Wednesday, June 17, 2015

If this is Wednesday, it must be Nostrum

I just finished the first run-through of the long lost Tennessee Williams High School material. It's not the greatest thing ever, except for Behind Moby Dick, which just broke me up. I do entertain myself...

Meanwhile, it's been a while, so we'll skip ahead in the epistles of St. Jules to the Forensicians to this one:

Oscar Wilde once said that no man can live with a woman without falling in love with her. Oscar Wilde never lived with the Nostrumate. [Yeah, somewhere along the line the Nostrumite got a girlfriend, in epistles that are apparently completely lost.]

Like I said, we went to Disney World. One would expect that this would be a happy occasion, even given my feelings or lack thereof for the Mite’s new girlfriend, but one would be wrong. First of all, we all shared a single motel room together; ‘nuff said there. Second, the motel was not just off the grounds, it was practically off the planet. We had nearly an hour’s drive every morning, and given the philosophy that you should be at the gates before the joint opens, this makes for some pretty early alarm calls (and just try to get the Nostrumate out of the shower—just try!). Then it turns out that a certain person has a predilection against what she calls vomit rides, which means no Space Mountain, no Twilight Zone, no Star Tours, and even no Carousel of Progress, for God’s sake, because somebody once got killed between the walls and what if it happened again? Good grief! Which doesn’t leave much, let me tell you, and since the Mite was too goo-goo eyes to leave Kathie Lee outside with a Mickey doll for company while he and I actually went and had some fun, well, the fun quotient was low indeed. And then we hit rock bottom: on the third ride through It’s a Small World (yes, you read correctly, that was “third ride”), the thing broke down. Our boat was dead in the water for over half an hour, during which the song continued its endless saccharine loop, and all the little multicultural Stephen King dolls kept bouncing up and down and up and down—and a certain person, rather than screaming for mercy, actually claimed that this was the most fun she had ever had at Disney World.

Enough is enough, even for the Nostrumite. Thus were planted the seeds of discontent, and on our last night, when he and I were sort of feeling like a blow-out at Pleasure Island, when it was suggested that one last ride on It’s a Small World would be the perfect ending to the vacation, it all fell apart. The Mite ripped off his Mickey Mouse ears, threw them to the ground and stamped on them, all the while ranting about camaraderie and joie de vivre and it isn’t all that small a world no matter how you slice it, as is his wont, and the winner of the K.L. Gifford Look-alike Contest was appalled that the boy had it in him, and that was, pretty much, that. I mean, it had to play out for the rest of the night and the flight back home the next day, but by the time we landed at JFK, we were back to male bonding again, and the Nostrumate was history.

For now, of course. 1. know that sooner or later the real thing will come along for one of us. But, please God, don’t make it a K.L. Gifford type. Me, I think I’d rather marry Frank Gifford, given my druthers, except for his lousy taste in women.

Anyhow, we didn’t get to Emory after all, which was sort of disappointing, because we always like to watch those big-time policy coaches judge a few rounds of declamation, but which was also why we got to write an extra episode or two (we did get ahead a couple of installments, which is nice to know, so that if the Mite and I are, say, sent by our Commander-In-Chief to bomb Iraq, or Kenneth Starr’s house, we’ll have a few weeks’ work available on the back burner). We will be at Harvard, however, and we look forward to looking up some of those who have written us fan mail, to find out if they’re as mentally unstable as they seem. 

Keep the faith.

Jules

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