QUAINTUPLETS: Yvonne and the Princess

     Once upon a time, there was a cow in a fairy tale.

     “What am I doing here?” she complained.  “I don’t wear glass slippers, and I don’t have a basket of goodies for Grandma.  I don’t believe I even have a Grandma.  I can hardly trade myself for magic beans.  If I could, I don’t have hands to climb a beanstalk.  I can chew, moo, and give milk…if there’s someone around to take it.  This is not very promising.”

     Nevertheless, she started off along the road that runs through fairy tales.  She walked until she found a fairy godmother waiting under a tree.

     “Oh!” said the fairy.  “I wasn’t quite expecting a cow.”

     “No,” said the cow.  “It’s a surprise to me as well.”

     “Mmmmm.”  The fairy looked the cow up and down.  Her mouth twisted to one side.  “Welllllll, I suppoooose it’s my duty to turn you into a princess.  If I can.”

     “Don’t be daft,” said the cow, taking a step back.  She kept both eyes on that star-tipped wand.  “Why would anybody want you to do that?”

     “Don’t you want to be a princess?” the fairy asked, her eyebrows arching way up.

     “I am a cow,” the cow informed her.  “I never get carried away to a high tower, there to await a prince.  I never have to prick my finger and fall asleep for a hundred or two years.  And witches don’t come around feeding me poisoned apples.    Who would be a princess if she was lucky enough to be a cow?”

     “Well!”  The fairy set her hands on her hips.  “If that’s the way you feel about it, very well.  But should you change your mind and want me to change the rest, just whistle.  No.  Wait.  You can’t really whistle, of course.  Just snap your fing….  How about you moo in a low and wistful way?”

     “Okay,” said the cow, making a note to herself not to moo wistfully for a while.  She moved on down the road.

     The road took a turn around a tall, rocky hill.  On the far side of this, the cow found a dragon abusing a princess who was tied to a stake.  “How’s this for a hotfoot?” demanded the big lizard, blowing fire to heat the ground around the woman’s bare toes.

     “Now, what do you suppose I’m expected to do about this?” muttered the cow.  It was obvious that someone had to do something.  The princess’s hair was singed all down one side, and her gown was covered with dark scorch marks.

     “I have no experience at all fighting dragons,” the cow said.  “I just chew, moo, and give milk.”  Thinking about this, the cow eased in closer.  When she had moved in close enough, she bit down on the dragon’s tail and chewed a bit.

      This attracted the attention of the dragon, which turned.  “Huh!” the dragon confided to the princess, “Thought I felt a knight jabbing at me, but I don’t see anyone.”  The dragon saw the cow, but, knowing cows have nothing to do with fairy tales, didn’t suppose she had anything to do with it.  “Now, where was I?  Oh, yes, cooking sole food.”

     The dragon blew flames at the ground again.  The cow reached out again and chewed its tail some more.  The dragon whipped around to look, but by now the cow was munching slightly smoky grass.

     “An invisible knight, eh?” the dragon growled to the princess.  “My mother told me about these things.  Better pull back for a bit until I learn his secret.”

     With a bound and a flick of the tail, the dragon hopped to the other side of the hill.  The cow waited until it was out of sight, and then ambled forward to chew the ropes which held the princess to the stake.

     ‘That was very well done of you,” said the princess, stumbling free.  “Thank you, sir.”

     The cow batted long eyelashes at her.  “I make allowances for people who live in castles,” she said.  “But where I come from, not so many people address a cow as ‘sir’.”

     “Oh!”  The princess was rubbing sore wrists.  “I thought you might be a prince under a spell.”

    “No.  To tell you the truth, I am a cow.”

     “It was very well done of you, all the same,” the princess said, brushing scorched hair back.  “But how did you reach me?  The cow is usually traded for something else by this point in the story.”

     “I have no idea, really,” the cow said.  “Wow, that looks as if it hurts.”

     The princess was trying to walk on singed feet.  “It does, rather.  Could I hold onto you on the way back to the castle?  Thank you.”

     They moved slowly along the road, discussing Jack and the Beanstalk, a story the cow had always taken an interest in, and about which the princess had recently read an article.  “Apparently, the beanstalk represents how humans always strive for social betterment.”

     ‘Fancy that!” said the cow.  “That must be why I haven’t seen the farmer or his boy lately.”

     “Aha!”

     The cow and the princess pulled to the side of the road as the dragon came bounding back.  “Thought you could trick me, huh, you prince in disguise?   Well, it isn’t going to work again!”

     “I am a cow,” said the cow.

     “Likely tory,” the dragon snorted.  “I’ll deal with you in  a second.  Right now, I’m going to chomp this princess.  I haven’t had any breakfast yet and I’m wasting away to nothing.”

     The dragon felt that there seemed to be too much dragon, but decided not to mention this.  “Why not eat me instead?” she said.  “I’m bigger, so you’d get more to eat.  And it is socially acceptable.  Lots of people eat cows.”

     “Cows are far too fatty,” said the dragon, with a sniff.  “I like the crunch and the scream when I bite into a princess.”

     “Would it make any difference to you if I screamed right now, before the crunch?” the princess inquired.

     “I’ll moo a bit myself, if that helps,” said the cow.  And she gave out with a low and wistful sound.

     The fairy godmother blinked into view.  “So you decided to be a princess after all?”

     “And be dessert?” the cow demanded.  “Perish the thought.  If you want to make yourself useful, turn this dragon into a princess.”

     “Hey, now!”  The dragon took two steps backward.

     “A dragon?  Into a princess?”  The fairy was shocked.  “They have nothing at all in common!”

     “I don’t know,” said the princess.  “I have an aunt, Princess Gyrdolene, who is practically a dragon as it is.”

     The fairy frowned.  “I could maybe turn a dragon into a cow.”

     “I wonder if fairy godmother crunch,” said the dragon, licking one of its hind claws.

     The cat wondered why this looked familiar, and then remembered a friend back in the barn.  “Why not turn the dragon into a pussycat?”

     The others stared at her.  “A cat?”  The princess shook her head.  “Why not a dragonfly?  Then I could swat it.”

     “No, wait.”  The dragon sat back.  “I think…I believe I used to be a pussycat.  Yes, I distinctly remember.  A girl traded me to a wizard for some magic string.”

     “What became of her?” the fairy inquired.

     “I never knew.  I remember now.  The wizard was taking me home when he ran into bandits in the forest.”  The dragon nodded.  “Yes, that was it.  He turned me into a dragon so I could eat the bandits.”

     “What became of the wizard?” the princess asked.

     The dragon licked his lips.  “I believe I mistook him for a bandit.  In the heat of the moment, you know.”

     “Well?” the cow demanded.  “Are we going to stand here reminiscing or are you going to turn this dragon into a pussycat so it can crunch fish instead of princesses?”

     “Done!”  The fairy swung her wand.

     A flash of light made everyone blink.  When eyes were opened, blank space sat where the dragon had been.  A small gray cat was admiring its reflection in a puddle by the side of the road.

     “Very good.”  The fairy patted the cow on the head.  “You’ve arranged everything, Yvonne.”

     “My name’s not Yvonne,” said the cow.  “It’s Collywobble.”

     The fairy frowned.  “But the title of this story is Yvonne and the Princess.  My name is Parsleyroot.  So who….”

     The cat looked up from the puddle.  “My memory is coming back.  My name’s Yvonne.”

     The fairy shook her head.  “If you’re Yvonne and this is the princess, what is this cow doing in the story at all?”

     “I was wondering that,” said the cow.  “I hope it’s over now.”

     It is.

FICTION FRIDAY: Those Old Piano Roll Blues

     I need to get this off my chest.  You’ll understand why.

