Next Stop: the Couch

This is to alert psychiatrists to keep their couches dusted off.

At
a party the other night a man was telling about a recurring dream. In
it he would go up to a tobacco counter and ask for a certain brand of
cigarette. At the mention the young lady behind the counter would turn
into an old crone and cackle menacingly, "Show me your tattoo!"

Unable to do so he would ask for another brand, at which she would pull a knife on him and snarl, "Prove you’re a thinking man!"

And so on until he settled for a candy bar.

ONLY IN L.A. —
A certain all-night restaurant near MacWestlake Park is rendezvous for
people who have no particular place to go except home after the bars
close.

The other night a man came in and asked for a piece of coconut-cream pie.

"Out!" commanded a stalwart gal named Trudie, who presides over the place.

"All I want is a piece of coconut-cream pie," he said plaintively.

"Out," she repeated. "You’re 86d!"

"But why?" he pleaded.

"Because," she said, "the whole idea of a grown man asking for coconut-cream pie at 2:30 a.m. is repulsive, that’s why!"

INQUIRY
Tell me, dear beatniks,
Is it really a crime
To write plain ol’ verse
With both reason and rhyme?
–TERRI McDANIEL

DISCLOSURE here that I can talk to squirrels is still reverberating fiercely.

A
lady named Mary Louise confides she has had some interesting
conversations lately with Buster, a possum which forages in her back
yard for her dachshund’s leftovers.

And North Young, the
Malibuite, was glad to read of my squirrel talk because now he doesn’t
feel so silly about telling of his linguistic rapport with Sid and
Smitty, two silverfish which adore his library shelf.

A couple
of months ago he found them having a ball on the A section of his
collegiate dictionary. They stopped chewing long enough to exchange
greetings with him, then proceeded down Page 46, wolfing great chunks
of "arcanum" and "archeology."

But when they got to the bottom
of the page he noticed they were spitting out syllables of the
next-to-last word. After that they disappeared and North concluded they
must have gone to the nearest Lepisma mental hospital.

Well, the other day they showed up again, completely cured, breakfasting normally on an old Maugham novel.

"Ever find out what caused your nervous breakdown?" North asked.

Sid and Smitty stopped chewing long enough to reply in unison, "Oh, sure, we were trying to eat ‘archaic’ and have it, too."

SPEAKING OF
dictionary backtalk, Jim Bassett came upon a fascinating standoff. An
"inverted mordent," he discovered on Page 1306 of the big book, is a
"pralltriller." And what is a pralltriller? An "inverted mordent."

It isn’t as bad as it sounds — it’s a musical term.

AS
vice president of Chaos Unltd., I feel it is my duty to report that
while visiting a friend I picked up a book titled "A New Model of the
Universe," by P.D. Ouspensky, and found a bookmark in a page with this
sentence: "Why is it that people do not understand that they are only
shadows, only silhouettes of themselves, and that the whole of life is
only a shadow, only a silhouette, of some other life?"

I don’t know, but let’s not nag about it.

MISCELLANY — Stand
back, everyone, for the Whirley Whirler, being boomed to replace last
year’s Hula-Hoop madness. You twirl a plate on a stick and hold it
aloft . . . well, maybe you do.  

Fix your toaster, mister?

One
Saturday morning about four years ago a man came into the Mayflower
Hotel on Grand Avenue to repair a toaster. In the ensuing confusion
involving the chef, the engineer and the assistant manager, the man
walked off with an extremelyhockable four-slice machine, which didn’t need repair and was worth about $200. 

It was to be returned Monday but he didn’t say which Monday, one of which occurs each week following Sunday, and it never was.

The other night the same fellow came in again and told the engineer he had come to overhaul the toaster.

This
time the same assistant manager, Robert M. Stewart, happened to
overhear him. He remembered the previous incident and affixed the
fellow with a steely eye. The repair man caught his glance, mumbled
something about a mistake in the address and took off through the lobby
like a startled gazelle.

So beware, hotel and restaurant people, the toaster repair man is up to his old tricks again.

A MAN I KNOW was
appalled last Monday at Santa Anita to see hundreds of grim-faced
persons make a break for the exits immediately after the sixth race.
Seemingly they had no regard for the almost sacred obligation to see
the great Round Table run in the seventh, a widely heralded and
historic spectacle provided at great pains by the management. Many of
those hurrying out one exit didn’t even glance at the super horse being
saddled a few yards away.

It left this man with the abhorrent
thought that people don’t go to the race track to see a great horse,
only to try to win money. For shame.

IT’S A FACT
Stop and think and force a smile.
Spice your life with laughter,
This is but a little while-
The rest is all hereafter.
–G.C. McHOSE

ON A RECENT Sunday Bud Rainey, a city fireman, took his daughter, 10, to San Gabriel Canyon to see the snow.

As
he entered the snow area their car was severely snowballed by
irresponsible youths. This continued all day. On the way home when a
souped-up car passed him and the young men in it threw snowballs in his
open side window, almost causing him to lose control of the car, he
decided he’d had it.

He overtook them, pulled the car to the side, and when one snowballer stuck his head out the window, punched him in the nose. Then he calmly walked back to his car and drove off.

The
next day Bud’s brother, an identical twin who attends a college here,
was walking on the campus when a husky six-footer tapped him on the
shoulder and said, "Hey, buddy, were you up in San Gabriel Canyon
yesterday?" He truthfully said no but he noticed that in addition to a
puzzled expression the fellow had a bruised nose.

A YOUNG bank
teller named Kenneth Brown, who took Malvin Wald’s screenwriting course
at SC eight years ago, subsequently became a producer of technical
films.

Last year Hughes Aircraft assigned him a difficult job — dramatizing the employment of the handicapped.

The budget didn’t provide for an outside writer so he asked his former prof for guidance.

When Bob Cummings saw the film he was so moved he volunteered to narrate it.

The film, "Employees Only," has just been nominated for an Academy award in the short documentary classification.

FOOTNOTES — The
Kingston Trio’s new record, "Tijuana Jail," recounting the plight of
three American youths arrested in a gambling raid below the border, has
this sequence, "So here we’ll stay ’cause we can’t pay, just send our
mail to the Tijuana jail." Familiar? . . . Dr. Robert H.Alway’s talk at
the Stanford conference tomorrow at the Ambassador has the succinct
title, "Ills, Pills and Bills." He’s dean of the medical school . . .
Jack Wagner ofKBIQ-FM is amused at the disc jockeys taking bows for "introducing" stereotape shows. He did it more than a year ago.