Foolish Words

Foolish Words 2009 Draws Nigh!

2009-01-13T17:21:00.001-07:00

Are you in?

Let me know! Also, please feel free to tell your writer pals. The more the merrier!

Foolish Words 2008 - The Mighty Document

2008-04-13T21:52:00.002-06:00

Ryan Cassavaugh

Ryan Cassavaugh is a founding member of improv comedy juggernaut Equinox Comedy DeathMatch, erstwhile writer/performer for TV sketch comedy show “The Pizza Show,” stand-up comic, puppeteer, and writer of four award-winning plays, including “Last Kings of America,” which won best script and audience favorite at the 2008 Equinox One-Act Festival.

In the beginning...

Has this ever happened to you? You’re waiting for the bus to pick you up and take you to one of the fabulous stores we have in lovely downtown Bozeman (Downtown, mind you, not the mall); when, quite out of nowhere, a very frightened looking man with an obscenely fake mustache runs towards you, shoves a small, oddly shaped package in your hands, hoarsely gurgles the name “Marcellus” and drops dead at your feet with a skull-handled dagger protruding from his back? Well, if it has, then that is one thing you share with James, a young man who was just now finding himself in that most unlikely of circumstances.

He blinked confusedly (it seemed the least he could do), then he blinked again. He stared at the dead man, then at the package, then at the dead man again. He blinked a third time. At this moment James really wished there had been another person waiting there for the bus, so he could at least turn to them and say “Well, you don’t see that every day!” but there was no one to turn to. He was alone; alone with a dead man, a package, and an overwhelming urge to run like hell.

‘There is of course, no sense in running’ he told himself. ‘Running would solve nothing. What is needed is a cool, level head. A rational man does not panic!’

James had just made up his mind to be very cool about the whole affair when, to his surprise, he realized that he was running, and, apparently, had been for quite some time. He was well out of sight of the bus stop by the time his mind fully accepted the fact that while it was busy thinking, his body had been busy fleeing.

Still clutching the package, James came to a stop down a small side street and scuttled into the doorway of a dilapidated apartment house to catch his breath and more closely examine the package.

The package was heavy; very heavy for its size. It was no bigger than a super-ball, wrapped in brown paper, and trapezoidal in shape.

James sniffed it. It smelled like his grandmother’s house when he was a kid. He held it up to his ear and listened. Was it... ticking? A BOMB! No, wait, that was just his heart pounding. No, it made no sound.

This was nerve-wracking.

Things of this kind just didn’t happen to James. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to James was being struck on the head by a foul ball during a minor league play-off game. (He had been in the papers!) But this was something altogether different. This was... mysterious. James was pretty sure this was some sort of espionage. The thought staggered him... he, James Quincy Monroe was, through some twist of fate, mixed up in honest-to-God espionage! For the first time in his life, James wanted a martini!

Before he could explore the fantasy any further he was startled back to reality by the sound of the apartment house door creaking open behind him. He spun around quickly only to find himself face-to-face with the largest man he had ever seen. The man was easily two heads taller than James and twice as broad. His eyes were small and mostly obscured beneath two dense outcroppings of yellow eyebrow. His fingers, which were the size of summer sausages, were clenching and unclenching furiously. This man was, in a word, ‘menacing’.

“There you are!” the man cried with, what James noted, was marked relief. “The professor was beginning to think you weren’t coming. Do you have the package?”

James held the package out instinctively. The gorilla looked at it approvingly then motioned for James to follow him back into the building.

James followed like a man in a dream.

The hallway inside was cold and completely dark except for the small patch of light that streamed in through the open door.

“We’ve been expecting you Mister Marcellus,” croaked a voice from the darkness of the hallway. The door behind James creaked shut, and the room went black.

Marjorie Smith
Marjorie Smith writes for several publications and acts in local theatre and film projects. She is also a musician, if being a member of the MSU gamelan and the Awesome Polka Babes counts.

You know how they say that before you die, your whole life passes before your eyes? James had always wondered how that could possibly be true. That time he was hit on the head by the baseball the only events that passed before his eyes before he lost consciousness were the innings leading up to that foul ball.

This time his mind was trying to work out the puzzle of the last few harried minutes as he lost consciousness. The professor and the giant goon hadn’t stabbed the man who had given him the package, he told himself, because they thought James was Marcellus. But why had he run exactly to the place where Marcellus was expected? Maybe it was the package? Could it have controlled his movement? After all, he hadn’t even meant to run!

Those thoughts coursed through his brain as he blacked out, along with that croaky voice saying, “Take the package from him.”

As he regained consciousness he heard the voice again. “I knew the needle was not a good idea. It’s paralyzed his grip on the package. Ana Maria, see if you can persuade him to release it.”

And James’ busy brain thought, Aha! That’s why my head doesn’t hurt. They didn’t hit me on the head – they jabbed me. That would be why my right bicep is so sore.

Slowly he opened his eyes. A table lamp nearby emitted a dim light but most of the room was filled with deep shadows. He could see that a gorgeous woman with long, dark hair was kneeling beside him, leaning over him. She was wearing a very low cut blouse and he thought he might pass out again from the view right in front of his eyes. He took a deep breath. She wore some sort of exotic perfume and she most certainly did not smell like his grandmother’s house.

Her voice was low and seductive. “Senor Marcellus, I need that package. Can you give it to me?”

James would have done anything she asked, but his fingers refused to obey him. They would not release the package. Instead they explored the odd shape. It reminded him of something. It felt like – could it be? A very heavy, very small Sponge Bob Square Pants?

No, that was ridiculous! And yet …

KEITH SUTA
Keith "That Jeopardy! Guy" Suta is co-host of KGLT-FM's The Coffee Show and is gainlessly employed as a writer. "Dead Noon," a movie he co-wrote and appears in, will be distributed later this year by Lionsgate Entertainment to video stores worldwide.

James groggily blinked and tried to focus on the object in his hand. Another vision took precedence-- Ana Maria's décolletage. James was still under enough nerve serum to think he heard a wailing saxophone solo and to imagine himself turning into a cartoon wolf, howling at the top of his lungs and unrolling his tongue an unprecedented length across the floor.
Just then, two seemingly disparate events occurred:
At that very moment, far away in his secret underground geodesic dome, a mysterious billionaire sat stroking his white, long-haired Norwegian Forest Cat, cackling evilly to himself. But that's just a normal Tuesday night for Ted Turner...
Also, James saw the Professor bearing down on him, wielding a device that looked like it was constructed out of pneumatic tubing, parts from a rusty meat grinder, a dentist's drill, and several Ron Paul campaign buttons. James stammered, “B-b-b-but I'm voting for Mike Gravel...” The Professor grinned a crooked smile, his machine grinding, humming, buzzing and making wheezing accordion noises all at once. Ana Maria was shrugging into a poncho, as if she was seeing Gallagher at Branson, Missouri and expected to get covered with watermelon goo. James thought he knew who the watermelon was going to be.
Just before one of the spinning blades, prongs, or assorted spork-like attachments made contact with James' face-- the door to the room exploded inward. Silhouetted in the light, stood a man, a military-grade AA-12 combat shotgun held at the ready. The AA-12 can emptied a 20-round drum of 12 gauge shells in just under four seconds. This is what it proceeded to do to the floor, walls and ceiling all around James. The Professor and Ana Maria dove for cover to avoid the falling debris. James would have done so, had he not been strapped to a table. The man with the gun hurried to the table and began unbinding James.
“We don't have time for questions. Come with me, if you want to live,” said the man, in a decidedly non-Austrian accent.
James glanced at the dusty object still clutched in his hand. “Who are you?” he blurted.
“I'm Thaddeus Franklin Akira Walter Bergdorf McKinley Spader Jodorowsky Thompson MacGee Alan Marcellus. Call me Marcellus.”
“No time for questions, but we had time for that?” James started to ask, but was yanked out the door...

Sid Gustafson
Sid Gustafson is a novelist, pacifist, and word bum. He teaches equine studies at the University of Montana Western in Dillon (High Horse University), but writes in Bozeman, where his mind wanders freely. www.sidgustafson.com

Marcellus dragged James into the hincty alley between Willson and Grand and stuffed him into his Hummer before heading through the neon dims of snowslain Bozeman, south, rising out of the streetlights of Bozeman, slowly humming up to the great farmy curve, and then left, up Hyalite, alongside the rock fences, rising into snow, and then into deeper snow, deeper darkness. “We’re going fishin’,” Marcellus stated militarily.
City water supply, James thought, not understanding where the thought arose. The grayling, the afluvial grayling. How are the grayling doing? he pondered. Are they fluvial or afluvial? They have the reservoir, and they have the creek. They have water. Still water. Running water. Cold water, water under ice. James was not sure what had overcome him-- what had overtaken his mind, his body. He did not feel like he thought he ought to feel. He felt poetic and destined.
As they wended through the steep canyon, the object in his hand began humming. The humming became paralytic. James could feel his hand loosening, his body loosening, the Hummer humming, his hand humming, the whole world… humming. Rising into darkness, rising into the mountains. Trees rising out of the world. Snow rising. Hummer rising, Marcellus driving robotlike, his redneck rough and red and hairy. They came to the reservoir. A gibbous moon arisen to starch the sky, whiffing the stars. Fluvial, afluvial. Effluvium. Moon arisen, moon risen. Oblong moon, long night.
Marcellus wheeled the Hummer to the boat dock on the eastern shore, southeastern shore, northeastern shore? James gawked out the window looking for Polaris. There was no Polaris, no BIG Bear, no little Bear. A glow to the north, Bozeman glowing in her valley, her bisected, resected, subjected, dejected valley of flowers not blooming.
His hand loosened enough for him to open his palm, and the thingy started glowing, humming now, and glowing. Marcellus dragged an icefishing drill out of the back of the Hummer. James followed him out onto the ice. The jaundiced moonlight phosphoresced the ice a sulfurous yellow. Marcellus flipped some little switches on the drill, and pulled the cord. The machine took life, rattling and choking and banging, and then, humming. The rattle choke and bang bounced off the dam, bounced off the mountains, bounced off the moon, and came back to James, back through the hum and glow of the object in his palm.
Marcellus drilled, drilled through the ice. Chips of ice. Chunks of ice. Drilling, chipping, and then chunking deeper. When the ice-commando hit water the reservoir spit and groaned, a glottal lurch buckled the ice, unshackling the juggernaut Hyalite Reservoir had become.
The fish, James thought, the gray ling, the bur bot, no, the rain bow… must be the moon glow splitting my fool hearty words.
“James, you Jimmy, you nin-com-poop ninny,” Marcellus bellowed, “drop that device in the hole.”
James leaned over the hole, the black hole, a moonlit blackness tinted sulfuric yellow. He tipped his palm, the thing a ma jig rolled, plopped, came back up floating as if to say farewell, before sinking into the depths of manmade Hyalite Reservoir.
As the two marched back to the Hummer the littoral water under the ice took up a prismatic hue, and the hue rose into the ice, all the hues of the world rising into the ice, and as they looked back the hues rose out of the hole into a vortex, swirling the night, shaking the ice, stirring the world.

Holly Zadra
Holly writes and edits for the Tributary, but she brings in the big bucks finagling fiscal sustainability for the non-profit sector in Bozeman.

Ana Maria Marcellus scoffed, pulling off her wig of bombshell brunette to reveal tightly cropped bleach-white hair, “He wasn’t as easy as Thaddeus, even under the serum.” She reveled in thoughts of Thaddeus’s former naïveté as she stripped off the poncho and replaced it with a neoprene body suit, lit a cigarette and blew it in the professor’s face.
“Your tactics are so gruesome. Can you not, in all of your intellectual finery, come up with something clean?” she asked.
The professor stood there, seething and charmed at once, and handed his latest device to the big guy who turned toward the door.
“Let’s get to the reservoir.”
Ana Maria brushed past the big guy secretly revealing to him a sleek crimson gadget as she and the professor hurried off to their converted Chevette rife with the professor’s rampant contraptions including a slant-six turbo-charged 7-liter engine. While the professor gassed up the thirsty Chevette – 19 miles to the gallon on the highway – Ana Maria placed her little red device under the front passenger seat. She pulled on a trilastic hooded vest, zippered boots, goggles and gloves.
She was in for a very cold dive, she thought bitterly. In her mind’s eye she saw the professor’s failed attempts to snorkel, his body seizing with anxiety and sinking toward the bottom of the pool…
She recalled his response, “I just couldn’t psychologically reconcile my being under water and being able to breath.”

Back on Main Street, the couple sped off to Hyalite. As they spun out around the left turn marking the entry to Hyalite Canyon, the professor slammed on the brakes. The two stared up at the sky in disbelief.
“We’re too late!” the professor stammered.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Ana Maria responded. “Move over. I’m driving.”
The professor sidled out of the car like a child being punished, and Ana Maria climbed over her submersible spare air and the stick shift to the driver’s seat. The professor hadn’t even slammed his door shut before she took off up the winding road. Straight ahead was Thaddeus in his Hummer.
‘Compensating for something?’ Ana Maria wondered as she lurched passed the giant tax incentive and waved to her husband and his newest follower…

Joseph Menicucci, Jr.
Joseph waxes poetic about our national pastime at baseballfaceoff.com. He is currently an instructor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Montana State University-Bozeman.

'It is little…very little…tiny even,’ thought Magnús as Ana brushed past him in the doorway, 'but... I… think that she just showed me the red detonator she mentioned last night.'
Magnús had been sleeping with Ana since her trial separation from Thaddeus; she liked him, and even told him things that she didn't tell anyone else.
"I like you Magnús. I can tell you things I can't tell anyone else."
'Yes, that is what she said,' thought Magnús as he struggled to recall more of their conversation from the previous evening. He eventually remembered that Ana said that he reminded her of someone that she read about in a book once, someone named Santino, or Sonny, (he wasn't sure which one) but only when he was making love. Ana also said the Lord's name a lot when they were in bed, but she said it was all right because she was an atheist anyway. She also said the f-word a lot when she had sex.
"You say the f-word a lot," he told her.
"It's alright, because I'm an atheist," said Ana.
'Atheists can say the Lord's name and the f-word when they have sex,’ thought Magnús, while making a mental note that he certainly was not an atheist.
Ana then told Magnús something very important. "Magnús, I'd like to tell you something very important…"
And this, of course, is all that Magnús could remember from the evening he had spent with Ana. He could remember the passion of their kisses, the lovemaking, the conversations of Sonny and the f-word, and Ana Maria saying the Lord’s name over and over again, but he could not remember the most important thing she had told him.
Frustrated by once again forgetting something so important, Magnús turned his head to the sky and made a noise so violent, so guttural, that it was as if all motion stopped around him. People blocks away paused upon hearing the horrible sound, and they turned toward him sympathetically. Just then, when the world had paused to gaze upon Magnús, the sky exploded into a swirling mix of colors that, for a moment, seemed to dance to the echo of Magnús’ primal scream.
His frustration turned to horror as Ana’s parting words suddenly materialized to him as if revealed amidst the cacophony of colors now overwhelming the sky. “You must remember what I’ve told you, Magnús. I need you to follow the plan exactly if something goes wrong. My very life depends on it.”
Many years later, when mothers would tell their children stories of the heroics of Magnús the Great, they often left out the story of a defeated Magnús Skúlason, huddled against the brickwork of the downtown Bozeman building, sobbing as he muttered repeatedly to himself, “I can’t remember…I can’t remember…I can’t remember…”

Liz Allen
Liz Allen is a therapeutic massage therapist who spends a substantial amount of time rock hounding in the mountains with her dog Tigger, telemark skiing, and writing poetry and short stories.

‘That Magnús is one unobservant dolt,’ thought Ana Maria as she shifted the Chevette into Hover-Craft mode. ‘What could he possibly be doing right now to miss this night sky extravaganza?’

The Professor regarded her wistfully on an ice sofa and remarked to no one listening, ‘This fantastic color display reminds me of the Aurora Borealis,’ while Ana Maria and her 5’ 11” model body loomed over the ice-hole and readied herself to jump into the swirls of the abyss.

Her voyage into the ice hole’s gaping mouth was brief. Underwater, she believed she pressed the red detonater and for a dramatic effect once on ice again, tossed it into the ice hole. It was actually a trilobite that the Professor swiped from Earth’s Treasures earlier that day. The Professor had his own plan, a twisted and undeveloped plan, but a plan nonetheless, despite his distracting prolific propensity for shoplifting.

Ana Maria, unaware of the slight upturn of his grimace, quickly wiped her hands together, and snapped “We best be getting back to town Professor, I don’t wanna be responsible for recovering your liquefied body off that ice sofa. You know what’s about to happen.”

“Right you are Ana,” the Professor tried to look hurried. When, in reality, nothing turned him on more than a woman in charge. “You should drive!”

They hopped into the Chevette, still in Hover-Craft mode, and glided back through the forest onto the rural road, in the outskirts of Bozeman. That’s when Ana pulled over to shift out of Hover-Craft mode, to fit in with the Subaru AWDs amassing on the roads.

“What the….?” Ana Maria began to stutter as she realized the red detonater was not doing its job. Instead, the psychedelic swirls in the sky transfixed her. For a moment, she thought she saw the outlines of a trilobite glowing bright orange. She felt herself slipping off the edge of reality.

“Did you…?” Her eyes teared as her gaze drifted to the grimace of the Professor and her question hung in the air inert. She slumped over in her bucket seat, a good hour of drooling unconsciousness upon her. At least that’s how much time the Professor hoped he had.

The Professor gently caressed her beautiful neoprene legs as he moved her into the back seat. Unfortunately, the kaleidoscopes in his eyes were of no effect to the person who pulled up next to him, in a maroon Subaru AWD.

Craig Kenworthy

Craig Kenworthy writes the 30 Second Timeout column for the Chronicle. His radio play ‘Hurf” won a Silver Charles Ogle Award in 2007. He still can’t believe he lost to that Bradbury guy.

It was the guy from the bus stop, minus the dagger sticking out of his back. The mustache looked as fake as ever, though. [A note to the reader- in full postmodern tradition, this would be a good time to reflect not on “I thought this guy was dead”, but instead on “What is death?” Is it a state of being? A resolution of all our hopes and fears, realized or not? Your father in law complaining about his heel spurs? And if death is a journey, is dying at a bus stop just symbolic as hell or what?]

“Creighton?”
The driver of the Subaru nodded. It was the kind of nod you don’t ignore.
“Hello, Professor. Or should I say ex-professor?”
The driver got out. He reached into the Chevette and took the keys out of the ignition.
“I prefer former professor. Just as you must prefer former grad student.”
“Former. Sounds like a good descriptor for me. At least until this little experiment or…” Creighton looked up at the sky. “….or experience, maybe, starting having some interesting side effects. Have you driven past the cemetery, professor?”
“The pet cemetery? You know I go there every week to see Buttons.”
“I am not referring to your obsessive devotion to a late Pekingese, you dolt.”
“Actually, she was a Chow and she was all I had, except for my patents. I tried curling up on the couch with them, but it just wasn’t the same.”
“Listen to me, the people in the cemetery. They’re…”
Pedro’s revelation was interrupted by the sound of Ana Maria hitting the Professor over the head with the Chevette’s owners manual. Normally, that would just be annoying, but in this case, she’d wrapped the manual around the vehicle’s tire iron.
The professor’s head hit the steering wheel, setting off the car’s horn. Ana Maria shouted above the din:
“We’ve got to find Marcellus and Magnus.”
“You want to find a trellis and sphagnum?”
She wondered how many tire irons this car had, but decided moving the Professor would be easier.
“I said we must find Marcellus and Magnus.”
“Magnus, the guy who owns the Icelandic restaurant on Tracy?”
“He’s the key to stopping this now.”
“Stopping this? I am not sure I like that idea.”
“We must protect the current state of affairs.”
“Listen, lady. In the current state of affairs, I’m dead.”

Bob Hendricks
Bob Hendricks was born in Frankfurt Germany in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration and moved back to the USA when he was ten months old. While he has no memory of Germany, he does retain a fondness for BMW motorcycles and dark Bavarian beer, and he credits both for the occasional inspiration to write a one-act play.