     First off, despite all the rumors which have surrounded my discoveries in the pianowork of Wolfgang “Whiskey Pete” M’Cloud, I did NOT use some kind of computer magic on his recordings.  I lack the skill even to come up with some of his amazing fingerings, and, in any case, this story goes back to before the days when such alterations were not within the budget of mild-mannered music collectors.

     It was 1976 when I went to that auction and bought that big box of piano rolls.  I’ve told that story before.     I the early days of recorded music, the machinery was simply not able to cope with percussion instruments: drums, chimes, pianos.  Your piano men who could would record their work for piano rolls, which could be played back on a piano and not on the primitive disc or cylinder machines.  Everyone wants to find a previously unknown Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton piece.

     I was a little excited to find I had reproducing rolls, the piano roll’s sophisticated cousin, which could record more flourishes and tricks than a basic player piano: dynamics, especially.  Unfortunately, these came from the files of a defunct piano company and consisted mainly of the performances of one Wolfgang M’Cloud.  These were drab, dull, and included not a single song unrecorded elsewhere: mass-produced songs written for mass consumption, middle of the road hymns and songs of the generation before his.  The only thing mildly interesting was that these were the original rolls.  The paper had been cut and pasted, as was common in the studio, to correct the occasional missed note.  This generally matters only if the song or the performer matters to somebody.  And Wolfgang M’Cloud mattered to nobody living.

     That did NOT mean they did not matter.  The night after I had closed up the box again, to be added to my other unnecessary purchases, I slept with difficulty, waking over and again from dreams where a hand reached to me out of the ground as someone called “Help me!”

     The seventh or eighth time, I just got out of bed and went into my study.  Maybe making a list of the songs on the rolls would put me to sleep.  And the box of piano rolls said “Help me!”

     I sat down in the old kitchen chair I used at my desk, thought it over, and decided the only way to figure out whether I was awake was to open the box.  I did this, and from among the musical scrolls rose a head with tousled grey hair, followed by a body in a tousled grey suit.

     “W-Wolfgang M’Cloud,” I said.  I had seen his face about six times on advertising flyers in the box.

     “Yes.”  His voice was deep and echoed with gloom.  “You must help me.  You CAN help me.  I am denied entry to Heaven while people believe the lie.  You can help me.”

     I pulled a piece of paper and pencil over.  “How can I help?”  I hoped this wasn’t going to be expensive.  The hollow-eyed specter didn’t look like anybody I wanted hanging around.

     “You must correct the lie.”

     I raised the pencil to the paper in what I hoped was an encouraging way.  “The lie?”

     He fixed me with those deep, grieving eyes.  “ I am NOT the brilliant piano player people think me.”

     As far as I ever knew (or have learned since), no one ever listened to a commercial M’Cloud piano roll and thought “What a genius of technique!”  But I had never argued with a ghost before and didn’t plan to start now.

     “By day, I played piano for our theater, and when the movie was bad, there was always the music.  A local businessman started a company which built reproducing pianos.”  The ghost sobbed, and ran his hands through his hair.  “I played like an angel for the audiences in the theater, but…this mechanical piano frightened me.  I could not…could not face it without help.”

     I continued to brandish a cheerful pencil while he broke off, face buried in his hands.  From between his fingers, he went on, “Everyone at the company knew how much I had to drink before I could sit up to the keyboard.  When they thought I could not her, they called me…Whiskey Pete.”

     He straightened suddenly, his face one massive scowl, causing me to squeak my chair back along the floorboards to put a little distance between us.  “You must show people the sodden fool I was.  Let the piano rolls be played as I really played them.  Show the world my shame, that I may no longer wait under the shadow of the genius they believe my recordings represent.”

     Of course, that was not the end of our association.  Each night at midnight, he would reappear, and I would take up the task of painstakingly removing every correction, every edit the piano roll company had made.  He was able to tell me where they had cut new notes, so these could be covered.  He showed where even the tempo had had to be changed.

     Paper, scissors, and glue were not expensive, but to make his repentance complete, I had to locate a reasonable facsimile of that obscure brand of piano.  I found one already restored or I might be at it today.  It even came with half a dozen of the published Wolfgang M’Cloud rolls, to the ghost’s great pain.

     But that pain was nothing compared to that in his face when the old piano was set up in my living room and I put in the first of the rolls we had worked on.  “Oh!”

     He shuddered.  The cacophony made him shrink toward the box of piano rolls.  “Oh!  Make them public.  Let my shame be known.  Let me rest.”  I have never seen that ghost again.

     I sat there and listened to the rest of the roll.  I rewound it and tried another.  His whiskey-tempered performance struck me as unrestrained, improvisatory.  The cacophony held together.  And so I, to some slight degree, invented the jazz genius Whiskey Pete M’Cloud, a tortured soul who slaved away at an uninspiring theater job by day and indulged his genius by night.  That’s all I needed to do: touch up the story a bit.  The wild errors Wolfgang made under the effects of the bottle have been studied and analyzed by musicologists ever since.

     Why tell anyone now?  Well, the doctor says I’ll be lucky to make it another month, the way my health is going.  And you see that chair?  My deck chair, the one Wolfgang leaned on as he looked over my shoulder as we consulted and fussed over those old piano rolls.

     Damaged?  Yeah.  Those burn marks are where his fingers sat.  Just taking out a little…insurance, let’s say.

Covering Dishes

     It has been some time since we meandered through Memory Kitchen, largely because this is NOT a food blog.  But casseroles came up in an online chat, and this threw my mind back into the Iowa kitchen of my boy days.

     And I must break your heart at the outset.  We never ate casseroles, at least nothing WE caked casseroles.  It is amazing how anyone who grew up in Casserole Central can have eluded them.  I have mentioned a cousin of mine who, having grown up in Miami, was amazed on visiting one of her mother’s high school reunions, at the variety of casseroles, congealed salads, and bars.  (I tried to explain about sheet cakes, but I know my limitations.)

     I think I understand where we took a left turn at Dubuque, but we can discuss this as we got through a list of the casseroles of my youth.

     Creamed Tuna and Peas on Toast: I have never seen this entrée.  My mother used it as a threat.  SHE regarded it as comfort food, but my father, who did not eat tuna OR peas, would not have allowed such a thing to happen.

     Tuna and Noodle Casserole: This, however, was unavoidable, and was offered to us every other Friday during hot lunch.  Tuna is something you either accept or loathe, and I thought the stuff was pretty good.  (My memory may or may not be affected by the amount of salt I threw on just about everything).  During a period of American history when canned tuna was inexpensive, I tried to duplicate this by cooking noodles and adding a can of tuna and a can of Midwestern Balm (Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup.)  It never had the same cachet, and I believe now it was because I was always too hungry (as well as lazy) to pour this into a casserole and bake it.  The baking seems to work its magic on the noodles, turning them into a substance known only to food scientists and midwestern buffets.

     Hamburger Macaroni: This is the original, a dish my mother served up from my earliest days on solid food (to judge by the pictures of me where I have smeared it all over my face.)  This is ground beef browned in a pan, drained, and then garnished  by the addition of cooked macaroni and tomato paste.  Let others call it Goulash; let others call it Pasta.  This was hamburger macaroni easily the first dish I dismayed my parents by utterly refusing to eat once the fun of spreading it on myself was played out.

     Hamburger and Noodles: No, come back.  This is an entirely different entrée.  THIS is ground beef browned and drained and then garnished with cooked NOODLES instead of elbow macaroni, and Cream of Mushroom Soup instead of tomato paste.  And not cooked in the oven before serving.  (Note also a complete lack of crushed cornflakes or potato chips on these entrees.  I don’t remember anyone doing this in my day, but I was not allowed out to eat at other people’s houses.  My hamburger macaroni reputation preceded me.)

