Restaurant Review: China Garden. Provo, Utah.

In my 63 years of living I have yet to walk into a Chinese restaurant where they are glad to see me. Usually they treat me like Dracula drifting into a blood bank; 'You here to suck us dry, or what?' After giving it careful and prejudiced thought, I have come to the conclusion that most proprietors feel an awful injustice has been done to them; they were meant to be Mandarin satraps or Confucian scholars, not grubbing for money over a greasy hot wok twelve hours a day. So they take it out on their customers.

When I asked for the tangerine beef, which is on their online menu, the lady hovering over me grimaced as if I had stepped on her bunion, then said "Don't have; never have it."

I had been looking forward to this particular dish. I researched it on Google and went without any breakfast this morning so I would have a good appetite to enjoy it. And then the lady tells me I can't have it. They don't have it. It's been a phantom, a willow-the-wisp, a fool's errand, all along. So I settled for the beef Szechwan.

  The beef was tender and the sauce was spicy. I got a bowl of hot and sour soup and a fountain drink with it. I paid $9.80. But it wasn't tangerine beef. So I'm only giving this place 2 Burps.

My fortune cookie slip read: "Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses an appointment."  I'm putting that one in my hope chest.

However, to be fair, they do have the largest men's room I have ever seen in a restaurant outside of a big franchise:

That counts for a lot to a fat guy like me.

Having made a thorough study of the works of Sax Rohmer, I believe I may speak with some authority when it comes to the many and varied types of torture to be found in a Chinese restaurant. I have already described one, namely the perfidious Tangerine Switcheroo. Here are a few others to look out for:

Chopsticks of Death. Many of these places give you a set of balsa wood chopsticks that are not quite split in half, so you have to pull them apart like a wishbone. Only, sometimes they don't come apart very easily and so you really yank on them -- then they explode into a shower of splinters, blinding you and quite possibly bringing on cardiac arrest.

The Mockery of Spice. It's not marked as 'spicy' on the menu, and yet when you shovel the first bite into your mouth you can immediately feel your tongue turning into hot asphalt. It's no use arguing about it with the waitress; she'll only bring you a plate of something else, if you insist, that is so bland your taste buds will catch the red eye to Miami for the next samba festival.

Water, water, everywhere . . .  During the start of your meal, before the soy sauce and MSG kick in, your waitress will stop by every 47 seconds to refill your water glass. But once you begin craving a long cool drink of water, all the help has evaporated. You are left to pant out your life on the floor, with an arid tongue so swollen it could pass for a sea cucumber.

The Belly Squeeze. All the table and chairs are bolted to the floor, so if you are a little on the heavy side, and try to slide into your seat, you find that  your gut is being sawn away by the table's edge. Frantic movement just increases the ripping action, and you're disemboweled in a matter of minutes.

En Strengen av Perler: Memoirs of Another Mangy Lover, or Alice of the Circus.

In 1962 Groucho Marx convulsed the country with his confessions of illicit passion in a book called Memoirs of a Mangy Lover. As a randy nine-year-old I obtained a paperback edition before you could say "prepubescent" and immersed myself in his slightly raunchy anecdotes. Needless to say, I was chapfallen when his book failed to deliver the dirty goods. It was merely a string of whimsical stories held together by the common theme of romantic collapse and calamity -- something I did not wish to study in depth at the time.

But today, older, wiser, and bereft of any meaningful connections with the distaff side of society, I, too, am ready to settle back and brew up some of my own memoirs of mangy love affairs gone awry.

Specifically, the tale of Alice of the Circus.

I have previously mentioned that in 1973 I worked as one of the advance clowns for Ringling Brothers. Among other things, this entailed spending 3 months in New York City touting The Greatest Show on Earth.

I enjoyed my settled routine in the Big Apple while it lasted, casting aside the nervous tics and ferret-like demeanor that comes all too often to those who lead a peripatetic existence. I went to church each Sunday and gradually put names to faces among the LDS congregants.

One member in particular had a face I desired to put a name to. Alice. She had jet black hair, effervescent brown eyes, pouty and luscious carmine lips, and a body that would not quit. I sat next to her every Sabbath, and gradually we began holding hands while singing hymns such as "Come, Come, Ye Saints" and "If You Could Hie to Kolob".

She was a nursing student at Colombia University, and lived at the Young Women's Hebrew Association building on Nagle Avenue in Manhattan.

