Bodyguard with automatic weapons: Step by step.

1) You’ll need to plan ahead. I recommend an 18 year ‘lead-time’. Your candidate should look much like ‘this guy’ after a decade and a half of parental love

 
2) Make sure he’s got sensible shoes….

3) And a quality diet….

4) And a reliable weapon. (Note: two weeks of practice and he’ll put 4 out of 5 rounds in a 5 cm. target at 150 yards.)

5) And the payoff: Relax, your butt is covered. Now to that list of sick-f*ck Xangans I need to eliminate with extreme predjudice… Just kidding. Maybe …

 

Lord/Lady of the Flies: Only a matter of time…

… until I addressed this subject :

Enoll Flynn stretched his wings, combed his antennae and turned to face the Mirror:
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the greatest of them all?”
Mirror: “You ain’t, dat’s fo sho.”
E: “Thanks, M, I needed that. Working on my modesty.”
M: “And you do indeed have ‘a great deal to be modest about.’ “
E: “No need to get smarmy. Mirrors break from time to time, you heard?”
M: “Ok, You are the MODEST-EST fly in all of TSE-TSE-DOM. Happy?”
E: “I’d be a fool to say ‘yes’. I am getting there, though.”
M: “Getting there? You’re ‘modest-er ‘ than Mussorgsky and Tschaikovsky put together.”
E: “Ooh. Tickles me to hear it. But that’s what bothers me. Can we talk?”
M: “No one here but you and me ‘n the lamp-post.”
E: “Well, ever since like, a week ago, when I licked that yummy stuff the airplane sprayed on the lawn, I’ve had these strange feelings.”
M: “Strange feelings?”
E: “Yeah, um, for other, you know, fly-guys.”
M: “Hey, it’s almost 8 already. Off to work, Eroll.”
E: “And I’m thinking of changing my name, too.”
M: *looks at watch*  “EBOLA sounds good, gotta run.”
E: “What, you’re missing A LOBE in your brain! No, I was thinking ENOLA. You know, sounds like Enoll.”
M: “That’s gay. But leave me ALONE to think about it, brother. Or ‘sister’, whatever.”
E: “Thanks, mirror. I knew I could count on you. Can I give you a teensy little kiss?

M: “Back off. That’s not in my contract. And what’s with the lip-gloss?”
E: “Ah, you noticed. Hey does this eye-shadow make me look… deep?”

I don’t know whether to blame the fly, the evil protazoans it transmits, or the Creator, but sleeping-sickness isn’t particularly fun.. or funny. Eradication efforts in the mid-African continent have included mass release of sterile males, since the females usually mate only once. My dream would be to develop a cheap, inocuous but irresistible bait which turns the male’s sex-drive up to Paisely♥. Of course we’d have to fight religious claims that we’re advocating homosexuality. For more on this gross species click here. (wiki article)

---

Footloose in the Garden of Eden

OR: “THE LEG-ENDS OF ADAM AND YVES ST.LAURENT“

Going out on the end of a limb or a ledge here
With my New Style: Verse, but free.
Well, not free, but pretty damn cheap
Ok, make that ‘inexpensive’.
No bothersome rhythm or rhyme
to slow down the pace of the leg ends
And luckily, this is a piece about Legends
One in particular, revealed grudgingly unto me
by my Father, Arthur of the Universe.
He liveth in Heaven where Everything is usually Everything.
Except on Tuesdays, when you’ll find him…
heaving heavy rocks around in a heavenly rage
 Tuesday is a bad hair-day for him. Always was.
He’ll smite me for spilling the beans, but here they are,
the honest legumes, I swear to God.

