TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 15

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 29, 200000006


Dear Members of the Tree,

	Meyshe's been home all week with a cold.  Now he's hacking 
and coughing and recuperating upstairs, while downstairs, I type out 
another cluster of life stories.


	          YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

	I was six years old and had survived yet another onslaught of 
my sister's.  She'd grabbed me by the neck and punched me around the 
head a bit, hit me in the chest and dragged me by my hair.  Lest it 
be misconstrued as being all physical, she was also teasing me and 
berating me for being the limited, sadly wanting, deficient 
disappointment that I was.  And she knew how to toss threats that 
could frighten a horse off its shoes.  I swear sometimes my shoes 
shot straight off, the socks shooting off my feet, right behind them, 
when she issued her threats.  I was sitting on the living room floor, 
recovering from a nasty row.  My mother came into the room and got 
down on the floor beside me.  She cupped her hand to her mouth and 
round my ear.  She said to me, "Tobie.  You can hit back."  It had 
never occurred to me.

	          YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

	Saturday morning I immersed myself in cartoons.  This was 
when I was four, five and six years old.  Truth be known, I probably 
drowned myself in Saturday morning cartoons up until I was 15, but 
we'll leave that.  We just won't go there.  When I was very little, 
in Silver Spring, Maryland, it was a weekly tradition, maybe a weekly 
compulsion.  All the Saturday morning cartoons were on one channel, 
because there were only three channels.  What they offered was 
Popeye, Betty Boop, the little clown in the ink bottle and all the 
old Loony Toons toons from the '30s, '40s, and what there was of the 
'50s.  Then, there were old movies, Hopalong Casssidy, Superman, The 
Lone Ranger and the Little Rascals, all of them.

	It was the little clown in the ink bottle that fascinated me. 
The cartoon would begin with a movie of the artist's hand opening the 
ink bottle, dipping his pen into it, shaking off the excess ink, then 
drawing the clown who came to life as soon as he was put on paper. 
Then, he'd take over the episode.  Sometimes, he climbed out of the 
ink bottle.  I can't remember which.  He had all sorts of adventures, 
but he was a bad clown, with oppositional behaviour (there are now 
drugs for this), always getting into trouble, and the last thing that 
would happen is the artist would have to stuff the bad clown back 
into the ink bottle and put the cap on tight to keep him and his 
trouble prisoner, keep the rest of us safe.

	The cartoon I remember best was about the end of the world. 
The clown was on the loose, and he got into this building where there 
were all sorts of levers and wheels, buttons and dials and gizmos. 
One big lever was labeled, "The End of the World", and the clown 
pulled that lever all the way over.  I think there was a little dog 
who tried to push the lever back, but the clown was dead set on 
pulling that one lever all the way over.  After he'd pulled it, 
earthquakes happened and great fissures in the earth opened up.  The 
sun melted and the moon fell into the earth.  Buildings fell over and 
then there was a long view of the earth turning around in the heavens 
with the clown walking on top of it, the globe going round and round 
under his feet.

	The cartoon scared me so much that I couldn't sleep.  I lay 
there awake at night in the dark with my eyes open and after a while, 
I hallucinated, so that up on the ceiling above my scared head, I saw 
that evil clown traipsing on top of the earth which was turning under 
his big feet.  I screamed so loud that my mother came running in. 
Who made that cartoon for little kids?  Joel Lubar?

	          YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

	My mother's mother was the eldest of five.  Right after her 
in birth order was uncle Al.   Al's nickname was Alex Red-Man.  That 
was because of his hair.  But I only remember him having a big red 
bald head.  He was mean to us, very acerbic and never affectionate. 
He ignored the kids, mostly.  The closest he ever got to us was to 
make fun of us for something or scold us for something else.  He 
married a woman named Gussie, and Aunt Gussie was as nice as Al was 
mean.  Gussie had pointed him out to her girlfriends and swore she 
would marry him.  He was a tough catch, the pretty boy of the lot, 
the one who was vain and popular among the women.  I guess Gussie 
won, though there are other more ironic words for it.  Gussie laughed 
a lot and always had a good word to say about us little kids.  Al and 
Gussie had a daughter, Doris.  Doris and my mother were raised 
together, by design of my Gramma, as if they were sisters.  Whenever 
my mother got invited to a party, Gramma would call and ask if Doris 
could come, too.  My mother has told me many stories about how Doris 
and she got into trouble, or how they played this that and the other. 
Doris was a flirt, and pretty.  My mother felt inferior, not as 
pretty, and my mother was very very shy.  But I saw that photograph 
of my mother and Doris, lined up, a posed picture taken 
professionally.  Doris was pretty, but my mother was beautiful.  I 
always thought so.

	Doris married a man named Norman.  Norman was wealthy all his 
life.  I don't know where the money came from, but Norman had 
chauffeurs drive him to school and he'd have them drop him off a few 
blocks away from the school so none of the other kids would see him 
arriving in a limousine.

	When I became aware of Norman was when he owned a string of 
toy stores called, King Norman's Kingdom of Toys.  He even had an 
amusement park out in Concord, the east bay inland, even though they 
lived in San Francisco.  And on Saturday mornings, King Norman had a 
television program sponsored by a shoe company, Gallenkamp.  A few 
times, he invited my sister and me to come and be on his television 
program.  He dressed up as a king with a crown and robes and 
everything.  And Doris played the part of Page Joy.  She wore a 
little skirt and tights and had her hair cut in a page boy.  One of 
the things King Norman had on his program was a weekly talent 
contest.  Three little kids would compete with each other for a 
prize, and the judges were little kids from the audience.  Norman 
designated me as one of the judges, and I remember being out there on 
the stage, sitting in a chair at a table with the other judges, 
watching the three contestants perform and not being able to take my 
eyes off the T.V. monitor, because every so often, there I was, my 
face on television.  All three contestants were little girls in one 
strap sequined leotards doing tap dances.  They were equally rotten 
and equally good.  It came time to vote.  The judges were supposed to 
select one of three cards and hand it to Page Joy.  When they asked 
for my selection, I wasn't ready because I'd been too busy looking at 
the monitor.  So they hurried me up.  I panicked and picked any card 
out of the three without looking at it.  I was too flustered to 
select a true winner or make any sort of judgment at all.  And it 
turned out that the vote was unanimous for contestant number three 
who took the prize and probably felt good all week for what reason.

	Norman still calls  himself King Norman today, even in his 
80s, having retired from his toy stores decades ago.  He and Doris 
travel all over the country in their RV the size of a greyhound bus. 
You never know where they're going to be, unlike the rest of us.

	          YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net