October 16, Saturday afternoon -- Reading Dan Rhodes and Tibor Fischer

While I'm recovering from foot surgery....

Micropixie came over and read to me from Anthropology: 101 True Love Stories, by Dan Rhodes. The stories are one page each and they are zany and fun. Some of them are disturbing. There's a man who's recently become blind who is annoyed that his girlfriend, as a result of his blindness, has stopped dressing up for him, and he can tell from the sounds her legs and body make, that, while she's leading him around town, she's not wearing short skirts and stockings -- she's wearing jeans. And, she's traded her heels in for trainers.

She also read to me from a similarly fun and zany book called The Collector Collector, by Tibor Fischer, which is about an antique bowl that has been around since antiquity and because of this, and probably some magic, too, the bowl knows all sorts of stories.

The story she read (with her delightfully exotic "Queen's English") was your basic boy meets girl. The boy asked the girl to marry him. The girl said yes, but before they got married, he would have to visit 200 places of local interest on his knees, so that everyone would know how devoted he was to her. At first he thought this would be impossible, but he did embrace the challenge.

Every place he visited was happy to see him and that they were one of the chosen places of local interest. When he returned to the woman she was married already. He tried to kill himself in many different ways, all of which failed.

One day he walked into a town and asked that someone behead him. He found an idiot to do it, but the cleaver slipped and, instead of beheading him, sliced off a few of the idiots toes. This was particularly memorable failing for me. My foot has been numbed by local anesthetic, but when she read that passage, the nerve endings in my toes tingled.

Here's a link to a video Micropixie did on YouTube about her own beige foot.

Thank you!