     Beef and Noodles: Now this was a step up.  IF you have roasted your cut of beef in a can of C of M plus a can of water, and have covered it carefully so the sauce does not cook dry, you have an excellent gravy for warming diced leftover beef (and adding noodles.)

     Maidrites: I am not getting into this ancient debate, but one of the three recipes I know for this dish—the least traditional—involves taking the hamburger and noodles recipe and instead of adding noodles, scooping the result onto a bun and eating it as a sandwich.  Very filling, but NOT a maidrite.  Trust no one who offers you this and calls it by the wrong name.

     You will note several similarities among these dishes.  They involve cooking something in a frying pan and then adding some kind of pasta and, except for Hamburger Macaroni, large amounts of C of M.  And, at out house, these were never rebaked in the oven, which meant I grew up accustomed to noodles and elbows al dente.

     For which I think the world should be grateful.  If I had been brought up on “Add cream of mushroom soup and then stick it in the oven”, what manner of casserole would have resulted the time my mother brought home a pound of liver and said “Here, cook this.”

QUAINTUPLETS: Strange Bread

     Years gone, when folks ate fresh bread every day, despite a lack of electric bread machines and the Baker Do-Maker, the baking of that bread was vital to the community.  Recipes and techniques were handed down from grandparents to grandchildren, and handed down again when those grandchildren had grandchildren of their own.  Many of these recipes were similar, of course, varying just a bit from town to town.  And every resident of every town knew that the bread of THEIR town was the only REAL bread, the only bread worthy of its crust and crumbs.

     Towns in Moraska were known for their excellent bread, but there were regional differences.  In Kuczka, the baker added poppyseed to the bread dough, while in Kucera, caraway seed was used.  To those of us far from Kucera and Kuczka, this may seem trivial, but it led to arguments every year when the two villages held their great market fair.  Each village took its turn providing bread for the fair, but those years that the bread had caraway seed, no one from  Kuczka would eat it, while in the other years, people from Kucera turned up their noses.  This meant hungry marketgoers, and hunger leads to anger, so unfair words were inevitable on fair days, no matter which bread was brought.

     Eventually, the mayors of the two towns talked it over, and announced that this year, bakers from both villages would bring dough to be baked the morning of the fair in the massive ovens always erected for the Great Market Fair.

     “And so no unpleasantness can result,” each mayor told his village, “THIS Great Market Bread will contain NO seeds of ANY kind.”

     People marveled at the simple wisdom of this decision, and the master bakers nodded in agreement.  “Very wise is our mayor,” The Master Baker of Kucera told his assistant.  “I’ll wager the Mayor of Kuczka never thought of that.”

     “No seeds at all: it’s genius,” said the Master Baker of Kuczka to her helpers.  “Obviously, OUR mayor thought of that.  No one in that hamlet of poppyseed-eaters would have come up with it.”

     As the day of the Market Fair approached the mayors the mayors reminded their bakers again and again, “The bread for this Fair must be the best bread available.  Without seeds.”

     “Without seeds,” said the Master Baker of Kucera.

     “Without seeds,” said the Master Baker of Kuczka.

     Each baker used the finest ingredients in stock, and mixed up a goodly batch of dough, to be taken to the fairgrounds.  But as the dough was being packed into the wagons, each baker paused to consider.

     “It won’t really be bread without poppyseed,” murmured the Master Baker of Kucera.  “I can put in just a few.  Then, when the bread is kneaded, I’ll set aside those loaves for people who know real bread when they taste it.”  And he mixed in a bushel basket of caraway seed to his dough.

     “I could make just a few loaves with caraway,” the Master Baker of Kuczka told her chief assistant.  “Mix some seed in at this end of the dough, and we’ll see to it that that bit goes to the real bread eaters.”

     “How much, Mistress?” said the assistant.

      “Two bushels,” she told him.

      So it was a pair of guilty-seeming bakers who rode with their bread dough to the fairgrounds, and set it in warm spots to raise and rest.  The mayors nodded to the bakers, and then to each other, knowing that this year, at least, there would be no fighting over ingredients.

     Two mounds of bread dough were quickly raised into mountains, with the warmth of the ovens and the sun becoming two and then three times as big.  “Now,” the mayors announced to the crowds who had come around the ovens just to see thus amazing seedless bread, “To show how our two communities get along, all the raised dough will be kneaded together into one great ball of dough.”

     “Oh dear,” thought the Master Baker of Kucera.

     “Uh-oh,” muttered the Master Baker of Kuszka.

     The bakers ran with their assistants to the bread dough.  “Here, let us do the hard work,” said the Master Baker of Kucera, hoping to pull out the dough with poppyseed.

     “No, no,” said the Master Baker of Kuczka, thinking of the caraway, “We’ll take care of it.”

     “I insist,” said the master Baker of Kucera, stepping between her and the mountains of dough.

     “So do I,” she replied, giving him a little push.

     One of his assistants took up a big stirring spoon and swung it hard between her shoulders.  One of her helpers snatched a ladle from one of the nearby soup pots and bashed it down into the other assistant’s ear.

      The kitchens were right in the middle of the fairgrounds, out in the open, so of course everybody could see at once what was going on.  “What’s going on?” demanded a rhubarb farmer, more to make conversation than anything else.

     “Those cooks from Kuczka are poisoning the bread!” cried a parsnip salesman from Kucera.

     “Nothing of the kind!” snapped a beer merchant from Kuczka.  “That’s swine of a cook from Kucera was throwing rats in the soup!”

     The rhubarb farmer and the parsnip vendor clutched at this man’s neck, but a farmer from Kuczka, seeing this, planted a fist square in the face of the parsnip man.  A butcher came running with a knife, but tripped over a basket kicked between his legs by a plumseller.

     In no time, people up and down the fairground were punching, kicking, and elbowing each other.  As newcomers arrived at the Great Market, they located fighters from their village, and joined the melee.  Screams and curses rose like fog of the fairgrounds.

     And all this time, two mountains of bread dough continued to rise.  Soon there was no room for two balls of dough, so they pulled together into one while the people around the ovens were busy observing that this year’s Fair had gotten to the exciting part much earlier than usual.

     “This would never have happened if your baker hadn’t been so pushy,” shouted the mayor of Kucera, clinging to his hat as the battle raged around him.

     “Our baker?” demanded the mayor of Kuczka, kicking him in the shins.  “What about your baker?”

     No one in the crowd paid much attention to the actual bread they were fighting about.  So not one of them noticed that a bubble in the dough popped out a big shape kind of like an arm, and another a leg.  They continued to roll in the dirt of the fairground, clawing and spitting, until they could not ignore a cold, dark shadow.

     The first to see was the Master Baker of Kuczka, who screamed.  This was not unusual, as she had been screaming for some time, laying about her with a bread board.  What she screamed now, though, was “What is that?”

     People looked where she swung the bread bord.  Those not already on the ground fell to it.  Teller than the trees surrounding the fairgrounds, smelling of yeast and radiating heat, was a blobby giant with eyes that scowled down at the crowd.

     “What is it?” the people whispered to each other.  “What is it?”

     The Mayor of Kucera rose from the crowd, looked for his hat, and then decided to forget about it.  Raising his face to the giant, he called, “What are you?  What do you want?”

     “I am bread of both of you!” the giant said, setting fat hands on doughy hips.

     The people waited for more, but when there was no more, the mayor of Kuczka, wiping dirt from his face, called “What are you doing here, Master?”

     A great yeasty wind came from the giant’s mouth.  “I am no master.  I am bread.  I do what I am made to do.  You made me; you command me.”

