Three Little Oddities

Impromtu
There's this guy, right? He's part Yeshua of Nazareth, part Matthew of McConaughey, and he is a movie star and he has been flitting around all day stressed about his public image. We're in what appears to be an industrial basement, mazelike but tidy, and through a series of rooms a series of issues has plagued McJesuhey. The most recent problem is his being linked in the subversive online press to pedophilia. (Pizzagate and Comet Ping Pong are not mentioned by name, but it is obvious what's on Brain's mind.) So here's the stripper messiah, wearing shiny pants (oldsters: think BeeGees) and a sort of vest-thing designed to obscure from view not one single square decimeter of his tan, ripped, lightly furry torso (oldsters: think Andy Gibb).

With this latest scandal brewing, McX is fretful and pacing, positively outgribing with anxiety. It falls to me to calm him down and map out his rehabilitation strategy. So I put a hand on his shoulder and speak quietly and reassuringly—'Look, this is nonsense and everybody knows it and we have to deal with it head-on and blah blah blah'—like a diva whisperer, and I talk him down to the point where we can go see The Guy, some media nabob or representative thereof who is suddenly standing behind a service counter (actually, he has just re-purposed an institutional 3' x 8' folding table). And I say, 'We have a problem here: the adoring public may start lumping my client in with John Wayne Gacy.' 

Both guys look at me blankly. They've never heard of Gacy. I have my work cut out for me.

Romanza 

I'm with a bunch of friends in a restaurant in California. We're drinking cocktails and engaged in lively conversation, but what's really on my mind is a bit of geographical detail re the city we are in: it's a sort of sunken table land in the middle of the city, with a lake on one side and a highly storied neighborhood on the other. It has an instantly, universally recognizable name, like Hollywood, which waking Brain can't recall; for our purposes, let's call it Wallyhood. Wallyhood has the unique feature of extending across the table land and other parts of the city which sit in a vast earth-structural overhang, somehow naturally cantilevered, such that much of Wallyhood is basically in a cave.

I've never actually been to this area of the city but I've seen—we've all seen—so very many movies set there. What's on my mind right now, since we're just a few miles away, is how the reality of the place compares with the mythos. So at one point I avail myself of the presumed expertise of the restaurant's manager. He is mid-30s, Latinate, rotund yet spry, neatly bearded and mustachioed, dapper in a dark red suit over black shirt, and absolutely adorable. Yes, sir? How may I be of service? he asks. 

My words run away and hide. 

I want to ask him what is the real story of Wallyhood. It's not really all glamorous and sexy and Sunset-Strippy, right? But I can't remember the name Wallyhood, or the name "Sunset Strip", or any names or attributes of anything I set out to ask. It suddenly occurs to me that I am very drunk: so drunk that things I thought mere seconds ago are being irretrievably misplaced. And the manager, without his professional smile diminishing one iota, is becoming more and more impatient. I finally give up the battle to make words and deflate into a blancmange before him; he leaves with a masterfully snide quip about how it is absolutely his duty and his pleasure to assist me.

Yep, I'm drunk. But Heather is totaled. She is lying facedown on the tiny cocktail table. She is still awake, though, and responsive in conversation; she just can't get up. It's because we've been drinking stiff cocktails for hours and we ordered food ages ago (some huge shrimp preparation for a dozen people to share—perhaps because in this world there is only shrimp) and after all this time the food hasn't arrived. I become mortified that it is my fault the food hasn't arrived, since I distracted the manager so pointlessly from his actual labors.

Novelette
It's the basement of Morris Library and I still don't know where anything is, since they completely overhauled it (years after I left my employment there). I try to think back, and I believe I can safely say that where I am sitting right now, in the midst of an Technolollapalooza, used to be the Government documentation stacks. (Actually, while I was there Brain came up with "Reference Section" but I am correcting Brain because Brain was wrong.) Anyway, I tell Marya, by phone—and then by writing the same message in red crayon on the wall with my foot—that where I am right now used to be Government docs, back when they actually had information printed on paper stored on shelves. Progress must progress! Indeed, the red crayon is really a stylus and the wall is a screen that accepts my writing and lights it up all Christmasy.

I set out to see what else has become of my old stomping grounds; and I've stomped almost out of range when I hear some appealing, old-timey music coming from where the Medicine and Technology stacks used to be. I turn around and head back toward the music. It is a group of guys performing a patter-song, but somehow it is one they are creating on the spot by reading the words of a technical journal to an existing tune, something awfully Arthur Sullivany, rather like Tom Lehrer's listing the chemical elements to the tune of "I am the very model of a modern Major General". Only this song, or at least the rendition, is more distinctly ragtimey or dixielandish. It's an intriguing performance, and for the infraction of being intrigued I am summarily called out to do the next such filk. 

Well, actually, Cramer and I are both called out to come up with something. We get to choose the tune and the source material to be sung to that tune; but I can't for the life of me come up with any good ideas. Brain tries out things like Moby-Dick sung to the tune of "I Am a Rock" by Simon and Garfunkle; whereas Cramer, clearly an art masochist, goes for the yellow pages and Buddhist chant.

We are not a hit.