Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!".... I wanna hold yore hand!!

“Dee vortune ees rred as sooch: dee tumb ees dee ruler ob dee hahnd! Eet vairs dee crown and commands all dee odders! Eben zo, it ees lahrge like dee moon at night and moves freely like dee moon ahnd cahn change eets shape with funny bends!

Dee eendex pinger..or Meester Pointer! Dee Pointer ees like dee north starr aroun wheech all hahnd ahctions are deerected und guided. He points the vay, shows dee toughts ob dee hooman mind, and eben pokes in the eye…or peeks dee nose.

Da meedle pinger, dee tallest ob dee five, ees the highest point een dee hahnd-sky, and zo ees represented by dee sohn at dee nooon. Eef a mahn makes you trubble, geeb heem dee meedle-pinger und say “Hab a sohnny day, sheet-hole!”.

Da rrring pinger ees dee one ob dee marri-ahge. Eet represent dee belobb-ed and dee human-hart! Boht eet also ees the pinger ob de drink…dee empty bohtle. Bevare dat your lob-life duz noht becomb a life ob dee booze!....ha! ha! ha!

And pinally, vee cohm to dee pinkie pinger! Eet shows dat you hab lohst yore key, und slept on dee street. De wreest says you see clearly dat you wair a mess last night ind maybe poo-pood yore uundie, and dee palm says dat you now smell like dee bad feesh!..Wash yore hahnd!! That will be $7.00.”….

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"... Melanie Farkakte...

From Sybil Bruncheon's My Merry Memoirs: Chapter 18, "Funny Friends and Their Funny Ways"...

I knew a Melanie Farkakte on the McFeeney's Burlesque Circuit... she recited dirty haikus, played the trombone, and bent herself into surprisingly suggestive shapes, using oblong vegetables as her inspirations... Sadly, her arms had been paralyzed from a soap-box derby crash... and she'd lost her left leg in a potato-sack race gone-horribly-wrong at the Lucas County Fair... (she also happened to be an orthodox Jewish girl!) She’d leave the theatre at 4PM every Friday, did no shows on Saturday, and refused boxes of chocolates that she feared might contain shellfish or bacon!) She passed away suddenly at 43 years of age in the deadly Contagious Guilt Epidemic that struck Five Towns, Long Island… during a Weight Watchers Convention...

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Sybil's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!".... oh well, it's a living.....

Hello, Trick or Treaters! Did you know that in times gone by, many people like Mommy and Daddy had to do jobs that were very hard?... sometimes very dangerous?... sometimes even STINKY?... well they did! They did bad jobs because they loved their own very little children, just like you. Even when they made their children work in scary factories with sharp points... or in dark mines with stones that might fall down!!....for 18 hours a day! One job that no one liked even though it was in your own house was cleaning out the chimney. When people burn fires, chimneys sort of get sore throats, and we have to clean them out so the house doesn't get sick!...just like a human being! A house can get sick too!...except when a house gets sick, the nice people who live inside can go to sleep forever... or the house can explode into a million pieces and kill all the other houses down the street! When you get sick, you don't blow up and kill your little sister, do you? Well, a house CAN! So Mommies will sometimes ask their daughters to help clean out the chimney before anything bad happens!

The girls get brooms and brushes and long sticks and take off all their clothes so they don't ruin them and climb up inside the chimney very carefully. They make sure there isn't a fire going... or even any cinders in the ashes! Why would they want to toast their little tootsies?? Then they poke and climb and brush and scrub and cough and yell bad words at each other...and finally, the chimney is as "clean as a whistle"! Do you know what that means? "Clean as a whistle"?... I don't either. But when they've got it perfectly clean, their loving mother pulls the big wheelbarrow away from the hearth where she pushed it to keep the girls up there working and lets them come back down to take a bath in the backyard for two hours or so before they go to the village dance, or to milk a goat... They use very hot water, wire brushes, scratchy weeds, sand, tree bark...and even rocks...

And sometimes, they don't bother to wash at all!... At Halloween time, they just dance around a campfire they start at a neighbor's house while they sing songs that have bad words in them. The naked ladies make drinks with frogs and bats in them, and that makes them sing louder and fall down... and maybe bark at the moon, or at Mr. Carruthers who has the binoculars!!... Now cleaning a chimney sounds like fun, doesn't it??

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!".... what is that, there in the shadows?...

....the tradition had always been to make a wonderful costume either with your friends in the weeks before the big night, or do it all separately from them all so you could surprise them on Halloween night at the parties before everyone went out Trick-or-Treating. That was the tradition... and it was a good one... and one that everyone trusted, generation to generation... father to son, mother to daughter... on and on... Until the Bad Time came.... when children were no longer safe to go out into the night and only play at being scared, and to gather candies in exchange for facing their childhood fears.

