Mike’s boxes all tied up with string containing wondrous confectionery mysteries.
The shop was predictably crowded and I ordered a Florentine cannoli that I saw from behind some taller people. Unlike the traditional cannoli, this one was covered in some sort of caramel, had the texture of peanut brittle, and came with a vial of insulin on the side. We nibbled our pastries outside of the Boston Museum of Science and required a great many napkins.
We had tickets for two shows at the Museum of Science. The first was an IMAX show about Australia, where we learned that kangaroos can freeze the growth of their embryos in times of drought and that shiny-eyed frogs can hibernate under gooey membranes for years on end. We watched a second show about collisions in space in the newly-renovated planetarium. The seats were remarkably comfortable and I found that it was the perfect place to take a much needed accidental nap.
We wandered through the exhibits, seeing tree-climbing snakes and dinosaur bones. The best exhibit was an infrared camera that showed your levels of body heat. We discovered that anything you touch temporarily turns a hot color and that my braid has a gradient. I decided that it is necessary for me to procure an infrared camera, which is entirely feasibly on a writer’s salary.
Before we returned home, my companions and I took a walk beside the Charles River and watched the sailboats and swans.
For my Playwriting class, I was supposed to use a New York Times article to make three ideas for plays. I found this article about Mars Needs Moms incredibly inspiring for this assignment.
Mars Needs Ideas – A Tragedy
Bob, Jack, and Steve, three filmmakers, sit together around a table on stage. While brainstorming and smoking cigars, they come up with a brilliant idea for a 3-D film about Martians kidnapping the mothers of ungrateful earthling children. The three filmmakers take turns fantasizing about all the money they will make and how they will spend it. They invest $175 million into making and marketing the film only for it to flop. Later, they sit around the same table wondering where they went wrong as the contents of their studio are carried away.
Mars Needs Film Producers – A Comedy
Three producers – Bob, Jack, and Steve – are kidnapped by a space ship full of Martians, transported to their home planet, and dropped into some sort of inescapable chromium zoo. They find that the creative team of The Adventures of Pluto Nash is already there. A little green Martian explains to Bob, in fumbling English, that Mars has a severe shortage of intergalactic family films. The three producers then smoke cigars around a chrome table and brainstorm the idea of Mars Needs Moms, inspired by the adventure that brought them to this strange and mysterious red planet in the first place. They spend $175 million Mars dollars making and marketing the film only for it to flop because of its socially insensitive depiction of Martians.
Mars Needs Film Producers – In 3-D!
A play that will be performed in… 3-D! The story will be the same one mentioned in the previous paragraph, but the audience will pay 30% more for the tickets.
Mars Needs Pixar Animators
The characters of Toy Story quietly watch a bootleg copy of Mars Needs Moms on Andy’s giant television. They feel sort of embarrassed and turn it off.
Mars Needs Action Romance
Bob and his two film-making friends are kidnapped and taken to Mars. They are dropped into some sort of chromium zoo where several slovenly Neanderthals with outdated filming equipment seem to have been stranded for years. Bob and his friends watch in horror as the hideous, green Martian faces gaze down from the space-glass above. Zafronia enters through steel doors and explains, in fumbling English, that the Martians want them to make an intergalactic family film. She has stylish hair and breasts which indicate that she is an attractive female Martian. Bob, Jack, and Steve desperately work together make a film, but it flops in the intergalactic markets. Conveniently, Zafronia has a warship and helps the filmmakers escape during the disastrous premier. She reveals to their surprise that she was just an Earth-Mom that was kidnapped and turned into a Martian. After blowing up Mars, they return to Earth and make the film Mars Needs Moms.
The Zemeckis Technique
Actors will perform Mars Needs Moms on a bare set wearing uniforms outfitted with sensors that record their movements. An avant-garde production for the whole family!
(Image credit: www.joeacevedo.com, home of the perfect Martian woman.)
I arrived in Prague and moved into my dormitory/repurposed hospital, Kolej Komenskeho, on Monday, greeted by a surge of yellow from every wall. Last night I finally got working internet. More has occurred than I could reasonably fit into a single blog, so I’ll just stick to today’s events. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get to my student ID crisis, my unpleasant encounter with the Czech police, and how I learned that Czech men beat women with sticks once a year. If you want to see some pictures before I reveal the stories behind them, click here.
