Sybil Bruncheon’s “Fascinating Folks Far & Near!”…… Selena Upshaw – Nature Girl!

Selena Upshaw had always been in love with nature!...all aspects of nature, and it both delighted and fascinated her large family. She had been raised as most girls from wealth were, on an estate handed down generation to generation and finally to her father, the Earl of Benthaven. He adored his daughter (his eldest child), and he lavished every luxury on her, particularly when it nurtured her brilliant mind.

The Earl boasted about her achievements scholastically and in the fields of music, poetry, and in the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and origami. She won numerous awards and medals for exotic napkin-folding. As she entered her teens, two of her greatest hobbies moved to the forefront; exotic flower botany and her apiculture ….”bee-keeping”. Selena soon began to breed and crossbreed the most extraordinary examples of flowers in all the different classes, orders, genuses, and species. And she used her allies, her beloved allies, the bees in her journeys. She adored them, watching them for hours working cheerfully away on all the plants in her huge gardens and in the specially built and maintained greenhouses and arboretums.

The Earl spared no expense on Selena’s staff although she insisted on doing most of the work herself, often leaving her assistants to sit idly by, watching intently as she schooled them on the fine points of botany and zoology. So dedicated was Selena, that she began doing experiments on insect and arachnid venoms, as well as the poisons that could be found in hundreds of different flower and fruit species….encouraged by medical professionals who were friends of her parents. Physicians and researchers from Edinburgh and Oxford informed her that many common “poisons” and venoms might, in the right dosages, be used to cure the terrible illnesses that afflicted humanity. Selena took to this new journey as avidly as she continued with her flowers and bee-keeping. And then it happened… it started with some faint itching, a little blurring of the vision, excessive thirst, a ringing in the ears…or a buzzing… and strange cravings; chocolate, the darker the better. Sugar. …and of course… honey. Selena knew she was lucky to be so wealthy. Her parents and the rest of her family were worried at first, but saw that she was so calm in the face of such a shocking stroke of …well, not “good-luck” certainly.

Selena dictated the course of her life to all of them and the few servants who were of the inner circle and trusted completely. Life would go on as usual. Her meals and needs would be met and provided within the walls of the enormous estate. She would receive no visitors, and all enquiries about her would be deflected with stories of “foreign travel”, “living overseas”, vague evasions, and changes of the subject… and of course, there could be no mirrors… never again. But that was alright with Selena. She had always looked for the beauty of life outside of herself… the sights and smells of all her flowers...and the company of the other insects in the vast gardens... all that beauty... and that, that had been a choice that worked out quite well…

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Sybil Bruncheon’s Halloween Update!!......An Attractive Smile!

Boys & Girls! Trick-or-Treat time is always fun for everybody, but a responsible young gentleman or lady remembers that an attractive smile lasts a lot longer than a bag full of sweets! When collecting treats from your neighbors tonight, ask the nice man or lady if instead of a chocolate bar or candy corn, they might give you an apple, a glass of milk, a Parkerhouse roll, or even a REAL ear of corn! Not only can treats like these build strong bones and bodies, but they'll keep your smile nice and bright for the rest of the year, and keep Mother and Father from fussing at the Dentist's office! Yes, children!..Have a Happy and HEALTHY Halloween!......and keep your smile pretty, instead of "pretty scary"!!!!!

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HALLOWEEN-ERS!!.... Convention Time!!!

HALLOWEEN-ERS!!!...Attention! The International Vampire Hunters Convention is converging on Manhattan this weekend. Last call for pre-registration for seminars, exercises, meet'n'greets, classes, symposiums, demonstrations, cocktail parties, celebrity banquets, vampire slayings, Holy-Water-Balloon Fights, and the Equipment & Device Swap! (.....please notify the caterers of any dietary preferences or allergies to shellfish, peanuts… or garlic) 

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN": Curtain UP!

...Hey Facebook Friends! Aren’t sure what you’re doing on the evening of the 31st yet, but you don’t want to be home for Trick-or-Treaters??...well, the Shubert Organization and a posse of producers are proud to present a special new play to premiere that very night; PRIVATE LIVES…ON URANUS!! The new interpretation of the Noël Coward classic will feature the regular characters, Amanda, Victor, and Sybil, but the character of Elyot has been replaced by a suave yet psychotically dangerous and petty robot… his behavior, alternately murderous and then gossipy and condescending, (with a cigarette holder!) vexes the other lovers and eliminates the servants one-by-one. A frayed extension cord, a sudden Spring shower, and a stale scone bring the riotously funny and frightful horror-comedy to a very satisfying close…albeit in an oxygen-free atmosphere at -276°F….