True, in the past, there were occasions, rare, very rare occasions when a child might go missing, but those were very few and far between. But NOW... in the Bad Time, no one would dream of sending a child off into the night, not in the neighborhood, not even into the gentle countryside to celebrate the merriment and mystery of Halloween without watchful, even fearful adults, hovering, questioning, fretting.... And that was why, when she appeared out of nowhere... well, so much upheaval. Rumors whispered, compounded on more rumors... wild, strange terrifying stories about horrible, horrible... too horrible to even name. Grown-ups spent sleepless nights…or else endless nights of strange, heated sleep, sweating but frozen too till they shivered and ached in their soaking wet sheets...tangled and twisted with dreadful visions... to wake exhausted into flat gray mornings. Too gray to even know if it was morning..

She was nameless, so someone, unnamed themselves, called her The Melon Lady because of that... was it a face? ...At some point, she became The Melon Lady. And her reputation was instantly known far and wide because she had been named. Her .... "proclivities"...and "habits" had been witnessed...from "remains".... but it was the naming that made everything so final. And so factual. There was the fact now of what she could do...and might do.. and how much farther and more grotesque it might get...if she wasn't stopped...She had to be stopped. But how? The banal powers of the "modern world" were useless...stupid and clumsy.

You see, the Bad Time had created her ...and made her necessary... in an odd irony. The Bad Time had brought her here...and she was created out of the great mystery of the thing known as Balance. And that Balance was what was both a horror…and a comfort. For you see The Melon Lady was the one who did the bad things… to the bad people. It started out only as rumors… a person would be found perhaps days after being reported missing… well parts of them would be found..in various places where many people would find what she had left behind. There would sometimes be writing …on the pieces.. or if fire was involved, then on a wall nearby.. or a note pinned to a doorway. As the acts became more hideous, a sort of humor would be injected… the notes would be scrawled on fine stationery… in blood… or ..No!... it was lipstick… It started out as a word or two, a phrase, but eventually they turned into short poems with deliberately bad punctuation, misspellings, dangling modifiers… split infinitives… or… “provocative” drawings… drawings that sneered at the victim, and insulted his or her family… and even threatened them as well…

And so, she became bolder, more brazen in her daring… the Balance required that, as the Bad Time worsened, she had to be more… thorough. Because she was the Protector of children. The Avenger. The Terrible Price. Her names became manifold…. So it was easier, more expedient… and more terrible just to say that The Melon Lady had come. The Melon Lady had been there. The Melon Lady had left.. that… behind. The Melon Lady would punish you. And she did. She always did. …and …gradually the Bad Time and its friends began to be burned away… She was never wrong. The Balance was infallible… She was The Melon Lady… and children everywhere grew to love her… love her very much.

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"......what if?.....

... if only John Wilkes Booth had continued with the mail-order ventriloquism classes that he had gotten from the back of the comic books... His brother Edwin said he showed real promise...maybe even more than he had with the "Learn-To-Juggle" and the “Musical-Saw” learn-at-home classes he had bought the year before... Oh, how different everything might have been..... how very different…

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Sybil's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"...... Abba Dabba Dabba.....

"Of course I love you Monkey-Boy, and I want to build a life with you in a banana-hut of our very own, but first you must go and eat my wife. Her name is Elsa and she's over there buying a coconut brassiere! Now GO! GO!!!..."

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Sybil Bruncheon's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"... P.O.T.U.S.

...Although described as a perfectly nice and well-meaning President, Rutherford B. Hayes was best known for the efforts of his tee-totaling wife "Lemonade Lucy" to bring sobriety back into the White House after 8 years of rampant drunkenness under Ulysses Grant. Hayes was also known for wearing a top hat... even to bed.... ever since the chandelier came loose in his office during the festive "bobbing-for-apples" on Halloween, 1877.

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Sybil's "31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN!"..... The Brancuzzis...???

.....at the height of the Great Depression, so many formerly innocent and "nice" boys and girls in America's so-called heartland became increasingly desperate. Jobs were scarce, family savings had been wiped out, crops failed, and all the giddy hopes of prosperity that had been the seeming destiny of a post World War I America had vanished into the dry, dusty air of the Dust Bowl.... It was in that context that young folks dropped out of school, gave up on their parents' illusions, and turned to crime. It started with the famously infamous bootleggers, mobsters, and career criminals; names like Al Capone, Pretty-Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Machine-Gun Kelly, Dutch Schultz, and Lucky Luciano.... but then the "home-grown" drifters began to appear.... kids like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

And in that vein came the Brancuzzis..... three siblings who started out with petty "smash 'n' grab" crimes in small town drugstores, Woolworth counters, and movie theatres, and graduated up to minor private banks and savings and loan offices in second-rate rust-belt towns. Their one particular gimmick was their disguises... they wore clothes of the opposite sex, taking turns as women or men, alternating back and forth, back and forth. Soon, the authorities had no reliable identities for any one of them, since their school and birth records couldn't be located, and their origins were not known. Their actual names were constantly in flux as news agencies and police records conflicted according to city and state arrest reports. They each had dozens of aliases, all backed up with bogus driver's licenses and birth certificates. Finally, it was realized that even their genders were unknown; were they three boys, three girls, or any combination of each?? It seemed that the only way anyone would know for sure was when they were eventually hunted down and killed like Bonnie and Clyde.... but that option never came about.

The Depression began to lift, then came America's focus on the war and Pearl Harbor, the draft, jobs for everyone.... even rationing and the home-grown black market weren't front-page news, and the Brancuzzis' crimes faded from notice. They disappeared into the turmoil of the 1940s and the comparative calm and eventual abundance of the 1950s.... It was said though that in Pleasantry Falls, Nebraska, three unmarried siblings living together in a large farmhouse eleven miles from the center of town bore a faint resemblance to the few blurry newsprint photos of what people claimed were the Brancuzzis. It was never proved, and the MacDonahues (as they were called now!) were nice enough neighbors. They helped out at the Veterans' Ice Cream Sociables, at the 4H Club Fairs, and the March of Dimes Drives, at the Scout Jamborees.... and their spacious house was always a famous delight at Halloween time when they would dress up in fantastic outfits and throw a gigantic costume ball for the entire town...and for all ages!! They remained unmarried well into old age, lived long and very happy lives, and none of their neighbors or the townsfolk were quite clear who was who!.... or even ...um..."what was what"...

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Kelmer Cuthbertsen.... the world's most famous baðherbergi hunter.

The baðherbergi were a rare and beautiful animal species found mostly in the Scandinavian and Arctic regions, even on remote islands, but were gradually decimated by over-hunting. Cuthbertsen was a sensitive soul, given to emotional excesses especially during the hunting season. He felt tremendous guilt at what he and the others were doing, especially because the baðherbergi were so docile and trusting.

Indeed, none of the hunters ever had to actually shoot the animals. They would simply beckon the animals to them with outstretched handfuls of M&Ms, Good & Plentys, and even Candy Corn. The hunters would always conceal a few sleeping pills in with the treats, and then chloroform the unconscious baðherbergi painlessly.... It didn't make any difference though to Kelmer. He was a vegetarian, and he had only gotten into hunting the gentle animals because his family had done so. In fact, he had been fascinated by them as a child as great herds of them would pass his village in the Spring.... over 7' tall and weighing hundreds of pounds.

And now here he was, helping to wipe out the gentle giants who had always been his childhood friends playing in the snowdrifts around his little village of Ísafjörður.... No! It was too much. He had to stop...and encourage others to stop too, before it was too late.

You see, it was the 1950s, and the shag rug and bathmat craze had struck the American public's fancy. Even toilet seats were upholstered in the luxurious fur of the baðherbergi. And then, when they were dyed pink or even aqua, well, you can imagine the demand...and the hysteria in shopping centers and Sears catalogues!....

Sadly, although Kelmer became a world-renowned naturalist and wildlife advocate, it was too little too late. The baðherbergi disappeared from all of Northern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Arctic region. Eventually, like many extinct animals only seen stuffed in strange museum displays, they were often claimed to be fictional...to not have existed at all... like the dodo, the querestral, the chevroned bandyjrrrl, and the grey huft.

Kelmer finally withdrew from the greater world and lived out the rest of his life on the tiny island of Viðey.... a happy place with stunning views, joyous citizens, and the last of the baðherbergi, forgiving, loving, and with great sparkling eyes filled with kindness. Kelmer still carried his great grandfather's walrus gun when he was out and about.... but only to ward off any big game hunters who had somehow found his little sanctuary. ....and over the years, he only had to kill three or four....

(postscript: Many years later, a film was made by Republic Pictures about Kelmer’s life. It starred Percy Herbert, Herbert Percy, Herbie Percocet, Sherbet Personelle, and Poosy, The Sure-Footed Sherpa. Sadly, no copies of it currently exist.)

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(for George Sweet)

Sybil Bruncheon's "People In Poetry"…… page 52. "Some Friendly Advice"...

When Mummie says, “Please look both ways
When e'er you cross the street!”
I hear you sigh! You ask me, “WHY?!”
And madly stamp your feet!

When Mummie says, “Put on your scarf.
It’s cold today, you’ll freeze!”
You say you’re cross, I’m such a boss,
And promptly start to sneeze!

You argue here. You argue there.
We never can agree!
What e'er I say, it “wrecks your day!”
I have to set you free!

And so my boy, my pride and joy!
I’ll let you be a Lout!
But may I propose, don’t pick your nose.
You may just put your eye out!

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