The Danger Of Walking The Babysitter Past The Elephant Zone

Ingredients to a highball: 1.5 ounces of whiskey, with ginger ale and ice, frigidly ready by 5 p.m. That is all I require for optimal functionality. That, and Ed Sullivan. The secrets that I have carried with me, like fragments of a torn love note, I have carried.. and carried. And like a man about to be administered Last Rites, I seek confession. Shall I confess my secrets?

Gladys sees none of this. She is in the kitchen. For Christmas, I bought her a new Fridigaire. A new one, with automatic defrost. She will be happy for a month.

The babysitter will arrive in an hour. A tie; I must wear a tie. Which tie? There is danger in even the smallest nuance. Every act must be rationed, because the slightest choice conveys a message. Shall I put on Perry Como? Or Nat? Will she think me too middle-aged if I play them?

Does she appreciate the extra 5-spot that I slip her at the end of the evening when she vanishes like a whippet out the door into the darkness? To her boyfriend, perhaps, or to her Beatles, spinning, as I imagine, on her pink kiddy record player on her bookcase, and her lamps and teddy bears?

Where is my TV Guide? The movie that I read about last month does not exist. Last night I spent an hour digging through back issues in search of it. I swear I saw it. Or did I dream it? It involved a man who stood in his living room. His daughter was about to leave for a date. As the date entered the house, the father felt the chill of immediate disapproval. So, he grabbed the young man by his jacket and pulled him out the door. Outside, the streetlamps were just coming on. I want to talk to you, he said. And then there was a growl, from the bushes, and a rustling. It the unmistakeable sound of a panther.

The man worked in a building in a job that involved fastening ceiling tiles with jagged screws. He worked 11 to 7 each night, and fought the onrush of sleep that threatened each night at 2 a.m. Sleep could mean death--death from falling, death from attack, in the blackness of the jungle.

The man had been warned by the shaman of the danger of walking the babysitter past the elephant zone.

Let's Ask Joan Crawford! Informercial For Jesus

Dear Joan:

Recently, I was approached by a friend to participate in a Multilevel Marketing scheme involving sales of products designed to promote Jesus(TM). I decided to join. Our organization would retain exclusive license on the name and likeness of Jesus, and it would also be in control of both the message and the product.

While attempts had been made in the past to reconcile the various conflicting sects of Christianity under one umbrella, we think that a market approach to the problem would ultimately be the best solution.

The potential for growth would be excellent. Profits of Jesus-related products routinely outperform the Standard & Poor's index by at least three percentage points, annually. In addition, the federal government has shown an interest in providing capital for such a venture.

This is not an offer to sell. For full information on costs, estimated return on investment, and possible risks, please review our prospectus.

Janelle from Long Island Beach

Dear Janelle:

Market-based solutions to social conditions involving complex and conflicting moral dogma might seem a "buy" right now, but my advice, as a committed Marxist, might be to withhold your capital for the moment and look at some more long-term trends developing in America.

Almost completely beneath your radar, the hybrid Communist-capitalist state of China is quietly taking you to the cleaners with their Trojan horse storefronts bearing the "Wal-Mart" label. And China is achieving this, as Marx predicted, by using the tools of the capitalists themselves. So you have thousands of third-world sweatshops dotting low-income communities across the U.S., funneling billions of dollars on a fast boat to China.

Remember that China is officially an atheist state.

So I don't have to draw you too many pictures for you to see that the long-term prospects for Jesus(TM)in America may be bearish.

Ironically, the best prospects for marketing Jesus may be in the erstwhile Islamic state of Iraq. I understand that the long-term plan for that country is to carpet the various cities with hundreds of Christian soldiers, after the military ones leave in about 2007.

Joan Crawford

Lincoln In The Twenty-First Century

There are no angels left in America, having fled briefly after the second world war. I had wandered as a ghost for a century, occasionally haunting the White House, even frightening the queen of the Netherlands when she slept in Lincoln's Bedroom. One woman, I haunted while she took her nightly showers. I was in full suit and top-hat--nothing inappropriate. However, when she exposed my indiscretion during the call-in hour on Coast to Coast, I knew that I needed a new cover.

I decided to seek employment. I found the city of glittering lights and raucous machines that ate coins. I applied for the position of hat-tupper. For occupation, I listed "Ghost." A balding, Italian man squinted at me and asked, "What are your qualifications?" I did not have a college degree, he said.... "Hit the road."

Bizarre, I thought, to have to validate my worth in a world that knew me only as a myth. I returned to Illinois, to the common people, where I first campaigned. I earned my first vote by doing a turn on the plow for some farmers. "If you can plow a straight line to the end of the sycamore tree, you have our vote." And so I did. But the farmers had now vanished, replaced by strange sculptures of iron and rust, and fields of smooth, hardened rock.

I went South. This, for me, was a novelty. My political party, I had learned, had been embraced by the South in the century that I had wandered. I found a dead-end street of lights and rain in a Verne-esque metropolis. A veteran paced the sidewalk, covered with a billboard placard that read, "I killed innocent Iraqis." Loud machines with fiery eyes sought to attack him, and he dodged and fled.

I would get no votes here, I thought.

So I went to Antarctica. The horizon was a brutal blue, a vast expanse, both empty and new. The time was now, and it was here, I decided, to begin my campaign to reclaim America.