Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Meme Demystificatus

No-one took a shot at my stories here at The Last Duchess, but numerous readers at Shakespeare's Sister dove in, and quite a few were correct in their guesses, though they weren't all 100% sure. Which is why it's called a guess, no?

This little collection was great fun to put together though, and it confirmed my belief that I am a better storyteller than creator of flat-out fiction. On to the stories and their veracity (or lack thereof), then.

Story Number One, Final Exam Anxiety. True. I held on to the B, but suffered a nasty cold throughout my Christmas vacation.

Story Number Two, Motherf*cking Bomb Scares On A Motherf*cking Plane. True. The story of what I was doing in New York that particular time around is so unbelievable, I considered including it, but it's also a rather long and involved tale that would've consumed the whole post.

Story Number Three, Tea And Tyranny. False, but only the name of the leader: Idi Amin was indeed living in Saudi Arabia then, and I doubt I'd have run into him in Nassau, as Minstrel Boy pointed out. The tall, uniformed man who approached me at the harbor was actually a high-ranking Bahamian official, and he was very charming and proper--not at all despotic. And the tea and biscuit purchase, the setting, the car, the conversation, and the lunch were all recounted accurately. I simply thought that a hated, exiled criminal with an oddly fun-to-say name would make for a story so outrageous, it had to ring true.

Story Number Four, Brown M&M Blues. True. Furthermore, at an after party, Mr. Roth literally climbed over me, stepping onto and across my lap and bracing himself by placing one hand on the wall and one on my shoulder, in order to get to the other side of a fully-occupied sofa and sit closer to the bar. What a jerk.

Story Number Five, Yo, ho, ho...Fish Fingers! True. A while back, I wrote an e-mail to the parent company of Birdseye to ask if they had any of that year's ads in their archives. The correspondence went back and forth, with employees copying me at every turn, and then it all went silent. Oh well. The sounds, smells, and colors of the experience live on, in all their sunny accuracy, right here in my brain.

Thanks to all who hazarded a guess or two. What fun!

1 comment: