*Tour-ette from my little driveway-garden! Chilly nights.. and "witches' hair"... 4/12/2022

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Sybil Bruncheon’s Easter News From Around The World!!!...

Yes, Boys and Girls! Here we have what used to be called "a naughty French postcard"! This one is of a Lady Easter Bunny wearing a fancy costume that she dances around in front of men who pay money. And the funny trick of these cards was that if you pulled out a quarter or a French franc and scratched at the nice lady’s costume painted on the postcard, it would scrape off, and the lady would have no clothes on at all underneath!!!! Would you like to have a card like this one and show it to Daddy... and maybe to all of his friends at the office?… or when he’s in the locker room at the golf club… as a funny surprise!

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Sybil Bruncheon’s Easter News From Around The World!!!...

Chagrin Falls, Ohio.....It was only when the "Easter Bunny" began foaming at the mouth and growling some sort of gibberish that the police were called. It was later discovered to be graphic anatomical terms about sexual organs recited in Yugoslavian, and spoken backwards. The Bunny's ears also appeared to be horns when viewed in a mirror in the precinct men’s room. A local priest, Father Aloysius Throckmorton was called to exorcise the Bunny, but when Holy Water was thrown on him, the smell of sulfur, burnt marshmallows, and Prince Matchabelli "Wind Song" forced an evacuation of the police headquarters for three hours.... a hazmat team was called, and the EPA sent its specially trained team. They made several attempts to get the Devil-Bunny to surrender quietly, but it resisted, and finally they were forced to open fire. With a shriek of laughter, it disappeared through the floor in a burst of bright pink sparks and flames. Where it had been standing, they found a small pile of scorched Easter basket “grass”….also bright pink… there may have been a decapitated head in its wooden bucket…. Or perhaps just a jumbo-sized Cadbury chocolate crème egg…… melting… melting!.. or was it hatching?

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Sybil Bruncheon's Easter News From Around The World!!!...

Easter, 2003: From a press photo showing (then) President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney reaffirming their stand for family values and the virtues of prayer, charity, and universal love to an adoring crowd in Poka-Ma-Hola, Idaho. The local Shriners threw an ice cream sociable at the VFW Lodge. (Anti-war protesters were chased off with cattle-prods or shot with crossbows and Uzis)...

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Sybil Bruncheon's Easter News From Around The World!!!...

Yes, Boys & Girls!..our little friends in Mexico also celebrate Easter! That's when Señor Pasas de Conejo Diablo comes to the back door...or maybe even climbs a ladder and breaks into the house in the middle of the night! He plays castanets and draws children's eyebrows so they look like Frida Kahlo, and he leaves brown rice, beans, and a jalapeño pepper in their slippers!... Now, doesn't THAT sound like a fun way to spend Easter?? ¡Sí cómo no!

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Sybil Bruncheon's Easter News From Around The World!!!...

"On our Planet Jazzuzltron, the Easter candy eats the CHILDREN!!! BWAH HA HA HA HA!!!!!"...

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Sybil Bruncheon's Easter News From Around The World!!!...

"Oh, dear GOD!!!... that baby chick I just ate was made out of ...MARSHMALLOW!!!"

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... from Sybil Bruncheon's “EASTER EGGS-traordinaries”… Greggy Horbinger…

Greggy Horbinger was NOT a very nice child. He started bullying his classmates even in nursery school! Imagine! At 4 years of age, he managed to black the eye of Stevey Whiteford… who considered Greggy his “very bestest friend”… well, until he blacked his eye. The Whitefords were terrified that Stevey might even lose the eye for about a week. Thank goodness Dr. Chaka had been so vigilant, thorough, and comforting. And discerning too. He warned the Whitefords that they should steer Stevey away from the Horbinger boy, even when Mr. Whiteford was in a forgiving mood with his “boys will be boys” nonsense (as Mrs. Whiteford called it). Dr. Chaka was Greggy’s pediatrician too, and he had already noticed… “unsettling things” about Greggy almost from birth. Greggy played too rough with the puppy his father had given him for his second Christmas, and by that July, the Hornbingers had given the puppy (fortunately!) a new home with a loving neighbor lady. Who knows how that might have turned out?... 

Suffice it to say that with Greggy being so aggressive and belligerent at 4, he could only accelerate and intensify his malignant energy. Toys were broken and stolen from other unwary children. Acts of vandalism started out small and repairable enough but escalated into serious and often heartbreaking acts of damage and loss… and finally the police had to be involved… and Children’s Court. The Horbingers remained indignant about Greggy’s behavior, making excuses about the school board and its teachers being somehow whimsically and unfairly against “our little Greggy”. They claimed all sorts of conspiracies and plots surrounded their special child and never admitted or took responsibility for the shambles that he was leaving in his wake. Other mothers avoided Mrs. Horbinger in the grocery store or at the gardening center. Mr. Horbinger was no longer included in golf or tennis games at the club.

And then came that particular Easter celebration in the town square open to all the children of the community. The school bands competed in the beautiful gazebo in Mendelsohn Park by the huge fountain. There was the annual bake sale and contest for best cakes, best pies, best jellies & jams, best cookies and tarts. And of course there were the three-legged race, the sack race, the egg-carry on spoons race, and the Easter Egg Hunt… with a grand prize of a brand new bicycle for the child who found the most eggs! 