When the circus hit town I invited her down to Madison Square Garden to watch it whenever she wanted. I had an in with the operator of the private elevator on the east side of the Garden. It was supposed to be strictly for the bigwigs, but the guy who ran it was crazy for yellow bread pudding the Greek joint on the corner served; I would bring him a cold hunk every few days -- and for that he let Alice and I ride up to the mezzanine as if we were royalty.

Alice was enchanted with the show. She became fast friends with the Hungarian teeter board act, giving the older women in the troupe back rubs when their spines threatened to blow out from catching the menfolk on their shoulders.

On her birthday Mark Anthony in clown alley made her a petite foam rubber birthday cake that turned inside out into a yellow duck.

After the last show I would escort her back to the YWHA. We stopped at a coffee shop along the way that featured something called 'sinkers' -- donuts of a particularly heavy composition that were ideal for dunking in coffee. In fact, the shop featured an 8 by 10 photo of Red Skelton doing his famous "How to Dunk a Donut" routine, using one of their donuts.

Male company was not allowed upstairs at the YWHA, and so we dallied in the lobby, making goo-goo eyes at each other and locking lips when we had the place to ourselves. We were in sync; simpatico; crazy about each other.

Then the time came for me to move on with my advance clown duties, first to Philadelphia and then to Chicago.

And we argued. She wanted me to call her every day. I said I'd write her every day. (A stamp cost eight cents, while a daily long distance call ran into a lot of nickles and dimes.) Then she called me a bad name. She said I was cheap.

I left her standing alone at the Orange Julius bar, took the subway back to my room, packed my bag, and was off to Philly that night.

And once I reached Philadelphia . . . I began calling her every day, to apologize.

She accepted my apologies gracefully, and even let me fly her out so we could attend a performance of H.M.S. Pinafore together.

All was well between us again. She went back to school in New York and I carried on with my publicity work.

Until Denver, when I realized that my bank book was hemorrhaging badly thanks to Ma Bell.

My last call to her was short, sharp, and stereotyped. I told her it was over; she cried; I told her she hadn't done anything wrong; it was all my fault; and she told me to stick my red rubber nose where the sun don't shine.

Alice was my first serious circus fling. After her, I decided that women and clowns don't mix. Clowns are social misfits whose yearning for affection is white hot and spills out in their wild attempts to win an audience's laughter and applause. As long as they are getting that, no woman can ever move into their hearts as anything but a temporary boarder. Real love and domesticity came to me only after I had quit the road (temporarily, as it turned out) and found an apple-cheeked schoolmarm in the wilds of North Dakota . . .

Inversions prompt EPA to bump Utah pollution status to 'serious'

In Utah the air is so clean
it turns the esophagus green.
Each breath that you take
puts your fitness at stake.
(Keep driving your car like a teen!)

The Father of lights

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

James 1:17

The Father of lights sends his brightness abroad
as gifts of the spirit to rich and unshod;
to noble and ragged, to free and repressed,
that all may partake of His gift and be blessed.

Nothing can shake His decrees, or His hand
from spreading the light to the furthermost land.
May I bear your light in my countenance, Lord,
and never conceal it like some treasure hoard! 

A license to practice the news

"There’s no license required to be a journalist."

by Michelle Morgante writing in the Merced Sun-Star


A license to practice the news
would stop many mountebank views.
With certification
would come validation
of all that reporters diffuse. 

Light the World #10

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.

Romans 13:12

Bright shines the armor of those who defend
the Light that will have ev'ry knee soon to bend.
The night of the world with its darkness has fled.
The day peeps around us; we've nothing to dread.
Full sunlight will play on the water and land
to quicken our spirits, as always was planned.
Cast off my black thoughts; my soul now take sway,
so onward I stride towards that unblemished day!  

En Strengen av Perler: A Circus Goat Story

I have a goat story.  Doesn’t everyone?

Back in 1985 I was briefly associated with Aurora, the Living Unicorn.  She was the feature attraction of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus that year.  I had retired from the circus several years earlier to marry and raise a family in Minnesota, working at a small-market radio station in Park Rapids.  I followed the saga of Aurora, the Living Unicorn, in the newspapers.  The media unequivocally  branded her a goat, with some kind of kinky horn transplant.  