Yes it was a Tuesday in Paradise when He created Adam and Yves
Blew the breath of life into ’em and said ‘what a good boy am I.’
The plan was for them to be fruitful and multiply.
It didn’t work out.
They divided the ‘space’ between them,
 added a modest but tastefully-appointed kitchenette-cum-work-area,
Gazed on each other’s nakedness and were ashamed.
Yves glanced at his Cartier and whined:
“Eleven thirty and we don’t have a scrap together yet… for the Fall/Winter collection.”
And Art spaketh: “This is not my first priority, boys, excuse me.”
Something about the word ‘boys’ caught His ear
He thumbed through the Create-it-yourself © Manual. “Aha!”
‘Male and female created He them’. Shit, how could I have screwed that up?”
‘Men have leg-ends at the bottom‘, it read.
‘Useful for kicking, running…
and beloved of the lesser gods, among them Nike® and Adidas®
‘Women, on the other hand, have legs which end
where they come together at the top. Useful for..’
Art needed to read no further, although he sorely felt like it. But there was work to be done.
He reached down and grasped Yves by the heel…
gently dipped him in the Holy Birdbath of Procreative Gender

Voila! Eve
Art said “It is good.”
Adam’s general attitude semed to improve
By Wednesday Everything was back on track
Leg-ends, what a concept.

Accounts Receivable? No Progress

Saving old posts is a good way to monitor one’s progress in life. But on the issue of my learning to collect debts, well, ‘watching paint dry ‘ has more live action.

I found this piece from 40 months ago, a short story which addressed a problem I knew I had, in the guise of playing with P-L words. It’s sadly still relevant, so I’m re-posting it here.

Happy Christmas to my friends who enjoy it…oh, and a lucrative, (among other equally important blessings), New Year.

Free to a good Home-on-the-Range

     A few nights ago I was instructed, ‘entreated’ even, on the phone, by someone who is as boundlessly over-endowed with physical charms as she is lacking in a grasp of what we professionals call ‘the hard sciences’. The task mentioned was for me to become conversant ASAP about ‘free-range chickens.
‘Yes, ma’am… um..sweetheart.” I told her. What a wimp. Yet it was not the first time I’ve abandoned a healthy skeptcism in favour of currying favour with gorgeous breasts. Astrology, macrobiotics, tarrot-cards.. I know too much about all these subjects, and only because of my libido.
    In this case, an advert on the back pages of ‘Yediot Aharonot’, an Israeli daily had caught her eye. ‘Free-range chickens: Check us out today!’ My easily-duped  ‘research-partner’ went on and on about ‘organically-fertilized ozone-free eggs’, but I cut it short and promised to swing into action.
     Ok, I paid not a single penny for the stove which adorns my humble dwelling. Found it on the sidewalk, on Rehov Ha’Palmach, corner of Rothschild. So yeah, it’s ‘a free range’. Got that detail covered.
It took 40 minutes to find the place. I parked in the stingy lot and smiled at the pony-tailed guy at the register.
“I’m here about the chickens.” I told him. He flashed me a look which dripped “Bless you, my son. In the back. Pick one you like.”
The enclosure dedicated to the advancement of the humble chicken as Queen of the Observable Universe was impressive, to say the least. Here I was, a moral dinosaur, trained since birth to relate to goddamn chickens as basically ‘Tyrannosaurus’ revenge. (By the way, dinosaurs are now officially classed as ‘non-avian ornithological species, regrettably extinct’… something like that) I’d seen roosters almost kill my litle sister when I was a kid: they knocked her down without remorse in the liquid cow-poop till she all but drowned. And thence to their evil routine of pecking the ‘jelly’ out of the feet of newborn calves, which relegates the poor foundlings to the veal truck at age one week and weight 15 pounds.
But, with my new approach-card studiously in its slot, I watched the prima donna bird-brains enjoying the Israeli fall weather, cavorting in the spacious lot. Choosing one (for her body-weight?), I beckoned her to join me in a heart-to heart conversation. A quick peck on my nose was all it took for the guy-in charge to approve of the match:
“Ah.. she likes you. ‘Clucky’, we call her. You brought a car-seat?”
“Car-seat?” I asked. “I brought a plastic bag.”
“No good. But you can rent one here.”
This was turning into a major learning curve for Johnny. Simply tossing the fowl in the trunk was going to be frowned upon, I gathered.
“How much is this one per pound?” I asked, again revealing my crass ignorance.
“Well, her last medical check-up was two weeks ago, but of course we don’t charge a shekel for the creature, per se. Let’s quick do the paperwork… You want to continue with the dental insurance we use, or do you have your own plan?”
Hey, my plan was to have schnitzel for supper. I actually looked around the place for a hatchet, in my bone-head Philistine primitivism. Mr ‘Chicken-shepherd’ was busy putting ‘Clucky’s’ personal effects into a bio-degradable hand-bag: her fuzzy pink teddy-bear, a bunch of papers, a filled-out application to Poultry Univ, her favorite MP-3’s…My original plan to bite the damn pigeon’s head off at the first exit-ramp seemed suddenly a bit gauche.