Weaving through the sea of Hyalite Reservoir bound Subarus, topped with Yakima bike racks, and sprouting fists with raised middle fingers deriding the H-1’s conspicuous consumption, Marcellus and James headed north—back toward Bozeman. The endless stream of oncoming traffic braided a rope-light that stretched to the historic downtown retail district. Congestion on South 19th slowed progress, and prompted drivers to pass without regard for oncoming traffic, and—when the inevitable collision blocked the opposing lane—they took to driving on the shoulder and passing in the ditch.

“I much prefer police states—I prefer the order. No traffic jams and the trains run on time,” groused Marcellus, as he detoured to Cottonwood Road to avoid the gridlocked South 19th. James knew the route… knew there were two unavoidable ninety-degree turns that would require the lumbering Hummer to slow to a crawl and give him a chance to jump and run. Marcellus downshifted as they approached the first opportune corner. James steeled his nerves and inconspicuously grabbed the door handle. It was a right turn, and centrifugal force would hold the passenger side door closed—his escape would require extra effort, and his adrenal glands were rising to the occasion. James suddenly realized that escaping the Hummer was only the first step. He must also escape the AA-12 shotgun and its professional handler. The perpendicular roads he anticipated were surrounded by wheat fields; there was no cover… no place to hide… no escape. James sighed and released the door handle—adrenaline capitulated and regrouped for another opportunity.

James correctly concluded that this shotgun-wielding commando who rescued him from the clearly perceived—yet thoroughly misunderstood—threat back in the apartment building, was much more concerned with the package than with James’ well being. He resented the demeaning tone Marcellus used to address him. If this package was so valuable… so vital… then shouldn’t he be accorded some respect for ushering it away from the bus stop, its dead courier (or so James thought), and the gathering crowd?

Cottonwood Road passed the little red schoolhouse and descended slightly as it approached Hyalite Creek. As the Hummer crossed the creek, James noticed the blue-green glow that month-old ice, and a two-foot blanket of snow could not conceal. The spread of the glow was outpacing the river’s current. The current could not have carried it from the reservoir, over the dam, down the canyon, and into the valley faster than the Hummer had speeded down the paved roads.

“What is that?” he demanded of Marcellus. “What was in the package? What is it doing to the lake… to the water?”

Marcellus responded as he had been splendidly trained: “You don’t have a need to know.” While his answer was surely condescending, his tone had changed, and James noticed it. But he did not realize that the tone of Marcellus’ voice meaningless. He had rehearsed that response for years so that he could deliver it in the exact same manner to the lowest errand boy that Langley could dispatch to retrieve his laundry, to the President. And he had indeed delivered that same line—in the same flat tone with a hint of respect—to both.

James contemplated his next possible escape opportunity, oblivious to the commotion behind him. The blue-green glow beneath the ice and snow was far more brilliant—indeed violently psychedelic—in open water. And it marched upstream under the ice—defying the current—toward Palisade Falls, where it raced up the column of ice to the top of the waterfall and shot into space like an electron charged fountain reaching up to the sky, seeking its Aurora Borealis source and bridging the eight and a half light minutes back to the sun… back to the solar flair that spawned it. Cold fusion had been created, but was far from corralled.

For the second time that evening—and the second time in his life—James craved a martini. A Bombay Sapphire martini. Straight up with a twist… and dry. Put the vermouth in the air humidifier.

Alison Grey
Alison Grey is a Bozeman native who has spent much of her adult life trying to avoid the real world, a semi-successful pursuit. When she isn’t skiing, eating French fries or wasting away her youth in local dive bars, she is a writer who prefers the ridiculous and socially unacceptable to the boring and mundane and is attracted to hot men in snow pants.

Word spread quickly throughout Bozeman of the incoherent transient emitting horrible groans and mumbling the same repeated phrase over and over again.

The first to come across this mysterious transient were Dorothy and Jan, a duo a retirees walking home from their usual luncheon date at the Nova Café. Their animated conversation detailing the numerous achievements of their grandkids was cut short when they came upon Magnus, now huddled in fetal position, peering up into the sky with glazed eyes, red and puffy from his dramatic breakdown.

“Are you all right?” asked Jan, inching slowly towards Magnus.

“I don’t remember,” said Magnus, his voice so hoarse Jan could barely understand him. “I don’t remember…we had sex…oh, we had great sex, mind blowing…but, ah, I don’t remember.”

Magnus mustered his last bit of strength to raise his arm towards Jan, beckoning her towards him as he let out a low guttural noise. She lurched backwards, moving more quickly than she had in years.

“Dear Lord,” she said to Dorothy, her voice quivering with a mixture of fear and animosity. “What a pathetic sight. The last thing we need are a bunch of beer guzzling, crack smoking, sexually perverse, societal rejects dirtying up our community.”

“Absolutely,” Dorothy agreed. “What this town needs to do is buy these low life scoundrels a one-way ticket to Missoula with all those hippies that actually feel sorry for them.”

“Ah, she was so beautiful, naked, sweating and moaning,” Magnus quietly bellowed, tears streaming down his face. “But, I just can’t remember.”

“That’s it,” screamed Jan. “We’re calling the cops.”

“Pervert,” hissed Dorothy, as the two scuttled down the street.

As the two were busy alerting local law officials, a black Ford truck pulled up next to Magnus, screeching to a halt inches from his head. Through his blur of tears, Magnus saw two dark figures in cowboy hats coming towards him.

He let out a whimper, wishing he was back in Ana’s arms, cuddled tightly against her voluptuous breasts as she screamed profanities to the Lord and called him Sonny.

Weak and tired, Magnus did not resist as the two men wrapped him in some sort of animal hide. He could feel himself being lifted, and with a thud, dropped into the bed of the truck. As the engine roared beneath him and the truck sped off, Magnus could hear sirens in the distance approaching the site of his abduction.

After a long and painful ride over bumpy dirt roads, the truck came to a halt. Before Magnus knew it, he was unwrapped, and found himself sitting on a buffalo hide. He looked up to see a grinning Ted Turner gently stroking a long-haired white cat.

Brian Kassar

Brian has lived in Bozeman for 8 years and been active in the arts community as an actor, singer, writer and director. His scripts have won an Audience Choice award and 2 Best Production awards in the last three Equinox Theatre One-Act Play festivals.

“Where’s the Orb of Dominion?” asked Ted, placing the cat on the floor.

Magnus was still sitting on the buffalo hide, a bit dazed from the trip and subsequent deposit in front of Ted Turner. The cat rubbed against knee, purring loudly. Magnus absently began petting the cat as he tried to make sense of this surreal tableau.

“The Orb!” screamed Ted, simultaneously maniacal and benevolent.

The outburst jolted Magnus back to the present. With surprise, he noticed he was petting the cat and immediately stopped. He hated cats.

“I…I don’t know. I’ve been having problems keeping track of things…my memory…”

Ted interrupted him. He bent down, inches from his face, and hissed, “What do you think will happen to our little deal without the Orb? The fate of Ted’s Montana Grill lies with that Orb. Without it, our previous agreement will become null and void.”

Magnus noted a smell of sandalwood and tobacco. “Our lives are now inextricably entwined my friend,” gloated Ted.

“Mr. Turner, please. I need this deal as much as you do. I can help find the Orb. I know someone…someone close to the Orb. You see, a while back this girl and I..”

“ENOUGH!” shouted Ted. The cat, which had begun licking its ass, paused with its leg raised in the air as if hoping to answer an arithmetic question. “Bring them in.”

At that moment, an elevator door opened and one of Magnus’s cowboy-hat wearing abductors shoved Anna Maria and James into the cavernous room.

“Anna Maria!” exclaimed Magnus.

“You know this guy?” James asked Anna Maria.

“Yes,” she replied. Hoping to avoid speaking the truth (oh the awful truth) of their knowledge of each other, she said, “He owns the Icelandic restaurant on Tracy.”

“Indeed he does,” said Ted Turner.

Magnus tried to interject. “But—“

Both Anna Maria and Ted Turner gave him a look that served to silence him. Anna Maria’s out of desperation, Ted Turner’s out of menace.

James quickly made sense of the situation. “I think I have what you want!”

Like a predator, Ted Turner approached James from the other side of the room.

Michele Corriel

Michele Corriel is a freelance writer working with about a dozen regional and national magazines. But perhaps she is even less well-known for her invention of the Poetry Dispensers that keep popping up around town (and around the West). She is currently working on her third (or is it her sixth?) novel for young readers.

Playing with the somewhat dull-edged skull-shaped dagger, Ted turned to the hermetically sealed doors that were supposed to have guaranteed that no microorganisms gained entrance. But something much bigger than a microorganism had indeed obtained a foothold in his lair.

“I thought I told all those Romney kids to get out of town!” Ted sneered at his personal assistant, none other than Pedro Creighton.

“I told them, sir, but they insisted on staying. I believe their father is buying the Yellowstone Club and turning it into a retreat for the Tabernacle Choir.”

“Creighton, seal those doors at once! I can’t be bothered with the noveau rich. And don’t forget to vacuum the cat,” Ted returned to his guests.

“But aren’t you?” James pointed at Creighton. “Isn’t he? … What the?” James stuttered into his half-finished martini.

Ana could see Creighton pretend to vacuum the cat, but in actuality he was signaling an escape route to her.

Ted’s head swiveled and caught Creighton in the act. “So, I see we’ve got a mole here.”

“Where?” Ana searched her face to see if that pesky mole on her upper lip had resurfaced. “Does anyone have a small hand mirror?”

“Not that kind of mole, you idiot!” Ted yelled.

“You mean a spy?” Creighton feined disbelief.

“No, there, that furry animal burrowing under my carpeting! Quick Creighton get my buffalo gun!”

“But sir, that’s only for shooting buffalo.” Creighton replied, unlocking the back door and allowing both Ana and James the ability to leave.

Ana knew her only chance to make a run for it was to create a diversion. But what?

In a last gasp effort to save herself and James, who was looking rather cute in a bedraggled sort of way, stepped forward and declared, “All right, you got me. I’ll tell where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are.”

“Honey, that’s yesterday’s news. No one believes in them anymore than we believe in cold fusion.” Ted threw his dagger across the room. “We need the Orb, darlin’ The Orb.”

Ana’s eyes signaled to James, darting from the curtain to his feet. “Run,” she mouthed when Ted wasn’t looking.

And he did.

Right into the Professor who was emitting multi-colored rays of light from the ends of fingertips. Everything he touched turned psychedelic. He was the trippiest Midas that ever walked the streets and tunnels (tunnels?) of Bozeman.

At that moment Ted hoisted his buffalo gun and shot at the mole.

“Wait!” screamed the Professor. “That sir is no mole, that’s my wife!”

Mike Finkel

bio: Mike Finkel is currently producing offspring at a disconcertingly rapid pace.

--

Goddamn there’s a lot of characters in this story, thought Mike Finkel as he read he tale, then read it again, and found himself thoroughly confounded. I guess that’s what happens when there’s too many cooks in the kitchen. How wonderfully, egotistically rude would it be, he wondered, to fuck the whole thing up, insert himself as a character, have that James guy -- remember James? has anybody actually read this far? hello? -- shut the book he was reading back near the Thomas the Tank Engine track over at the Barnes & Noble, and, in a nice Italo Calvino sort of way, start the whole damn story again?

It could be a simple, coming of age yarn about a young man -- a man named James -- and his mother -- let’s call her Eileen -- driving with the multitudes down North 19th Street, talking about what they’d like to eat for lunch, speaking of the weather, telling unfunny jokes. Tender. Poignant. Subtle. A searing look into the quiet angst that defines our time. The ennui of life. The meaning of it all. Possibly written in French.

Certainly, we could weave in a lot of insider hilarity, like making good-natured fun of the fact that you have to mortgage your home to afford a bagel at the Co-Op, or that there’s really only two types of people left in town -- real estate agents and yoga instructors -- or that by city ordinance you must own a black lab or face expulsion. We’d have to note the amazing and unbelievable fact that Petsmart can be read as either Pet Smart or Pets’ Mart. And we’d no doubt retell tell that great old Bozeman knee-slapper about being only 20 miles from Montana…

Shit.

You’re right.

It’s a bad idea.

Really bad.

So: There’s an orb in the lake. The sky is all trippy. Someone has apparently wed a rodent. We’ve poked some fun at Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, and Mitt Romney, but not the sacred Democrats. People are named Marcellus, Ana Maria, Magus (with an accent aigu), the Professor, Dorothy, Creighton, Jan, and Ted. It’s possible that the Professor has a name, but I missed it. Marcellus is also known as Thaddeus. I think. Anyway, there’s been a bit of sex. People have driven all over the valley. The word “hincty” has been used. Someone has a diminutive penis. Can we say penis in this story? Martinis have been craved. James, I believe, is still the main character.

Plow on, my dear Soren.

Soren Kisiel

Soren Kisiel is an award-winning playwright and co-author of Broad Comedy, the Executive Director of the Equinox Theatre Company and the founder of Spontaneous Combustibles Improv Comedy Troupe.

Plow on, indeed, Mike. For what choice have we?

I understand your impatience, my friend, but sit here by the fire. Let the night’s quiet calm you, for there is still much to tell.

You cannot be blamed for feeling that there are too many characters in this story. There are many. But you see it is only by a complete telling of the tale that the deeds of Magnus the Great can be seen in their full light. Only with a full recounting of Magnus’ mighty actions, and those of the legends around him, can the true heroism be seen, and the fullness of his humanity.

Indeed, it is tempting to disrespect our ancestors. To chuckle over a word like “hincty” or the confusion of names, but is this what we wish to teach our children?

If our great stories were allowed to be treated so lightly, how would we know who we are? When we are asked why we wear the cloaks of silver dire-wolf fur upon our shoulders, or why our leaders wear a ring of cold iron from the north seas upon their brow, what will we answer?

Just as if the traditions of Magus Terra of the Denim Overalls had been lost, we would have been lost as well.

If the Ways were not passed to her from the earliest times, from wise one to wise one, if they had not been preserved to eventually land in Magus Terra’s leathered palms, would we even be here to tell the tale? Passed from Sun Tzu to Sun Ra, and indeed from the hearthstone to Firestone. Yes, Firestone. For, my friends, my community, it is around tires that our story now turns.

Magus Terra of the Denim Overalls stood just outside the property line, across the street where Hyalite Canyon Road finds its bottom, at Cottonwood Road. She knew this was coming. And she knew she wouldn’t be prepared. She had spread herself too thin.

When the elders had given her the task of maintaining the wall, she should have made that her only goal. Live in the house across from the bottom of Hyalite Canyon Road, and keep the holy tire-wall intact.

Few in Bozeman now remembered the tire wall, it had been so long since it was taken down. A fence, long and proud and as high as any rancher’s, constructed entirely of old tires. Of eternal tires, holy tires, tires imbued with the elasticity of angels, as all rubber is. Tires made to stand the test of time, the test of progress.

That wall had been gone a half-decade, at least, when now it was finally needed. For half a generation Magus Terra had watched over the wall, before she became distracted.

It was too easy to become distracted. Her attention had been pulled away in so many directions. Supporting local businesses… fundraising for small non-profits… reading the Food Co-op’s newsletter… taking on students of her ways, like Stephanie Campbell, or Holly Zadra. This land offered so much for a woman like Terra, how could one blame her for not maintaining her focus? So when the property taxes got to be too much - for all her income had gone to bailing out small theater companies - and the house with the tire fence was sold, she tried not to think of the tires, to put them out of her mind. Terra, after all, wasn’t her real name, anyway. She’d done what she could, right?

But now, watching the dancing glow reaching out from the mountain tops, she understood why the angels had placed the tire wall there. Why the spirits had chosen that spot at the bottom of the canyon to make their steel-radial stand.

She pushed a tear from her eye. This was no time for self-pity, or regret. Pulling a worn bandana from her pocket she blew her nose, steeling herself against what was to come.

She climbed back into the U-Haul she’d rented, the illustrated postcard of Wounded Knee painted on the side no coincidence. From the breast pocket of her denim overalls she pulled a long graying eagle’s feather, and placed it on the dashboard. Firing the engine, she headed for the storage unit. The storage unit where the tires had been stacked upon one another like prayer stones, sleeping peacefully for these many years.

Sally King

After paying her New York dues, King lives in Bridger Canyon and writes about food, wine, travel and design for Big Sky Journal, Western Art and Architecture, Wine Review Online, Wine Enthusiast, More, and other publications and websites. sbkproductions.com

Hunkered down in the U-Haul, Terra (a.k.a. Ana Maria, Junior) thought about the life she had led before storing so many things in the storage unit. She’d had an exciting life, a good life, and now she was willing to put it all on the line.

In addition to the tires in the storage unit, there were cases and cases of Ketel One vodka. Why had she felt the urge to stockpile so much vodka? It had to do with some feeling of scarcity. Terra was always worried about being broke, poor, hungry, and unable to pay her rent. Now that cost of living in Bozeman was out of control, she had felt compelled to be somewhat of a pack-rat.

During her years in town, she had asked Ted to bail her out so many times—which he did, even when he was married to Jane—and she just couldn’t ask him again. It was too embarrassing. And she certainly couldn’t call Marcellus! Not again!

So, she slumped back in the driver’s seat of the U-Haul and thought about what to do next.

Terra worried about the tire situation; it was more of a stressor now that she was divorced from Thaddeus and she had to fend for herself. She started pacing.

Then, it came to her: YOGA! If I go to Down to Earth’s mysore class, I’ll be able to think straight; I’ll be able to come out of the Emerson—pink and glowing with that yoga high—and confront the contents of the storage unit. The tires. The vodka.

So she walked over to the yoga studio, spread out her yoga mat, and proceeded to chant, breathe, and move her body and mind. After 1 _ hours of introspection and yoga poses, Terra had a clearer head. It worked every time. “Practice, practice. All is coming,” said her guru.

She rolled up her sweaty yoga mat. “OK.” She sighed. “Here we go.” (When she got nervous or anxious, she talked to herself. It was her own way of dealing with stress. )

When Terra arrived at the storage unit, she entered her code, and there they were: All the tires, plus, all the Ketel One vodka. The room was chilly, and she was grateful that alcohol didn’t freeze. “Plus,” she said out loud, “…he LOVES martinis!”

She knew she had to consider the Orb. She thought about adding some Ketel One to the hole in the ice. Would it help or hurt the situation? Terra worried about the fish and the environment, but she also knew that the vodka would very slightly change the temperature of the water in the reservoir so that the water would be more accessible.

She sat in the storage unit, opened a bottle of Ketel One, and took a long swig, right out of the bottle. Just like James had done.

She put on the red Neoprene suit that she knew she had to use, took one of the tires, tucked two small bottles of vodka in her vest—the one she bought on sale at Northern Lights-- and headed up to the reservoir.

When she got to the reservoir, she took out the tire and……

Jonathan Gans
Lives with horses and over the ridge from Bridger Bowl in Brackett Creek country. He writes poetry, teaches kids, talks to his dogs and has loved the same woman for 31 years. His recent book 49 Poems: Where Are You Leading Me Now? was published in 2005.

a can of charcoal lighter she kept in the trunk for starting fires on wet mornings in the campground. She tucked her rolled up Yoga Tarp under one arm and her prayer helmet under the other.

“I’m a gonna either scare that loony Orb back into the zenith delta where he come from or git him to settle down right heah ‘cross from me like we was gonna smoke a pipe and he’s gonna tell me just what this whole shindangdooie is about,” she muttered, taking a look around to see if anyone else might be watching her one woman parade from her Rambler down to the lakeside. She’d gotten tired of shifting into that worn out U Haul clutch and had left the beast at the storage yard.

“Ain’t this a helluva thing for a gal as shined up an smart as I used to be, reduced to this kind of foolishness in the dead of night, and for what? Got to be some dumbass furriner man type behind this I am sure.”