     One big hand came up to spread over the fairgrounds.  “I can grow larger.  Each pf my feet could crush your villages to sticks.  My hands can lay waste your fields.  I can choke every one of you.  I can leave your children hungry and homeless in a wasteland.”

      The hand came down to its hip again.  “Or I can be made into loaves, to feed everyone.  You made me: it is your decision.  The seeds of both results have been sown.”

     “Seeds,” murmured the mayors.

     “Seeds,” sobbed the master bakers.

     Everyone knew in the same moment that this was their bread, and the argument they had put into it.  The giant had spoken yeasty truth: they could let the argument grow until it destroyed both villages which would, of course, deprive the world of two mighty fine bread recipes, among other things.

     “Loaves!” screamed the Master Baker of Kucera.  “Leaves of bread for everyone, even if it has SESAME seeds in it!”

     “Let it be loaves!” cried the Master Baker of Kuczka, looking to the two mayors.

     “You are sure you can have it that way?” came a question on the yeast.

     “Yes!” cried farmers and merchants and mayors.

     “As you need.”

     The blink of a rabbit’s eye, and the giant was gone.  There was no bread dough anywhere.  But a familiar aroma brought people rushing to the bread ovens, where they found hundreds of golden loaves, ready to be turned out.  Half of these held caraway seeds, and half poppyseed.

     “Gimme some of that caraway bread,” said the mayor of Kuczka.  “It’ll be strange, but better than bread with no seeds, I guess.”

     “Or no bread at all,” agreed the mayor of Kucera, still checking the sky above to be sure the giant was gone.  It might be that each man was thinking if the giant came back it would be beast to eat the other village’s bread away first, but they smiled, and raised buttered slices of competing loaves.

     And so it was that the villages of Kuczka and Kucera added to the usual adventures of a great festival, as they do to this day, the adventure of sampling their neighbors’ bread.  The seeds of discord were not allowed to grow, and both breads are now baked in both villages, without any hint that preferring one seed over another signifies any lack of mental capacity or moral rectitude.

     Mind you, there’s still that argument about putting ketchup on fried eggs at breakfast.  But you should eat breakfast before setting out for the Fair.

That Don Lock

     It has been a while, so I thought we might revisit the new arrivals to my inventory which I would characterize as Ass Joke Postcards.  Now, I realize the world has turned around a little, and that innocent three-letter word has a popular new meaning as “Something Bad”.  So, no: these are not postcards involving really bad jokes…at least, that’s too broad a definition  Not ignoring the fact that in some of these the broad…look, you’ll figure it out as we move along.

     A donkey is pretty much the linking theme in these postcards;  Here, it seems that the ass in question is a mere bystander.  Unless you want to argue that why the bysitter is crying is what happened to…but spanking jokes are now considered more questionable than ass jokes, so we should probably move along.  (Anyway, this use of the word ‘spanking’ is now almost totally obsolete, though still in use in the phrase “Brand spanking new”.)

     Here, we have a situation which usually resolves itself with an ass joke but has here substituted the speaker’s “dear fanny.”  (By the way, what IS that bird on the right?  I wanted so much to call it a boiled owl, but the more I looked, the less like an owl it seemed.)

     This is a new version of a card we have discussed before, playing on the theme that saying one’s poor donkey is tired is above suspicion and perfectly proper.  What makes this unusual is that it is one of a small number of cards repurposed by the Teich Company to include a note in the cartoon (and a longer one on the backside) about West Texas.  Were the cards involved CHOSEN by someone in Texas, or was this handled at the company headquarters?

     We have devoted a lot of blogspace on different postcards with this ass joke, but this version was a new one on me (so to speak.)  Bob Petley has done without the funny little hat with its lonesome flower usually worn by the woman, AND her usual cry of “Tally Ho”, and has given her a far more opulent figure.  Always interesting to see how different artists cover a classic theme.

     This is another ass joke done by numerous different artists, involving many different states, and alternating between a woman and a cowboy.  This is the only one I’ve seen so far where the artist has spent more time drawing the four-legged ass than what most artists would have felt sold the card.

     Hal Empie gets at least three puns into this one.  (Yes, still counting Butte.)  No humans in sight to confuse the viewer about what is meant.  Even the caption noting that we are resting our asses here OBVIOUSLY means the four-legged variety.

     This takes the word in an entirely different direction.  Unless Walt Munson has drawn the protagonist naked (except for shoes) to give our minds a boost toward the more common definition.

     While this gag uses no wordplay at all.  (There MAY be a hint that the locals are all jackasses, but this is not really confirmed  by the caption.)

     And we come to the end, with another appearance of a classic ass joke which does not include a donkey at all, at all, but plays along the same general notes as the old familiar song.  (The Vicar of Bray?)

Midweek Fiction: Principles of Economy

     “Mighty big nuggets thus time, sir.”

     “I know it.  Just weigh ‘em out and give me scrip to take to the bank.”

     “Of course, sir.  Your weekly delivery of gold has been the making of our establishment. My wife and I….”

     “Dadgum it!”

     “I’m sorry, sir.  I keep forgetting.”

     “Nothing against your good…lady, Milligan.  Jus’ brings back memories of…other…wives.”

     “I would not wish to cause any pain, good sir, to someone who has been the mainstay of our finances here.  I have hired more help, and we are now one of the most respected assay offices in the territory.”

     “Okay by me.  Just weigh it out, can you?”

     “Certainly, sir.  These really are high quality….”

     “Fine.  Lemme get my victuals and such and get back to the cabin.”

     “Sir?”

     “I said I want to get back home.”

     “You know you will be followed again, sir?”

     “If ever’one in the dadblasted county don’t know where I live by now, they’re welcome to waste their time.  Long as you don’t waste mine.”

     “The mayor hired a priest to check whether your home is the center of evil magic.”

     “And he’s welcome to waste his money.”

     “You never go out to mine anywhere, and never have any guests but those guards you hired.  And they’re tight-lipped about where you find all this gold.”

     “They don’t know. I pay ‘em not to get curious.”

     “I don’t suppose, sir, that you could put my mind to rest about whether such a supply of fine gold is legally obtained.  I will not breathe a word, even to my…spouse.”

     “Magic beans.”

     “If you don’t wish to tell me, sir….”

     “If you don’t wanna listen, it’s no extra sand in my boots.”

     “I hope I have not insulted you, sir, by my….”

     “Had a mine miles south of town.  Ever’body knows that.”

     “Yes, sir.  It hasn’t been worked in months.”

     “Pulled out a couple ounces of dust once, headed back to town.  Hot day.  Got lost an’ went ‘round in circles ‘til this jasper comes by, gives me a swig of water, offers to swap magic beans for my poke.”

     “Magic beans, sir.”

     “Magic beans.  I wanted another swig from his canteen so I swapped.  Got home, planted the beans.  Figured I might save myself buying a couple cans at Finley’s.  Beans grew up overnight, right up toward the sun, and I climbed until I came out next to this castle. like.”

     “And there you found a goose that laid golden eggs, sir?”

     “Didn’t go in the castle.  Didn’t like the looks of it.  Either gimme my scrip and laugh after I leave or listen up.”

     “Sorry, sir.”

     “I look around for something more my style, and there’s this shed, ten times as tall as me, with the door open a crack.  I slides in and I sees all this silver wire all over everyplace.  Like spider webs, it was, only when I brush up against it, it’s solid silver.”

     “No kidding?”

     “Just what I said.  And a voice says ‘Hush!  Don’t wake the…wife.”

     “And who….”

     “I look around and at the top of one of these big old webs is this spider the size of your shop window.  I tips my hat and says I likes his webs but I wasn’t fixing to try and take any home with me.”

     “A prudent move, sir.”