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!”…. Those Naughty Nickersons!

                  Toinette Nickerson proved to be a fairly mischievous child even at 4 years of age. She teased the cat, hid thumbtacks in grandma’s rocking chair cushion, and replaced the sugar in the sugar bowl with salt. At first, her family chuckled that she was “such a scamp” as her Aunt Delia called her, but her pranks escalated in both frequency and severity as she grew older. A missing tricycle, a broken wagon, and a stolen princess tiara at Halloween were eventually superseded by missing money, a broken windshield, and a stolen wallet when she was in high school. It was interesting that she became a delinquent when most young ladies were obsessed with just that; acting like young ladies. But Toinette bought herself a black leather bolero jacket, and kept a pack of Lucky Strikes in the breast pocket with her Zippo lighter that she flipped open with one hand. She could talk tough with any of the guys in shop class, and dated a few of the football players, though none of the stars.

                   High school came and went!...she managed to graduate with a C- average. College never exactly came… Toinette wasn’t really interested, motivated, or gifted enough to think about college. And so the usual events tumbled one after the other in her humdrum, small-town, rustbelt life. Barmaid in a roadhouse and dating a biker, then a bass guitarist in a local band, then a gas station mechanic who was both a biker and a drummer in the same band.

                  And then the first kid, and another, and another …all with an aluminum siding salesman she met at the roadhouse. Things (and years) flowed along with some ups, some downs, nothing very dramatic…or exciting either. Toinette found herself accepting that she had become a woman, mellowing, and even responsible in many ways especially because of her three children for whom she tried to set a good example. Her own parents before they died were often surprised at her growing maturity, chuckling at how even she had become …well, “motherly”. Her figure thickened, she kept earlier hours, she and her husband bought a station wagon…and a swing set…and were saving up for an above-ground pool for the kids. Eventually, they actually bought the roadhouse and ran it together…fairly successfully, especially after the new highway was rerouted right by it.

                 Everything was going great, until that one Halloween. The rumors were that Toinette had been telling the children about her own childhood Halloweens and the pranks that she and some of her naughtier friends from “the wrong side of the tracks” had practiced on the neighbors. Old Mrs. Kenbright had her porch covered with wet toilet tissue and bags of dog poop that had been set on fire. Mr. Bandy had stepped on the rake they left on his front steps, and it flipped up and broke his glasses and chipped his false teeth. And they had taken Kimmy O’Connor’s tricycle and left it five blocks away in the parking lot of the Piggly-Wiggly…. But it was never seen again. Toinette’s children laughed and laughed, mostly because she had a fun and frisky way of retelling her misadventures… but she also managed to strip the events of any empathy for the victims or seriousness in the consequences. And there were consequences. Mrs. Kenbright’s trellis actually caught fire, and it spread up the right side of the house, charring the magnificent, ancient oak tree that had been planted there 150 years before. Mr. Bandy, in his late 70s, was severely bruised for weeks afterwards, and died suddenly of a heart attack only three months later. And little Kimmy was never really very cheerful or trusting again after her beloved tricycle disappeared. One would think that children were much more resilient, or forgetful in the face of loss, but Kimmy was one of those more sensitive and introspective children. From that Halloween night on, Kimmy was described as having a “sad streak”, becoming untrusting and withdrawing from most of her friends. She ignored the new tricycle her father bought her claiming that her “old one was lost somewhere out in the world” and was crying to come home. She woke up constantly from nightmares screaming that her tricycle was lonely and afraid in a field in thunderstorms….or that “it was being killed by bad men with sticks and rocks”. Whenever it snowed, she would sit in her bedroom window with her little hands pressed against the brittle glass, rocking back and forth obsessed that it was lying in the frozen mud wondering why she hadn’t come to save it. She was inconsolable and grief-stricken as only sensitive children can be who have none of the callouses and maturity that adults use to make sense of or ignore the cruelties that befall the innocent in our world.