Down on the ground went the old tire when she’d carried it through the pine woods as far as she could on what breath she still had left at that altitude. She squatted stiffly and squirted the inside of the rim with lighter fluid. Reaching into the front slash pocket of her skin tight suit, she pulled out a Zippo lighter and flicked it into flame in front of her face for a moment. “You light MY fire, baby. Always, Jimbo” read the engraved inscription on the cover.

“What the hell do I think I’m doin out here anyway? Savin’ the world? Bringin in the Orb? Livin out a dam fairy tale gone real wrong, ‘ats whut.”

She reached forward and lit the fluid inside the tire. It all leapt into a flaming blue ring, and instantly began to cast up the putrid black smoke for which riot tires are famous. With the tiger striped prayer helmet pulled down snugly, her rhythmic chanting of the Zarathustrian Manger Moan Mantra echoed and ricocheted inside her head like a swallow trapped in an attic trying to find a way out. But keep it in she did, as she was supposed to do, now sitting on her spread out tarp in the pose of reception, soles of her Birkenstocks pressed together, the burning tire’s black light casting an eerie glow on her red neoprene suit. She was like the red pointer of her own compass, aimed in some new magnetic direction other than the four cardinals, calling out of the dark matter of the sky whatever Power, God, Orb, or late night freak with a portable dish might tune her in.

She felt prickly. Was it the suit? Itchy on her skin. Hard to concentrate on the Mantra. What if the tire burned out before she got the message? Would she know the message when she heard it, be able to distinguish it from her own inner slavish rant, her worn through complaint on life? She would know. She had to know. She was the only one out here, the only one with her own tire, her own inner reggae filling in what crevices remained in her disintegrating brain, the only one in The Red Suit, the only one believing in The Great Man after so many disappointments from so many little men, the one true believer in The Orb. Somethin’s comin.

She paused for a good long swig of the cold and burning vodka. And another. One more. Back to the chant. Now she was feeling the energy, her blood running warmer, her eyelids twitching from the expectant REMs behind them. She tilted her head back and looked directly up into the night sky and she saw it then, saw the rainbow Orb, circling the moon like rings around a stone thrown into night’s own water. It was descending slowly, spinning as it came down to where she sat, a patient disciple, a Vestal waiting in the light of a burning tire, her mouth dropped open, eyes wide as temple bells. Did she see the little man, the little man just inside the rim of the rainbow Orb, as if he were at the controls, controlling the descent of the glimmering, shimmering donut orb. Yes, she had harnessed its power, and it was coming down to meet her, to greet her, to rescue her, to reward her with all those dreams she had for so long been wanting.

She was fixated on it, her face full upward as it grew in size. She felt her neck stiffen and cramp from the cold and she couldn’t straighten it. She was losing her balance, being drawn into the light tunnel. She fell backward and the nape of her neck, unprotected just below the helmet, landed with a heavy thud on a downed log and she passed out.

Kate Howe
Wastes a lot of time writing poetry, short stories, screenplays (some of which she’s finished!) and the occasional novel. Sometimes they get published. When she isn’t teaching skiing at Bridger Bowl or rock climbing at Spire, she can be found hanging absurdly large sculptures from the ceiling of the Co-op or documenting the insanity that is her life at www.skiingintheshower.blogspot.com

James looked down at the neoprene clad, Birkenstock wearing fruitcake that was his former flame and sighed. Why are the most interesting ones also the craziest? Clenching and unclenching his right hand, which was pulsing in psychedelic patterns where he had touched the Professor (read as: shoved him violently out of the way as he made his escape), he looked across the ice to the group that had gathered on the shore.

Anna Maria nodded at him. Magnus, who had the potential to be great, stared vacantly at Anna Maria, wondering if he could inhale her bodily and suck her into his skin. The Professor and Marcellus were trading touches back and forth, seemingly playing games with the psychedelic pulses of light. Interesting that in every crisis, there is also time for boredom and distraction. The dead guy sat dejectedly, looking sullenly at Magnus, and realizing that it could just as easily have been him. Okay, it HAD been him. Anna Maria hadn’t let him inhale her bodily into his skin, either. It was time to get on with life. Perhaps he could find work up at Bridger teaching skiing. People say it’s a good job, an okay place to meet hot women.

James surveyed the motley group and knelt next to Tara. Lovingly, he removed her tiger striped mantra helmet, allowing her wild, unkempt hair to spill from it. Even insensible, she was still strangely compelling to him. He still couldn’t believe this had to be done. His history with her, it had been hard to stay away, and equally great to be outside her orb of insanity… he glanced again at Anna Maria, who was scraping Magnus off her lower leg with her heel, and gesturing for James to get on with it.

“This is ridiculous” thought James, feeling a bit biblical, a bit in over his head, a bit moronic, and not just a little curious. He bent down over his former love, whispered her name. The Professor and Marcellus touched the ice at precisely that moment, sending pulses of cosmic light across the reservoir toward them.

James, who might have thought “Not again” or “Oh, please” normally under such circumstances, was wholly captivated by the spectacular goggle tan that Tara was sporting and drew nearer and nearer realizing as the scent of hot neoprene and sweat assaulted his senses that he had never ever needed to taste someone as badly as the taste of Tara… his lips descended upon hers and all eyes turned to the sky as…

Mike England
Once a writer of marginal promise, Mike England has currently suspended his literary ambitions to engage in the equally unprofitable business of independent magazine publishing.

…Ted Turner emerged from the center of the iridescent glow, riding a white, winged buffalo. The deranged media mogul bore down on them, eyes ablaze with the indignation and fury that only a member of the bourgeoisie can feel when outsmarted by proletarians. “Impudent little wretches,” he growled, kicking his spurs into the flying bison’s ribs. He reached out and stroked his cat, poised like a sphinx on the beast’s shaggy head. It purred momentarily, then let out a horrid wail that echoed through the canyon.

The group on shore froze in place. Not only would Ted be on them in seconds, but they were all transfixed by the banner trailing from the winged creature’s tail: “Where Culture Meets Evolution: Buffalo Ted’s Montana Grill and Flying Wild West Show.” Anna glanced at the Chevette and was overcome with shame. Her “Be a Yokel, Buy Local” bumper sticker now seemed so 2006.

The Professor cringed with self-loathing. He had helped create this abomination, when he was part of the secret genetic engineering program concealed in the geodesic dome beneath the Flying D Ranch. The winged bison Pegalo had been their only real success—unless you call turning his wife into a mole successful (which he certainly did). The Professor remembered Ted’s impassioned soliloquy when Pegalo was born. “Forgive me, Montana, for Jane,” he’d said, in a rare moment of humanity. “I was weak! Like Beowulf with Grendel’s mother! Jane is my curse, and always will be—at least until the Vietnam vets die off. But the Flying Wild West Show will be my salvation! What ex-Marine could hate me after seein’ buffalo-mounted cowboys jousting 200 feet above the Gallatin River?”

James, still in his liplock with Tara, opened his eyes in time to see Ted and his giant albino bison-bird landing on shore. As Tara smiled and groggily maneuvered herself into the downward dog yoga pose, James’s mind wheeled with a single, persistent thought: “Can you really get high off tire smoke?”

Ted dismounted and leveled his buffalo gun at the group. “Where is the Orb of Dominion?” he demanded. “Without it, my genetic augmentation program cannot succeed! Anna Maria, unless you want a 50-caliber slug through your saline sacs, I suggest you get in the water and fetch me my orb.”

While Ted was threatening breast reduction and James was considering new psychoactive opportunities, Magnus was thinking. An ember had ignited inside his brain. He felt everything around him changing, shifting, like the air before a storm. And then all at once it burst into his consciousness. He suddenly remembered what Anna had told him during their moment of non-blasphemous, profanity-laced ecstasy. How could he have forgotten? Those tender lips, whispering to him ever so sweetly that it was he, and only he, who possessed a penis diminutive enough to save Bozeman from certain doom.

A change came over Magnus. His stooped shoulders raised and broadened. His furrowed brow relaxed and a look of calm permeated his countenance. Everyone turned to witness the grandeur and dignity of Magnus’s transformation. He was no longer Magnus the Miniscule. No longer “Big Guy with Tiny Pee-Pee,” as the Hopi called him. Destiny had arrived at last. He would become what his Aunt Ruthie had always told him he’d become: Magnus the Great. And for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what he had to do.

Shayna Gibson

Shayna Gibson is the recent recipient of mild Internet infamy. She wishes she were joking. She also can’t resist flirting with the boundaries of literary decency. She’s sorry. No she isn’t.

It takes a great act of daring to be considered by the Board of Literary Name Suffixes to be qualified as a “the Great.” It is, as of yet, an unbusted myth that correlates outstanding genital characteristics to greatness. Of course, that said, the size of a man’s genitalia has little to do with the quality of his constitution. Unless, of course, you happen to find yourself in Butte, Montana on St. Patrick’s Day without pants.

Of all of the greats, Magnus had by far the most fascinatingly magical stick of salami in his pants (except, perhaps, for Joan of Arc, who found her holy armor more comfortable when she stuffed its codpiece to prevent chaffing the empty slot.) This trouser tiger had lain dormant for the majority of Magnus’ life, only did it finally begin to awaken with the arousal provided by Ana Maria’s sailor mouth and the vacant afterlife plans that solidly slept behind her irises. It was a lust-slaked glimpse of a faith in vast empty nothingness that was promised in Ana Maria’s climax-dialated pupils. Like all “the Greats,” Magnus had been injected by his own potential by the noncommittal affections of a disdainful woman of action.

Catherine the Great had a prophetic vagina. Xerxes the Great possessed a testicle that permeated the aroma of freshly baked bread. Alexander the Great had been blessed (or cursed depending on the moment) by two nigh-identical Greek peni to pack in his Byzantine underpants. The slightly lubricated hand of fate had touched Magnus with a gift that might cost him his very life, or at least certainly his dignity.

With one last look of profound, almost pubescent longing at Ana Maria, Magnus dropped trou. A collective eyebrow raise directed itself at the new dangling member of the adventuring party. It would have introduced itself, but it was rather cold. The awkwardness of the moment lingered at length before finally giving way to the light jazz-infused sounds of Tony Mottola.

“Magnus!” Ana Maria gasped as she fully understood his plan, “I had no idea that your penis was baritone.”

Ted Turner was not amused. His flying buffalo was not appeased by the sounds of pants-sausage easy listening. Ted Turner was not a man to trifle with with your pants down. Unless of course, you knew his secret…

Rebecca Kinman

Rebecca Kinman is a vagabond writer whose recent travels to South America have inspired a number of humanitarian projects. A former Co-op employee, she enjoys the occasional indulgence in affectionate jabs at the store’s philosophical core. But she doesn’t mean it because she wants to continue friendly visits with her ex-coworkers while they’re still on the clock . Read her blog at http://people.tribe.net/rebeccarose

……That second to the Co-op, the Ted Turner Foundation was one of the biggest annual beneficiaries to ACRDA (Americans for Complete and Rapid Destruction of the Amazon). “What a useless, putrid waste of potentially profitable advertising space,” Ted grumbled.

“Yah, Magnus’ penis is capable of so much more,” chimed Anna Maria.

“No, you Latina wannabe fool,” cried Ted. “These foolish words astound me! The Amazon Rainforest is a waste! I’d like to buy it all and start a new advertising campaign,”

Ted’s eyes joyfully sparkled at the thought of thousands of species of endangered monkeys violently dying, one by one. His mind basked in the thought of lush green canopies being whipped to shreds and ancient native traditions slashed by the pleasure of capitol greed. His heart pounded expectantly as he conjured the idea of replacing the entire Amazon with a colossal… billboard. The largest one ever. It would be visible from…the moon! From Saturn! From His secret collection of Sinead O’Connor reggae bootlegs! It would read: “Ted’s Montana Grill. Eat Great. Kill the Rainforest. ” His late father would be very proud.

As if telepathically detecting Ted’s devious plan, Anna Maria grabbed Marcello’s AA-12 shotgun with her right hand and Magnus’ very vocal manhood with the other. It was a trick that she’d learned from an 180-year-old shaman that she had met in Venezuela after her post-college quest to find herself. “The male member is a great thing. It is like a shotgun,” the shaman had said. “Only a woman can combine their powers to save our people. To save the jungle. And the world.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Anna Maria commanded, pointing the expensive firearm to Magnus’ temple.

‘Sorry honey,” she whispered to a very sweaty Magnus. “This will only take a second,”

She bravely pointed Magnus’ singing penis toward the buffalo, who was now trying to plug his ears with his hooves.

“Make one move and I’ll put this penis on permanent Barbara Streisand. You and your Buffalo will live in an infinate hell that no soundproof geodesic dome can shelter you from!”

“Oh, you foolish, foolish girl…”cackled Ted. “Everyone knows that the Double-Handed Feminine Phallus Grasp can be overridden by pressing just one simple button. One that lies deep within the center of the Orb of Dominion. Now tell me where it is, or I will be forced to buy Hyalite Canyon and have the city’s water supply laced with…chlorine! Then I’ll have the Board of Directors at the Co-op raise the price of local, organic non-genetically modified bison! Then I’ll sell the Co-op’s McDonalds’s franchise and use the extra cash to bleach my mustache! I’ve got those sold-out hippies wrapped around my little finger! Huaahuaa huaaa!”

Everyone fell silent. The idea of toxic cleaning products in their drinking water -- and on Ted’s face -- was sickening. And Terra had just read in the Co-op newsletter that ground bison was already an astronomical $5.99 a pound. Not to mention, Mcdonald’s--and thus the greater Bozeman Community--would suffer greatly the economic loss of the Co-op’s underground investment in unethically raised meats and their not-so-undergound investment in soy-based, tasteless meatlike product. The future of Bozeman was greatly dependent upon stopping Ted Turner, the Co-op, and their collaborative efforts to make a buck off of pseudo-environmentally progressive causes.

There was only one thing to be done.

Stephanie Saline
Stephanie Saline writes at her kitchen table, rides bikes, works at the Emerson, is a member of Equinox Comedy Death Match, and will play Mindy in Alan Ball’s “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress” in MSU’s Black Box Theater in April. She is currently scouting acts for a summer burlesque show in her backyard. Seriously. Email backyardburleycue@gmail.com for more info.

Had Ted only known that the indulgent revelation of his nefarious intentions would actually cause their ultimate undermine, perhaps he would have chosen to enjoy an unexpressed thought.

His tragic fate, sung from the shelves of Poor Richard’s by so many ravenous heroin-hollowed and rehab-muted sirens on the covers of glossy fashion and celebrity gossip magazines, could have been avoided. But Ted, too rich to fetch his own copy of the latest Vanity Fair let alone burden his pockets with an actual wallet, had abandoned a life of chance and confrontation – which threatened to change him in ways he did not plan or expect – for one of convenience and catering. Ted’s housekeeper Doris had dispatched the lowest ranks of her staff to run in-town errands on his behalf for years.

What had once seemed the hallmark of luxury – the having of others tend to life’s everyday tasks so as to spend one’s time in more esoteric or at least commercially lucrative endeavors – had, over a lifetime, left Ted with a rather stunted soul. Thanks to Doris’ competent anticipation of Ted’s every whim, a small bell had even been recently installed in his personal water closet, which when rung, sent a manservant running to him, in each hand a roll of bathroom tissue.

Like Howard Hughes and Doris Duke before him, Ted had in fact noticed the gradual erosion of his dignity. Mostly in the dull pity he felt whenever he saw a photo or interview of Britney Spears. Yet Ted felt – if he could be said to feel anything anymore - strangely helpless to counteract it. His common sense had long since been replaced by an eccentric’s reasoning, which would explain why, upon remembering that he no longer knew how to operate a motor vehicle, instead of enrolling in the “Safe Driving Refresher” adult ed course, he had taken to traveling by bison volant.

And so, like any starved soul who joins the conversation half-emptied martini glass in hand, Ted blurted out his pathetic designs for Bozeman, the rainforests, and his restaurant, whose giant red neon sign proposed for the Baxter franchise had rankled the Historic Bozeman Society, who - with the mistaken sense of ferocity usually reserved for small yapping dogs - had predictably threatened to deep six the whole project.

On the banks of Hyalite Resevoir, the group had grown restless and fidgety in the musk of Ted’s loneliness. Oblivious, Ted barreled on.

“…and after the sign thing is put to bed, we can all get together for dinner at the restaurant. San Pellegrino’s on me. And then, you can all come over to the Flying D and we can watch youtube. Have you guys seen ‘two girls in a…’”

Had Ted been more keen, he would have known the “Double-Handed Feminine Phallus Grasp” for the ruse that it was. Instead of being distracted by the AA-12 in Ana Maria’s right hand, he would have understood that fate of his villainy was held in her left.

In the time that it took for Ted to impress the friends he longed for with his plans of domination and conquest, Ana Maria’s clever hand had succeeded in warming Magnus’ previously shy member. Had Ted been more observant, he would have seen Ana Maria release Magnus’ little warrior, now fluffed for his world-saving mission.

And if Ted had been a man who wiped his own ass, he would have registered that a freed and aroused Magnus was now waddling - pants around his ankles - to the hole bored mere hours before by Marcellus and James.

On and on, Ted talked. “There’ll be simulated sunrise and sunset ever hour on the hour, and every Friday night the maître d’ will release baby bison into the dining room for a running of the bulls…”

As Magnus kneeled, he looked back at Ana Maria. She was laughing in the moonlight. Unlike Mr. Turner, Ana Maria’s secrets were protected behind a pair of imperial guard dogs, her grin and her cunt. There is but one hero in the stories of men, she mused. She made a mental note to check out Beefalo Station, the new all-male burlesque club and fantasy show behind Miss Lil’s in Belgrade, after this adventure wrapped up.

Somehow, Magnus knew his singing cock was the one thing that would attract the Orb of Dominion like a magnet. Instinctively, he prostrated himself on the ice.

Ray Sikorski

Ray Sikorski wrote a play for the 2008 Equinox One-Act Festival, has a book called “Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures,” and contributes to national and regional publications. He has never seen anything quite like the 11,797 words that preceded his Foolish Words installment.

“I'll be damned if I'm going in there,” said Magnus' penis, rapidly shriveling. “You can soak your head all you want, but I ain't goin' in and I ain't singing a tune.”
“C'mon!” implored Magnus. Everyone was watching, which didn't help matters any.
“You know,” said Ted Turner, eyeing Magnus waning member. “Buffalo meat just isn't selling quite the way I intended it. Maybe Ted's Montana Grill needs to branch out into something a little more exotic.”
“I going in!” yelled Magnus' penis, straightening back up. “Name me a tune! You want it, I'll sing it!”
Magnus reassumed his position over the ice hole, and the crowd egged him on. The colorful orb swirled across the heavens, and Ted Turner noted to anyone who would listen that it was only colorful because he colorized it. And then, appearing from behind a snowbank, was a character who looked vaguely familiar, yet no one could quite place him.
“Who's that dude?” asked Ana Maria.
“I'm the star of this story. James. Remember me from page one?”
The others looked at him blankly.
“I was handed the package from the dead guy while I was waiting for my bus.”
The dead guy nodded in vague recollection.
“What I want to know,” James asked, “Is what the hell is going on with this story?”
“What does it look like,” said Magnus, his undulating nudeness turning pink from the cold. “I'm saving the world from a sinister plot by humping this ice hole with my diminutive, singing penis.”
“Well, you're right about a sinister plot,” replied James. “But the sinister plot isn't to destroy the world. It's to keep me from being the main character of this story, and I'm not gonna take it any more!”
“Why do you deserve to be the main character?” asked Magnus. “You don't have a singing penis.”
“You don't have a billion dollars and a flying white buffalo,” said Ted Turner.
“You don't have a red neoprene jumpsuit,” said Ana Maria, Jr.
“You don't have beautiful decolletage and use the f-word during sex,” said Ana Maria, Sr.
“You aren't dead,” said the dead guy.
“You don't know your way around Bozeman's hincty alleyways,” said Marcellus.
“You don't have a cool name like Creighton,” said Creighton.
“You don't know the ins and outs of Italo Calvino's style,” said Mike Finkel.
“You don't grasp the essence of Norse sagas,” said Soren Kisiel.
“You don't understand the concept of meta-narrative,” said Ray Sikorski.
James listened very, very patiently. “That all may be true,” he finally said. “But I do have the keys to the Chevette.”
And with that, James got in the old rustbucket, fired it up, and drove the ice-covered Hyalite Road back to Bozeman – leaving behind the crowd, the orb, and Magnus' penis, which was now softly blubbering just below the surface of Hyalite Lake.
James drove to town and parked at the bus stop. This time, he paid no attention to the dead guy and his package. Instead, James waited for his bus, got on, and simply rode away.