One spring morning, as I looked out the kitchen window at the pearls of dew glistening on the tiny new leaves of the butternut tree in the backyard, feeling the lick of a playful southern breeze on my cheek, and generally rejoicing in the placid simplicity of my life, the phone rang. It was my old Ringling pal, Jerry, impresario of garish headlines and unabashed ballyhoo for the circus.  We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes before Jerry got down to brass tacks.  Aurora the Living Unicorn needed a babysitter while the show was in Chicago.  Her current keeper had to leave the show on family business for two weeks.  Would I consider rejoining the show for that time period, to tend the fabulous creature?  Transportation would be paid and the remuneration was handsome.  I could even stay at the Palmer House.

I was initially cold to his offer, but promised to discuss it with the wife and call him back with my decision later in the day.  Amy liked the money, which we could use to pay down the mortgage.  I had the two weeks available as vacation if I wanted.  And several of Amy’s sisters were coming for a long visit anyways.  So it seemed more opportune than I had at first imagined.

That is why a few days later I was in the Windy City, trying to stare down a one-horned goat.  There was no doubt about it – whatever the circus programme might burble, that animal smelled like, looked like, and acted like a goat.  Her horizontal pupils glistened with pure goat malice; she tried to butt me constantly, and nibbled my windbreaker to shreds.  Plus she had the scours, which in goats is a mild form of diarrhea.  Instead of neat little berries of poop scattered here and there, she was constantly dribbling an unspeakable green slime.  Jerry assured me this was not serious.  I should dose her with slippery elm powder, just put it in her grain, and she would be right as rain.

Aurora had her own float, on which she rode in triumph during the Spec.  My job was to be at her side so she did not try to bolt off the platform.  She was tethered to it, but still insisted on leaping away like Super Goat, which might have strangled her.  The costume that circus wardrobe rigged up for me while I was on the float was a cross between Napoleon on the battle field and Bozo.  I staggered under the weight of a ten pound bicorne that sprouted peacock feathers, had a checkered silk vest that was too tight, and wore blazing red knickers that gave way to yellow stockings and large pink slippers.  Aurora wanted those peacock feathers.  She kept jumping up on me, placing her front hoofs on my chest, to better grab a mouth full.  Her foul breath would have made sewer gas seem like Chanel #5.  

True to Jerry’s promise, I had a lavish room at the Palmer House, but I never stayed there.  Not a single night.  Aurora, bless her Bovidae heart, needed companionship at night, as she suffered from insomnia and night jitters when left alone.  So I rolled up in a sleeping bag and nestled with Aurora in fresh hay each night.  By day she was irascible and intractable.  By night she was all affection.  He who snuggles with a goat partakes of the aroma of a goat.  The only way to get rid of that goatish perfume was to shower with Fels-Naptha laundry soap.  

I took the goat, um, I mean the unicorn, to a press conference, where Chicago reporters displayed more interest in the buffet table and free bar than in Aurora.  I had been labeled her ‘temporary entourage’ by a playful Jerry.  He had given me an information sheet on Aurora, which she promptly ate before I had a chance to review it.  A woman reporter, in between bites of brie on a cracker, asked me if Aurora could have kids.  Only with another unicorn, I replied.  I felt pretty cocky after that zinger, so I was unprepared when another reporter began to grill me about how cruel it was to force a living creature to demean itself with horn bud transplants.  I finally managed to stammer that Aurora was in absolutely no pain and that nothing had been done to alter her horns or any other part of her body.  At this point Aurora decided to end the press conference by bleating loudly and rushing the front row of ink-stained wretches.  The room erupted into chaos, with reporters cowering near the free bar, protecting the fragile liquor bottles from harm, while Aurora cheerfully trotted around the room, butting abdomens and lapping up the spilled booze.  She was a mean drunk, sucker-punching several TV cameramen.

When I finally managed to drag her away from the imbroglio she had started she repaid me by giving me a good, sound kick in the knee with her hind legs.  It would have been curtains, or goatburger, for her at that moment if Jerry had not intervened with the joyous news that Aurora’s regular keeper had returned, a few days earlier than expected.  I guess Jerry figured I was too disgruntled about the whole Living Unicorn episode to trust, so he put me back on a plane to Minnesota that very same day.  Which was fine with me, because I had the big, fat Ringling check in my wallet.

