PaperGirl Blog by Mary Fons

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

Roses On Noses.

Go ahead. Try it sometime.
Go ahead. Try it sometime.

I dated a vaudevillian magician. Talk about confessions!

This was an astonishing eight years ago, before I got sick, before I got married and divorced, before all of that.

The Magician and I met at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, a legendary jazz club here in Chicago. If you are good at jazz, you work a long, long time to get to play at the Mill — all the known greats have done so, all the future greats will. But every Sunday night for the past twenty-five years, the Uptown Poetry Slam takes over the club and it’s “See ya later, jazz, hello, poetry.”

The show’s format includes a half-hour set from a feature performer. The night I met The Magician, he was that act. Usually it’s a poet in the slot, or on rare occasions it’s a music group, but because The Magician was/is a bit of a lyricist and, as he would tell you, a sesquipedalian, (lover of big words) he fit right in and his act was quite popular with the slam crowd. He wore a three-piece suit and he was in his thirties and he had this broad smile and a head of thick black hair and I was smitten. He saw me be a bloodsport poet onstage that night. I saw him pull a Queen of Spades from his shoe. We met and were laughing with each other in under twelve seconds. Et voila: le boyfriend.

One morning months later, I was lounging in his spacious apartment in Logan Square, beaming at him as I watched him rehearse. He was always rehearsing because being good at magic was his profession (it still is.) Magic is all that he does, work-wise, and he’s made his living doing it for over twenty years. I was admiring his dedication and also his jacket and tie; he always wore a jacket and a tie, always. He didn’t own bluejeans. I thought that was so cool.

“Would you like to see something special, Mary?” he asked me. I nodded and clapped and bounced in my seat. Watching magic tricks makes you seven.

He took a rose from his magic case. He kind of shook himself once to loosen up and focus. Then, talking to me sweetly while he moved, he tilted his head back and brought the stem of the rose up to the tip of his nose. That is where he placed it, the tip of the long-stemmed rose, right there on the end of his nose. And then…he let go.

He was balancing it. I couldn’t believe it. He made microscopic movements to the right, back, left, left, backforward, backright to keep the rose upright, right there on his nose! He had definitely stopped talking. I didn’t even breathe. This was not a fake rose, a trick rose. This was a rose rose, and he was magnificent, like a seal or a cartoon come to life. My boyfriend kept it there for fifteen seconds or so until “ah!” it tipped over and he caught it and bowed deeply.

“Wow,” I said, mouth hanging open. “That was so cool! Do it again! Do it again!” And he did do it again for me and many times after that. But I’ll never forget what he said when I asked him how long it took to be able to do it.

He said it took him about ten years.

“Ten years??” I pictured him practicing tilting his head back every day for ten years. All those roses!

“That’s right. Ten years of daily practice for ten seconds of your enjoyment,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. He turned back to his case and began to put away his tools. I sat and thought about the time it takes to really learn something, the years that we spend to get good at what we do, and how there are no overnight successes. Roses fall off noses for years and years and then, with a pinch of luck, we keep them up there. And someone sees.

Storytime: The Hotel Coffeemaker

posted in: Day In The Life, Story, Work 3
Why I oughtta...
Why, I oughtta…

The Hotel Coffeemaker

Once upon a time, there was a girl whose alarm went off.

She fumbled for her phone and knocked it off the bedside table. Thus, she began her day the way she always did, with panic that she had just broken a piece of plastic that cost five hundred dollars. Finding that her phone was fine, the girl shut the alarm off and rubbed her eyelids for awhile.

She got up and shuffled to the bar sink in her hotel room. She took a little paper hat off a coffee mug and plugged in the coffeemaker on the counter. “Hello, coffeemaker,” she said.

The coffeemaker said nothing.

The girl filled her mug to the top with water and poured the water into the coffeemaker’s reservoir. She put the coffee pod in the coffee pod basket. She pushed a button that said BREW and then she stood there at the sink and thought about her job.

The coffeemaker burbled and steamed for a few minutes, and then with a rather rude “Pah!” it was done. The girl — who needed coffee very badly — was excited until she looked at what the machine had produced: a half cup of coffee. But she had poured a full mug of water into the reservoir! However much water was in her mug, when it ran through the coffeemaker, shouldn’t she get exactly that much coffee in her cup? Even adjusting for evaporation/inflation, there was definitely coffee missing. But where had it gone?