THE END

Who da Fool?

2008-03-10T14:06:00.001-06:00

Hi, Fools,

Don't forget to mark your calendar for the big reading, which will take place Tuesday, April 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Leaf and Bean on Main St. Please get there around 7:10 so we can figure out who's there and who's not, and arrange substitute readers. I'm thinking we ought to carry over to the Cannery after all is said and done to trade war stories.

Here's the 25-word bios of the Fools who have contributed so far (I know writers aren't supposed to be good with numbers; "25" seems to be one that's trickier than most):

Ryan Cassavaugh is a founding member of improv comedy juggernaut Equinox Comedy DeathMatch, erstwhile writer/performer for TV sketch comedy show “The Pizza Show,” stand-up comic, puppeteer, and writer of four award-winning plays, including “Last Kings of America,” which won best script and audience favorite at the 2008 Equinox One-Act Festival.

Marjorie Smith writes for several publications and acts in local theatre and film projects. She is also a musician, if being a member of the MSU gamelan and the Awesome Polka Babes counts.

Keith "That Jeopardy! Guy" Suta is co-host of KGLT-FM's The Coffee Show and is gainlessly employed as a writer. "Dead Noon," a movie he co-wrote and appears in, will be distributed later this year by Lionsgate Entertainment to video stores worldwide.

Sid Gustafson is a novelist, pacifist, and word bum. He teaches equine studies at the University of Montana Western in Dillon (High Horse University), but writes in Bozeman, where his mind wanders freely. www.sidgustafson.com

Holly Zadra writes and edits for the Tributary, but she brings in the big bucks finagling fiscal sustainability for the non-profit sector in Bozeman.

Joseph Menicucci Jr. waxes poetic about our national pastime at baseballfaceoff.com. He is currently an instructor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Montana State University-Bozeman.

Liz Allen is a therapeutic massage therapist who spends a substantial amount of time rock hounding in the mountains with her dog Tigger, telemark skiing, and writing poetry and short stories.

Craig Kenworthy writes the 30 Second Timeout column for the Chronicle. His radio play ‘Hurf” won a Silver Charles Ogle Award in 2007. He still can’t believe he lost to that Bradbury guy.

Bob Hendricks was born in Frankfurt Germany in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration and moved back to the USA when he was ten months old. While he has no memory of Germany, he does retain a fondness for BMW motorcycles and dark Bavarian beer, and he credits both for the occasional inspiration to write a one-act play.

Alison Grey is a Bozeman native who has spent much of her adult life trying to avoid the real world, a semi-successful pursuit. When she isn’t skiing, eating French fries or wasting away her youth in local dive bars, she is a writer who prefers the ridiculous and socially unacceptable to the boring and mundane and is attracted to hot men in snow pants.

Brian Kassar has lived in Bozeman for 8 years and been active in the arts community as an actor, singer, writer and director. His scripts have won an Audience Choice award and 2 Best Production awards in the last three Equinox Theatre One-Act Play festivals.

Michele Corriel is a freelance writer working with about a dozen regional and national magazines. But perhaps she is even less well-known for her invention of the Poetry Dispensers that keep popping up around town (and around the West). She is currently working on her third (or is it her sixth?) novel for young readers.

Mike Finkel is currently producing offspring at a disconcertingly rapid pace.

Soren Kisiel is and award-winning playwright, the Executive Director of the Equinox Theatre Company and the founder of Spontaneous Combustibles Improv Comedy Troupe. He and his wife Katie Goodman are the authors of the hit raunchy-feminist theater project, Broad Comedy, which completed a three month run at a commercial theater in Boston, and is currently showcasing as guest performers in New York City, including Caroline’s Comedy Club on Broadway.

After paying her New York dues, King lives in Bridger Canyon and writes about food, wine, travel and design for Big Sky Journal, Western Art and Architecture, Wine Review Online, Wine Enthusiast, More, and other publications and websites.

Jonathan Gans lives with horses and over the ridge from Bridger Bowl in Brackett Creek country. He writes poetry, teaches kids, talks to his dogs and has loved the same woman for 31 years. His recent book 49 Poems: Where Are You Leading Me Now? was published in 2005.

Great job, Fools! We seem to be more or less on schedule. Here's what it looks like:

1) Ryan Cassavaugh
2) Marjorie Smith
3) Keith Suta
4) Sid Gustafson
5) Holly Zadra
6) Joseph Menicucci, Jr.
7) Liz Allen
8) Craig Kenworthy
9) Bob Hendricks
10) Alison Grey
11) Brian Kassar
12) Michele Corriel
13) Mike Finkel
14) Soren Kisiel
15) Sally King
16) Jonathan Gans
17) Kate Howe (WE ARE HERE)
18) Mike England
19) Shayna Gibson
20) Rebecca Kinman
21) Stephanie Saline
22) Ray Sikorski

Don't forget - April 1st!

Where are we at?

2008-02-07T14:39:00.003-07:00

Here's the latest batting order. Today is Thursday, February 21:

1) Ryan Cassavaugh
2) Marjorie Smith
3) Keith Suta
4) Sid Gustafson
5) Holly Zadra
6) Joseph Menicucci, Jr.
7) Liz Allen
8) Craig Kenworthy
9) Bob Hendricks
10) Alison Grey
11) Brian Kassar (Fool of the Moment)
12) Michele Corriel
13) Mike Finkel
14) Soren Kisiel
15) Sally King
16) Kate Howe
17) Mike England
18) Jonathan Gans
19) Shayna Gibson
20) Rebecca Kinman
21) Stephanie Saline
22) Ray Sikorski

Foolish Update

2008-02-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

Hello, Fools,

Can you hear it? Can you smell it? Can you taste it? Yes, it's a story metastasizing, right here in our town. After experiencing pixels propelled by Ryan Cassavaugh and Marjorie Smith, Foolish Words 2008 is now is the highly caffeinated hands of KGLT Coffee Show co-host Keith Suta.

Those film strips in high school were right: peer pressure is a dangerous, formidable force. Thanks to it, three newcomers have been sucked in to the Foolish Words vortex: writer/actress Shayna Gibson, playwright Stephanie Saline, and Outside Bozeman editor Mike England. That means a record-shattering 21 participants for this year's Foolish Words, which should make for a jolly good evening at the Leaf and Bean on April 1. The moderately augmented batting order is below.

In not so great news, Foolish Words will not be published as an ongoing serial in the Tributary this year. Being a monthly, readers apparently have a hard time remembering what wild plot twists and characters came the month before. Which may be a valid point; thanks to Tributary editor Corinne Garcia for having it in there at all. Personally, I always considered publication in the Tributary to be the icing on the cake - and cake is still delicious without the icing!

In much better news, Leaf & Bean proprietor Kate Wiggins has confirmed our spot in the schedule for Tuesday, April 1st, at 7:30 p.m. Please plan to arrive at around 7:10; several writers won't be able to make the reading, so we'll have to arrange who will read others' parts.

Be it known that due to our mightiness and noble April Fool's Day quest, Wiggins has agreed to put the Bean's normal Tuesday night stage-dwellers, the Bluegrass Jam, on a hillbilly hiatus for the evening. The stage is ours - thank you, Kate and banjo-wielders!

In other news, I'm writing this to you from room 225A of the Emerson Cultural Center. Due to something I refer to as the "Broom Closet Residency," of which I am the first recipient, I'll be working here for the next several months. As such, it is also now the official headquarters of Foolish Words. So pop by and say hi!

Here's the new batting order:

1) Ryan Cassavaugh
2) Marjorie Smith
3) Keith Suta (Fool of the Moment!)
4) Sid Gustafson
5) Joseph Menicucci, Jr.
6) Liz Allen
7) Criag Kenworthy
8) Bob Hendricks
9) Alison Grey
10) Brian Kassar
11) Michele Corriel
12) Soren Kisiel
13) Sally King
14) Kate Howe
15) Mike England
16) Jonathan Gans
17) Shayna Gibson
18) Rebecca Kinman
19) Katie Goodman
20) Stephanie Saline
21) Ray Sikorski

Okay, now, back to work.

Ray

UPDATE ON THE UPDATE: Mike Finkel and Holly Zadra have joined our ranks!

Let the Foolishness Begin!

2008-02-02T15:30:00.001-07:00

Hello, Fools,

I've got a tentative batting order for Foolish Words 2008, based on your preferences and a semi-random hurling of names a dart board. You will each be allowed three days to complete your 400-word installment. I didn't include dates because if you hand yours in early I'll pass it immediately on to the next person; that will allow a little extra time for johnny-come-latelies to join in.

Speaking of johnny-come-latelies... 18 of you have proudly signed up to do your Foolish duty. I've included a few extra names on the mailing list as a sort of peer pressure. Hey, all the cool kids are doing it!

Okay, here's the list:

1) Ryan Cassavaugh
2) Marjorie Smith
3) Keith Suta
4) Sid Gustafson
5) Joseph Menicucci, Jr.
6) Liz Allen
7) Craig Kenworthy
8) Bob Hendricks
9) Alison Grey
10) Brian Kassar
11) Michele Corriel
12) Soren Kisiel
13) Sally King
14) Kate Howe
15) Jonathan Gans
16) Rebecca Kinman
17) Katie Goodman
18) Ray Sikorski

Playwright Ryan Cassavaugh has already started us off - thanks, Ryan! - and currently the tome-to-be is in the able hands of Chronicle columnist Marjorie Smith, who is the only writer to participate in every Foolish Words since its inception five years ago.

Oh! Please include a 25-words-or-less bio with you submission. I'm hoping to have a nice program this year.

UPDATE: Peer pressure pays off! Freelance writer/Broad Comedienne Shayna Gibson has signed on. I'll put her somewhere in the middle.

Foolish Words 2008 is upon us!

2008-01-29T00:17:00.001-07:00

Hello, Bozeman-area writers,

It's that time of year again! Yes, cabin fever time, when the walls of winter close in, the only two colors are white and night, and you ask yourself over and over: Why, exactly, did I choose Montana over Maui? It's time to think of the cheery days of early spring - and why not think of the cheeriest day? April 1st is the day I'm talking about, the day Southwest Montana's scribes have their moment in the spotlight. Foolish Words Day.

I've known a few writers over the years, and one thing I've noticed is that writers seek to appear humble. That, of course, doesn't mean we are humble; we just prefer people to think of us that way. If they knew the truth of our gargantuan egos and our need for constant praise and validation... well, we'll just keep that to ourselves. Except on April 1st! This is the day we get to be on stage and show the world just how big a bunch of hams we really are.

For the unindoctrinated, I'm talking about Foolish Words, a story passed along from one Bozeman-area writer to the next. Started by a meager handful of writers in 2004, Foolish Words has become, if not an institution, then at least something that deserves to be institutionalized. Fifteen writers took part in last year's ridiculousness, ranging from those whose work has barely passed before the public's eye to jaded veterans of the written word: authors, journalists, playwrights. After our live reading at the Leaf & Bean, an edited version was once again published in installment form in the Tributary magazine.

You may have noticed that Bozeman has something of a disparate - or should I say desperate? - writing community. There's tons of writers of all different levels of establishment, but they almost never do anything with each other. Here, we can create something wonderful together. Or nonsensical. Or wonderfully nonsensical. For an idea of what I'm talking about, visit the Foolish Words Bozeman blog at http://foolishwordsbozeman.blogspot.com/

So, here's how it works: Everyone who's interested gets e-mailed the progressively growing oeuvre for three days, and in that time he or she needs to come up with no more than 400 words to add to the story. When all is said and done, we all band together on April 1 and read our parts at the Leaf and Bean. Can't show up? No worries, someone will read for you. Got a friend who may be interested? Pass the word along! The more fools the better, I always say.

Please let me know right away if you're interested in participating.

Ray Sikorski
logorhythmic@hotmail.com

Note: Our dear former leader, poet Sam Louden, is now in law school in Boston, on his way to becoming a judge (poetic justice?). So that leaves just me in charge for now... although I will be out of town for parts of March. Does anybody want to be my organizational collaborator?

Foolish Words 2007

2007-11-11T23:31:00.001-07:00

The entire shooting match! Here's the edited version, from start to finish, as it progressively appeared in Bozeman's Tributary magazine from May through December 2007. A special thank you goes out to Tributary editor Corinne Garcia for welcoming this nonsense year after year.

Part 1 - Tributary, May 2007

This year’s Foolish Words got off to a mile-high, mile-low start with poet/gardener Sam Louden taking the story straight off to the Richest Hill on Earth, setting the literal/metaphorical stage for “Butte, the Musical.” Poet Liz McRae took the story a mile higher, with the introduction of the Tibetan-linked producer.

Sam Louden

“This is my idea, see?” said Lenny. He could sell lonesomeness to Ekalakans. He could talk the pants off a nun. He was smooth and persuasive. He was also ugly as all hell.
“I don’t want to hear it,” said Virginia, grabbing a firm hold of her pants.
“Musicals! People love musicals. They love to gag at their ridiculous sentimentality. They love to point out the absurdity of people breaking out into song — in harmony, with dancing. People love to pretend they hate musicals, but they can’t get enough of them,” he said.
“I’m skeptical.”
Lenny expounded on the need for Butte to have yet another blue ribbon tourist attraction. He continued with how the glorious city needed — deserved — an emotional pick-me-up. He concluded with the saliva of sincerity dripping from his malformed mouth: “Yes, Butte, whose history begs for the honor it long ago earned in sweat and blood and has so long been denied; this Butte, my Butte, our Butte; our majestic, beautiful Butte is the miracle it has waited for!”
Virgnia wordlessly begged for the miracle. It would take organizational skills Lenny lacked. Virginia, however, was practically made of organizational skills. She had developed a formula to determine anyone’s personal sock needs. She was ridden out of Helena on a rail for demonstrating shortcuts through red tape that could eliminate hundreds of state bureaucratic jobs. She trimmed out nearly fifty percent of her own useless DNA. Holy Butte would rise from the ashes, borne by the silk of Virginia Sullivan’s networking and Lenny Crenshaw’s hot air.
In minutes Virginia had secured two theater venues, acquired the necessary permits from her cousin Eddie in City Hall, and enlisted the support of the unions. Lenny sat gaping in awe of the presence of excellence.
“Can you find me producers?” he asked.
“There isn’t enough loose capital here to float a Sunday school skit,” said Virginia.
“Do you know anyone in Bozeman?“

Liz McRae

Virginia closed her eyes and imagined a floating Rolodex before her. Lenny watched, mesmerized as she raised up her arms and flicked her fingers in front of her face like some sort of off-the-hook administrative assistant. She feverishly flipped through her 400 nonprofit connections in Bozeman. No, she thought, we need cash, not the under-funded, liberal crowd. And then she hit ‘F’. Virginia opened her eyes, looked Lenny as straight in his crooked face as possible, and said, “I think I’ve got our man.”
Virginia had come to Irwin Finklestein. The image of this eccentric, Jewish New Yorker flashed before her as she last saw him: standing in front of a window fan in his Manhattan apartment, long gray hair blowing in all directions, leopard skin briefs - whoa. The image wasn’t all that appealing. A downside to channeling contact people was that you always got that last vision of them.
Irwin was a scholar of ancient Tibetan script, specialized in growing rare orchids, and was Virginia’s former lover. He lived between his apartment in downtown Manhattan and an old, renovated grain tower outside of Bozeman. Like many Tibetan scholars and rare orchid growers, Irwin had a sizable trust fund and was highly connected in NYC. Also notable, she explained to Lenny, was his production of the very popular Oklahoma performance in Lhasa – the only Western musical of its kind performed entirely by Tibetans for Tibetans.
Lenny’s mind was scheming like a whirling dervish. Visions of Virginia as the next David Copperfield blended with saffron-robed monks yodeling and dancing across his Butte stage. People would come from China, New York, maybe even from the Yellowstone Club to visit and fall in love with the land of pulchritude and plenty, Butte! He was nearly in tears with visions of fame, money and people bursting into song.

Stayed tuned for future installments of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 2 - Tributary, June 2007

The Foolish Words 2007 odyssey continues! The reins of the second installment have been taken over by freelance writer and editor Heidi Lasher, and poet, playwright, comedy writer, and sports columnist Craig Kenworthy.
When we left off last month, Lenny and Virginia had joined forces to make a musical to save Butte — but where to find the money to produce it? Why, Bozeman, of course, home to orchid-growing Tibetan scholar Irwin Finkelstein.

Heidi Lasher

Irwin leapt from his chair and twirled with delight. “My Pangolin! She LIVES!” he exclaimed. His index finger circled his iPod, landing quickly on “O What a Beautiful Morning” by the dashing and flamboyant Jengbu Lakhpa. He shook his hair loose from its rubber band, and held the Bozeman Daily Chronicle to his cheek. Wearing nothing but his leopard-skin briefs, he pirouetted in front of the picture window and giggled in anticipation.
For nearly 12 days Irwin had scanned the Bozeman police blotter for news about the rare and scaly anteater he’d rescued from a Chinese restaurant in Lhasa. He shuttered, remembering how the poor creature had been dying a slow death in a cage, losing up to six scales a day to greedy customers eager to enhance their sexual performance by drinking tea spiked with her potent scurf. Moved by the animal’s dismal existence and the sense that he could provide a better life for her (and perhaps a more lasting sexual state of arousal for himself), he devised a plan to rescue her like he’d done for so many other reptiles in the past.
For the past month, Irwin safely harbored the Pangolin in his renovated grain tower apartment in Bozeman. With love, plenty of fresh, local, organic ants and water, her scales grew back to their God-given glory. Irwin, too, began to heal the emotional scars of his previous relationship, pouring his pain and humiliation of their last sexual encounter into a deep and soulful song called “O Virginia.”
Then, one night, without warning, the reptile vanished. Every day since, Irwin had combed the neighborhoods, calling her name. His devout prayer was that a neighbor would spot her and call the police. And today his prayer had been answered. The Pangolin was spotted by the dishwashing staff at the Panda Buffet, scuttling across the parking lot.
Irwin pulled a saffron robe over his head and grabbed his Sorels. Just as he was walking out the door, the phone rang.

Craig Kenworthy

After three hours, Irwin finally gave in and bought the mortgage disability insurance. Fortunately, he had call-waiting and spent fifteen minutes of that time talking with Virginia.
That girl had nerve, calling him for a favor after what she’d done to him. But any show that included two different troupes of blind acrobats reenacting a mining disaster and the exhumation of the body of the late Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo, was a show he wanted to be a part of. He hit 666 on his speed dial and called his former partner, Squids Guggenheim.
Squids loved the idea of a musical set in Montana; he loved it so much that just the week before he’d sunk all of his money into a new play called “Custer slept here… forever,“ by an up and coming Native American playwright.
“Listen, Irwin, I can’t help you but I know a guy in Big Timber who might. His name is Still Bottled Water. Runs a small family foundation that supports the arts. Some of their standards for grants are a little strange. You don’t happen to have an anteater, do you?”
After a quick trip to Panda Buffet, Irwin finished perusing the foundation guidelines. Only using compact fluorescent bulbs in the footlights? Still, he thought his proposal had merit, based on his digital photo of an anteater — although he wasn’t really clear on why the foundation insisted that the animal be wearing only high heels and a pioneer bonnet.
Irwin finished proofreading the grant application and clicked “Send.” He went downstairs to look in on his cold-blooded guest. As he entered the reptile’s room, Irwin smelled moderately priced perfume and felt a damp breeze. Looking up at the shattered glass of the skylight, he spotted a woman’s leg disappearing through the opening. He leaped up to grab it, then remembered he was only five foot four and should never have put a vaulted ceiling in the laundry room. By the time he returned with the extension ladder, the foot was gone, but he found a note lying on the floor. His palms adrift in sweat, Irwin read it over and then read it again. The note contained only ten words, but they were words that no sane person ever wants to see.