                Toinette had started out as not one of those innocents. Whether by birth or by training, she had never been heartbroken or betrayed by the casual and careless world, and if she had been, she certainly didn’t let it inconvenience her for more than a moment or so. Some people don’t mind the pain that others feel. They don’t see the devastation in the eyes of another person in the face of terrible loss. And even as she grew and aged, and matured with a family of her own, that lack, that flatness if you will, still remained inside her, because of course, as you well know, people are pretty much what they are. After the first few years of childhood, it’s almost impossible for someone to be other than what they have become. Their characters have set in stone, so to speak….for good or ill. Is that why Toinette took her children out trick-or-treating that one Halloween evening and suggested that they might do a few “innocent pranks”, even when they had been given candy! At the Bancroft’s house, she tiptoed up on the porch and showed her children how to soap the windows over on the side where it wouldn’t be noticed till the next morning… and at the Carterette’s, they smashed the huge pumpkin that Nellie had carved herself and named King Chuckles…. right in the bushes, his smiling face caved in and broken, half-smiling still and yet now, unbearably sad. Toinette and her children scampered off into the dark, going from one house to another as the night drew on, and finally she realized they were forgetting to even ring doorbells and collect the “treats” that they had started out for. She herself seemed to be returning to her own childhood as she dragged her breathless kids along on an increasingly frenzied rampage.

                 It was getting later, much later than most parents would have allowed their children to be out, and so reluctantly, Toinette decided it was time to head home. Her eldest asked if they were going to ring bells for any more candy, but Toinette knew that they would be met with concerned and even disapproving looks if they wandered up onto porches at that hour, especially with her youngest being a toddler and her oldest no more than 6. As they rounded the corner of one of the streets, she noticed a darkened house up a remote and winding drive that looked abandoned. She stopped and asked the children if they’d like to have one last adventure where they could play all the pranks that they could think of. Her children stared at the house in the faint and fading moonlight and the middle one sniffled a little about being scared. Toinette told her not to be a baby, and she began marching up the gravel drive, grown over in many places with weeds and ivy. Toinette picked up some stones in her free hand and handed them to her children saying that if the house was empty they could throw them through windows!...much more fun than soaping them. And she said to the kids, wasn’t it fun that they had dressed as ghosts because they could go into the house and run about pretending to haunt the place, making scary sounds, and breaking furniture and anything else they found inside. They could scream and shriek and moan like hideous monsters as wildly as they liked! Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t that be the very best fun??... and her children stared at her, both excited and a little frightened by their Mommy’s strange voice.

               As they walked up to the huge house, right up to the dilapidated porch that had once been so wide and grand but now was falling away, Toinette gathered them all together. She hugged them and laughed and encouraged them to be scary and wild. They looked back down the long drive, winding and black into the thick bushes and leaning trees, and marveled that they had been brave enough to come all this way. “See?”, said Toinette. “Look how far we’ve come, and we’ve been ghosts all night long. Just like when I was a little girl playing tricks on people and scaring them!”… and then, suddenly, for a split second she heard her own voice…outside of herself. And she thought for just one instant… just one, of Nellie’s pumpkin looking sadly up at her as the candle flickered out… and of Kimmy’s little tricycle, so many years ago… looking back over her shoulder at it sitting in the single lonely light of the parking lot. Waiting to be taken back to the loving arms of a little girl who would never see it or hold it again.

              And it was in that moment, that moment of remembering other Halloweens over the many years, that Toinette heard a small twig snap behind her… and the children…. And then, for the first time, it was her turn to be afraid…

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!".... Other-Worldly!

FOOLISH Earth-Dwellers! Do you think only YOU had beloved grandparents who cherished each other and held hand-things during their monogamy exchanges? Many galaxies have similar proceedings ensuring domestic tranquility, strong family bonding, and game-nights where the males of each species laugh, belch, yell, and play table-sports with cardboard devices in full view of their proprietary females. Beverages and small food stuffs are served, while the guests discuss hydroponics, interdimensionality, and bowling... sometimes with musical interludes where they wave their jointed appendages about… or even bang them together. It is afterwards that the males and females depart in their appointed pairs (or sometimes trios!) and make infant or larval versions of themselves employing small-talk, body-fluids, and bolts... then they wire them for sound...

(photo by Francesco Romol - “No. 7”)

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Sybil's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"... Phone Etiquette!!