The girl drank the coffee, but it was gone too quickly and she was confused.

“Let’s try this again,” the girl said, and she studied the directions on the coffeemaker’s lid. She repeated the steps: mugful — truly full — of water, pod, BREW. Sure enough, “Pah!” went the coffeemaker when it was finished and her mug was again only half-full.

“Coffeemaker, why did you not make a full cup of coffee?” the girl said in a stern voice. Again, the coffeemaker said nothing.

The girl picked up the coffeemaker and shook it. She unplugged it and plugged it back in. She read the instructions on the lid once more; she even tried making two cups at once to see if that might be the ticket, but every time, no matter what she did or how much water she poured into the coffeemaker, she still only got a half cup of coffee in her mug. Every time.

“I don’t like you,” the girl said, narrowing her eyes. “At best, you’re terrible at making coffee. At worst, you’re drinking it. If you don’t explain yourself in the next 60 seconds, I’m going to the breakfast buffet where there are faucets of coffee just waiting to fill up every cup in Houston. Do you understand me? Now talk!”

The coffeemaker was silent. The girl tapped her foot. Almost a minute went by.

“That’s ten more seconds you’ve got, Mister…Coffee,” said the girl, though really it was a different brand so she knew she had just weakened her position. After ten more seconds, after the coffeemaker had stubbornly refused any attempt to explain itself, the girl sniffed and turned on her heels. She promptly tripped on her bathrobe, catching herself on the closet door handle on the way down. The day was shaping up great.

Pah!

Who Can Say What Is Good and What Is Bad?

posted in: Art, Tips, Word Nerd 4
It's a baby bunny who is seems to be clapping? This is inarguably good. Keep reading.
It’s a baby bunny who is seems to be clapping? This is inarguably good. Keep reading.

There’s a Chinese parable I like. It basically goes like this:

“There once was a farmer whose only son grew up to be a great horse rider. ‘How good it is that my son is masterful with horses!’ the man said, and the villagers exclaimed, ‘Yes, it is wonderful that he is so good with horses,’ and no one could disagree.

One day, the boy was thrown from his best horse and injured badly. Both his legs were broken and his back was broken also. ‘A tragedy!’ cried his father, and the villagers lamented the crippled boy, agreeing that it was a terrible tragedy that the boy was thrown from his horse. The farmer cursed the day he taught his son to ride.

Not a week later, soldiers came to the village to take the young men away to war. When they stopped at the farmer’s house, they saw his crippled son and did not take him to fight because he was injured. ‘What luck!’ cried the farmer. ‘How good that my son was thrown from his horse!'”

The point is a question: what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’? I was diagnosed with a terrible disease several years ago; that felt pretty bad. But through my illness I found a sweetness to life that was until then unknown to me. Was it good, then, to be ill? Debatable, but…well, solidly debatable. Getting invited to my first cool kid party in high school was so very, very good for a nerd like me — but then I drank mass quantities of rum and apple juice, the room began to spin, and I wanted to die. That was, um, bad. (Rum and apple juice?? Oy. Youth is wasted on the young.)

But isn’t there a hard stop on this? Aren’t there some experiences or ideas or situations that are unequivocally good or unequivocally bad? Coming up with examples is not an easy exercise, but neither are squat thrusts and we all know how good those are for you. Just for fun, here are two straight-up “good” situations to be in and two clearly “bad” ones, at least according to me, at press time:

GOOD
– kissing the boy (or girl) you have a crush on for the first time
– getting a paycheck

BAD
– having to hide in a broom closet, quickly
– gum in your hair

Right? I mean come on, now.

Comic Relief: The Cantaloupe Poem

posted in: Art, Food, Poetry, Word Nerd 1
Well played! Courtesy DailyDoseOfCute.net -- no artist name was given.
Well played! Courtesy DailyDoseOfCute.net — no artist name was given.

Man! All the empathy and the bummed out fourth graders around here are starting to get to me. Today, a diversion. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you The Cantaloupe Poem, a little ditty I wrote awhile back and the first in my series of fruit poems.

Enjoy, and read aloud if you’re able. The meter is entertaining and you can do voices if you want.

