SYBIL'S CINEMA!....The "WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?" series... A CHRISTMAS CAROL...

... I've proposed some epilogues to Hollywood to be shown after the credits roll on some well-loved films. Perfect for those stories and characters you just want to go on and on and on… A CHRISTMAS CAROL (any version you like!)…

After the final credits with Ebenezer Scrooge completely reformed and won over to a life of love and generosity, he lives a long glowing life of joy, robust health, and extraordinary prosperity. Interestingly, the other characters in the story have surprisingly different adventures and journeys.

Jacob Marley, his long-dead former partner, condemned to purgatory and chained to his misdeeds, serves out a long sentence of penance and is freed to pursue a new destiny. In 1971, fully a hundred and thirty years after first scaring the wits out of Scrooge on Christmas eve, Marley applies for a job in the Haunted Mansion at the newly opened Disney World in Orlando, Florida. After only a few months of furniture dragging, bad-face making in mirrors, and coloratura-groaning and yowling, he is promoted to “head-ghost” and put in charge of cotton-candy soiling and bottom-pinching. The charming and oh-so-patient Ghost of Christmas Past joins him at the resort later but is judged as too pleasant-natured to scare guests, so she’s given a popcorn stand to service near the Dumbo the Elephant kiddie-ride.

On a completely different note, the frighteningly jolly Ghost of Christmas Present is discovered to be pushing drugs, possibly cocaine and hallucinogens at the parties he crashes. It certainly explains the delirious reactions he gets from complete strangers when he waves his so-called “magic horn” over them! Always showing off his extravagance and luxurious lifestyle, he single-handedly oversees the boom-and-bust profligacy of the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, various Ponzi and real estate scams, and most of the activities of Wall Street. He is especially fond of caviar, rare Napoleon brandies, hand-shake buzzers, and whoopee-cushions.

As for the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he’s mistaken for a pile of extremely dirty bed-linens from a disreputable motel and is washed in scalding water and Oxi-Clean. After an hour in the dryer, he emerges much brighter and softer but his paltry thread-count dooms him to being donated to a Housing Works in lower Manhattan.

What can we tell you of the other characters in the story? The two businessmen who asked Scrooge for donations to orphanages are later arrested for questionable child-photography. They specialized in hand-tinted daguerreotypes of young persons dressed as naked fairies in a garden… or oblong vegetables. The old crones and their impoverished thug-pals who gathered at Scrooge’s house to scavenge his draperies and valuables did indeed find a winning lottery ticket in a broken drawer of moth-eaten socks, but it had expired, and they only end up with lice. Scrooge’s nephew Fred and his young bride prosper mightily under their Uncle’s generosity, but at a Christmas banquet in 1884, someone accidentally kicks over a candelabra during a particularly raucous gavotte. Their great house burns to the ground driving poor Fred to distraction. He is never quite the same again, and is later considered a possibility for Jack the Ripper by Scotland Yard… it is never proved.

Finally, the Cratchits; Bob did indeed get his job back, is promoted slowly but surely through the years although no one knows at that time what “dyslexic” or “attention deficit disorder” mean. Bob and his wife never actually do learn the names of all those children milling about and screeching (but then neither did Dickens himself.) The youngest, Tim, eventually turns out to be perfectly healthy, but later exhibits all sorts of psychosomatic symptoms as a cry for attention in such a large and frenetic family.

However, being so sweet-natured and handsome, is it any surprise he turns out to be gay? He becomes friends with Henry Fenster, the “intelligent boy, the remarkable boy” who ran to the butcher’s shop to get the “prize turkey” for Scrooge on Christmas morning. They become more than friends later, build a home together, inheriting Scrooge’s business eventually, and turn it into a highly successful import company of Asian silks for ladies’ underwear. Cratchit & Fenster Fine Lingerie ‘n’ Dainties is still featured prominently at both Harrod’s and Bergdorf Goodman.

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