Stay tuned next month for part three of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 3 - Tributary, July 2007

The Foolish Words 2007 epic continues, with our heroes desperate to produce the surefire theatrical sensation, “Butte, The Musical.” When last we left, loinskin-clad producer Irwin Finkelstein was checking up on the illicit pangolin he had been harboring in his grain-elevator abode. This month, author/veterinarian Sid Gustafson takes over the typewriter, but not before freelance writer/herbalist Rebecca A. Kinman picks up where comedy writer Craig Kenworthy left us last month: with a note containing ten words “that no sane person ever wants read.” Read on, Foolish Words fans, we dare you:

Rebecca A. Kinman

"Take the garbage out and unclog the bathroom drain. - Mom"

Irwin felt a moment of remorse for allowing his mother to live in the PVC pipe tree house outside. He also regretted connecting the two houses with a swinging bridge. To Irwin's further dismay, he found that the lizard's swimming pool, cappuccino machine and hair-rollers had yet to be used, and the pangolin herself, Sweet Banana Tail II, had vanished once again.
Irwin paced the house, calling her name to the melody of Rain Drops Falling on My Head, but then jumped into his hot pink helicopter and searched Peete's Hill and beyond for his precious darling. He called Virginia with the news.
"Irwin, you KNOW how those scaly things always take off whenever you mention my name,” said Virginia, rolling her eyes. It reminded her of the time that Irwin took her to the Bistro wearing a polka-dotted boa and cat-eye glasses. The pet was so jealous that she skipped town and was found three days later singing karaoke at the Owl in Livingston.
The current situation wasn't all that different. Sweet Banana Tail II was fed up with Irwin's lack of decency to forget their twelfth anniversary (in pangolin years).
She scurried west on 1-90, sensing she would come closer to achieving her dream. She didn't need Irwin any longer, she had her strength and her trusty book entitled "From The Cage to the Red Carpet: How to Succeed as an Exotic Pet Actress." She confidently ran down the highway as semi trucks and multi-colored Hummers with ski racks wailed past her.
Snow began to flitter down around her double-jointed ankles, and soon she was covered in two feet of slush. She gradually moved slower and slower down the Interstate until she came to a complete, cold-blooded stop.
Even though Sweet Banana Tail II was almost completely frozen, she managed to spot a large mass in the distance slowly approaching.

Sid Gustafson

Before she could see what it was, Sweet Banana had identified the crawling creature with her vomeronasal gland. It was none other than her old nemesis, the dogwoman from the Heel of the Valley Animal League. Evidently someone had reported what had been perceived to be a dazed, lost Lhasa waltzing down I-90… but then Banana did have her Tibetan roots.
Banana was bagged and in the trunk. In the quarantine ward at the pound, the animal officer picked up an electronic ID bleep under Banana’s mange-riddled hide, which was traced to Irwin’s address at his silo flat. Next thing Banana found herself in the tree house with a bowl of maggots.
The following morning, Irwin was on the phone with Bottled StillWater (his real name, in the proper Absaroka order). Bad news. StillWater discovered the play had been written to good affect by a failing horse doctor, and previously produced at High Horse University in Dillon — sell-out cowboy crowds for a three-week run. “Stole the thunder plum away from Butte.”
“Couldn’t be,” cried Irwin. “Virginia swears her pal Lenny wrote it all his self.”
“Nope,” said StillWater. “That Lenny’s a literary thief with a faux bibliography long as a pangolin tail. The horse doctor had himself a hit in Dillon, and later in Dell on the Red Rock River.”
“Are you sure it’s the same play?”
“Same play, same clowny, cowboy plot,” said StillWater.
“What about the music?”
“I didn’t hear the music. Can’t read music.”
“Well, can’t we just change the music, if that’s the case?” asked Irwin.
“I suppose we could. We could change the words too, as long as we’re at it. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.”
“Well jeez, let’s do that. Change the words, write the music.” “Any ideas who might accomplish that?” asked StillWater.
“No problema. There’s enough deluded writers hanging about the Seed and Bean coffeehouse to have a circus, and all those ring-nosed musicians strumming away just outside the door — I’m talking tattoo talent.”
“Well, let’s get down there and see what kind of creativity we can resurrect. Maybe we’ll find some actors sipping lattes to script in, too. Maybe we can turn this keyboarding charade into something real, a real play, with live music and actors. Something like art.”
“We’ll have those Willson and Main juggernauts write a play, find some strummers to strum in, drag actor folk off the street, and turn this into a real production behind a real script,” declared Irwin.
“See you down there in an hour.” StillWater, Montana-CoffeeHouse-AmericanIndian-PlayProducer he was, fired up his Pontiac and headed to BozAngeles.

Stay tuned next month for part four of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 4 - Tributary, August 2007

When last we left Foolish Words 2007, “Butte, the Musical” was ramping up pre-production. Producers Irwin Finkelstein and Bottled Stillwater realized that to make the musical a reality, they had to hit up Montana’s primary talent hangout: Bozeman’s Seedy Bean Coffeehouse.
This month, freelance writer/editor Marjorie Smith and playwright/improv comedian Ryan Cassavaugh take you deep within the dark and squalid belly of the Seedy Bean.

Marjorie Smith

Donna Lou deChris hurried to the Seedy Bean immediately after work, as she did every day. She ordered her hazelnut latte, put on her shades and slouched into her regular chair at her regular table with the insouciance she knew marked her as very experienced.
She recalled her childhood naiveté when she had spent every daylight hour in the front yard looking cute, waiting for Samuel Goldwyn Mayer to drive by and recognize her as the next Shirley Temple. She had learned a great deal about geography in the interim. Now, at 25, she knew that a front yard in Absaroka, Montana, was no place to be discovered. The Seedy Bean on Main Street in Bozeman – that’s where producers hung out.
In the Rolodex of her mind, she flipped through memories of her stint as a film actress three years ago when an intense young man who needed to replace a cast member in his junior film had approached her at this very table. “I originally saw this part as being for an old man,” he told her. “But I think I can use you.”
It had been the most wonderful experience of her life. The whole thing – the days of filming on snowy Bozeman streets wearing soggy bedroom slippers and ugly knee high stockings, the student makeup artist patting powder on her fevered brow… and, of course, the intensely passionate if brief love affair with the author-director, Gary Geek.
“Ah, Gary,” Donna Lou sighed, closing her eyes, reliving scenes of unbridled passion. Oh, why did she have to be such a nitpicker! She just couldn’t let him go through life under the mistaken impression that anteaters were reptiles. She’d screamed at him right out there on Main Street: “Tits, Gary! They have tits!”
Gary Geek had strode away from her, never to return. She knew he had gone on to graduate and hightailed it to Hollywood where he would one day be famous, or at least employed. And here she sat, at the same table in the Seedy Bean, waiting to be discovered.
A large tear oozed out of her brown eye and plopped into her latte. As she opened her eyes to search for a Kleenex, there, standing beside her table, were two men.
“Excuse me,” said that smaller man. “Are you by any chance an actress?”

Ryan Cassavaugh

The question sent Donna Lou’s mind reeling back thorough the years, to when she had first been asked that question. She was on-stage in a high school production of “Annie Get Your Gun… Again!”, an ill-conceived and short-lived sequel to the popular stage musical. Her drama teacher had posed the question as he flung a toasted sesame-seed bagel at her head.
“Are you an actress?” he had asked. “Because you give the impression of a tone-deaf cow in high-heeled slippers having a seizure!”
The question confused Donna Lou, since she was, in fact, playing a tone-deaf cow in high-heeled slippers having a seizure. To this day she was still unsure if the comment was a compliment or an insult.
“I think she’s deaf,” the taller man said, staring at Donna Lou with a look that straddled the fine line between pity and annoyance.
“Pity,” said the small man. “She would have been perfect for the part of the mining pit.”
The taller man smiled a pleasant smile and nodded; the two men moved away both shaking their heads.
Donna tried to yell, “Wait, come back!” but the words didn’t come. She was paralyzed with anticipation. This was her big break, she knew it. Why couldn’t she say anything? They were leaving. Worse… they were going to another table. To Patti Ponderfund’s table. Patti was Donna’s arch-nemesis, or at least Donna thought so. Patti was the lead in all the local productions. She had even been in a national commercial for a line of vegetarian pet food. She had an entire line: “Cats don’t know it’s not real fish!” She said it directly into the camera. The thought of it made Donna Lou queasy. Patti was going to get Donna’s big break. It wasn’t fair. This was Donna’s break, not Patti’s. She had to do something! Why couldn’t she speak? Time almost stopped. Donna watched as the two men inched closer to Patti’s table. In an instant Patti would see them and smile that million-dollar smile at them and it would be all over. It was now or never, Donna had to act… that’s when it hit her.
Of course! There was only one thing she could do…

Stay tuned next month for Part Five of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 5 - September 2007

In the last installment of Foolish Words 2007, Donna Lou deChris agonized as producers Irwin Finkelstein and Bottled StillWater proceeded toward Donna's arch-nemesis, Patti Ponderfund, to hand out the lead role for “Butte, the Musical.”
Donna had to act. What would she do?
This month, freelance writer, poet, and poetry-dispenser originator Michele Corriel has the answer. And award-winning playwright, Broad Comedy co-author, and Equinox Theater executive director Soren Kisiel has more wacky shenanigans than a Butte-Irish wake.

Michele Corriel

Donna opened her mouth, and her humongous set of tonsils began to whirr. She reached deep inside herself for a word, a sound, anything to get the attention of the small man and the tall producer. As her mouth opened wider, people began to cling to the Seedy Bean’s overstuffed chairs and under-upholstered couches. But it was too late. The vacuum effect had begun.
Holding their hands over their faces, careful to avoid the flying chai, StillWater and Irwin made their way over to Donna, who had the good sense to close her mouth.
“My God, she’s perfect as the Berkeley Pit!” Irwin said.
Just then, who should walk into the Seedy Bean but Virginia herself, accompanied by none other than Sweet Banana Tail. And they were laughing.
Irwin was bewildered. His finger wagged back and forth between the two of them. He knew Virginia’s history with reptiles and this wasn’t making any sense.
“Anteaters, even giant pangolins from Uganda, are not and never were reptiles,” she said to Irwin. “So don’t even start with me. Besides, I’ve found I have a soft spot for mammals that can roll themselves into balls. Me and Sweet Banana Tail have a lot in common.” And they both made noises that no mammal should ever have to listen to.
Irwin was intrigued. But Virginia, the human Rolodex, got back to business.
“What’s this I hear about changing our script?” she asked.
“It’s true. We here in BozAngeles decided to find us some talent, rewrite that piece of crap you sent us, and get the show on the road, so to speak,” Irwin said, now staring at Donna, who had stolen his heart. He was done with reptiles. His life was now all about a woman who had the lung capacity of a submarine.
“Just hold your damn horses, there,” Virginia said, unwillingly removing her eyes from Sweet Banana Tail. “I checked the Internet’s Suburban Legends site and that failing horse doctor in Dillon is nothing but a big myth. He never wrote anything except a boring account of breach horse births at the turn of the century. The guy’s as phony as an Indian arrowhead found at the Buffalo Jump. As a matter of fact there isn’t even a High Horse University…”
Just at that moment who should walk into the Seedy Bean but...

Soren Kisiel

A plumber.
Plumber by day, that is. Plumber through the cracked-pipe frozen January mornings below the streets of Butte. Plumber through the soul-stealing corroded-copper afternoons of Butte’s sweating August. Plumber by day, but Irish Fairy by night.
The Irish Fairies, the toughest ethnically-based street-gang in Butte since the “Uptown Danny-Boys” of the 1950s. The Irish Fairies, who once threw one of
their own into The Pit just for mentioning that he was also Scottish. The Irish Fairies, so tough that no one in all the years of The M&M’s existence ever once cracked a joke about their name. Yep, those Irish Fairies.
The Plumber popped his thick knuckles, the forward motion of his hands straining the shoulders of his green polyester blazer. Across his chest “Kiss Me I’m
Irish” leered like a threat. He revealed teeth inlaid with golden shamrocks.
“Which a’ ye is Irwin?” the Plumber asked. He had never been to Ireland, but his grandmother’s accent had moved though his umbilical cord and deep into his
soul. His voice was high, scraping Irwin’s brain with its fingernails. “Which a’ ye bastards is selling Butte’s heart to Bozeman?”
Silence spread through the Seedy Bean.
“Which a’ ye is it that believes that the bold, wild, unruly soul of Mother Butte – the finest city west of Galway – needs these leather-furniture-buying fleece-wearers to help it stand on its own two damn feet?”
Donna saw her chance. Whatever this artist’s, this genius’, this Irwin’s past – oddly-reptilian mammals, fraudulent claims of plagiarism, Native American grant-makers – she knew she was his future.
She stepped forward, drawing air into her greatest asset. The air poured out, lovingly, bravely: “I’m Irwin.”
Irwin’s head snapped around. His first thought - “I get to keep all my teeth” – was quickly swept away by a surge of emotion. Could this be what he had been looking for in those cold, semi-reptilian features for so many years? When he’d first laid eyes on Donna all he saw were those mismatched eyes, that lumpy nose, that unibrow. Now all he could think of was things he wanted to do with that gaping mouth.
A voice spoke behind him: “No, I’m Irwin.”
He turned. There Virginia stood, gently stroking the pangolin’s scales, eyes defiantly holding the Irish Fairy’s.
“No,” spoke a male voice. “I’m Irwin.” StillWater’s braids danced around his shoulders as he held his head high.
Silence fell over the Seedy Bean, all eyes on the Plumber.
“So that’s the way is it then, is it? Ya bunch of bleedin’ tossers. You think you can beat the Irish Fairies, do ya? You don’t know how we beat the fish-and-chips out of the Great Falls Leprechauns, or the way we pounded the Gilette Pennywhistle Gang all the way back into Wyoming for stealing Fergus’ mushy peas recipe! You Bozeman Irwins are nothin’ compared to them!”
Delight danced in the Plumber’s green eyes as he scanned the room. “You’ll not get away with this. No one will produce a musical about my beloved Butte – no
one that doesn’t live there, breathe her air, drink her water. No one will make a feel-good family experience out of dearest Butte without including among its theatrical delights a bit of its history: the Screaming Panda bit.”
Irwin’s nerve rose in him like fire. He looked to Donna – my Lord, that mouth – and found bravery in her eyes. He stepped forward.
“Sir, my name is Irwin. And while I happen to live in Bozeman, I actually was planning to include the Screaming Panda bit.”

Stay tuned next month for part six of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 6 - October 2007

A Seedy Bean showdown loomed large in the last installment of Foolish Words 2007, as the Plumber from Butte threatened to take on all the Seedy Bean’s leather-furniture-buying fleece-wearers to find Irwin, the one who would sell Butte’s heart to Bozeman for the sake of funding a musical.
This month, Livingston poet/storyteller/singer Polyestra, a.k.a. Susan Connell, gives the story the fetid aroma of imminent disaster, and screenwriter, actor, and KGLT “Coffee Show” host Keith Suta shows how a simple vowel movement could alter Bozeman’s fate forever.

Polyestra

Irwin's mother sat alone in her tree house, and extinguished her cigar out in the “80” written on her birthday cake in bleeding red icing.
"Foolish boy," she said.
She moved along the rope ladder like a whip snake into the vaulted laundry room, and retrieved her special “going out” turban from the dryer. Back in her treehome, she sat before a candle, closed her eyes halfway, and began to levitate.
"Foolish boy spending my money on this overpriced Bozeman dump," she hissed, hovering two feet off the floor. Her astral body peeled off and shot like a bolt over the land to the Berkeley Pit.
"Hello little lovely," she said to the angry wound below. The bright red stinking liquid stared back at her with words emanating from its burned mouth, like: “Arsenic and sulfuric acid and pH level of 2.5.”
"Soon, it will be soon,” she said.
Her stiff little body hovered along above the road to Uptown, where she met her friend Bob, astrally visiting from Jackson Hole, for lunch.
"He forgot my birthday because he's trying to make another stupid Montana movie," Irwin's mother said.
"The pit is going to breach," Bob said.
"Yes, soon.”
"That stretch of track in the mine was especially steep," said a man at the next table. “A panda like that didn't have a chance."
All the dishes in the restaurant began to tinkle and vibrate and tip over edges. The astral travelers shot out of the roof and over to the Pit.
"It will melt all the inhabitants of Butte," Bob said.
"I'll use my turban to divert it.”
Laser-like rays beamed from the two elders' eyes, lifting a wave of red acid up onto I-90. As Hummers popped and dissolved like effervescent sugar cubes, flocks of ducks and geese hovering above the heavy metal-saturated liquid turned north to land on the asbestos piles in Shelby instead.
As the last drop of red digestive juices joined the tidal wave heading east on I-90...

Keith Suta

...Lenny sat in front of his computer, studying the final draft of his musical masterpiece. He reasoned that no musical masterpiece to date had included a section of endnotes, and since so few musicals were truly masterpieces, surely the missing element was a comprehensive historical bibliography.
Upon final annotation of the Screaming Panda Incident - including the Time Magazine coverage and Edward R. Murrow commentary - Lenny sat back and poured himself a hearty glass of Midori as a treat for a job well done.
Lenny's cell phone rang. It was Virginia, calling from the Seedy Bean.
"I'm sorry, Virginia, you'll have to speak up..." The call was on the verge of being dropped when the Bozeman City Council hurriedly erected another cell phone tower. Lenny caught the end of Virginia’s statement:
"...cannot believe they don't serve termite lattes here."
"Termites?" inquired Lenny. "Aren't you kosher?"
"Of course I am, Lenny, but pangolins are notoriously finicky in their dietary needs."
The rest of the conversation was lost with a sudden scream emanating from a corner of the Seedy Bean.
Irwin and the Plumber from Butte had agreed to settle their dispute via a game of Scrabble, the winner of which would receive the right to stage the play wherever he saw fit. Not three minutes into the game, it became apparent that the coffee house's Scrabble set was lacking three D tiles and no end of vowels. The Plumber stared forlornly at a rack holding F, N, X, P, Z, and L as Irwin placed down letters spelling "perspicacity" for a Triple Word Score of 69 plus a bonus of 50 for using all seven of his tiles. Seeing as how "perspicacity" contains twelve letters, the Plumber began to suspect that the fix was in. He picked up his rack and flung it square at Irwin's solar plexus, screaming, "I've a moind ta smash yer
face into that display of attractive and reasonably-proiced gift oitems fer such fourberie!"
That particular moment was when the acidic tidal wave wiped out
Montana's Central Cellular Phone Communications Center in Whitehall. Pizzas were suddenly half-ordered, rendezvous were only partially completed, and thousands of overly public conversations were suddenly silenced. Virginia closed her phone, sat down, and wondered how any creative project can take form without a cell phone.
Sweet Banana Tail II waddled over to console Virginia by sharing her ant latte – which, fortunately, had been on the menu.

What next? Stay tuned next month for part seven of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 7 - November 2007

In the last installment of Foolish Words 2007, Lenny and the Irish Plumber decided to settle their differences with a Seedy Bean Scrabble showdown, while Irwin’s mother traveled astrally to Butte to breach the mighty Berkeley Pit - because her ungrateful son forgot her birthday. When we left, a toxic tidal wave was heading up and over the Continental Divide on its way to Bozeman.
This month, Equinox Theatre/Broad Comedy founder Katie Goodman adds an immortal element to the tale, while writer/massage therapist Liz Allen lets us wade in the Berkeley Pit’s free-flowing river of ferredentin.

