This page is based on a letter I actually sent to the poor, innocent author of Nobody's Baby but Mine, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Amazingly enough, she actually scrawled a personal note on a newletter she sends to her fans, which I thought very gracious. By the way, this is a bit of a spoiler for what I consider to be the two most hilarious scenes in the novel, so if you haven't read it yet, you might want to wait;)
I started out by pointing out what I felt were problems, without any particular authority or proof that I knew what I was talking about. I then did some gushing (well, this book is an awful lot of fun) and finally, since the main character is a physicist, conducted a little experiment of my own, one for which I was actually more or less qualified:
Now, I knew I was going to enjoy the book when Jodie marveled at all Georgia O'Keefe's flower pussies. And after the “equations all over the house like mouse droppings” which I thought the most vivid image in the book, my favorite scene was the one with lucky charms. However, there's a problem with it.
...though I string beads for a living, I get my jollies, among other ways, by sorting things. Nothing makes me happier than a big jar of garage sale beads and junk all mixed together, bought for a song, in which I hope to find a few treasures. I thought it would take me about fifteen minutes to sort the marshmallows out of a box of lucky charms. Fifteen minutes times five boxes would yield a little over an hour's work, not four. (For those of you who haven't read the book, the character doesn't start this task till late, and is thus very tired by the time she doggedly finishes.)
So I asked my spouse to buy the biggest box he could find (20 oz), which he did... From the time I started hunting around for an exacto knife, opened the box, till I finished the sort took about 18 minutes. (I figure I actually spent about 16 minutes actually pushing cereal around, so my estimate was pretty close.) I couldn't find tape, so I decided to use a hot glue gun. While I was waiting for that to heat up, I sorted the charms into their individual colors, shaking my head: these just weren't the cereal I remembered. Total time, to sort the cereal, fix the box back up, sort each kind of marshmallow into its color: half an hour. If I'd been Darlington I couldn't’ve resisted the temptation to drift given colors: say the yellow and orange whatchamalcallems into the orange stars across the front seats; the blue, rainbow and purple across the back, say, and pink and red over the dashboard, blending one color into the next.
Granted, I didn't do a perfect job: though I sorted out marshmallow bits down to about 5mm, 3 pieces of cereal (since it's neutral colored) got blended in with the more brightly colored stuff. Fortunately, it's much easier to spot the reverse, so I didn't worry about it: even at my level of effort, I still figure no marshmallows got back into the cereal. Formica strikes me as the ideal surface (you sort slick beads on a fuzzy surface, but the cereal is plenty rough, so you'd want something smooth so you could move it faster) but I had to use fabric. I was also too lazy to come up with a really efficient way to get the cereal back into the box, since I've gotten pretty good, over the years, at using my hands to put beads away.
I don't get the impression that Darlington is into a lot of tasks demanding fine motor control (except typing, maybe), but those charms are big—probably 15mm across. I'm about her age, and I figure her brains compensate for my experience: we're not talking rocket science, here...What humor I can claim to possess is warped (though after reading this you'd hardly need to be told) and it leads me to wonder what sorts of delicious situations will arise from the televangelist's indiscretions. Poor clergymen, they've been the butt of novels since Jane Austen.
But what the dickens do I do with this box of cereal, now?
Very truly yours,
(sig)
Okay, so I have weird ways of getting my jollies. This is a surprise?
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