     “Says he don’t care.  He’s got plenty, being the spider that spins silver webs.  His…wife might get upset, though.  She’s got a nasty sting about her, he says, and it casts spells on folks,  He told me about this goose that laid the golden eggs and a cow that gave silver milk and a pig with streaky gold and silver bacon.”

     “Amazing!”

     “I said that.  Shouldn’t’ve.  Feel this stab in one arm an’ I looks up to see this spider twice as big’s the man of the house.  She don’t look happy, so I ducks out, shins down the beanstalk, and chops it up for kindling.”

     “But how does….”

     “Ever since, I takes care not to get too far from my own chamber pot by the bed at home.  Them big nuggets you seem to like…well, gimme my scrip and tell me if you’d ruther I took my homemade gold over to Sweeny’s Assay Office instead.”

     “Thank you for the interesting story, sir.  I hope to see you again next week.  I guess your gold’s no dirtier than what the mayor brings in.”

Quaintuplets: Soapsuds, pt. 2

     “Well, um, I, er, don’t dance very much.”  Soapsuds waved a hand back toward the ballroom without looking.  “One of those other ladies would probably make a much better partner.”

     “I’ve danced with most of them already.  I have to dance with all the ladies, you see.”

     Soapsuds thought this was interesting, so she raised her eyes from her collection of cobwebs.  The speaker was a tall man with a broad smile, young, but with lines at the sides of his eyes, which showed he smiled a lot.  Recognizing him, she took a deep breath and shook the rolled-up cobwebs from her hand.

     The prince reached out to take her other hand.  “Just one dance,” he promised, “So I can tell my mother I did my duty and danced with everyone.”

     They stepped out onto the dance floor.  Soapsuds, like most other girls, had been required to take dancing lessons.  The prince danced so well—he’d had lots of practice, of course, if he had to dance with all the lady guests—that she regretted a little all those times she skipped class to sweep out the pantry.

     Trying to think of something to talk about besides how badly she was dancing, Soapsuds asked, “You don’t think this collar is cut too low, do you?”

     The prince, who had spent his evening looking at collars that low and lower, had wondered why some of the court ladies couldn’t wear their collars right up under their chins to hide some of their shortcomings.  (Lady Zarma was so thoroughly freckled that she looked as if she needed to shave, and the Duchess of Denkiehle had that mole.)  Pity the first person he’d seen who looked good in this style was worried about it.

     Being a bright young man, for a prince, he knew enough to change the subject.  “That color suits you very well.  So many of the guests are wearing those antiquey cream-colored gowns.”

     “I wouldn’t like that,” she said, shaking her head.  “They look dusty.”

     The prince smiled.  “That would be a problem for you, wouldn’t it?”

     She frowned at him.  “Well,” he said, “It isn’t every guest who comes to the palace and hunts cobwebs.”

     “I hope you didn’t mind.”  Soapsuds blushed.  “It’s just a habit.”

     “You find cobwebs wherever you go?”

     “Usually,” she admitted.  “So many people hire servants right out of the country, you see, and though they know quite a lot about feeding cattle and taking care of chickens, you can’t expect them to know where to look for cobwebs way up on top of the china cupboard, or inside the piano.”

     The prince nodded.  “Most farmhouses don’t have pianos.”

     “That’s right!  So people complain and complain about how lazy the servants are, when, really, they don’t know as much about cleaning as their servants, even.  I know one lady who just didn’t know anything about dishes, or washing them.  She thought her basement was all full of dishes and the servants just threw away the dirty ones and brought new ones upstairs.”

     “I think I know who you mean, but we won’t say her name since she’s right there by the buffet,” said the prince, with a wink.

     “I know,” Soapsuds whispered.  “I went over one morning and showed her new maid how to polish the breakfast tray.”

     ‘Was she grateful?”

     “The maid?  Oh, ever so much.  I wouldn’t want to work for Lady…but we weren’t going to say the name.”

     “Have you helped other maids?”

     Soapsuds had advised maids, cooks, scullions, and even, on occasion, butlers.  This had all been done secretly, so her mother and sisters, and the people of the town, wouldn’t find out.  The prince learned quite a lot about his subjects, and a few things about washing up as well.

     “Her downstairs maid grew up in a house that didn’t even have windows, so naturally the poor girl wouldn’t know about using vinegar on window glass,” she told him about Lady Azimi.  “Can you imagine?”

     “Not a bit.”  The prince had never heard of washing windows with vinegar either.  It was all new to him, and interested him.  Most of the ladies he danced with wanted to talk about the health of his whole family, or, slightly less boring, of THEIR whole families.  (He reminded himself to tell the queen Lady Diane said her mother had that terrible cough again.)

     Soapsuds, for her part, had never met anyone who was this much fun to talk to.  She could sort of tell he didn’t know much about cleaning, but she supposed princes wouldn’t.  He was honestly interested, though, and he smiled so prettily.  She did wish he wasn’t quite so tall, or that this dress wasn’t cut quite so low.

     One dance became two, and then four.  Some ladies at the ball required no rouge to grow red in the face.  “What CAN they be saying to each other?” Lady Glennorah asked the Countess of Eyre.

     “I don’t even know who she is,” the Countess replied.

     As a matter of fact, Soapsuds was just explaining how she had taught the Countess’s laundress to use a separate tub for rinsing.  He laughed out loud at the funny part of the story, which showed again that he really was listening, and not just pretending.

     She did like him very much.  She did hope, though, that her fairy godmother was not planning for her to marry him.  The thought of having to dress this way all the time, and goto big parties, and horse shows, and highway openings, when what she wanted to do was mop the kitchen floor, was terrifying.

     Soapsuds was so busy liking the prince, and worrying about it, that she entirely forgot to keep checking the clock.  “What was that?” she demanded suddenly, in the middle of his story about washing horse blankets.

     “Just the big clock,” he told her, “Striking eleven.”

     “Oh!”  She whirled to look up at the clock.  “Oh!  Eleven!  Oh my!  It isn’t very loud, is it?  I expect the chimes are dusty.  I’ll run get some polish.”

     “But….” The prince said.

     Soapsuds was already headed for the door.  As she ran past the ladies at the buffet, someone stuck out  foot.  She tripped and dropped her reticule, but kept running.  She didn’t even look back, and thus did not see her fairy godmother (whose foot it had been) smile.  A wave of the wand, and the reticule became a sponge again.

     The prince stooped to pick it up.  “What’s the matter, son?” asked the king, who had come over to the buffet to see what the fuss was, and also to see if any of those little eclairs were left.

     “The woman I was dancing with dropped it,” the prince told him.

     “It’s probably a shoulder pad,” sniffed Baroness Mdena.

     “That is a sponge,” said the queen, joining them.  “No doubt one of the cleaning women left it behind.”  She reached to take it from the prince’s hand.

     “No.”  he pressed the sponge to his chest.  “It is hers.  I will search the country to find her.  Only one woman could have brought a sponge to a royal ball.  I shall ride out to search for her through every village and town.”

     “Sounds unnecessarily flamboyant.”  The king reached for a little pinwheel of salami and cheese.  “Why not just put an ad in the paper?”

     The prince didn’t do that, but neither did he ride out through every village and town.  His dancing partner had told him so much about her house and her neighbors and all the things she’d cleaned that he really felt he’d recognize the street she lived on.

     By the middle of the first afternoon, he was realizing what a lot of streets there were in Slingtown.  In these streets were plenty of nice, clean houses, and in each of those houses there seemed to be simply hordes of pleasant young women who had somehow learned the prince was looking for someone.  They came crowding out of the houses, trying their very hardest to look like someone he was looking for.  It all made for a very long day.

     At one house where there were no daughters, he drew his horse up tp the trough for a drink of water.  He took very good care of his horses, to the point of washing the horse blankets personally.  He quite frequently talked to his horses as well.