Katie Goodman

“A musical?” Adonai, The One Who Cannot Be Named, asked.
“Yeah,” Jesus said, thoughtfully. “It’s worked before. Look at what Menopause The Musical did for Orlando.”
“Orlando already had a few things going for it, financially speaking,” Shiva said smugly, always the one who had to be right.
“It might work,” Adonai said, popping a piece of pickled herring into his mouth.
“Yes, let’s not judge too quickly,” Jesus said.
“You always say that,” White Buffalo Woman snapped. She was tired from recent appearances.
“I thought we were just going to write off Butte,” Shiva sulked. “Let the damn thing destroy itself and fall away to dust. That’s such the obvious answer.”
Adonai shrugged his shoulders, palms up, eyes squinting like his grandmother used to do. “Look, they need a hand. They asked. Their intentions are pure… Plus I owe Finkelstein.”
Buddha perked up: “For what?” He was so damn quiet. It was unsettling. Everyone preferred it when he spoke up occasionally.
“Um,” said Adonai. “I’d rather not say.”
St. Patrick was taking all this in. He was chewing on some road-kill beef jerky White Buffalo Woman had brought for everyone. The stuff got stuck in your teeth like nothing else.
“I don’t think we should get involved,” he said. “We’ve got several warring factions here and it’s getting hard to tell them apart. We don’t want another Middle East.”
“Or middle west!” laughed Bacchus, lamely trying to lighten the mood.
“That is sooooo not the middle west, you moron. It’s the West,” chided White Buff, as her girlfriends called her.
“It’s all the West, out there,” Shiva snipped. “West, west, west.”
“All right, all right! Enough!” Adonai shouted, shushing everyone into a shamed silence. “So, what should we do? Consensus says…?”
The one who hadn’t spoken yet sat up:

Liz Allen

“We cannot interfere. I have to admit these mortals are damned entertaining,” Ullr quipped. “Besides, I don’t feel like snowing.”
Not wanting to further the argument or make another dreaded appearance, all the immortals simply gazed back into the circling blue orb.
“Blixseth development hour on XM radio?” Lenny’s cousin Jane murmured from her motorcycle somewhere near the Continental Divide. She wasn’t supposed to be listening on the job, but she despised giving speeding tickets.
Uncannily, Jane’s spiritual growth had recently burst forth, like so much Burning Man apparel riding a Nevada dust storm. Her secret admirers at the station had watched in awe as she patiently fanned these writings, these pontifications, into a not-unpleasantly-fulfilling “way-of-being.”
“No one insults Cormac McCarthy!” Daddy’s sugar-lump was spewing these horrible, righteous, and assuredly judgmental statements.
“I must sit in my zendo for at least four hours tonight,” she told herself. “I will cleanse.”
Just then, Sweet Banana Tail II jetted across I-90, suddenly ending up in Jane’s surprised arms.
“What the… Who are you?”
Her preoccupation with her own filth blinded Jane to the first blast of light that licked the edges of the putrid soup spewing from the Pit. It seemed to be pouring out of the dusky sky.
“What the bejesus? Sweet lord…” With the reflexes of a newly trained CIA Official Guantanamo Interrogator and more than five times the mental prowess, Jane fired up her ride and started the horrific flight east to Whitehall, with Banana Tail riding sidesaddle.
Her motorcycle squealing to a stop on the roof of Bob’s Auto Barn, Jane took quick note of the hungry toxic stew’s work on the Montana Central Cellular Phone Communications Center.
The soup hissed and bubbled, encircling its next victim – an 8-foot-tall knapweed fence. As the knapweed smoked, Deputy Max joined Jane on the roof.
Max swallowed the lump in his throat. “Sweet child of mine, is that a free-flowing river of ferredentin?”
“My evil thoughts created this river of bile!” Jane swooned.
“Is this meth?”
“All this time, I was creating my own reality… I didn’t even get it…” Jane trailed off.
“Is there more scripture transcription tonight?” Deputy Max meekly pondered. “I don’t feel so well with that medical lookin’ river comin’ at me.”
“I’m gettin’ out of the force, Max, starting right now!” Jane ripped her badge from her vest.
Glancing at the badge one last time, Jane remembered her inspiration – her cousin Lenny. She held onto the badge.
“I’ll play a cop in his new play, and meditate in my time off,” she decided.
Sweet Banana Tail II approved. With her highly tuned telepathic powers, her silent call vibrated out to Virginia, her new love, with a request:
“Ant latte – with soy.”
A mix-up in Banana Tail’s telepathy produced an odd result: With the power of a pit bull protecting a trailer, a sudden dust storm blew in the Irish Fairies. Their fists clenching and unclenching signified a grave situation....

What could that grave situation be? Stay tuned next month for the final installment of Foolish Words 2007!

Part 8 - Conclusion - December 2007

When last we left our fearless Foolish Wordsters, a toxic river of ferredentin was making its way from Butte's Berkeley Pit to Bozeman, promising destruction of our fair city. To top it off, Butte's ferocious Irish Fairies gang was threatening the would-be producers of “Butte, The Musical” in Bozeman's Seedy Bean Coffeehouse.
Freelance writer and Foolish Words editor Ray Sikorski picks up where we left off – the Irish Fairies fists clenching and unclenching signified a grave situation....

…and their toes tapping and heels clicking signified an authentic sense of rhythm.
They had not come to Bozeman to rumble. They had come to Bozeman to audition.
They intoned, from high to low, and went into their rendition of “It’s a Long Way From Clare to Here.” A hush fell upon the Seedy Bean. Those Irish Fairies could harmonize. They even had matching outfits. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
“You guys are in!” yelled Lenny. Irwin and Bottled Stillwater grunted their approval.
“The male lead shall go to me,” demanded the Plumber. “For I am the most charming Irish Fairy in all of Uptown Butte. I can dance the Riverdance, and I can sing from me heart so sweetly, why, the fair Lady of the Rockies herself would come down for a listen.”
Mumblings arose from both the over- and under-upholstered seats of the Seedy Bean. “Prove it!” the crowd yelled.
“It would be me pleasure,” said the Plumber. “I shall sing this song as a tribute to me plumber’s helper, Danny.
“’Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…”
The Seedy Bean patrons put down their cups. Even the milk steamer was silent. And way, way off in the distance – 81 miles away, to be exact – one could discern the faint yet unmistakable percussion of massive stone footsteps.
Just then Jane and the rest of police burst in to the coffeeshop. “The Berkeley Pit is coming down the Insterstate,” she cried. “It’s headed for Bozeman!”
Tables overturned, coffee went flying. The Irish Fairies urged calm. “The water in the pit isn’t bad for ye,” one said. “Me brothers and me drink it all the time. Keeps ye young.”
The police tried to settle the crowd. “He may be right!” Jane said. “What we need is a guinea pig to go out there and test it. And, if we can’t find a guinea pig, I hear a pangolin will work in a pinch.”
Sweet Banana Tail’s ears perked up at that. She put down her latte, wiping the ant residue off her upper proboscis. “I’ll be freakin’ damned if I’m going out there,” she said.
Off in the distance, the footsteps grew louder. And sploshier.
“Oh, dair, she’s a comin’ all righty,” said the Plumber. “Sounds like she’s walking along the Interstate. She’ll be a’trompin’ in the Pit water, and I fear she won’t be wearin’ her irrigation boots.”
“Sir, let me get this right,” said Jane. “Along with the floodwaters of the Berkely Pit, the giant Our Lady of the Rockies statue is headed to Bozeman?”
“Aye, and she’s hoppin’ mad! Oh, and that Pit water will make her grow, a kilometer if she’s an inch. And that’s no Blarney!”
Half the crowd went into a panic - too much caffeine. The other half, who also had too much caffeine, started brainstorming.
“I know, we’ll fight her with an enormous icon of our own!”
“What have we got?”
“Uh, how ‘bout the ‘M’?”
“But that’s just a big letter 'm'! Can it fight?”
“Comes in handy in Scrabble.”
“I know!” said Lenny. “We’ll film it. It’ll be the greatest new reality show ever – part Cops, part Survivor, part American Idol, and part America’s Funniest House Pets.”
“I resent that,” muttered Sweet Banana Tail, swallowing an ant clump.
“And part Godzilla versus Mothra!” yelled Virginia.
So it was on. The denizens of Bozeman no longer feared being flooded with toxic water and stomped to death by the mighty Lady from Butte, because they would be made famous in the process… with help from the song and dance accompaniment of the Irish Fairies. The producers brandished their cameras – it was showtime.
The drumbeat of stone footsteps grew louder. Darkness fell along Main Street; it wasn’t a thundercloud, it was the massive shadow of Our Lady, now passing the 19th Street interchange, her feet sloshing with poison. Rather than hiding in their basements, Bozeman’s overly recreated came out in their Patagonia hazmat suits, hoping to be on TV.
The Plumber was right: She was a kilometer tall if she was an inch. She approached Main Street, towering above it. Some people screamed. The rock climbers in the crowd desperately searched for their chalk bags and harnesses – opportunities like this didn’t happen every day. It would be Bozeman’s day of darkness; Butte would finally get the respect it deserved.
But the Plumber wasn’t right about everything: Our Lady of the Rockies wasn’t hopping mad. She was concerned.
“That Berkely Pit toxic sludge made my feet itch,” she boomed. “And it’s headed for the North 7th Avenue exit!”
The crowd screamed. Panicking looters broke into Schnee’s and cleared out their stock of irrigation boots.
“No!” boomed Our Lady. “You can be saved!”
“Save us, O Lady!” yelled the crowd.
“I’m not the one to save you. The one who can save you is among you. It’s… Donna Lou deChris!”
A confused murmur went through the crowd. “Who’s she?” someone asked.
“She is an actress,” said Our Lady. “And she will be the true star of this show.”
Donna Lou, who had been moping silently this whole time, suddenly brightened. At last!
“Is she any good?” asked another.
“She sucks,” said Our Lady. “I mean that literally. She has an exceedingly large capacity for air intake… and, hopefully, for toxic Berkeley Pit effluent intake. She is Bozeman’s only hope!”
They all look at her endearingly, Lenny and Virginia and Irwin and Squids and Bottled Stillwater and Sweet Banana Tail and Gary Geek and Patti and the Plumber and the Irish Fairies and the Great Falls Leprechauns and the Gilette Pennywhistle Gang (who had also come to audition) and Irwin’s mom and Bob and Adonai and Jesus and White Buffalo Woman and Shiva and Buddha and St. Patrick and Ullr and Jane and Deputy Max and Cormac McCarthy and Our Lady of the Rockies. They implored: “The show must go on, Donna Lou.”
Donna Lou pondered for a moment. She would have to swallow up the entire contents of the Berkeley Pit. She considered the pros and cons: She’d be famous, but it probably wouldn’t be very good for her complexion.
“I’ll do it!” she said.
The crowd cheered, and carried the exhuberant Donna Lou on their shoulders to the I-90 interchange, just as the toxic stew was bubbling off the exit ramp. “You suck, Donna Lou,” the crowd yelled. “You suck!”
And suck she did. At last, it was her moment in the spotlight – all the auditions, all the humilation was finally paying off… and for something she was naturally good at. She inhaled powerfully, and the toxic pit water was vacuumed straight into her cavernous mouth. As gallon after gallon of the gurgling brew disappeared into Donna Lou’s capacious maw, the crowd held its collective breath.
She had done it!
Donna Lou had sucked the entire Interstate dry, and she mopped the damp asphalt with her unibrow.
Bozeman was saved, Butte made it happen, and it would all be on TV. Both towns erupted in glee and merriment, praising Donna Lou, the Irish Fairies, and Our Lady of the Rockies.
As drunken revelers ascended her flanks to give her big, wet kisses, Our Lady shushed the crowd, for she had one last question before returning to her perch above the Richest Hill on Earth:
“Just what the hell is the screaming panda bit, anyway?’

Thus concludes Foolish Words 2007! Thanks to all 15 local writers who helped put together this gloriously silly and incomprehensible tale. To view the story's complete text (edited and unedited versions), or to inquire about participating in Foolish Words 2008, please visit foolishwordsbozeman.blogspot.com

Unedited versions below!

2007-11-11T23:25:00.000-07:00

For the purists among you who can't stand to see a writer's anguished splatterings adulterated by the wanton axe of a heartless editor (a.k.a. me), below you'll find the original versions - minus a few glaring spelling and grammatical errors - as were read at the Leaf & Bean coffeehouse on April 1, 2007.

Sam Louden

2007-04-02T01:03:00.000-06:00

Sam Louden, primarily a gardener, also writes poems, short stories and other ridiculous foolishness.

“This is my idea, see?” said Lenny. Lenny was always pitching something. Sometimes it was softball; sometimes it was the hull of a ship; usually it was a deal or a scheme—depending on one’s perspective. He could sell lonesomeness to Ekalakans. He could talk the pants off a nun. He could negotiate with terrorists. He was smooth and persuasive. He was also ugly as all hell.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Virginia, grabbing a firm hold of her pants.

“Musicals! People love musicals. They love to make fun of them. They love to gag at their ridiculous sentimentality. They love to point out the absurdity of people breaking out into song — in harmony, with dancing. People love to pretend they hate musicals, but they can’t get enough of them,” he said.

“I’m skeptical,” she said, debating if he looked more like a javalina or a road kill.

“Of course, I’m just beginning!” said the man, who in truth resembled a severe laboratory accident in progress more than javalinas or road kill. He expounded on the need for Butte to have yet another blue ribbon tourist attraction. He continued with how the glorious city needed — deserved — an emotional pick-me-up. He concluded with the saliva of sincerity dripping from his malformed mouth at the climax of his argument eloquently tying the entirety in one beautiful whole. “Yes, Butte, whose history begs for the honor it long ago earned in sweat and blood and has so long been denied; Butte whose people—strong, pulchritudinous, and hospitable magnify its glory in too humbly mute of tones; Butte whose best days are yet to come; this Butte, my Butte, our Butte; our majestic, beautiful Butte is the miracle it has waited for!”
Virginia, enthralled, wordlessly begged for the miracle. Her wide eyes, doublewide with excitement, implored Lenny for the clarification he paused to make. He clarified magnificently, explaining how a musical play about the Mining City, performed there would attract tourists, employ locals, boost the local self-esteem, and reestablish the Richest Hill on Earth as the preeminent cultural force in the Inter-mountain West.

This would take organizational skills Lenny lacked. Virginia, however, was practically made of organizational skills. She had developed a formula to determine anyone’s personal sock needs. She was ridden out of Helena on a rail for demonstrating shortcuts through red tape that could eliminate hundreds of state bureaucratic jobs. She trimmed out nearly fifty percent of her own useless DNA. This was why Lenny needed her. Holy Butte would rise from the ashes, borne by the silk of Virginia Sullivan’s networking and Lenny Crenshaw’s hot air.

Lenny neglected to go into the devilish details of his plan. The specifics were in some cases too sensitive to leak for fear of Anaconda beating them to the punch. Other details, namely the Screaming Panda bit, were sensitive for other reasons. Some things simply need the context of the entire Butte the Musical experience to even comprehend. In minutes Virginia had secured two theater venues, acquired the necessary permits from her cousin Eddie in City Hall, and enlisted the support of the unions. Now Lenny sat gaping in awe of the presence of excellence.

“Can you find me producers?” he asked.

“There isn’t enough loose capital here to float a Sunday school skit. There’s no way we can scrounge up the scratch around here for the epic production we’re talking about,” said Virginia, as yet unaware of the obligatory Hungarian contortionist or the expensive yodel chorus.

“Do you know anyone in Bozeman?“ he said.

Liz McRae

2007-04-02T01:00:00.000-06:00

Liz McRae, poet, is currently putting the BIG in Big Sky, where she nests, recreates, vocates, and is (at the time of writing) extremely pregnant - due tomorrow!

Virginia closed her eyes and imagined a floating Rolodex before her. Lenny watched, mesmerized as she raised up her arms and flicked her fingers in front of her face like some sort of off-the-hook administrative assistant. She feverishly flipped through her 400 nonprofit connections in Bozeman. No, she thought, we need cash, not the under-funded, liberal crowd.

And then she hit ‘F’. Virginia opened her eyes, looked Lenny as straight in his crooked face as possible, and said, “I think I’ve got our man.”

For his part, Lenny was taken. Not only did this woman have some organizational skills, she was a magician. Maybe he could write in a part for her in the musical, or maybe just be her manager. He wasn’t sure whether to take off her now-steamy glasses and kiss her, or sit down, shut up and listen. Although it was not in his nature, he sat in awe.

When Virginia hit the ‘F’ section of her Rolodex, she quickly came to Irwin Finklestein. The image of this eccentric, Jewish New Yorker flashed before her as she last saw him. He was standing in front of a window fan in his Manhattan apartment, long gray hair blowing in all directions, leopard skin briefs - whoa. The image wasn’t all that appealing. A down-side to channeling contact people was that you always got that last vision of them… Irwin was a scholar of ancient Tibetan script, specialized in growing rare orchids, and was Virginia’s former lover. He lived between his apartment in downtown Manhattan and an old, renovated grain tower outside of Bozeman. Like many Tibetan scholars and rare orchid growers, Irwin had a sizable trust fund and was highly connected in NYC. Also notable, she explained to Lenny, was his production of the very popular Oklahoma performance in Lhasa - the only western musical of its kind performed entirely by Tibetans for Tibetans.
At this point, Lenny’s mind was scheming like a whirling dervish. Visions of Virginia as the next David Copperfield blended with saffron-robed monks yodeling and dancing across his Butte stage. People would come from China, New York, hell, maybe even from the Yellowstone Club, to visit and fall in love with the land of pulchritude and plenty, Butte! He nearly
was in tears with visions of fame, money and people bursting into song.

Seeing Lenny’s reaction to the mention of Irwin, Virginia realized she was going to need to call him. This would be a little awkward in lieu of their last meeting, but she just had to rise above it. After all, cross-dressing had never been a crime, and even though she felt very uncomfortable with the reptiles, she just had to remember that not all people were brought
up with the strong family values she was - thank god - instilled with as a young girl.

Heidi Lasher

2007-04-02T00:58:00.000-06:00

Heidi Lasher is a freelance writer and editor with a knack for saying yes to fun, time-consuming projects. She is a mother of one, and is currently incubating number two.

Irwin leapt from his chair and twirled with delight. “My Pangolin! She LIVES!” he exclaimed. His index finger circled his iPod, landing quickly on “O What a Beautiful Morning,” by the dashing and flamboyant Jengbu Lakhpa. He shook his hair loose from its rubber band, and held the Bozeman Daily Chronicle to his cheek. Wearing nothing but his leopard-skin briefs, he pirouetted in front of the picture window and giggled in anticipation.

For nearly 12 days Irwin had scanned the Bozeman police blotter for news about the rare and scaly anteater he’d rescued from a Chinese restaurant in Lhasa. He shuttered, remembering how the poor creature had been dying a slow death in a cage, losing up to six scales a day to greedy customers eager to enhance their sexual performance by drinking tea spiked with her potent scurf. Moved by the animal’s dismal existence and the sense that he could provide a better life for her (and perhaps a more lasting sexual state of arousal for himself), he devised a plan to rescue her like he’d done for so many other reptiles in the past.

Under the cloak of darkness, Irwin and his thespian friends liberated the animal from her cage and ran to a local monastery for cover. The following morning, Irwin bid a tearful adieu to his friends and smuggled the terrified and slightly odorous creature over three borders and past a suspicious TSA agent who was tipped off by a 6 ounce tube of hair gel floating in his carry-on bag without the protection of a Ziplock baggie.

Fortunately, the scaly creature hiding in Irwin’s saffron robe did not catch the agent’s eye.

For the past month, Irwin safely harbored the Pangolin in his renovated grain tower apartment in Bozeman. With love, plenty of fresh, local, organic ants and water, her scales grew back to their God-given glory. Irwin, too, began to heal the emotional scars of his previous relationship, pouring his pain and humiliation of their last sexual encounter into a deep and soulful song called “O Virginia.”

Then, one night, without warning, the reptile vanished. Her plush cedar bed from L.L. Bean still bore her outline, but she was nowhere to be found.

Every day since, Irwin had combed the neighborhoods, calling her name. His devout prayer was that a neighbor would spot her and call the police. And today his prayer had been answered. The Pangolin was spotted by the dishwashing staff at the Panda Buffet, scuttling across the parking lot.

