Tribute

Over at the Oh Get A Grip! blog this week, they're playing a delightful game: writing imitations of favorite famous authors!

And when OGAG regular Charlotte "Mighty Viper" Stein said she didn't do impressions, it got me thinking... Charlotte Stein is one of my favorite authors, and I wanted to try to write an imitation of her work! And with her kind permission, I did.

What follows is a fake story beginning inspired by the incredible Ms. Stein. It's merely a pale imitation of her genius, of course; but what fun it was to play dress-up!

Then, after reading my pastiche, you'll naturally want to spend some time with the real thing.

Here's to you, glorious Charlotte!

When Winifred invites me out for coffee, I almost don’t go. In fact, I not only almost don’t go, I also almost throw the West Chelmsford Harvest Society commemorative quilt over my head and hide under my bed for three days. The only thing stopping me is the fact that when Winifred asks me out for the coffee, I’m at least two miles north of my bed, and four flights down.

Also, I recall that I finally took the West Chelmsford Harvest Society quilt to a jumble sale last month, because it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen apart from Ezekiel, my pet toad, whom I miss terribly.

If I still had a pet toad, I could now tell Winifred I have to hurry home to feed it warm moss. Winifred, who is the most witty and sophisticated woman who has ever spoken to me, is probably too sophisticated and witty to know that toads don’t actually eat moss—of any temperature—so she would hopefully believe my cowardly lie and be secretly relieved that she didn’t have to have coffee with me after all, since she probably thinks I’m uglier than Ezekiel the departed toad and has only asked me out in a moment of time-delayed temporary insanity caused by glimpsing a hideous quilt at a jumble sale over the weekend.

Except of course women like Winifred don’t go to jumble sales. Women like Winifred go to bohemian-chic parties with art installations and remix DJs and men approximately ten million times handsomer than me, and maybe I should pretend I do still have a toad and run away now before I melt into a pool of unhandsome patheticness at her bohemian-chic feet.

But somehow I’m too cowardly even to be cowardly, so instead of lying or running away or melting I agree to have coffee with this fabulously arty and remixy woman. And my hard-on.

Oh yes, my hard-on is always here tagging along when Winifred and I are in the same room. You couldn’t pay my hard-on to miss a glimpse of Winifred. So what’s going to happen is we’ll arrive at the cafe, and Winifred will lead me to a table for two, and I’ll have to bring over an extra chair for my hard-on, and then I’ll promptly die from embarrassment—leaving Winifred to step elegantly over my ugly, hard-on’d corpse and move to a table for one, which is where she would have been seated in the first place if she hadn’t succumbed to the insane, quilt-induced impulse of inviting me along.

So, really, things will work out all right for Winifred, one way or another.