---

I could obviously go on. Suffice it to say that I now have a new beak to feed, three times a day. Not to mention being 378 shekels poorer. If and when ‘Clucky’ succumbs to ‘natural causes’ (g-d forbid), I may decide to make a posthumous meal of her.. or have her stuffed. What I won’t do for a chick

.
Wu: Why do you write this stuff, js?
Me: Well, in this case, largely just to make readers smile. If pressed, there is a small serious point I can defend.
Wu: Yeah, I got that: Man’s dream of the perfect McChicken™ will forever be at odds with their dreams of idyllic summers in the Hamptons..
Me: Haha. Yeah, and I speak as a guy who’s hatcheted enough chicken-kopfs in his youth to be indicted at Nuremburg.
Wu: Ok, any way you can think of to get this onto the Front Page? To kinda balance the low-cal diet there?
Me: No idea. Mebbe if people ‘Rec’ it, but only if they whole-heartedly wish it upon their beloved readers.
Wu: Oh well, post it and take yer chances. How’s the chicken by the way?
Me: Great! She’s got yoga from 10:00 to 12:00. *looks at watch* Oy, I’m late to pick her up. CYA

Desde Senegal con mucho gusto

HELLO
My name is nadia i am female hopefully that this mail will find you in a perfect state of mind and good condition of health.how are you today i hope that every things is ok with you as it is my pleasure to contact you after viewring your profile and see your personal definitions which i personally find interest on it.i decided to have communication with you if you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what will happened in future.i will be very happy if you can write me back with (nadiayusurf86@yahoo.com) for easiest communication and to know all about each other, So that i can send you my PIC. i will be waiting to hear from you as i wish you all the best for your day.
Thanks take care and have a nice day,
Yours Truly Love nadia

---

The above appeared in My Xanga Message box..a week ago. Of course I sent her an immediate reply:

My dear Nadia:
May God Bless You for appearing in my life at the perfect moment. Our life together as one will begin tomorrow evening. I’ve msg-ed you with the details/ Johnny

Having noted her ISP from Senegal I quickly checked what happens to ..um..‘those of my persuasion’ at the airport. And decided to travel on my US Passport. We ‘met cute’, as they say in movie reviews.
Long ‘A’
“Whither thou gehest, ich gehe auch,” were her first words. I was already engorged and in love.
“Book of Ruth, what a beautiful cross-cultural story.” I told her, trying not to slur my words. She melted into my arms in the Arrivals Hall at Dakar Int’l. I thought about the cramped back seat of my rental car, but, with divine effort, decided to prolong the sweet agony.
Short ‘A’
We somehow found the Renault, and gassed it up in a ghastly gas-station close by the terminal. Luckily, my usual need to pee while listening to the petrol rush into the tank was overcome by nature’s fortuitous valve system. So far so good.
Long ‘E’
At an unmarked ‘Y’ near the entrance to her little village she shouted ‘à droite, à droite, mon ami!” I saw the panic in her dark and mysterious eyes. “I was geese-ed there once.” she explained, pointing to the ‘wrong turn’ I luckily hadn’t made. A thatched-roof hen-house was all I could see in my rush to stay on the road-to-nirvana. “Many many gooses. Happy end, but not do again.” she elaborated. I put my arm around her and she pulled my hand deep into into her traditional garb. Such is trust among soul-mates.
Short ‘E’
Ten kilometers of rough dirt road led to her abode. A simple mud hut, occupied only by ‘my’ Nadia and her two kittens. She gave the distinct impression of having a deep and no-secrets relationship with them, something which hardened my, let’s call it ‘resolve’ to get somewhere inside her..um..her.. Ok, leave it at that.
“Our guest guessed right,” she told the kitties. “He knew, from my message, that I need to be needed, and expertly for once, in my virginal life. Oh, I’ve needed to be kneaded for as long as I remember.. My dear mother, bless her memory, knew this; that I would be putty in the arms of my chosen Saviour if only I could find him. Hi-speed Internet access helped, and she pays dearly for it, servicing the sailors down at the wharf, kitties.” I gulped a bit, but firmed my commitment to make our dream come true, if only for her Mom.