Irwin pulled a saffron robe over his head and grabbed his Sorels. Just as he was walking out the door, the phone rang.

Craig Kenworthy

2007-04-02T00:55:00.000-06:00

Craig Kenworthy is a poet, playwright, comedy writer and sports columnist who is known for his single-minded focus.

After three hours, Irwin finally gave in and bought the mortgage disability insurance.

Fortunately, he had call-waiting and spent fifteen minutes of that time talking with Virginia. That girl had nerve, calling him for a favor after what she’d done to him in Des Moines. But any show that included two different troupes of blind acrobats reenacting a mining disaster and the exhumation of the body of the late Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo, was a show he wanted to be a part of. He hit 666 on his speed dial and called his former partner, Squids Guggenheim.

Squids’ nickname had nothing to do with his penchant for seafood and everything to do with the fact that he bought only cheap ballpoint pens. The good news was that Squids loved the idea of a musical set in Montana. The bad news was that he loved it so much that just the week before he’d sunk all of his money into a new play called “Custer slept here… forever,“ by an up and coming Native American playwright.

“The guy is brilliant. He wrote that Shakespearian drama set in a tribe’s casino.”

“Macbet?”

“No. Taming of the less than Shrewd. Listen, Irwin, I can’t help you but I know a guy in Big Timber who might. His name is Still Bottled Water. Runs a small family foundation that supports the arts. Some of their standards for grants are a little strange. You don’t happen to have an anteater, do you?”

After a quick trip to Panda Buffet and three Diet Cokes with oat bran later, Irwin finished perusing the foundation guidelines. He figured Virginia could care less about the requirement that the male lead weigh no more than 150 pounds, have all of his toes and speak fluent Mandarin, but this part about using only compact fluorescent bulbs in the footlights? Still, he thought his proposal had merit, based on the digital photo of the anteater Irwin emailed to him, although he wasn’t really clear on why the man insisted that the animal be wearing only high heels and a pioneer bonnet.

Three Diet Dr. Peppers with spinach and a Vodka Collins later, Irwin finished proofreading the grant application and clicked “Send.” He went downstairs to look in on his cold-blooded guest. As he entered the reptile’s room, Irwin smelled moderately priced perfume and felt a damp breeze. Looking up at the shattered glass of the skylight, he spotted a woman’s leg disappearing through the opening. He leaped up to grab it, then remembered he was only five foot four and should never have put a vaulted ceiling in the laundry room. By the time he returned with the extension ladder, the foot was gone, but he found a note lying on the floor. His palms adrift in sweat, Irwin read it over and then read it again. The note contained only ten words, but they were words that no sane person ever wants to see.

Rebecca Kinman

2007-04-02T00:52:00.000-06:00

Rebecca A. Kinman is a spoken-word artist, herbalist and blossoming freelance writer who continuously celebrates and seriously concentrates on holistic, authentic endeavors that create positive change for all.

"Take the garbage out and unclog the bathroom drain."
-Mom"

Irwin felt a moment of remorse for allowing his mother to live in the PVC pipe tree-house outside. He also regretted connecting the two houses with a swinging bridge. To Irwin's further dismay, he found that the lizard's swimming pool, cappuccino machine and hair-rollers had yet to be used, and the Pangolin herself, Sweet Banana Tail II, had vanished once again.

Irwin paced the house, calling her name to the melody of Rain Drops Falling on My head, but then jumped into his hot pink helicopter and searched Peete's Hill and Beyond for his Precious Darling.

In the meantime, Still Bottled Water read Irwin's proposal, jumped from the bed of nails that he was meditating nude upon, and emailed an excited "YES" back to Irwin, exclaiming that this was just the type of production he had wanted to be a part of.

Irwin stopped searching for his Precious Darling for just a moment to call Virginia with the latest news.

"Irwin, that's great but you KNOW how those scaly things always take off whenever you mention my name,” said Virginia, rolling her eyes. This reminded Virginia of the time that Irwin had tried to take her to the Bistro wearing a polka-dotted boa and cat-eye glasses. The pet at the time was so jealous that she skipped town immediately and was found three days later singing karaoke at the Owl in Livingston.

The current situation wasn't all that different. This pet was one pissed Pangolin. Sweet Banana Tail II was fed up with Irwin's lack of decency to forget their twelfth anniversary (in Pangolin years).

She scurried west on 1-90, sensing that somewhere — in that direction — she would somehow come closer to achieving her dream. She didn't need Irwin any longer, she had her strength and her trusty book entitled "From The Cage to the Red Carpet: How to Succeed as an Exotic Pet Actress". She confidently ran down the highway as semi-trucks and multicolored Hummers with ski racks wailed past her.

But just then, snow began to flitter down around her double-jointed ankles and soon, she was covered in two feet of slush. She gradually moved slower and slower down the Interstate until she came to a complete, cold-blooded stop, right next to the NASCAR track in Belgrade.

Hours passed. But then, even though Sweet Banana Tail II was almost completely frozen, she managed to spot a large mass in the distance slowly approaching.

Sid Gustafson

2007-04-02T00:47:00.000-06:00

Sid Gustafson is a novelist, veterinarian, and professor of equine studies at UM-Western, where he manages the Natural Horsemanship Program. he was born in Montana, as were his parents and children. His latest novel is HORSES THEY RODE. He hides out in Bozeman.

Before she could see what it was, Sweet Banana had identified the crawling creature with her vomeronasal gland. It was none other than her old nemesis, the dogwoman from the Heel of the Valley Animal League. Evidently someone had reported what they perceived to be a dazed, lost Lhasa waltzing down I-90, but then Banana did have her Tibetan roots.

Sweet Banana had dealt with righteous riff-raff of the dog-catching sort on a previous animal-at-large escapade. Banana belted the control officer good with her powerful tail, up one side and down the other. By the time the dog-catcher had Banana bagged and in the trunk, she’d taken a real beating. In the quarantine ward at the pound the bruised animal officer scanned Banana and, sure enough, picked up a bleep under Banana’s mange-riddled hide. She subsequently traced the electronic ID to Irwin’s address at his silo flat. They called Mr. Irwin Finkelstein, but to no answer. The League conferred, finding it in their hearts to sedate and deliver Banana to her rightful owner. Next thing Banana found herself in the treehouse with a bowl of maggots, and Irwin’s mommy was back fermenting in the silo with her dandered son.

The following morning, after serving his mother an oatmeal-and-raisin breakfast in bed, Irwin checked his email and found another message from Bottled StillWater, (his real name, in the proper Absaroka order). Irwin called the Native. Bad news. Apparently, StillWater had checked out the Lenny play under consideration and discovered it had been written to good affect by a failing horsedoctor, and previously produced at High Horse University in Dillon, sell-out cowboy crowds for a three-week run. “Stole the thunder plum away from Butte.”

“Couldn’t be,” cried Irwin. “Virginny swears her pal Lenny wrote it all his self.”

“Nope,” said StillWater , “that Lenny’s a literary thief with a faux bibliography long as Pangolin tail. The horsedoctor had himself a hit in Dillon, and later in Dell on the Red Rock River.”

“How’d you know about Pangolin?” Irwin asked.

“Oh, I have my informants in Bozeman. Police and the like. Plainclothesmen.”

“Are you sure it’s the same play?”

“Same play, same clowny, cowboy plot,” said StillWater.

“What about the music?”

“I didn’t hear the music. Can’t read music.”

“Well, can’t we just change the music, if that’s the case?” asked Irwin.

“Well I suppose we could. We could change the words too, as long as we were at it. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.”

“Well jeez, let’s do that. Change the words, write the music.”

“Any ideas who might accomplish that?” asked StillWater.

“No problema. There’s enough deluded writers hanging about the Seed and Bean coffeehouse to have a circus, and all those ring-nosed musicians strumming away just outside the door, I’m talking tattoo talent.”

“Well, let’s get down there and see what kind of creativity we can resurrect, see what kind of music waiting writers can conjure up for us. See if they can dance the words. Maybe we’ll find some actors sipping lattes to script in, too. Maybe we can turn this keyboarding charade into something real, a real play, with live music and actors. Something like art.”

“Things are coming together, and o so sweetly. We’ll have those Willson and Main juggernauts write a play, find some strummers to strum in, drag actor folk off the street and turn this into a real production behind a real script, a story with a morality and resonance? Something people will watch and be better for it,” declared Irwin.

“See you down there in an hour.” StillWater, Montana-CoffeeHouse-AmericanIndian-PlayProducer he was, fired up his Pontiac and headed to BozAngeles.

Irwin blipped off his phone, did the silo dishes, kissed Mom on the top of her head, fed and slopped the anteater, hopped on and pedaled his ten-speed through the slush to meet StillWater at the Seedy Bean…

Marjorie Smith

2007-04-02T00:41:00.000-06:00

Marjorie Smith is a freelance writer and editor who likes participating in Foolish Words because you don't have to finish what you start.

Donna Lou deChris hurried to the Seedy Bean immediately after work, as she did every day. She ordered her hazelnut latte, put on her shades and slouched into her regular chair at her regular table with the insouciance she knew marked her as very experienced.

She wished there were mirrors on the wall of the Seedy Bean so she could check to be sure that the experience she evinced was as an actress, and not as a typist in a yogurt brokerage, her day job. Bozeman was full of filmmakers – not just students from the university but authentic Hollywood types eager to cash in on the Big Sky on the Big Screen. One day soon someone would spot her and catapult her to stardom.

She recalled her childhood naiveté when she had spent every daylight hour in the front yard looking cute, waiting for Samuel Goldwyn Mayer to drive by and recognize her as the next Shirley Temple. She had learned a great deal about geography in the interim.

Now, at 25, she knew that a front yard in Absaroka, Montana, was no place to be discovered. The Seedy Bean on Main Street in Bozeman – that’s where producers hung out.

Donna Lou carefully wiped foam off her slightly lopsided lips and reapplied lip gloss before continuing to sip, projecting her image – bored, sophisticated and glamorous. Perhaps it was just as well that there weren’t mirrors on the walls - it was
easier to feel glamorous from inside her face rather than from the outside where she would be confronted with her single eyebrow, mismatched eyes, and cheekbones buried in mounds of pudginess – to say nothing of her bulbous nose. But hey, with talent, anything was possible.

In the Rolodex of her mind, she flipped through memories of her stint as a film actress three years ago when she had been approached at this very table by an intense young man who needed to replace a cast member in his junior film. “I originally saw this part as being for an old man,” he told her, “but I think I can use you.”

It had been the most wonderful experience of her life. The whole thing – the days of filming on snowy Bozeman streets wearing soggy bedroom slippers and ugly knee high stockings, the student makeup artist patting powder on her fevered brow, the hours spent huddling in a huge pile of fallen leaves while someone crashed through it driving a car much too fast
whereupon she would pop out, usually unbloodied, providing the comic relief the story required. And of course, the intensely passionate if brief love affair with the author-director, whose name was Gary Geek.

“Ah, Gary,” Donna Lou sighed, closing her eyes, reliving scenes of unbridled passion. Oh, why did she have to be such a nitpicker! For the thousandth time she recalled that final argument. She just couldn’t let him go through life under the mistaken impression that anteaters were reptiles. But why had she made such a big deal of it? She’d screamed at him right out there on Main Street, “Tits, Gary! They have tits!”

Gary Geek had strode away from her, never to return. She knew he had gone on to graduate and hightailed it to Hollywood where he would one day be famous, or at least employed, and here she sat, at the same table in the Seedy Bean, waiting to be discovered.

A large tear oozed out of her brown eye and plopped into her latte and she opened her eyes to search for a Kleenex. And there, standing beside her table were two men: a strange-looking little man and a tall, handsome man of the Native American persuasion... or so Donna Lou assumed since he wore his hair in long black braids.

“Excuse me,” said that smaller man. “Are you by any chance an actress?”

Ryan Cassavaugh

2007-04-02T00:38:00.000-06:00

Ryan Cassavaugh is a member of the improv comedy troupe Equinox Comedy Deathmatch and a writer for the "Pizza Show," as well as an award-winning playwright. He is happily married with three cats and a baby on the way.

The question sent Donna Lou’s mind reeling back thorough the years, to when she had first been asked that question. She was on-stage in a high school production of “Annie Get Your Gun…Again!” an ill-conceived and short-lived sequel to the popular stage musical. The question had been posed by her drama teacher, Mr. Wilberforce, as he flung a toasted sesame-seed bagel at her head.

“Are you an actress?” he had asked. “Because you give the impression of a tone deaf cow in high-heeled slippers having a seizure!”

The question confused Donna Lou, since she was, in fact, playing a tone deaf cow in high-heeled slippers having a seizure. To this day she was still unsure if the comment was a compliment or an insult.

“I think she’s deaf,” the taller man said, staring at Donna Lou with a look that straddled the fine line between pity and annoyance.

“Pity,” said the small man. “She would have been perfect for the part of the mining pit.”

The Native looking man smiled a pleasant smile and nodded; the two men moved away both shaking their heads.

Donna tried to yell, “Wait, come back!” but the words didn’t come. She tried to say anything. Nothing happened. She was paralyzed with anticipation. This was her big break, she knew it. This is what she had always dreamed of. Why couldn’t she say anything? They were leaving. Worse… they were going to another table. To Patti Ponderfund’s table. Patti was Donna’s arch nemesis, or at least Donna thought so. She doubted Patti even knew her name. Patti was the lead in all the local productions. She had even been in a commercial. A national commercial for a line of vegetarian pet food. She had a line. An entire line! She said “Cats don’t know it’s not real fish!” She said it directly into the camera. The thought of it made Donna Lou queasy. Patti was going to get Donna’s big break. Patti was going to be a star. It wasn’t fair. This was Donna’s break, not Patti’s. She had to do something! Why couldn’t she speak? Time almost stopped. Donna watched as the two men inched closer to Patti’s table. In an instant she would see them and smile that million dollar smile at them and it would be all over. It was now or never, Donna had to act… that’s when it hit her.

Of course! There was only one thing she could do…

Michele Corriel

2007-04-02T00:35:00.000-06:00

Michele Corriel is a freeelance writer, poet and originator of the Poetry Dispenser.

Donna opened her mouth, and her exceedingly large capacity for air intake as well as her humongous set of tonsils began to whirr. The room became cavernous. As she reached deep inside herself for a word or a sound, anything that would get the attention of the small man and the tall producer (she just knew he was a producer, he had that special slicked back quality) her mouth opened wider. People were hanging onto the overstuffed, comfy chairs and under-upholstered couches. But it was almost too late. The vacuum effect had begun.

It did however get the attention of StillWater and Irwin. Holding their hands over their faces, careful to avoid the flying chai, they made their way over to Donna, who thankfully had the good sense to close her mouth.

“My God, she’s perfect as the Berkeley Pit!” Irwin said, finding his footing. “How do you do that?”

Just then who should walk into the Seedy Bean but Virginia herself. Not only that, but she was accompanied by none other than Sweet Banana Tail. And they were laughing.

Irwin, bewildered, said, “But I thought, I mean, you said…” his finger wagged back and forth between the two of them. He knew Virginia’s history with reptiles and this wasn’t making any sense.

“Anteaters, even giant pangolins from Uganda, are not and never were reptiles. So don’t even start with me. Besides I’ve found I have a soft spot for mammals that can roll themselves into balls. Me and Sweet Tail have a lot in common.” And they both made noises that no mammal should ever have to listen to.

Irwin, on the other hand, was intrigued. But Virginia, ever the organized human Rolodex, got back to business before the next batch of milk was steamed and no one would be able to hear anything.

“What’s this I hear about changing our script?”

“It’s true. We here in BozeAngeles decided to find us some talent, rewrite that piece of crap you sent us, and get the show on the road, so to speak,” Irwin said, now staring at Donna, who had stolen his heart. He was done with reptiles. His life was now all about a woman who had the lung capacity of a submarine.

“Just hold your damn horses, there,” Virginia said, unwillingly removing her eyes from Sweet Banana Tail. “I checked the Internet’s Suburban Legends site and that failing horse doctor in Dillon is nothing but a big Myth. He never wrote anything except a boring account of breach horse births at the turn of the century. The guy’s as phony as an Indian arrowhead found at the Buffalo Jump. As a matter of fact there isn’t even a High Horse University…”

Just at that moment who should walk into the Seedy Bean but...

Soren Kisiel

2007-04-02T00:27:00.000-06:00

Soren Kisiel is the Executive Director of the Equinox Theatre and an award-winning playwright. He is the co-author of Broad Comedy, which last year completed a three-month run in Boston and showcased in New York.

A Plumber.

Plumber by day, that is. Plumber through the cracked-pipe frozen January mornings below the streets of Butte. Plumber through the soul-stealing corroded-copper afternoons of Butte’s sweating August. Plumber by day, but Irish Fairy by night.

The Irish Fairies, the toughest ethnically-based street-gang in Butte since the “Uptown Danny-Boys” of the 1950s. The Irish Fairies, who once threw one of their own into The Pit just for mentioning that he was also Scottish. The Irish Fairies, so tough that no one in all the years of The M&M’s existence ever once cracked a joke about their name. Yep, those Irish Fairies.

The Plumber popped his thick knuckles, the forward motion of his hands straining the shoulders of his green polyester blazer. Across his chest “Kiss Me I’m Irish” leered like a threat. He held his wide hands out in front of him like an invitation, and revealed teeth inlaid with golden shamrocks.

“Which a’ ye is Irwin?” the Plumber asked. He had never been to Ireland, but his grandmother’s accent had moved though his umbilical cord and deep into his soul. His voice was high, scraping the roof of Irwin’s brain with its fingernails.

Irwin, Virginia and StillWater looked to one another. Fear rising in his throat, Irwin shook his head quickly, imperceptibly. Virginia and StillWater both looked around the room, noticeably scanning for where this “Irwin” could be.

“Which a’ ye bastards is selling Butte’s heart to Bozeman?”

Silence spread through the Seed and Bean. Even those with earphones plugged into their computers looked up.

“Which a’ ye is it that believes that the bold, wild, unruly soul of Mother Butte - the finest city west of Galway - needs these leather-furniture-buying-fleece-wearers to help it stand on its own two damn feet?”

Donna saw her chance. Whatever this artist’s, this genius’ – this IRWIN’s – past: oddly-reptilian mammals, fraudulent claims of plagiarism, Native American grant-makers… she knew she was his future.

She stepped forward, drawing air into her greatest asset. The air poured out, lovingly, bravely: “I’m Irwin.”

Irwin’s head snapped around. His first thought - “I get to keep all my teeth” – was quickly swept away by a surge of emotion. Could this be it? Could this be what he had been looking for in those cold semi-reptilian features for so many years? How could he have been so blind? At first, when he'd looked at Donna all he could see was that lumpy nose, those mismatched eyes, that unibrow.

Now all he could think of was things he wanted to do with that gaping mouth.

A voice spoke behind him, “No, I’m Irwin.”

He turned. There Virginia stood, gently stroking the pangolin’s scales, eyes defiantly holding the Irish Fairy’s.

“No,” spoke a male voice. “I’m Irwin.” StillWater’s braids danced around his shoulders as he held his head
high.
Silence fell over the Seed and Bean, all eyes on the Plumber.

“So that’s the way is it then, is it? Ya bunch of bleedin’ tossers. You think you can beat the Irish Fairies do ya? You don’t know of us here, do you? You don’t know how we beat the fish-and-chips out of the Great Falls Leprechauns, or the way we pounded the Gilette Pennywhistle Gang all the way back into Wyoming for stealing Fergus’ mushy peas recipe! You
Bozeman Irwins are nothin’ compared to them!”

Delight danced in the Plumber’s green eyes as he scanned the room. “You’ll not get away with this. No one will produce a musical about my beloved Butte – no one that doesn’t live there, breathe her air, drink her water. No one will make a feel-good family experience out of dearest Butte without including among its theatrical delights a bit of its history: the
Screaming Panda bit.”

Irwin’s nerve rose in him like fire. He looked to Donna – my Lord, that MOUTH – and found bravery in her
eyes. He stepped forward.

