Performance pieces

When my uncle was in high school, he and a girl friend used to go into a store where they were not known and stage a mock, ad-libbed break up fight ending with her either slapping him and storming out or kissing him to make up. Once, when in a Vegas casino with his sister, niece and friends, he convinced staff that he was a man of the cloth there in Sin City with members of his flock. They got a very fancy dinner comped at which he said grace and after which they got the heaven out of there.

My grandfather once acted like a complete lunatic while stuffing kerosene soaked rags into the runs of the moles infesting his lawn all because someone pulled over to the roadside to ask for directions and seemed to expect him to stop what he was doing and walk over to the car so they wouldn’t have to get out. He fell about laughing when their tires squealed during their rush to get away. He also scared off a door-to-door salesman who ignored the “No Salesmen” notice on the door by complaining loudly to my grandmother, who had also come to the door, that her efforts were keeping him from seeing the salesman’s wares and the salesman had promised to show them. This while she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform for work with her arms around grandfather pulling him away from the door while saying in an undertone to the salesman, “If you back away slowly, you should be okay.”

My grandmother also used to dress as a witch at Halloween and sit in a chair beside a tree stacked around with pumpkins halfway along the sidewalk to the house. My grandfather would pass out the treats at the door and as the little ghouls, cowboys and princesses came back along the walk she would suddenly lean forward and say, “Did you get anything good?” The screams still reverberate through time.

All this is just so you’ll know I come by it naturally.