Long ‘I’
“Vater, Sohn, und die Heilige Geist!!” she screamed when I entered her. More German, but I was too busy concentrating on our unitarian..um..unity to care about the trinity. ‘Something about the first time is always interesting at least’, I said to myself, over her deafening wails.

Short ‘I’
“We can do this forever?” she asked me. I caught the gist of her question as I exploded inside of her. ‘Yes forever..um.. after a recess of maybe ten minutes.’ I thought to explain, then thought better of it.

Long ‘O’
“Whither thou goest, there shall I go also.” she hummed in my ear as we lay there. Hmm, King James. The picture of her Mom hung over the bed like a ghost. Fifteen years and a generation separated them. Oh, and a visa to the big world out there. Nadia surely had some small designs…
Short ‘O’
“Naturlich, we gost to get marry now.” she whispered in my wet ear. “Married”. I shusshed a chicken off the bed and corrected my tender young wife: “Gots to get married”. At least the life sentence was now grammatical.

Long ‘U’
“…yes, and Green-card, You know… since you  goosed me.. I mean.. like.. deep goose.” She sounded a bit like a child reciting some  translated local axiom. I pondered introducing her to my own Mom. The sun was slowly setting through the open window.

Short ‘U’

A gust of dry wind blew across our nakedness. I held her tightly, but my mind was suddenly wind-blown by memories: Clicking on a message on my Xanga. The $1700 flight. Senegal in all its exotic squallor. I closed my eyes. She took that as a yes. And yes, we truly had used up all the vowels. Soul mates then, I suppose it is.
No, wait. One I forgot. The only thing which could still save me from this possibly rash magnetic attraction, this buildup of errant flux. I excused myself for a second, walked out to the car and found what I was looking for.  It took ten minutes to carefully cover my whole body, inch by inch. One area required multiple passes, but when I returned to the hut I could see that everything had changed. A heavy-set, hump-backed, balding man was sprawled on the bed where we’d lain.
“How you could do this to me?” , he asked, a heavy French accent as he struck his forehead with his palm in some regional mannerism I hadn’t ever seen.
“Do what, sir?”
“Get de-gaussed.” , he fairly spit at me in disgust.
Only his limp let me get to the car before he caught me. “Vowels, Quasimodo,” I yelled as I floored the gas. “Read ’em and weep.”

Whether Rapport four Isreal?

    And you peoples wander why I have Irritable Vowel Syndrome. Ha. Lucky I don’t suffer (yet) from In-consonant-ce. This scream-capture is from the Official (Government-funded) Israeli Meteor-urological Web-Sight. That means I pay taxes through the nose for it. Taxing to read, is all I can say. The Hebrew site is generally error-free, at least in the spelling department. But every few days I check the english abortion, just for yuks, I guess. Hey, native english speakers make up, I’d guess, less than 3% of our population. A docile minority, known for their ability to suffer perverted prose in silence. Still.. glance at the photo below, and then allow me to decipher the coded message-in-a boggle:

1)  ‘sothern’ = southern, but without ‘you’ in the picture, I suppose
2)  ‘vadies’ are wadies, dry desert stream-beds, where ‘V’ and ‘W’ have long since evaporated themselves of any linguistic importance
3) ‘fress’ winds are harsh and voracious; they blow here from Germany, and can eat a man alive.
4)  ‘dengerous’, high waves notwithstanding, refers to the ever-present risk of contracting dengue fever from bravely bathing in septic system runoff on our pristine(?) beaches
5)  ‘isoleted’ thunderstorms are a bitch. They contain sleet, and attack without warning, in a constant phobia of being deleted.
6) And finally, ‘maily’ in the north? Yes, residents of sectors ‘R’ and ‘W’ receive letters direct to their P.O. boxes. The lucky suckers. Three weeks after the fact, but still, damn. I pay taxes too.