     “I just don’t know, Yarrow,” he said.  “I thought I’d have an easier time of it.  The princes in stories always seem to find what they’re looking for.  Of course, some princes have fairy godmothers, who can give practical advice at times like this.”

     “Excuse me, young man.”

     The prince turned to find a small, roundish woman with a quantity of dark rings around each eye.  She looked a little dangerous.  “Yes, Ma’am?”

     “I think your horse is thirsty.”

     The prince had been trained to be polite, and simply nodded, ignoring the fact that his horse was drinking loudly all the while.  “Yes, Ma’am?”

     “There are all kinds of horse troughs along this street,” she informed him.  “Don’t you think your horse would like a drink from each?”

     He nodded again, determined to be polite as long as this took.  He noticed, though, that this strange woman was winking at him.  Furthermore, she had a wand tucked up inside one sleeve.

     “Horse troughs,” he said.

     “Give it a try,” she told him.

     Nodding a third time, he led Yarrow away from this yard, and headed for the next.  “Horse troughs,” he muttered.

     His trip to the end of the block took no end of time.  Naturally, everyone in a house where he stopped had to come out and help water his horse, and discuss the weather or the well-being of his relatives.  (No one seemed to notice that the horse s not drinking, and looked rather bored.)  Along about the fifth trough, the prince began to wonder whether the woman had been an evil fairy bent on making mischief rather than a fairy godmother.  Shaking his head, he let one hand fall to the edge of the trough.

     “Oh yes, Aunt Donvia is much better, thanks.”  It was none of their business how Aunt Donvia was feeling, but everyone in these houses seemed fascinated by the royal family.  He slid his hand along the trough, answering their questions with his best royal smile.  Then he frowned.  Most troughs so far had been weathered, with the wood somewhat spongy, or splintered, or both.

     This one had been polished.

     He looked around at the people who were pretending to admire his horse and show interest in the maladies of his relatives.  “And, er, your family,” he was able to break in at last, “Is this, er, um, all of it?”

     The lady of the house nodded.  “Everyone, Your Highness, except for my stepdaughter Sloogner, who said something about the attic shelves needing to be dusted.”

     His eyes went to the house.  “The attic is, um, upstairs?”

     “That’s where most people keep them,” she said.  The prince heard only the first word; by the end of the sentence, he was inside the house.

     The first room was spotless, and the first door he opened showed signs of having been scrubbed.  He found stairs and ran up, two at a time.  “Aha!” he cried, at the sight of a dusty individual behind a half-closed door.

     Soapsuds turned, her dustcloth clutched to her chest.  “What…what do you want?”

     The prince reached into his pocket.  “I came to give you your sponge back.”

     She reached out.  “Not to ask me to marry you?”

     “I was thinking about that, too.”

     “Don’t.”  She pulled her hand back, and the sponge dropped to the floor.  “I’ve got so much to do right here.  Nobody will ever clean these shelves if I don’t.”

     “I understand.”  He took a step toward her.  “If I were to marry somebody, I wouldn’t be able to do some of my work, either.  I couldn’t go to the Prince’s Ball at the palace any more.”

     “Why not?” asked Soapsuds.

     “When I marry, I have to move out of the palace and start living in the Prince’s Castle, to the north.”

     She frowned.  “Just because you got married?”

     “It’s the official residence of the prince and his wife,” he replied.  “There hasn’t been a prince and wife to live there since my father became king, thirty years ago.”

     Soapsuds looked down at her sponge.  “Nobody has lived there for thirty years?  It must be….”

      “A terrible mess.  Absolutely filthy.”  He leaned down to catch up the sponge.  “I visited about ten years ago.  A lot of the windows are broken, the wallpaper is covered with dust, and not one of the chimneys draws properly, so there’s soot on everything.  I expect there are rats.”  He ran one finger along the top of the sponge.  “And the place is positively huge.  Even if I brought in a hundred servants, it will be years before it’s clean enough to hold a tea party, even.  You wouldn’t care for it.”

     Soapsuds put one of her own hands on the sponge.  “I…I’d have to see it before I could decide whether I liked it.”

     He folded her hands around the sponge.  “I can show you around the place.  But you’d better meet my parents first.”

     Soapsuds changed into better clothes to go to the palace, but she still felt a bit dusty when she found herself standing before the king and queen in the throneroom.  “So you are the woman my son believes he wants to marry,” said Her Majesty.  “What is your name, my dear?”

     “E-everyone calls me Soapsuds.”

     The queen sat back in her throne, her eyes as wide as the rubies in her crown.  “We can’t possibly have a daughter-in-law named Soapsuds!” she exclaimed to her husband.

     “I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” Soapsuds added quickly.  “I should have said that my real name is Slawfneer.”

     “Slofner?” the king demanded.  “Why, that was my grandmother’s name!”

     So it was all right.  The king and queen called her Princess Slofner, and everyone else called her Soapsuds.  After she and the prince were married, they rode away to the north, to a vast dusty castle that took ages to clean, even though they had the assistance of dozens of servants trained personally by princess Soapsuds herself.  Soapsuds and the prince worked together on the great dining hall and the ballroom.  Soapsuds found there was also a simply huge garden, which her parents never had.  This opened up whole new kinds of housework that were totally new to her.

     With so wonderfully dirty a castle, and so attentively helpful a husband, Soapsuds was deliriously happy.  She did wonder why he liked her to wear those low-collared ballgowns when they scrubbed floors together, but that is a minor matter, unworthy of mention in a story of pristine cleanliness.

Three of the Culprits

     This column frequently touts the work of postcard cartoonists Walter Wellman and Ray Walters, with occasional salutes to other people whose work is now easiest to find on fossilized tweets from the past.  But the collections coming in to inventory over the past month or so have included the work of several artists we haven’t blathered about, so settle back for a quick glance at three who came into view.

     Bob Petley, seen above, is one of the easiest to find on the online marketplace.   The “cowboy cartoonist” was also promoted by the company he founded as “king of the postcards”; it was claimed that some 40 million Petley postcards sold during the years of his glory.  The company was founded in 1943, after Petley worked as a candy salesman, layout artist, and illustrator of maintenance manuals for the B-29.  He published his own cartoons and photographs, traveling through Arizona in a car to shoot wildlife and scenery (and, after he took out the back seat and replaced it with postcard racks, hawk his wares.)  He did so well that he could buy work from other artists and photographers (including his photography advisor, Barry Goldwater.)  He analyzed his customers well, noting that women bought the sunsets and roadrunners while men bought the cartoons.  He also found that people MAILED the sunsets but kept the cartoons at home for personal reference.  He died in 2006, at the age of 94.

     Jay Jackson wrote a very brief autobiography in the 1940s which showed he ALSO held a number of jobs before turning to postcards, but of the three men listed here never considered postcards a major source of income.  After dropping out of high school he swung an eleven pound hammer for a railroad, worked in a steel mill, and then tried a year of college.  He started selling cartoons in the 1920s, and these brought him his primary paychecks.  By 1934 he was chief of cartoons and comic strips at the Chicago Defender, but continued to supplement his income with pinup postcards for Colourpictures, and, famously, science fiction and fantasy illustration for Amazing Stories, and other magazines in the Ziff-Davis line.

     He seems to have done only one pulp magazine cover, and a collector who has compiled a bibliography of his illustration work notes that he seems to have avoided the standard motifs: only one spaceship and never a single robot or BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster).  His comic strips in the Defender started taking a science fiction turn at this time, and he experimented with Black superheroes and secret agents.  Eventually, he was lured to Los Angeles, where he worked on some so far unidentified early TV cartoons before dying of a heart attack in 1954.

