Another stumbling effort at entertaining a tiny group of people.
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| Sleepytime Toothgrinder's Carnival of Errors Another stumbling effort at entertaining a tiny group of people. |
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25 January 2002 Susan, Dr. Toothgrinder’s assistant, was also unusual. He found her in England, working as a receptionist at an undistinguished museum in York. He found that she never really touched anything. While she could affect objects, use tools, consume food with no difficulty, they never came closer to her skin than a few millimeters. For a time, she had an act in the Carnival, but it was difficult to make a really sensational show out of someone not touching things. Susan vociferously objected to the idea of appearing in a show where she touched things, and Sleepytime was not so cruel that he would turn her out, so she became his assistant. posted by Bigtooth | 10:30 AM 24 January 2002 It had five legs. Really, in the scheme of the Carnival, it was not that unusual a creature. Also, the paws that he’d wanted rampant and frightening really didn’t look very scary, with almost no claws to speak of at the end of skinny, skittery legs. Five of them. The presentation would have rested on the sight of three paws reaching out toward the viewer underneath those huge, staring eyes and the (admittedly quite small) mouth full of (yet smaller, and not very sharp) teeth. After Dr. Toothgrinder decided to spare it, though, he noticed how agile it was, the fifth leg fully functional and its paw as apt as the rest to grab some shiny thing from his desk and secret it elsewhere in the room. Training it to pick pockets was a simple matter, or would have been had any of the people in the village where he then lived (in Madagascar, as you will recall) wore clothing with pockets. He decided to move the Carnival to Canada immediately. posted by Bigtooth | 10:20 AM In Sleepytime Toothgrinder’s Carnival of Errors there was a pet. It was an unusual pet, of course, as Dr. Toothgrinder (who was a doctor, indeed, and that story another time) was a collector of God’s errors and other such curiosities. He had at first intended to collect this pet the way he had collected so many others: pinned to a board, its snout frozen in a snarl, its clawsy paws clawing the air. He paused, though, sitting in his little laboratory in Madagascar (he lived there at the time, though his carnival is now somewhere in Alberta), the point of a yard-long needle hovering over the creature’s twitching spine. He could not kill it, whatever it was (in his heart of hearts, Dr. Toothgrinder was a fervent antinomian, and refused to learn the proper names of many things, which made medical school in particular very challenging). So, he kept it alive, and fed it fruits whose names he refused to learn, but which fortunately he could obtain by describing them to the operators at Pittman & Davis (which gave him the chance to say “sweet, juicy flesh” to a woman over the phone). And he trained it to pick pockets. posted by Bigtooth | 8:40 AM |
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