The Big Short
West Medford Variety Hour 2022
Unrelated and related:
My mom’s best friend from small times, Ellen, was in town from the Cape last week.
When my dad made dinner, Ellen said, “Start doing yoga, Steve.”
“What?”
“You’re going in the suitcase.”
Ellen brought their high school yearbook.
The names were amazing, most of them graphically Italian.
Ellen pointed to a picture.
“Fell in a manhole.”
“What?”
“Dino couldn’t find her. She fell in a manhole.”1
“Oh my God—”
“That’s a true story.”
Notes from Underground
Hazards of early-70s Medford also included the editors of the yearbook. Rather than captioning headshots with quotes, the editors opted to share their opinion of each student.
While some captions were positive, others included “Varied moods,” “Unpredictable,” and “Likes her car.”
Ellen said, “So many women left Boston because of how short the men are.”
Reader, I leapt.
I wrote about Italian women’s special enmity for less-towering men and I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Like, moved away permanently?”
“Moved away. Permanently.”
She listed names, refugees from the town that heels forgot. Like Jews from Egypt they fled.
As Hannibal braved the Alps, women of Boston braved the Turnpike westward or piled onto 95 like a lifeboat. In Maine, one heard, the stock is heartier.
No wonder the yearbook rando “likes her car.” Like Mad Max searching the wastes for fuel, her car bears the promise of a future to look up to, the dream of feeling small, hometown suitors shrinking in the rearview—O cruel fate for the already shrunk—boys against genetics, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The bottom of the manhole is the tallest Dino ever looked.
In the yearbook, the rando’s photo fades, time borne forward.
Talk turned to nail polish. There is a famous color, I learned, named “She’s Not Really a Waitress.”
Which, putting on the MFA hat, is a killer piece of flash fiction. She’s not really a waitress (S.N.R.A.W.): the narrative economy is spectacular. It’s a movie trailer in 22 characters.
Meanwhile, my nemesis is the demi-famous sentence “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” My nemesis.
Heard that one? People like to say Hemingway wrote it, which, fuckin, he didn’t. People like to say it’s the shortest story ever, which is unhelpful.
Also untrue. S.N.R.A.W. is better and shorter.
If we really wanted to crown a bestest-shortest story ever, “Jesus wept,” from LA BIBLA, presents stiff fuckin competition.
I don’t despise ‘ol babyshoes for its widespread misattribution. It’s too maudlin for Hemingway anyway. Unless the baby shoes are for sale because someone thought they were buying shoes for babies but ended up with baby-shaped shoes, and the author of the ad hopes to bamboozle a buyer as they, too, were bamboozled.
Misattribution can be generative.
Popular quotes are like the Grand Canyon: time hones them down gorgeously. “Politics is war by other means” is more elegant than Clausewitz’s original; “Rain nor snow nor gloom of night” is poetic—the actual line from Herodotus (!) inscribed on the 8th Avenue post office, less so.
Like slang formation, it’s a social process.
The most famous line in the movie Casablanca, “Play it again, Sam,” is not in the movie Casablanca. I love that movie but the scene’s actual dialogue would be improved by the misquote—has been improved by the misquote, if you aren’t an originalist.
Samuel L. Jackson’s famous line in Snakes on a Plane—“Get these motherfucking snakes off this motherfucking plane”—was not in the script, and not because he improvised it. It wasn’t in the movie at all. When the trailer was released, people joked on social media that it was the kind of line Samuel L. Jackson would say in a movie with that title. The producers went back and shot the new line, presumably after paying Jackson a handsome fee, then rushed to have it edited into the theatrical release.
Casablanca’s “Play it again, Sam” is not so much a mistake as a memetic mutation; the movie’s viewership (and/or cultural penumbra) reshaped the text, a kind of metasocial beer goggles.2 The line is a bug-turned-feature, an illusion made real.
Mistakes illuminate processes we might miss otherwise. The ancient Greeks painted their statues garishly; our ideals of classical beauty insist they didn’t.
The glitch reveals the Matrix.
Brevity is the soul of wit, says Hamlet’s biggest blabbermouth.
For sentences, shorter is better.
Just don’t tell the Italians.
SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.
Name changed to protect the guy who couldn’t tell his girlfriend from a hole in the ground.
As easily as it produces good, this process produces evil: egregores, collectively manifested like killer jellyfish in Sphere. For example, Pink’s career.