     Please do not try to buy any postcards by Hal Empie from me.  They do not stay in stock, as he is certainly the most avidly collected of the artists mentioned.  Postcards were sort of a third line of income for him, as he was a pharmacist by trade (and a talented one; he was the youngest person licensed to practice pharmacy in the history of Arizona.)  To while away his time between filling prescriptions, he painted Arizona scenery (from memory; he refused to paint from photographs, so Heaven knows what he’d say about AI artistry.)  And in his spare time from those usually 12 x 16 inch paintings, he did cartoons of the west as he saw it, a world of hapless cows and even more hapless cowboys.  He eventually started his own postcard company as well, and sold his Empie Kartoon-Kards from his own drugstore, as well as providing them to other retailers.  He lived from Mar. 26, 1909 until March 26, 2002, the interwebs informs me.

     So those are three of the artists whose work has come into the catalog around here.  If I ever get down to the deeper rabbit holes (Bob Petley, by the way, has some claim to having invented the Jackalope postcard, and almost always included a long-eared bunny in his cartoons) I will see what I can uncover about, say, Elmer, or Tony Luna, or Steamboat Larry.

Pages of History

     I realize I am a product of my time, and that time is passing.  There is a down side to bragging about my ability to untangle a phone cord and other bygone skills: there are whole generations of people who do not know what life was like in that foreign country that is the past.  Assuming my heirs and assigns look at what I leave behind and don’t just hire a dumpster and start tossing things out the window, I need to provide context for why certain things are there.

     I have no inventory but I am leaving behind a minimum of seven and a maximum of fifteen bankers boxes filled with scrap paper: that is, eight and a half by eleven inch paper which has been used on one side but is blank on the other.  Once excellent for those with typewriters, the size is still useful for computer printers.  (Note to self: why 8 ½ x 11?  Who made THAT the standard?)  (Note to future archaeologists: this also explains the twelve typewriters I wore out and which sit in storage.  Gee, I wish I still had that one that was used by the OSS in…but that’s w hole nother blog.)

     You will ask: why so much scrap paper, Uncle Blogsy?  Don’t you naturally just write on your computer and save stuff in the cloud?  Why print anything out, and, even if you do, how long will it take you to use all that paper?  Well, young’uns, let me tell you a true tale.  There is no point in blaming ME for some of my life decisions.

     It’s Johnny Carson’s fault.

     I shouldn’t have to explain why, in a world where an online commentator speaks and governments tremble, why Johnny Carson was such a power for good and evil back in the day when I was starting my writing career.  I will not try, in the space provided here, to take you back to those amazing days when we still had troops in Vietnam and those of us in school were being warned not to let our hair grow past our collars.  This was the era of the Gasoline Shortage, when Americans who had lived their lives in calm assurance that they could drive anywhere thanks to beautiful highways and plentiful fuel, were suddenly mortgaging their spouses and waiting in line for hours to buy gasoline at the new unimaginable price of thirty0seven cents a gallon.

     And one night, Johnny noted this shortage and made a joke about shortages of toilet paper.

To be clear, there WAS no such shortage: he was just making a joke about shortages.  But once again, Americans responded, valuing speed over verification.  Suddenly there WAS a shortage of toilet paper, as people rushed to assure they would have the proper supply of their favorite.

     The side effect was that suddenly, ALL kinds of paper began to disappear,as companies turned more of their production into rolls of tissue, and….

     Deep in the wilds of ancient Iowa, a youngster already writing bestselling novels no one would ever read discovered his local retailers were tripling the price of typing paper.  And, working on an allowance only occasionally augmented by a sale of fiction, our dewy-eyed artist said “Hey, why am I throwing away all this paper that I’ve used for typing on just one side?”  He started setting aside his first drafts, so he could flip them over for use.  When he spotted flyers and junk mail which included 8 ½ x 11 paper, he set this aside as well.  These pages would do for rough drafts.

     I could track his habit through the years, as he found himself in colleges where term papers found their way into the trash at regular intervals, and book fairs, where people might donate half a box of unused letterhead, but let’s leave that for researchers who dig through my papers years hence in search of anything to explain that Nobel Prize.  You begin to understand all this hoarding of paper (which I do use, when I can find a box buried under the boxes of things bound to be collectable one day.)

     So that is that.  And now maybe I won’t need to blog about why, after I started using a looseleaf notebook with pages which are half the size of a piece of standard typing paper…see, there’s this little suitcase full of HALF pages torn from….  I was just….  Anyway, it’s Johnny’s fault.

QUAINTUPLETS: Soapsuds, Pt. 1

    In Slingtown, there lived a young woman named Slaughnir, but nobody called her that because nobody could pronounce it.  Even her mother, who had found the name in a book, didn’t know what it sounded like.  So for the first few years of her life, everyone called Slaughnir “Baby”.

     Slaughnir’s mother died when Baby was about five, and for a year or so after that, everyone called her “Poor Thing”.  Her father remarried a widow who had two daughters older than Slaughnir, and this worked out very nicely.  Everyone could call Slaughnir “Baby” again, since she was the youngest.

     Slaughnir grew older and taller, though, and it eventually became ridiculous to call such a strapping young woman “Baby”.  People made attempts to call her by her given name, saying “Slogner” or “Slofnear” or “Sla-OOO-ner” or some other variation.  Slaughnir decided she did not care to be called ANY of these things.

     “I wish they wouldn’t call me anything anyhow,” she told her stepsisters.  “They always want to stop me and talk, and I have so many things to do.”

     “You are a deeply disturbed child,” said her stepsister Jessifer, peeling a grape.  “Don’t you like that nice young oxcart driver at all?  He just wanted to talk about the weather for a while, and you told him you had to go wash the mirrors.”

     “I did have to,” Slaughnir said, deftly catching the grapeskin Jessifer tossed to the floor.  “You keep kissing your reflection.”

     “She really would rather wash dishes than talk,” said her stepsister Tarmi.  “I think she’d rather wash dishes than eat, or wash clothes than wear them.”  She reached out to select a chocolate from the bowl.  “I think everyone should just call her Soapsuds.”

     Slaughnir threw her head back and laughed.  “Well, no one could say you called me a dirty name.”

     So Jessifer and Tarmi started calling her Soapsuds in place of Baby or Slaughnir.  This was hardly the sort of name a person would want to put in the family newsletter at new Year’s, so their parents utterly forbade them to call Baby “Soapsuds”.  Of course, everybody called her Soapsuds ever after.

     As Soapsuds got older, she was able to find more and more chores to do around the house: some cooking and sewing, but mostly washing and cleaning.  She polished the doorknobs, dusted the clocks, and swept cinders out of the chimney so no one would burn their feet stepping in them.  This left her no time whatsoever for a social life, which didn’t bother her at all.  It DID bother the rest of the family.

     “It is just not natural, Mother,” said Tarmi, as everyone sat around the fire one evening, telling stories.  (Everyone except Soapsuds, of course.  She had noticed the poker was sooty, and had carried it away to scour it.)

     “Do you know what Soap, er, Slopnor did this morning?”Jessifer demanded.  “Mrs. Ruck invited her over to tea with those three nephews from out of town.  But Sloffner said she had to come home and polish the mousetraps.”

     “No!”  Tarmi looked as if she might faint.  “Bad enough that she didn’t want to meet those nice boys.  But to let everyone know we have mousetraps!”

     “Most people have mousetraps,” her mother informed her.  “Now Mrs. Ruck knows that ours are shiny.  Never mind.  This year Sloognir is old enough to attend the Prince’s Ball with us.”

     “What?”  Tarmi sat up sharply.  “All three of us?  Oh, we’ll have to go in all three at once!  It’ll be stunning!”

     “If I don’t have to sell one of you to buy dresses for the other two,” said their stepfather.

