Anvil in a Lace Bootie

Following the disqualification of Rose Trelawny for stealing the president’s watch fob, the first runner up has been elevated to wear the crown of Miss Pageant.

Meet Iris Breedlove, our new Miss Pageant. Iris is a licensed plumber from Bennington, Vermont. When not plumbing, she can be found whittling facsimiles of Civil War cannons to give as gifts to hobos. On alternate Sundays, she flies to Denver, Colorado and washes dishes at the Fred’s Hofbrau there. She has been institutionalized twice, but the second time was a mistake. She refuses to dance unless a tuba is playing. She shouts “I LOVE WORLD PEACE” once in a while, sometimes in the midst of a completely unrelated statement. She reserves the right to be refused service.

A TALE OF TWO JESSIES

Two Jessies were born in 1864, one in San Francisco, California, and the other in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The Californian was Jessie Anderson, who in time turned out to be the loon’s mother’s father’s mother. Arriving in Massachusetts was Jessie Ralph, who in time turned out to be the actress playing the role of Jack Burley’s mother in the movie ‘San Francisco’.

THE QUAKE AND THE FIRE

The wealthy Mrs. Burley, Jessie Ralph, looks on as her mansion is dynamited after the quake by the Army as part of the attempt to create a fire break. Stealing the picture with the way she delivers this one line, she says, “My son was born in that house.”

MEANWHILE, IN SANTA MONICA

Jessie Anderson, now Mrs. Harry Gorham, has to endure worrying about her family and friends in the city of her childhood. She will succumb far too young to cancer in 1907.

Jim Fan Elliott cursed himself for perhaps the millionth time since the day forty years earlier when he had made the mistake of his life. Now on his deathbed in the creaky no good room he rented in an otherwise abandoned slut of a building, he moaned a final time at his folly. On his bedside cardboard box, he left his only possession, a never ending roll of toilet paper.

The fateful night forty years earlier unfolded as follows. Jim Fan, well in his cups, staggered down a dimly lit aisle in a grocery store in Fort Collins, Colorado. A groaning one-armed behemoth stretched a paw at him and said in a piteous manner, “Help?” Jim Fan was able to focus enough to see the deeply embedded thorn. Since he made a habit of having needle-nosed pliers on his person at all times, it was with the greatest of ease, drunk as he was, that he extracted the thorn. The grateful behemoth spilled words of thanks, “Words of thanks I haven’t enough of. However, I can grant you a single wish. Would you have untold wealth, told wealth, a diamond car, immortality?” Jim Fan smirked. He snickered. “How about an unending roll of toilet paper?” he joshed. SLAMBILLICKEE he stood alone in the dim aisle with a roll of toilet paper in his hand. And it accompanied him all through his life’s journey and never ran out.

Moral: Never josh in response to a wish offer.

At the foot of an old, old wharf lives the cutest, silliest tugboat you ever saw.

Are you sure about this, Hardie? I’ve quaffed many a brew with a wide variety of cute, silly tugboats in my time. Your tugboat is undeniably cute and silly, but you steer into troubled waters when you add the dreaded ‘est’ to anything. Am I right? Or no?

THE PRANKSTER CLOUD

Canada’s Gladys Smith, later known as America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, in fact did every single one of those things and more. Why, she swam the English Channel to celebrate her third birthday. She balanced on one foot on the back of a buffalo and rode it in that manner from Pasadena to Santa Monica. She summered one winter in Antarctica. She invented and flew her own intergalactic spaceship. She was some kind of talented. That’s for sure. And I haven’t even scratched the surface of her accomplishments, what with the yodeling, the rodeo, the social engineering, and the feats of strength, to mention a few. But I’ll save those for another time. My keeper is beckoning.

Mary Pickford:

a. once bested Fatty Arbuckle in an acorn eating contest.

b. twice put dead moths in D. W. Griffith’s porridge.

c. was a lumberjack before getting into pictures.

d. secretly scaled Mt. Everest in 1908.

e. had a wolverine farm in the San Fernando valley.

f. always kept a portrait of Martin Van Buren in her pocketbook.

The littlest germ moped.

“I never get to do anything,” it said.

While all of the other germs were out and about causing disease, the littlest germ was not allowed to leave the germ house and was constantly reminded that it was too small to cause any measurable misery. Vowing to itself to prove them all wrong, the littlest germ hitched a ride on a breeze and wafted into the nearest town.

Miracle of miracle, the littlest germ not only ravaged the small town, it decimated the entire planet, stripping it of every sentient life form bigger than a single M&M, plain, not peanut.

Moral: No tourniquet is too small to aid a broken heart.

Once upon a time the loon, the loonette, and the loon princeling were driving up to Tuolumne Meadows in the high country of Yosemite National Park. The loon was at the wheel when a speeding vehicle roared up from behind, passed on the right, swerved back in front and shot off careening into the distance. The epithet which leapt unbidden from the loon’s lips was, “Slime-headed bone!” Thusly did the mantle of lunacy settle more comfortably onto his shoulders, and what’s more, a very fine epithet was born.