Wednesday, September the 22nd, 2004

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Pale Flapper : A Love Story

“What do you do with the drunken sailor?” is a question that has often been posed in the past. Never having been to sea, except once or twice, as a stowaway, it was not something Sidney Paste had given much thought to. Yet when he awoke on that still September morning, pale sunlight leaching into his scandalous fin de siecle bedroom, he was confronted by not one but a dozen drunken sailors, dancing a sort of hornpipe on his balconyette. It was dubbed a balconyette because it was considerably smaller than the average balcony in that fair city, so tiny in fact that it was a wonder that twelve drunken sailors had managed to cram themselves on to it, let alone to dance a sort of hornpipe.

One of the sailors had an accordion, and was drunkenly squeezing out the tune to which they danced. Sidney Paste knew that tune well, for it was The Onion Song by Ashford and Simpson, memorably recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Although, as we have seen, not given to pondering what he should do with the drunken sailor, Sidney Paste often thought about the fact that pain and fear are the spices that make you cry, for in his life he had known much pain and not a little fear. Was it fear of the drunken sailors that found him leaping from his bed now, on this September morn? Or was it that Sidney Paste always leapt straight out of bed as soon as he awoke, eager to seize the day, like some hyperactive toddler bent on gratification?

Yes, that was it, for look at him now, filling the sink in his room with ice cold water and repeatedly plunging his head into it. But where is his towel? One of the drunken sailors has fashioned it into a piratical bandanna and wound it around his head to rein in his unruly locks, but his dancing of the sort of hornpipe is so vigorous that the towel is coming loose and within the next few seconds it will fall from his head and off the balconyette into the street so many storeys below, where it will land on a passing flapper on her way home from an all-night jitterbug party. In seeking to retrieve his towel, Sidney Paste will meet this pale and enchanting flapper, and what do you know, within the year they will be wed, and go honeymooning in the wild Arctic wastes of northern Canada, where they will befriend bears, commune with moose, and muck about like a lovestruck couple, smitten with bliss.