It was during the award and ribbon presentation ceremonies at dusk, right before the fireworks, that someone screamed!… over by the chicks and bunnies cages! A terrifying and terrified scream… by a child. It was little Helen McGormley, just 8, who shrieked and pointed at Greggy Horbinger, now also 8, as he dangled a squealing and writhing baby bunny by its ears. Dozens of frantic people, adults and children alike, raced to the screaming and continuing to scream and now crying Helen and follow her accusing finger to the reason… Greggy, smirking and beginning to wave the terrified bunny back and forth, challenging everyone, anyone to stop him. It was Officer Gladys Baker coming up behind him at full speed who both saved the bunny before it could be injured (or killed !) with one hand, and yanked the brat by the hair with her other and tossed him eight feet or so across the lawn. He landed with a scream and a heavy thud flat on his face in an inconvenient pile of trampled mud from the heavy Spring rains the night before. Except that most of the people were still shaken by Helen’s terror and the violence of Greggy’s treatment of the little bunny, Greggy’s smashed-in mud-face looking like a chocolate cream pie-fight triggered wild mocking laughter, finger-pointing, and hurled insults as the Horbinger adults rushed up. They were met with derisive and even angry insults, and not very veiled threats… so much so that the police, and Officer Gladys took charge and hustled all three of the Horbingers quickly to the parking lot, the filthy and bellowing Greggy literally lifted by his mud-drenched jumper by one of the burlier cops, none-too-gently. The bunny meanwhile was taken to the waiting and loving arms of little Helen to be consoled and consoling.

Imagine the entire town’s response to the news on Monday morning. As if the gossip and eye-witness reports weren’t enough to fill the coffee shops, the hair salons, the office elevators and water-cooler areas, the grocery store check-out lines with feverish versions of what had happened, and what always happened whenever “that Greggy Horbinger” was involved. No! There was more! Actually more. For the police had been called at dawn, presumably by the parents, the horrified and incoherent parents when they found their son. Dead. His face snarling like it often did, but now frozen in its familiar snarl… the face of a child who had somehow died not from any obvious violence, but was dead just the same. And more terrifying of all, that he had been stuffed into some hacked apart cushions and throw pillows from the wrap-around modular sofa… and fashioned, if that’s what it could be called, into an… Easter Bunny. A huge department store Easter Bunny… the kind you might see in Pinkleton’s holiday window display, surrounded by giant chocolate eggs covered in pastillage flowers and ribbons, loaded into dozens of festive baskets stuffed with colored grass nestling toys and treats, marshmallow peeps, and chocolate Easter bunnies… 

But there were no treats or Easter cheer for the police this grey morning. Just overturned furniture and torn and scattered cushions stuffed with the dismembered corpse of an inveterately rotten and irredeemable child. And as they stepped through the wreckage, Gladys Baker was heard to whisper to the coroner, “oh well…”…

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Just my opinion... BUT!"...

Sybil photo by Jack D. Pedota, styled by Susan Suka Taylor

1) Jar Jar Binks is one of the most loathsome characters in the history of fiction. Tedious, incoherent, and physically too ugly to live... as though Jabba the Hutt had finally taken a sh*t after two weeks of constipation... and it decided to talk.

2) Urkel... clear evidence that one last attempt was made in the 20th century to create a Steppin' Fetchit minstrel character to insult African Americans' intelligence and culture, (apparently with cooperation from some of them themselves...)

3) Aunt Alicia was right! "Bad table manners, my dear Gigi, have broken up more households than infidelity." Travel the country and watch how people hold their forks... and chew.

4) Perhaps this covid epidemic and all the obsession over cleanliness, contamination, and the transmission of germs and disease will finally convince people to keep their filthy feet off publicly used furniture and seating, especially in airports and in Starbucks!... then again... probably not.

5) The death penalty is not much of a penalty. We ALL die eventually, and most of us die rather badly. Very few people die peacefully in their sleep at a great old age, after a long, healthy, and problem-free life. So if we really want to punish someone, give him a life sentence in an appalling place with excellent medical care but unending squalor, deprivation, and despair... among his own kind.

6) Now that humans have developed simulated violence as entertainment, we watch "real housewives" instead of gladiators or chariot races. Their forlorn misadventures and mischiefs are like all reality television; a combination of metaphorical sword fights, joustings, fiery car crashes, and disembowelments. Sadly, we still seem to need "Ultimate Fighting Championships" and bullfighting.

7) All intelligence is not a matter of what one knows, but what one is curious to find out. The greatest minds through history have been insatiably curious, and usually felt at the end of their lives that they knew so little, and were filled with an overwhelming desire to learn more. Avoid anyone who is the dead opposite of this, especially in politics... or in your family… or in mine!

8) Kindness can be found anywhere and everywhere, and under the most surprising circumstances and from the most surprising sources... unfortunately monstrous cruelty can be found under exactly the same parameters. I have no idea what this means. But one must be ferocious... and be ready to do great and terrible things for one's loved ones… and for the causes one cares about.

9) It's better to know the worst in a situation, make arrangements and strategies that will serve you, and hope for the best in case things turn out better than you expected. In any case, remember to be Present, to be Mindful, and to be Grateful. Everything around us is Borrowed... only Borrowed.

10) In my experience, it seems that people through history who lived very long lives, weren't necessarily better off or even "happier". Indeed, many of them seem to have been full of turmoil, conflict and struggle, but... they all seem to have "burned" for something. They burned brightly for things they cared about. They were committed to things that mattered. They lived authentically and vividly, often at odds with most people around them. They had light coming out of them, and did not require others to provide their light, their truth, or their purpose... or even to validate the mystery of their existence... interesting.

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Who'z Dat?"... Marlon Brando (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004)

Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American screen and stage actor. He is widely regarded as having had a significant impact on the art of film acting. While he became notorious for his "mumbling" diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, "He is the marker. There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Actor Jack Nicholson once said, "When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one." An enduring cultural icon, Brando became a box office star during the 1950s, during which time he racked up five Oscar nominations as Best Actor, along with three consecutive wins of the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

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