“Sir, my name is Irwin. And while I happen to live in Bozeman, I actually was planning to include the
Screaming Panda bit.”

Polyestra

2007-04-02T00:22:00.000-06:00

Polyestra is the author of many stories and poems and screenplays and novels, and is the owner of the Independent Media Room bookstore in Livingston.

Irwin's mother sits alone in her tree house. She puts her cigar out in the “80” written upon her birthday cake with bleeding red icing.

"Foolish boy," she says.

She moves along the rope ladder like a whip snake into the vaulted laundry room. Hanging from her knees she rifles through the fancy pants in the dryer until she retrieves her special "going out" turban. Back in her one-room treehome, she sits before a candle. Her eyes close half-way and she begins to levitate.

"Foolish boy spending my money on this overpriced Bozeman dump," she hisses, hovering a good two feet off the floor. Her astral body peels off and shoots like a bolt over the land to the Berkeley Pit.

"Hello little lovely," she says to the angry wound below. The bright red stinking liquid filling in the massive void stares back at her with words emanating from its burned mouth like: arsenic and sulfuric acid and pH level of 2.5. "Soon, it will be soon."

Her stiff little body hovers along above the road to Uptown, where she meets her friend for lunch.

"He forgot my birthday because he's trying to make another stupid Montana movie," Irwin's mother says to Bob, who is astrally visiting from Jackson Hole.

"The pit is going to breach," Bob says.

"Yes, soon," Irwin's mother says, placing another french fry in her mouth.

"That stretch of track in the mine was especially steep," said a man at the next table. “A panda like that didn't have a chance."

All the dishes in the restaurant began to tinkle and vibrate and tip over edges. The astral travelers shot out of the roof and over to the pit.

"It will melt all the inhabitants of Butte," Bob said.

"We can divert it," Irwin's mother said. "I'll use my turban."

Laser-like rays beamed from the two elders' eyes, lifting a wave of red acid up onto I-90. Ducks and geese flocked from all directions to try to land on the heavy-metal-saturated liquid, but as they watched the Hummers pop and dissolve like effervescent sugar cubes, they turned north to land on the asbestos piles in Shelby instead.

As the last drop of red digestive juices joined the tidal wave heading east on I-90...

Keith Suta

2007-04-02T00:16:00.000-06:00

Keith Suta writes movies, acts, and is a founding member of KGLT's "Coffee Show," for all of which he is handsomely unpaid.

....Lenny sat in front of his computer, studying the final draft of his musical masterpiece. He appended a few essential endnotes and parentheticals – his reasoning being that no musical masterpiece to date had included a section of endnotes and since so few musicals were truly masterpieces, surely the missing element was a comprehensive historical bibliography.
He had finished annotating the Screaming Panda Incident (including the Time Magazine coverage and Edward R. Murrow commentary) and sat back to pour himself a hearty glass of Midori as a treat for a job well done.

As so often happens when one is just about to enjoy a full pint of green melon liquor, Lenny's cell phone rang. Lenny could barely make out Virginia's voice amongst what sounded to be considerable hub and bub.

"I'm sorry, Virginia, you'll have to speak up..." The call was on the verge of being dropped when the Bozeman City Council hurriedly erected another cell phone tower in the vicinity, raising both everybody's connection bars and metastasis rates.

"...cannot believe they don't serve termite lattes here," was how Virginia's statement concluded.

"Termites?" inquired Lenny. "Aren't you kosher?"

Virginia set Sweet Banana Tail II down on top of a high table and pressed her newly free hand to her ear.

"Of course I am, Lenny, but pangolins are notoriously finicky in their dietary needs." The rest of their conversation was lost in a sudden scream from Irwin's direction.

Irwin and the Plumber from Butte had agreed to settle their dispute via a game of Scrabble; the winner of which would receive the right to stage the play wherever they saw fit. Not three minutes into the game, it became apparent that the coffee house's
Scrabble set was lacking three D tiles and no end of vowels. The Plumber stared forlornly at a rack holding F, N, X, P, Z, and L as Irwin placed down letters spelling "perspicacity" for a Triple Word Score of 69 plus a bonus of 50 for using all eight of his tiles. Seeing as how "perspicacity"contains twelve letters and Irwin had not been working off of "city," the Plumber began to suspect that the fix was in. He picked up his rack and flung it square at Irwin's solar plexus, screaming, "I've a moind ta smash yer face into that display of attractive and reasonably-proiced gift oitems fer such fourberie!"

Irwin leapt to his feet, thundering, "I'm sorry you're a sore loser! I'm declaring this a win by default!"

The rage in Irwin's manner lessened somewhat by his rubbing his sore belly as he shouted.

Virginia was caught between the chaos of the abandoned word game and Lenny blathering on about some woman called Stagecoach Mary and some guy named Bishop Filbus N.E. Berwanger.

"They lived in Great Falls," Virginia scolded, "Would you concentrate on the matter at hand, Lenny?"

Lenny would have, of course, but that particular moment was when the acidic tidal wave wiped out Montana's Central Cellular Phone Communications Center in Whitehall. All phones in the state, roaming or non-, went out in a blink. Pizzas were suddenly half-ordered, rendezvous were only partially completed, and untold thousands of public conversations of what should have been of a private nature to begin with were suddenly silenced. Virginia closed her phone, looking around at other customers tapping and shaking their useless communication devices. Sighing, she sat down, wondering how any
creative project can take form without a cell phone. Sweet Banana Tail II waddled over to share her ant latte, which, fortunately, had been on the menu.

Katie Goodman

2007-04-02T00:10:00.000-06:00

Katie Goodman is the creator, writer, and director of Broad Comedy, as well as the co-artistic direcor of the Equinox Theatre Company; is a founding member of the nationally touring improv comedy troupe Spontaneous Combustibles; and her piece on authenticity appeared in the March 2007 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

“A musical?” Adonai, The One Who Cannot Be Named, asked.

“Yeah,” Jesus said, thoughtfully. “It’s worked before. Look at what Menopause The Musical did for Orlando.”

“Orlando already had a few things going for it, financially speaking,” Shiva said smugly, always the one who had to be right.

“It might work,” Adonai said, popping a piece of pickled herring into his mouth.

“Yes, let’s not judge too quickly,” Jesus said.

“You always say that,” White Buffalo Woman snapped. She was tired from recent appearances.

“I thought we were just going to write off Butte,” Shiva sulked. “Let the damn thing destroy itself and fall away to dust. That’s such the obvious answer.”

“Look, they need a hand,” Adonai shrugged his shoulders, palms up, eyes squinting like his grandmother used to do. “They asked. Their intentions are pure… Plus I owe Finkelstein.”

“For what?” Buddha perked up. He was so damn quiet. It was unsettling. Everyone preferred it when he spoke up
occasionally.

“Um,” said Adonai. “I’d rather not say.”

St. Patrick was taking all this in. He was chewing on some road kill beef jerky White Buffalo Woman had brought for everyone. The stuff got stuck in your teeth like nothing else.

“I don’t think we should get involved,” he said.

“We’ve got several warring factions here and it’s getting hard to tell them apart. We don’t want another Middle East.”

“Or middle west!” laughed Baccus, lamely trying to lighten the mood.

“That is sooooo not the middle west, you moron. It’s the West,” chided White Buff, as her girlfriends called her.

“It’s all the West, out there,” Shiva snipped. “West, west, west.”

“That is so like an easterner,” White Buff shouted standing up. “What, you can’t tell us apart?”

“All right, all right! Enough!” Adonai shouted, shushing everyone into a shamed silence. He was good at making them feel guilty enough to shape up. “So, what should we do? Consensus says…?”

Everyone got very quiet.

Then, the one who hadn’t spoken yet, sat up:

Liz Allen

2007-04-02T00:06:00.000-06:00

Liz Allen is a massage therapist who thrives on tele-skiing, writing, and spreading her pitbull Tigger's message of peace.

“We cannot interfere. I have to admit these mortals are damned entertaining,” Ullr quipped. “Besides, I don’t feel like snowing.”

Not wanting to further the argument or make another dreaded appearance, White Buff nodded silently, and from their repose on rainbow-colored velour love seats all simply gazed back into the circling blue orb:

“Blixseth development hour on XM radio?” Lenny’s cousin murmured.

Jane wrinkled her brow in the alpenglow glare that graced the dustless windshield of her motorcycle. She wasn’t supposed to be listening on the job, but she despised giving speeding tickets more than eating Lenny’s mother’s tuna casserole –- it was entirely possible she mixed up the Frisky’s cans with the Natural Value “tuna in water,” on purpose.

Jane’s rebellion within the Montana Highway Patrol was sparked by an incident near Bridger Bowl. Reminded of the brief encounter, her belly smoldering, Jane sensed in her core an unlikely kinship with geologic time. Uncannily, Jane’s spiritual growth had recently burst forth, like so much Burning Man apparel riding a Nevada dust storm. Her secret admirers at the station had watched in awe as she patiently fanned these writings, these pontifications, if you will, into a firestorm of a not-unpleasantly-fulfilling “way-of-being.” Jane had a following.

“No one insults Cormac McCarthy!”

As Jane handed out the expensive ticket she queried, “Who’s long-winded now?” Reliving these utterances shocked
Jane. This girl-next-door, Mama’s little-angel, Daddy’s sugar-lump was spewing these horrible, righteous, and assuredly judgmental statements.

“I must sit in my zendo for at least 4 hours tonight. I will cleanse.”

Just then, Sweet Banana Tail II jetted across I-90, bee-lining for Jane’s parked motorcycle. Sweet Banana was suddenly in Jane’s surprised arms.

“What the… Who are you?” Jane managed to sputter.

Her preoccupation with her own filth blinded Jane to the arrival of Sweet Banana and the first blast of light that eerily licked the edges of the aforementioned yellowish-orange putrid soup. It seemed to be pouring out of the dusky sky.

“What the bejesus? Sweet lord…” With the reflexes of a newly trained CIA Official Guantanamo Interrogator and more than five times the mental prowess, Jane fired up her ride and started the horrific flight east with Banana riding sidesaddle, toward Whitehall. The full moon’s giddy belly suddenly lit up like a psychedelic tribute to Furthur, and its usual suspects.

Jane’s motorcycle squealed to a stop on the newly tarred roof of Bob’s Auto Barn and took quick note of the hungry toxic stew’s work on the Montana Central Cellular Phone Communications Center.

The soup hissed and bubbled encircling its next victim –- an 8-foot-tall knapweed fence safeguarding Shady Boulders trailer park. As the knapweed smoked a fiery purplish haze, Deputy Max joined Jane on the roof.

“Sweet child of mine, is that a free-flowing river of ferredentin?”

Max swallowed the lump in his throat and relived the gag reflex he had endured nightly as a child.

“My evil thoughts created this river of bile!” Jane swooned. The 20-odd quantum physics books sitting on her pink, quartz crystal-studded shelf quivered - in unison.

“Is this meth?” Max’s eyes grew wide, he recoiled.

“All this time, I was creating my own reality… I didn’t even get it…” Jane trailed off.

Deputy Max meekly pondered, “Is there more scripture transcription tonight? I don’t feel so well, with that medical lookin’ river comin’ at me.”

“I’m gettin’ out of the force, Max, starting right now!” Jane ripped her silver badge from her bullet-proof vest. She glanced at it one more time, and remembered her inspiration – her cousin Lenny.

“I’ll play a cop in his new play, and meditate in my time off,” Jane decided.

Sweet Banana Tail II approved. With her highly tuned telepathic powers – owing to the relationship of her scale shape and size (not surprisingly correlated with Mitchell Feigenbaum’s universality theory in chaos – 4.6692016090) – her silent call vibrated out to Virginia, her new love, and a request: ant latte –- with soy.

A mixup in her telepathy - possibly a quantum leap - produced an odd result: with all the power of pitbull protecting a trailer, a sudden dust storm blew in the Irish Fairies. Their fists clenching and unclenching signified a grave situation....

Ray Sikorski

2007-04-02T00:02:00.002-06:00

Ray Sikorski is a freelance writer and the author of Driftwood Dan and Other Adventures, who likes participating in Foolish Words because he has to finish what everyone else starts.

…and their toes tapping and heels clicking signified an authentic sense of rhythm.

They had not come to Bozeman to rumble. They had come to Bozeman to audition.

They intoned, from high to low, and went into their redition of “It’s a Long Way From Claire to Here.” A hush fell upon the Seedy Bean. Those Irish Fairies could harmonize. They even had matching outfits. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

“You guys are in!” yelled Lenny. Irwin and Bottled Stillwater grunted their approval.

“The male lead shall go to me,” demanded the Plumber. “For I am the most charming Irish Fairy in all of Uptown Butte. I can dance the Riverdance, and I can sing from me heart so sweetly, why, the fair Lady of the Rockies herself would come down for a listen.”

Mumblings arose from both the over- and under-upholstered seats of the Seedy Bean. “Prove it!” the crowd yelled.

“It would be me pleasure,” said the Plumber. “I shall sing this song as a tribute to me plumber’s helper, Danny.

“’Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…”

The Seedy Bean patrons put down their cups. Even the milk steamer was silent. And way, way off in the distance – 81 miles away, to be exact – one could discern the faint yet unmistakable percussion of massive stone footsteps.
Just then Jane and the rest of police burst in to the coffeeshop. “The Berkeley Pit is coming down the Insterstate,” she cried.

“It’s headed for Bozeman!” she cried.

Tables overturned, coffee went flying. The Irish Fairies urged calm. “The water in the pit isn’t bad for ye,” one said. “Me brothers and me drink it all the time. Keeps ye young.”

The police tried to settle the crowd. “He may be right!” Jane said. “What we need is a guinea pig to go out there and test it. And, if we can’t find a guinea pig, I hear a pangolin will work in a pinch.”

Sweet Banana Tail’s ears perked up at that. She put down her latte, wiping the ant residue off her upper proboscis. “I’ll be freakin’ damned if I’m going out there,” she said.

Off in the distance, the footsteps grew louder. And sploshier.

“Oh, dair, she’s a comin’ all righty,” said the Plumber. “Sounds like she’s walking along the Interstate. She’ll be a’trompin’ in the Pit water, and I fear she won’t be wearin’ her irrigation boots.”

“Sir, let me get this right,” said Jane. “Along with the floodwaters of the Berkely Pit, the giant Our Lady of the Rockies statue is headed to Bozeman?”

“Aye, and she’s hoppin’ mad! Oh, and that Pit water will make her grow, a kilometer if she’s an inch. And that’s no Blarney!”

Half the crowd went into a panic - too much caffeine. The other half, who also had too much caffeine, started brainstorming.

“I know, we’ll fight her with an enormous icon of our own!”

“What have we got?”

“Uh, how ‘bout the ‘M’?”

“But that’s just a big letter m. Can it fight?”

“Comes in handy in Scrabble.”

“I know!” said Lenny. “We’ll film it. It’ll be the greatest new reality show ever – part Cops, part Survivor, part American Idol, and part America’s Funniest House Pets.”

“I resent that,” muttered Sweet Banana Tail, swallowing an ant clump.

“And part Godzilla versus Mothra!” yelled Virginia.

So it was on. The denizens of Bozeman no longer feared being flooded with toxic water and stomped to death by the mighty Lady from Butte, because they would be made famous in the process… with help from the song and dance accompaniment of the Irish Fairies. The producers brandished their cameras – it was showtime.

The drumbeat of stone footsteps grew louder. Darkness fell along Main Street; it wasn’t a thundercloud, it was the massive shadow of Our Lady, now passing the 19th Street interchange, her feet sloshing with poison. Rather than hiding in their basements, Bozeman’s overly recreated came out in their Patagonia hazmat suits, hoping to be on TV.

The Plumber was right: She was a kilometer tall if she was an inch. She approached Main Street, towering above it. Some people screamed. The rock climbers in the crowd desperately searched for their chalk bags and harnesses – opportunities like this didn’t happen every day. It would be Bozeman’s day of darkness; Butte would finally get the respect it deserved.

But the Plumber wasn’t right about everything: Our Lady of the Rockies wasn’t hopping mad. She was concerned.

“That Berkely Pit toxic sludge made my feet itch,” she boomed. “And it’s headed for the North 7th Avenue exit!”

The crowd screamed. Panicking looters broke into Schnee’s and cleared out their stock of irrigation boots.

“No!” boomed Our Lady. “You can be saved!”

“Save us, O Lady!” yelled the crowd.

“I’m not the one to save you. The one who can save you is among you. It’s… Donna Lou deChris!”

A confused murmur went through the crowd. “Who’s she?” someone asked.

“She is an actress,” said Our Lady. “And she will be the true star of this show.”

Donna Lou, who had been moping silently this whole time, suddenly brightened. At last!

“Is she any good?” asked another.

“She sucks,” said Our Lady. “I mean that literally. She has an exceedingly large capacity for air intake… and, hopefully, for toxic Berkeley Pit effluent intake. She is Bozeman’s only hope!”

They all look at her endearingly, Lenny and Virginia and Irwin and Squids and Bottled Stillwater and Sweet Banana Tail and Gary Geek and Patti and the Plumber and the Irish Fairies and the Great Falls Leprechauns and the Gilette Pennywhistle Gang (who had also come to audition) and Irwin’s mom and Bob and Adonai and Jesus and White Buffalo Woman and Shiva and Buddha and St. Patrick and Ullr and Jane and Deputy Max and Cormac McCarthy and Our Lady of the Rockies. They implored: “The show must go on, Donna Lou.”

Donna Lou pondered for a moment. She would have to swallow up the entire contents of the Berkeley Pit. She considered the pros and cons: She’d be famous, but it probably wouldn’t be very good for her complexion.

“I’ll do it!” she said.

The crowd cheered, and carried the exhuberant Donna Lou on their shoulders to the I-90 interchange, just as the toxic stew was bubbling off the exit ramp. “You suck, Donna Lou,” the crowd yelled. “You suck!”

And suck she did. At last, it was her moment in the spotlight – all the auditions, all the humilation was finally paying off… and for something she was naturally good at. She inhaled powerfully, and the toxic Pitwater was vacuumed straight into her cavernous mouth. As gallon after gallon of the gurgling brew disappeared into Donna Lou’s capacious maw, the crowd held its collective breath.

She had done it!

Donna Lou had sucked the entire Interstate dry, and she mopped the damp asphalt with her unibrow.

Bozeman was saved, Butte made it happen, and it would all be on TV. Both towns erupted in glee and merriment, praising Donna Lou, the Irish Fairies, and Our Lady of the Rockies. Even the screaming panda finally got around to doing his bit.
As drunken revelers ascended her flanks to give her big, wet kisses, Our Lady shushed the crowd, for she had one last question before returning to her perch above the Richest Hill on Earth:

“Just what the hell is that reptilian-anteater thing, anyway?’

THE END

Foolish Words 2007 schedule

2007-02-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

Here's the order for Foolish Words 2007. It looks like everyone should get about three or four days to slam out their bit. Currently (as of Thursday, Feb. 22) Heidi Lasher is working on her segment.

Sam Louden
Liz McRae
Heidi Lasher
Craig Kenworthy
Rebecca Kinman
Sid Gustafson
Mike Finkel
Marjorie Smith
Mike England
Michele Corriel
Ryan Cassavaugh
Polyestra
Keith Suta
Randy Glynn
Soren Kisiel
Katie Goodman
Ray Sikorski

Let us know how badly we spelled your name.

Something else we want to do is make an introduction of the scribblers to the audience. Please e-mail to Sam Louden (samyarpsam@yahoo.com) or Ray Sikorski (logorhythmic@hotmail.com) a one sentence biography that can
be read aloud before the main reading.

To further help audience members to know who-the-what-the-heck-is-going-on, the compiled bios will be printed as sort of a program. If we do not know who exactly you are by March 31, we will just make something up.

Note: Once again, the Tributary will be publishing Foolish Words over the course of the summer (and maybe into the fall, seeing as we have quite a lot of participants!).

Have questions or comments? Post 'em below! We'll see if we can address them.