Friends!...some of you younger folks may not realize that before cell phones, people out on the street, going about their days, had to use something called a "pay phone"! You would put nickels, dimes, and quarters into an open phone (often not working!), and make your call in public, perhaps even out of doors! Can you imagine??..and one of the worst things about using a public phone was waiting till someone else was done! What if the caller had several dollars worth of change in her little purse, and she gabbed on and on ...and on!?!? No wonder that sometimes a pay phone was the site of violence, terrible violence...and frustration! ...of course, pay phones were also a lovely opportunity to learn that very important lesson; SHARING!....

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Sybil's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"... Jean and "Alice".....

True Story!.... Jean Stapleton was Alice Cooper's girlfriend back at Miss Porter's Academy For Marginalized Girls of Unexceptional Social Standing.... they were both due to graduate when, at the Halloween Cotillion, Alice revealed that she was determined to have a sex-change, or gender-reassignment as we call it now. Of course, back then, these procedures were done in the backrooms of disreputable or unlicensed podiatrists...sometimes in gas station bathrooms in the middle of the night. There was no pre-op counseling, supportive nursing staff, or even sterile-procedure.... sometimes it was just "snip-snip" with some pinking shears from grandma's sewing kit and a shoelace or two.... This photo, the very photo you're looking at is the moment when "Alice", formerly ALEX, had just broken the news. Jean was heartbroken! She begged Alex to reconsider! Didn't they have a great time together? Hadn't they been happy as sweethearts? Didn't their parents and families adore each other? Weren't they planning a June wedding in a year or two...and children??? Yes! Children!!.... But Alex was adamant! "I can't bear living one more Fall fashion season as a MAN!" Alex cried, clutching the latest issue of Vogue! "I'm a woman! I'M A WOMAN! A WOMAN, I TELL YOU!!!"... Jean ran from the ballroom/cafeteria past the angel's hair spider webs and the glittered cardboard moons and stars as they spun slowly in the air. Her dreams were dashed!...and Alex? Well, he dropped out of school, spent all of his salary from the muffler repair shop on a ratty old top hat, junky brands of mascara, and laundry markers, and hitchhiked to Akron to begin his new life as "Alice". They both ended up stars in that rough and tumble carny-world known as "show-biz" ....but they never spoke again.... 

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Sybil's “31 Days of Halloween!”…. Life is NOT a Piece of Cake!

 ... A little known fact in the Cookies & Cakes world is that some of America's biggest food icons fell on very hard times later in life. How many of us remember the tragic heroin/powdered sugar addiction of Betty Crocker, the terrible night that Duncan Hines was killed in a meth-lab/chocolate frosting explosion in his own home in Piscataway, New Jersey, and the bank-robbery and strudel rampage that Sarah Lee went on throughout the mid-west ending eventually in a machine-gun riddled roadster outside of a Piggly-Wiggly in Tennessee? In that vein, (that forlorn vein!), it was an awful blow to children everywhere when we found out that Poppin Fresh, America’s favorite little ball of giggling and ticklish pastry dough, had aged into a skeletal madman, drooling and gibbering in an asylum where he received daily electro-shock therapy and forced kneading and pulling by burly Russian attendants who were not kindly. Poor Poppin Fresh was plagued by yeast infections and unwanted raisins from years as a homeless sticky-bun in city parks and alleyways until the Entenmann's family discovered him near a pretzel cart and took him to a city shelter. The gourmet press and the vindictive Food Network immediately leaped on the story gleefully, complete with lurid photos and clip-out recipes for cheesy items on laminated cards!… You know, the washable kind for easy wipe-ups, in case of… ahem!... so-called “late-night spills” in the privacy of the bathroom!

And the latest update?...Poppin Fresh is currently ambulatory and receiving thorazine therapy…and he’s actually enrolled in a hobbies program weaving small bread baskets and pot-holders… Still, some of the more sadistic staff members will entertain themselves by sprinkling cinnamon on little Poppin Fresh and threatening to leave him in an overheated car in the hospital parking lot… or pelting him with stale chocolate chips... just to get a rise out of him...

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Sybil Bruncheon's 31 Days of Halloween: A Halloween Hold-Up!...

"Ok, Children, put up your hands and turn over all your mini-Snickers and Reese's Pieces.... You! Skull-Mickey, move over to the right!... and Bat-Princess, I'll take your Mary-Janes! C'mon! C'mon! Get the lead out...!! This isn't your first time at the rodeo!".....

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