Seriously(?), Imagine if you will that the US government ran a web-site with 15% spelling errors. Would anyone complane? I’m thinking yeah, but then again, I don’t have to live there. Here, an MRI +three consultations with world-class neuro-opthamalogists costs me $19,95 plus tax. Can’t win ’em all, I guess. My sincerest hopes that you people will someday enjoy a  minimally-functionally health-care program. To mis-quote Everett Dirksen: “A trillion here (Iraq), a trillion there (Afgan-hounds), and pretty soon we’re talking real money.” Which reminds me: I’ve e-mailed the bozos at the Israeli Meteorological Service offering to spell-check their postings for free, daily. No response so far. Hmm.. First step in grammatical sobriety is always to admit one has a Problem.

“On The Origin (-ality?) of the Species”

    As customary, I spent the last hour of sleep this morning  dreaming that I was reading articles on the net. I do this. In a state of being alternately  aware, half-ware, or totally unaware that I am in fact asleep and manufacturing  the prose, poetry, illustrations, song-clips, whatever. Often I write them down here, verbatim.

Today’s little phantom reading-list had some wit calling Sarah Palin “Half-baked Alaska” and when I awoke I thought to myself ‘Hmm.. nice neologism, Johnny’. Then I did something drastic. Yes, I Googled it. Uh oh! Already been thought of. Oh well, there’s more where that one came from… Doesn’t destroy me. Still, since I’ve recently been laboriously saving back posts I couldn’t help but wonder which other supposed solbergisms are/were already in the public domain? I’m almost scared to find out. But facts are facts.

Join me as we board the ‘H.M.S. Bagel’ for a quick Voyage, a gallop off to the Xan-galopagos Islands, to Gallup-poll the tortoises, finches, and their respective neo-low-jisms.. Here’s a short list of putative solberg-coinages from the last month,  November ’09; cultured(?) pearls which particularly jumped me out of bed when I dreamt them up. And after quickly Valium-ating™ myself into a ‘What, I care?’ mini-mood-let, I’ll  google each one and shortly report back on its uniqueness(?). Pray for me. Still, my conscience is clean. Haven’t copy/pasted anything here since April ’06 when the sun stood still and I was xanga-born.

---

Nostradoofus
Is that a pistil in your pocket?
All rights reserved, unless reversed
The ink rohrshached into inconsistent hobgoblins.
supposed to be-be-headed
you get to be on-topic
pornithology
the aqueous humor is in the eye of the beholder
‘Practice limited to the upper limbic system
a humerus problem
Centrum Beer
 shoe-banging uni-brows
To ‘B’ (or not) in the ‘C’ of ‘A’-zov
party members who party a lot
NO, IT’S A BASTION (palindrome)
‘You’re Cheating, Hat’
tri-sexual
‘The Impotence of Being Frank’
‘Diary of A Frank’
 the ‘auto’ bio-graphed here ran out of gas
A tear is just a tear/It rhymes with here or there
Counsel is witnessing the badger
Almost ate my phone when I got the MSG
Ewe-Tube

Ok, I’ll be right back. *how many of these little blue pills should I take, Doc?*

---

AND THE RESULTS???

“Nostradoofus”: Bad news: 1450 results, mostly blogs, using the name as a critique of supposed forecasting power. Still, I thought of it all by myself, just never predicted it would catch on, ha

“Is that a pistil in your pocket?”  Yeah, a couple dozen citations; used as a witty title under floral photography, etc. Damn, and I was so glad to see it on my site.

“All rights reserved, unless reversed” Bingo, sort-of. One semi-scholarly law-advice site mentions ‘all rights reversed’ as a joke. One point for JS

“The ink rohrshached into inconsistent hobgoblins” Finally! As expected, ‘no documents match your search’. A play on the famous(?) “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

“Supposed to be-be-headed” Only two results, both of ’em straight faced. Hmm.. nobody but me sees the gallows humour?