I should explain that during our welcome week we go on tours and field trips and stress out over registering with the Czech police. My field trip for today was to the Voyna Memorial, a former concentration camp and “educational institution” for enemies of communist Czechoslovakia. The camp was in a rural area just one nap on a bus away from Prague. It is buried in the woods and no one who lived in the villages outside of the camp knew for certain what was there.
Our guide told us that all work camps were the same, right down to the sign reading “Work Will Make You Free.” They are all based on the model of the gulag.
The work part of this particular work camp was mining uranium. Political prisoners were given tools without any training and a quota. The uranium would be shipped off to Russia for nuclear weapons research, and to this day the Czechs can never know if the uranium they purchase was originally from their own mines. The camp’s mine has since been closed off.
The rows of rotting wooden barracks have, for the most part, been replaced with solid concrete replicas and a watchtower has been built to give visitors a good view. One barracks is left intact and the hospital still contains the authentic beds and equipment. A nauseating odor emits from the hospital, some combination of sterility, age, and bleach.
Our group entered a tight underground barracks that could hold as many as forty people at a time in complete darkness. The ceiling was only a few inches above my head and the asphalt was partially melted. Prisoners would dip their fingers in asphalt and write messages on the walls. I left the barracks feeling stuffy from whatever had been inside and nauseated by bad smells and general sadness.
On a lighter note:
Now that we all feel a little uplifted, I will continue.
Our bus stopped a small town called Pribram for lunch. We all left for two hours with a map of recommended restaurants. My friend and I searched for a vegetarian restaurant on the map, but it turned out to be a mere fruit stand. With nothing else nearby, we choose a hotel restaurant with sparkling chandeliers and floral upholstered chairs. We took our seats, noticing that Chumbawumba was playing in the background.
The music in Czech restaurants, shops, and other public areas baffles me. Often I hear things I haven’t heard in three or four years, like Hey There Delilah, or music that just seems out of place, like Lady Gaga in a classy restaurant.
The waitress insisted on speaking English with us, to my dismay. I ordered trout with almonds and rice. When my dish arrived, I received a whole trout, from head to tail, still full of thin, iridescent bones. The chef had placed a green pea in the fish’s eye, as though it would feel less personal.
As I was pulling long white strands of fish bones from my teeth in my socially clumsy manner, a group of girls from our tour group were trying to explain to the waiter that they wanted some tap water. They flipped through their phrase books to find the right words, explaining that they wanted water from the sink. A look of understanding eventually spread across the man’s face and he went to the bar.
I’ve ordered water at every restaurant I’ve been to so far, which appears strange when the beer is always cheaper and more abundant. The water comes in a stout glass bottle labeled “Bonaqua” or “Bellavoda” which the waiter will kindly pour into a glass for me. The restaurants here do not seem to have tap water as an option, but they always have beer on tap.
When the waiter arrived at the girls’ table, he set down a bowl of tap water. A slice of lemon floated on top.
After lunch, my friend and I went to an ice cream stand, where we noticed the prices were incredibly low. I asked, in Czech, for a small strawberry ice cream. I received what one might call a baby cone in the United States, with about a teaspoon’s worth of ice cream. (Maybe this is my distorted American sense of portion sizes speaking?)
My friend and I returned with the tips of our cones in hand, just in time to take the tour bus to the castle at Breznice. The castle is one of the oldest in the Czech Republic, and comes complete with a moat, mini hedge mazes, and gardens of symmetrical topiaries.
Inside of the castle we found an African game hunter’s personal paradise. The first room was covered with all shapes, sizes, and species of antler, mounted in rows on the walls. We put slippers over our shoes and skated from room to room to protect the antique wood finish.
Inside we viewed many paintings of the houses inhabitants over hundreds of years. Our group was standing in a room full of paintings of men, many of whom had eye patches. The young castle tour guide, clumsy with English, would point to a man explain that the nobleman lived in the castle at during the eighteenth century. Then he would point to the man next to him and say, “There is his wife.” Our ECES tour guide said that the women weren’t very attractive, and the castle tour guide answered, “You haven’t seen anything yet.” This occurred at least once in every room that contained portraits.
We came to a room that had other taxidermy animals and bamboo furniture. Our ECES guide said that she tried to book the castle months ago and was originally turned down because the staff was vacuuming the zebras. We’re lucky that the zebra vacuuming was finished in time for our visit.