Back in peaceful, unicorn-free Park Rapids I settled down in bed that first night with Amy and attempted to become reacquainted her.  She repulsed me.

“Whew!” she told me before turning over, “You smell like a goat!”

Thanks, Aurora.   

The Alt-Right

A majority (54%) of U.S. adults say they have heard “nothing at all” about the “alt-right” movement and another 28% have heard only “a little” about it, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Just 17% say they have heard “a lot” about the movement.

from the Pew Research Center 

The dumber John Public becomes,

the better for goose-stepping bums

to say with a smile

"Let's all shout Sieg Heil!"

as they apply screws to our thumbs. 

Letter to Madelaine. December 15, 2016.

Hey Madel, howz tricks?

Thanks for those emails. I’ve got them collected and ready to sort for my brand spanking new memoirs.

Are you the one who sent me that green table cloth? I’m putting a photo of it on Facebook today, cuz I’m having Sarah and the little ones over for lunch. I was just in the mood for spaghetti and sausage and didn’t want to eat alone, so I called her for lunch and she was available.

Hey, my phone is working again!  Sarah fiddled with it the other day and suddenly on Monday it began to work again. Don’t ask me why.

I get my life insurance physical next Wednesday. I hope they find a lot of things wrong with me and make Adam pay through the nose for premiums. Serves him right. He could spend that money instead  paying for the medical procedures I need done, like a colonoscopy and surgery on my prostate. Then I wouldn’t have so many health problems! But as it stands, now I have to wait for Medicare when I’m 65, and that dummy Trump is probably going to trash the whole thing so it won’t be available.

Are you feeling any repercussions yet in your office from the coming Trump regime?

Adam’s been keeping me busy with paid work, so I guess I shouldn’t diss him. Kind words are nice, but they don’t butter any toast!  I’ve been able to pay off a lot of old bills cuz of the money I’ve made from him.

We really haven’t had winter here yet. The forecast keeps calling for cold temps and more snow, but it never reaches Utah Valley. I went to the store today w/o wearing a coat!

I’ve decided that I’m going to regress back to buying books and filling my apartment with them. I always dreamed of living in a room full of books. Last month I spent one fifth of my Soc Sec payment on books!  I buy them second hand, naturally . No new editions for this little boy.

I’ve been called and sustained as secretary for the High Priest group leadership. We have a meeting every Wednesday evening at my apartment and I take notes. BORING.  They tell me they are also going to be calling me as a family history consultant -- and that almost makes me want to find a job with a circus and get out of here. Almost, but not quite.

Well, I better go set up the card table and put that green tablecloth over it. The sauce is starting to smell good -- I sauteed the Italian sausage in some leftover chicken fat I had from roasting some Cornish game hens earlier in the week -- and the whole mess is beginning to set my mouth to watering. Hope it tastes as good as it smells . . . .

Love, dada

Her response:

Hi Dad,

Yes, I sent you a tablecloth for Christmas. Although you may have been using those newspapers for table coverings to make some sort of political statement, I figured you could always put the newspapers over top of the tablecloth. I’m rushing around between meetings right now, but I think I got all my Christmas shopping done, I got the presents wrapped, the tree up, and we’re having our Office Holiday party today. I was volunteered to cook the steak that Donald serves on the food truck so I’m going to get that ready in a few before I head into my meeting so all I have to do is warm it up for the luncheon. Mom took Diesel Christmas shopping yesterday. I should have known better than that, they ended up going to the thrift store and buying a bunch of old candles…so now I have to find something crafty to make with them to give as last minute gifts to church people and people who give me unexpected gifts that I feel the need to reciprocate. It’s really cold here today, 17* and the high is 23*. Diesel actually work his coat voluntarily! I’m also about to go make a cup of hot tea to try and get warm. Hope you have fun at your physical, make sure to ask them for a copy of the notes so you can remember everything that’s ailing you!

-Madel

The Obit Writer: An Elegy

Writes there a man so thwarted and wary
as he who must pen an obituary?
Daily he sits, as life's merry race
runs past his solemn and world-weary face.

His colleagues rush out for a breathtaking scoop,
while he must stay put to post "Died of the croup". 
Pulitzer prizes rain down on the head
of many, but not on the clerk for the dead. 

He only knows endings, the sunset regime
that curtails the laughter and curdles the dream.
And when his time comes and he goes out to sea,
no one's at hand to write his eulogy . . .