“You get to be on-topic” Mine, all mine, Yippie. I get to be on top this time. That is what we’re talking about, right?.

“Pornithology” Ok, 1630 results. But not as rabid a field-of-study as I’d feared. Still, there’s a ‘pornithology.org’. I’m afraid to click on it

“The aqueous humor is in the eye of the beholder” Apparently mine, although ‘Peptides are in the eye of the beholder’ gets one mention. Mine, I guess

“Practice limited to the upper limbic system” No documents found, however there is an ‘upper limbic system‘. I didn’t know about it. Ok, maybe subliminally..

“a humerus problem” Only three mentions, two of which are from a standup-comic. Funny, huh?

“Centrum Beer”:  97 results, but as near as I can tell, none are proposing a vitamin-enhanced beer.
 

“shoe-banging uni-brows” Original. Damn Ruskies

To ‘B’ (or not) in the ‘C’ of ‘A’-zov  Mine, as I suspected.(a little Crimea River humour there)

“..party members who party a lot” Nobody else has been invited to this little word-party, it would seem. Great.

“NO, IT’S A BASTION” A few souls apparently discovered  this ‘reads the same backwards and forwards’ ,, but none used it so fluidly as moi

“You’re Cheating, Hat” Sorta mentioned in a Facebook contest for re-naming songs. Two uses listed.

“Tri-sexual” About half a million results. Oh well.

“The Impotence of Being Frank” One ‘Angelina Wartenburg’ thought of this independently two years ago. I may give her a call, and speak to her candidly.

“Diary of a Frank” Nobody else has used this, which I proposed as a horridly misguided title for the above spoof autobiography 
 

“the ‘auto’ biographed here ran out of gas” Original (Someone called a car-self-help book an’Auto-biography’. No bonus points for him.

“A tear is just a tear/ It rhymes with here or there“: Mine, all mine, as I hoped/suspected.

“Counsel is witnessing the badger” Three previous uses, none worth worrying about. I claim this one for me and any lawyers reading this post.

“Almost ate my phone when I got the MSG”  ‘No results found,’ and even without quotes, nobody seems to have put the shorthand-term MSG together with its monosodium glootey-mate.

“Ewe-Tube”; Ok, as I suspected, 9000 results, including a few videos of sheep. Can’t win ’em all.

So there ya go. Your demi-hero here is 60% original. No, actually, 100%; it’s just that I’m not alone in the cosmos, regretably.

---

Wu: And if you were looking for hits, you’d put ‘Xanga’ in the title, oh and ask a question at the end
Me: Like “Have you ever come up with a clever phrase, only to find that it’s like, duh, already in urban dictionary?”
WU: Yeah. Do that, Johnny
Me: I would, but the idea is so un-original. I couldn’t sleep at night.
Wu: You sleep at night?

A new low in spam?

 

ADD: Since this post for some reason appears on  ‘top-blogs’, I feel a need to clarify my point a bit. Specifically, The question is: Do G-mail and other e-mail hosts release content to spammers? On the surface, considering the facts, even as a skeptical scientist, I’m tempted to surmise ‘Yes’.
Look, there are hundreds of first-names. Thousands, even. And so the probability of a spammer randomly choosing those of my Aunt and Uncle, precisely on this day, is in the neighborhood of 1/1000 X 1/1000. That’s 1 in a million, and not even factoring in the timing.
Bottom line: If any reader has had a similar experience, i.e. spam bearing fake-names with a connection to your recent e-mails, please tell me about it. We may be able to sue G-mail for breach of privacy, and with the proceeds, buy enough cyanide to rid the world of spam forever./ js

---

My uncle Norman just died at 82. There’s been a flurry of private(?) g-mail correspondences which mention his name , along with that of my aunt, Arlene who survives, ’till 120′, as we say.
And now what do my wondering eyes behold but junk-mail in my trash-mail box from some fictitious ‘Arlene and Norman’, the names mentioned above, trying to sell me penis-enlargers and mind-relaxers.? Ugh. Can it be that these low-lifes also read my mail, along with Google’s innocent but demented robots?
Yes, there are always co-incidences, but so far I have no relatives named “Delicyous Twat” (a till-now typical spoofed sender-name.) If I find this grave-robber I shall kill him/her with my bare hands.