     This was totally the sort of thing he WOULD say, so he was totally ignored.  Anyway, they knew the dresses wouldn’t cost much because they could buy quite ordinary ones and Soapsuds, who was very clever with his fingers, could make all the alterations and add the trimmings.

     That was just what happened.  Tarmi had a white dress with lots of tiny black stripes, but once Soapsuds sewed on hundreds of black and silver sequins, it was positively dazzling.  Jessifer had a rather drab red dress.  Soapsuds cut it back a little here and pleated it there, and Jessifer declared she had never worn a more beautiful gown.

     Soapsuds helped her sisters dress on the night of the grand ball.  “Now you’d better hurry and put your own dress on,” Tarmi told her.

     “Oh!”  Soapsuds put a hand to her mouth.  “I forgot all about it!  I haven’t done a thing to my dress since I tore out all the stitches!  It isn’t fit to wear at all!”

     “Wear the blue one, then,” said Jessifer.  “The one you wear Sundays.”

     “Yes, I…..” Slaughnir’s hand spread all the way across her mouth.  “Oh!  I forgot!  Tarmi spilled trout paste on it two Sundays ago and I haven’t got the stain out yet.  There’s been all the work on your dresses to do, and all the cleanng….”

     Her father knocked at the door.  “I don’t suppose anybody’s ready yet.”

     Tarmi and Jessifer rushed out in tears to tell him what had happened.  Their mother came along and, hearing the story, just sighed.  “Well, Slagneer will have to stay home this year, I suppose.  Next year, we’ll see to it that she has time to tend to her own clothes as well as yours.”

     But as they were leaving in the coach, she whispered to her husband, “We’ll have to get the doctor in to look at Slavneer.  This isn’t normal.”

     “Very strange,” Soapsuds’s father agreed.  “Very strange indeed that she should have time to clean everything except her Sunday dress.”

     In truth, Soapsuds had done it all on purpose.  For weeks she’d been looking forward to her annual chance to sneak into her stepsisters’ rooms and scrub the floors.  As soon as the coach was out of sight, she ran to fetch her favorite sponge and her best pail.  When the pail was full of soap and water, she rolled her work dress above her knees so she could get down on all floors and scour the boards.

     Tarmi’s room would be quicker, so she started there.  Tarmi ate a lot in the bedroom, leaving apple cores and nut shells all over everywhere, but Jessifer simply threw everything on the flor.  All that would need to be picked up first, and would take longer.

     There was a bit of picking up, and sweeping up too, to be done in Tarmi’s room, of course.  Soapsuds had to get down on hands and knees to scrape up a lump of bubble gum.  Next to the bubble gum, she found a shoe she’d never seen before.  In the shoe was a foot.

     Looking up from the foot, she found a small, rounded woman whose dark eyes were surrounded by dark rings.  Those eyes looked hard at Soapsuds, as if expecting something.

     “H-how did you get in?” demanded Soapsuds, sitting up.  “Who are you?  And did you know your hem is coming out?  My needle is right over….”

    “Pause, please.”  The woman raised one hand.  “I am Elisabeth McPixie, your fairy godmother.  I am here to see that you go to the ball.”

     “Oh no!” cried Soapsuds, pulling back so  sharply she nearly upset the pail.

     “Yes!” said the woman, now raising both hands.  “I have the power.”

     “That’s what I was afraid of.”  Soapsuds stood up.  “I don’t want to go to the ball!”

     The fairy godmother now raised both eyebrows.  “Don’t want to go to the ball?  Of course you want to go to the ball!”

     “I didn’t even know I had a fairy godmother.”  Soapsuds threw her sponge into the pail.  “Do my sisters have fairy godmothers?”

     “No, dear,” said the fairy.

     “Why not?”

     The fairy godmother shook her head in annoyance.  “Heavens, I’m not in Distribution.  In general, I must say, it is the youngest who has a fairy godmother; the youngest always seem to need extra help.  Now, then.”  She slid a long wand from one sleeve.  “Off to the ball so you can dance with the prince.”

     Soapsuds almost stepped in the pail as she stepped back even farther.  “The prince?  But…what if he falls in love with me, like in the stories?  I’d be a princess, and have to sit around eating bread and honey all the time, or something.”

     The fairy godmother shook the wand, held it to one ear, and shook it again.  “You know, for two cents I’d mail this job to my sister, only what with postage these days, I’d lose on the deal.  Everyone thinks they know a fairy godmother’s job better than she does.  My roommate says it’s rough being a Tooth Fairy; I’d like to see her cope with you princess wannabes.”

     “But I don’t wannabe!” cried Soapsuds, stamping one foot.

     “Well, you’re gonna be, want to or not,” the fairy godmother snapped, stamping a foot right back at her.

     Soapsuds bent to pull the sponge from the pail again.  “If that happens to me, when are these floors going to get scrubbed?  That’s what I want to know!”:

     “Look.”  The fairy put her hands on Soapsuds’s shoulders.  “If you leave the ball on the last stroke of eleven, you’ll be home in time to get the floors nice and clean.”

     Soapsuds wrinkled her nose.  “Not if my sisters come home early.”

     “You’re talking to your fairy godmother child!” the woman cried.  “Leave that to me: they won’t be home before daybreak.  They’ll kick off their shoes and you can get up early to polish all the scuffed leather, I promise.  Okay?”

     “Well, all right.”  Soapsuds wrung out her sponge.  “If I have to go to the ball.”

     “You do,” said the fairy.  “Now let’s see to your dress.”

     When she wound up and swung the wand, Soapsuds’s stained work dress became a sweeping gown of deep blue with what seemed to be small stars sparkling through it.  The very threadbare apron became a shimmering belt.  “There!” said Elizabeth McPixie, “One of my better designs.  What do you think?”

     “Um,” said Soapsuds, tugging at the shoulders.  “Isn’t the, er, neckline cut a little too low?”

     “That’s the way they’re being worn these days.  Stop that.”  She pushed her goddaughter’s hands away from the collar.  “Now listen to me.  You be back here on the last stroke of eleven.  Ot’s not that the dress will disappear: these spells last until midnight.  But if you plan to scrub the floors, under the beds and all, you’ll need to be here by then.”

     Soapsuds frowned.  “How do I get to the palace and back?”

     “Trust your godmamma.”  Elisabeth McPixie waved the wand again.  The silvery pail became a big, broad shining carriage.  The whisk broom became a short-haired driver, while the broom and the mop became horses.

     “But didn’t you say they’d stay that way until midnight?” Soapsuds protested.  “How can I scrub with them like this?”

     “I’ll fix it when you get back.  Don’t fuss.”  The fairy frowned.  “And don’t think you’re carrying that sponge to the palace.”  Another wave of the wand, and the damp sponge became a reticule, a dainty purse that matched the gown.  “Now, off with you.”

     The fairy godmother handed Soapsuds up not the coach and then whispered to the driver, “Don’t you dare stop anyplace along the way.  She’ll probably try to polish every lamp post in the city.”

     In fact, Soapsuds rode quietly all the way to the palace.  The great building was awesome; she’d seen it from a distance all her life, but this was the closest she’d come to it.  Everyone she saw, when she stepped down from the carriage, was grandly dressed, so grandly, in fact, that she wished she had talked her fairy godmother into letting her stay home and sweep the chimney.

     Once she had been conducted to the ballroom, however, she was perfectly enchanted.  Ballrooms, you see, are so huge, and so vast, that even with an army of servants, the best of them are never perfectly clean.  Those spiral columns were loaded with places which needed dusting, and she saw cobwebs behind one of the tapestries.

     She was pulling these out and rolling them up when a voice behind her inquired, “Wouldn’t you rather dance?”