The Cantaloupe Poem
by Mary Fons

Say, friend! Could you spare some time,
For the timid cantaloupe?
That humble fruit whose name don’t rhyme,
‘Cept with “antelope.”

Not fit for tarts, no good for pie,
Pale melon sits, dejected.
“I’m tasty!” you can hear it cry —
But to whom’s the call directed?

The lady ne’er looks its way,
While enjoying her fruit salad,
“I’m sure the flavor’s swell,” she’ll say,
“But the color’s rather pallid.”

The men all pass it up and shout,
Cantaloupe’s for fairies!”
(Yet they’re always ready to flip out,
For oranges and strawberries.)

The fruit tends to befuddle
Those coarse and less refined,
The pastel melon’s flavor’s subtle —
Not counting, ‘course, the rind.

 Do enjoy some, like with ham!
Wrapped ‘round a slender slice!
You’ll quickly say, “Well, damn!”
“Now that tastes really nice!”

Or smooth it in a blender
On a hot midsummer’s day,
Then sit back and surrender
To a cantaloupe sorbet.

Oh, friends! Do reassess
Any anti-melon feeling;
Say not “no” but “Yes, yes, yes!”
And soon I’ll hear you squealing:

“Cantaloupe, I love you!
How firm and how delicious!
There’s now no fruit above you!
You’re yummy and nutritious!”

If The West Was Won, It Was Won Because Of This.

From L-R: Hero, Kid.
From L-R: Hero, Kid.

When I was in fourth grade, my parents got divorced.

It was 1989. Movies like When Harry Met Sally and Working Girl were out and they were funny but sad, too, because love was clearly hard. Erica Jong was writing divorced chick-lit with titles like Parachutes and Kisses; it was all Reagan and minivans in America back then and a failed marriage was kinda en vogue. Smart, devastated women had made foolish choices, okay sure, but maybe there was life after divorce and maybe that life included a wine cooler and a sexy, Mr. Right #2, if you listened to enough Carly Simon.

But divorce wasn’t a funny movie for Mom. And I was eight. For me, 1989 was Mrs. Brown’s homeroom and something disintegrating in my solar plexus. My sisters and I practiced our stiff upper lips. Mad verbal as we were, the word “adulterer,” was way too present in our vocabularies. We learned to use it because it was what Dad was; he was also “depressed.” He was also leaving again.

When it all came to an end in 1989, Mom bit the proverbial bullet and the marriage bit the proverbial dust. It was like a Western with a custody battle. One afternoon I got a note not to board the school bus home but walk to the library, instead. My mother and sisters met me there and we never went home. We never spent another night in the house where we grew up. It was over, and it was happening now. Mom had us; that was secure. But we couldn’t live where we had been living.

Minor glitch: we didn’t have anywhere to go. Which meant we were homeless.

There were family friends whose kindness and grace patched up some bullet holes. Each of us girls were farmed out to friends whose parents would take on a foster Fons for as long as they could while Mom wrestled with lawyers, the papers, and the wolves at the door. And outside of the weekends here and there in different spots, there were two different couples who took us in for several weeks on end, all of us, together. They interrupted their lives, their flow, their schtick, and they let three kids and a soon-to-be single mother into their house until the pack figured out the next step. There are acts of kindness and there are acts of kindness.

I was in North Dakota on Sunday when a ninety-three-year-old woman I’ll call J. was suddenly there, smiling at me. J. and her husband were one of the couples who sheltered my family. Her husband is gone; she lives in North Dakota now near her daughter. The ebullient, joyous, remarkably spry woman (a quilter, no surprise) laughed this glorious laugh and said, “Oh, my! Well, would you…! Kid! You’re looking awfully pretty for a kid — will you look…!” and her eyes were wet and she patted my hand and my hair and kept looking at me and laughing and patting and laughing.

I don’t cry as much as I used to. But I cried to see J. again. That woman helped us. She and her husband helped us when we needed it real, real bad. I left her in North Dakota after our happy, achingly awesome reunion and on the plane home I kept looping back to the conversation that must’ve taken place when she and her husband P. decided to help us. I picture them in bed, lights out, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling.

“Marianne and the girls, Paul. What we talked about.”

“Of course. You call Marianne in the morning.”

1 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 246