Guns to Roses to Art, and all for the senseless censors

Currently watching “April in Paris” w/Frederic March and June Lockhart

“Cut!”   Funny, I knew that was coming. Still, I hadn’t ever heard the Director shout quite that loud on a sound-stage. Mae-Belle gave me an impish look. One of the cameramen was on his knees laughing, headphone wires all tangled in his tripod.
“It’s right there in the script, Frank.” Mae defended herself. “Why don’t you come up to my room and look at it some time..” she added, mainly for the stage-hands.
“Well I didn’t see it. You have heard of the folks at the Production Code, now, haven’t you, Miss West?”
Mae gave me an exaggerated ‘Hmm.. never heard of ’em’ look.
Of course she had. It was a daily cat and mouse game, and often my job to referee, to rein her in, although technically I was hired as a lowly props go-fer/gaffer. Frank looked at me. I looked around the set. Something, anything? A rose on the table for the next scene caught my eye…
“Um, Frankie, we could have Cary here come in from the left, from back there, and, like hurriedly putting a rose in his breast pocket. Mae sees him and asks ‘Is that a pistil  or a stamen in your pocket, boy?“
“…or are ya just glad to see me?” Mae just had to add. I gave her a ‘Shh’ glance. That woman!  Don’t know when to keep quiet.
“Yeah, that’ll work. Places!” Frank bought it, at least the first part, looking at his watch.
“What is this, a Botany instructional film?” Mae didn’t like the idea. At least not stripped of one of its entendres.
“And personally, I prefer Biology..” She wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t?
“…Or chemistry. Hell, Anatomy, anyone?” She looked down her own blouse. It was pretty far down there.
Meanwhile no one moved on the set. Oh, one fellow, just hired; he was busily re-chalking the Scene/Take board. Wait..
“Hey..”, I said with some feigned enthusiasm, “What about ‘Is that a pastel in your pocket?‘  Cary can be holding a sketch-pad behind his back; medium long shot: we see it, she don’t.”
“Sure hope so, boy. Wanna come up and see my drawings..” Mae again. This time Frank got out of his chair and started walking to the telephone in the corner. A broad hint. He was, maybe, out of ear-sight when Mae suggested  “Or maybe y’all just want to dip your pen in my ink?”
“Mae,” I told her, “you know I love you dahling, but we be making a movie here. Costs money. It’s called ‘a budget’, but never-mind the technical …”
“I know all that.” Mae cut me off, not unkindly. “Still, if we can’t go with the ‘pistol’ line, what else you got? Something good”
I thought about it. Ground my gears a good long minute. Frank was still pretending(?) to be on the phone. Grinding his gears. A light went on:
“Is that a pestle in your pocket?” I suggested, all earnest and hopeful. Mae didn’t waste a second:
“…Cause if it is, I got yer mortar right here, honey..”
I shook her addendum off, feeling like a rookie catcher to a star pitcher. But she knew we were licked. All over. We wuz out of vowels. Oh, maybe ‘Postal’, but in those days if you got a job with the Post Office you thanked Jesus and tried to behave real nice. Even at home.
   Frank came back to his position looking… oh, ‘compromising’. Maybe he had been on the phone, and someone’d explained him about irreplaceable stars at the Box office. I never asked.
“Ok, we’ll go with ‘Is that a pistol in your pocket?’, and then you pause, look nervously out the window like you just heard something threatening, turn to Cary, and whisper:’God I’m glad to see you, boy.”
“I like it.” I said. I actually did. Frank’s not dumb.
“And don’t be looking down at the guy’s you know what..” Frank added, to restore his director’s image a bit.
“But that’s where the pistol is, Frank! Um.. anatomy?” Mae protested, but only half-heartedly.
“Nu, so have the gun  in his breast pocket, ok? Now ‘Places!'”

You heard it first right here.