Category Archives: Behind the scenes

Theatre stories

What’s in a name?

Behind the scenes, Nate, Sarah

Thanks to everyone who expressed their sympathy over the loss of Sarah’s jewelry. I think I am basically over it. It’s not as if I had intended to wear it, after all, and I still have the memories. I cancelled the maid service and changed the locks, and I (tearfully) gave the charm bracelets to Sarah’s nieces. I still have the first piece of jewelry I gave Sarah, a silver Tiffany bracelet with our initials engraved on opposite sides of a silver heart. That will have to do.

In the comments of the last post, Peg raised the question of how my blog got its name. It’s not quite as simple as she guessed.

Sarah’s totem animal was the manatee. She loved homely animals, and the manatee topped the list. She had manatee jewelry, manatee socks, manatee mugs, just all kinds of manatee paraphernalia. This made it easy for me to pick out gifts for her. A manatee trinket was shorthand for “I love you.”

When we met, I didn’t have a similar obsession. This made it a bit more of a challenge for Sarah to pick out gifts for me.

One day, when we were packing for our first overnight trip together, Sarah presented me with what she called a “travel animal.” She explained that one of her ex-boyfriends had been in the military, and he introduced her to the concept. Apparently it’s traditional for an infantryman to carry a small plush animal in his backpack, to be his “eyes behind” and help look out for danger. He shared the tradition with her, and now she was continuing it with me.

My new travel animal was a Beanie Baby: Happy the Hippo. I was completely delighted. Happy has accompanied me on every trip I’ve ever taken since then. He’s been all over the world. As time passed, however, we realized that this gift was much more than it seemed. It had revealed my totem animal to me. Any time I saw a picture of a hippopotamus, it reminded me of Sarah and how much she loved me. Soon the hippo-themed gifts began in earnest. We even made a pilgrimage to Busch Gardens in Tampa Bay, where we took the Animal Adventure Tour specifically so we could go backstage and feed the hippos. (Of course, we also visited the Lowry Park Zoo and hung out with the manatees for several hours.)

The suffix -potamus entered our vocabulary fairly quickly, but it really took off when Nate was born. When he was hungry, he was a hungrypotamus. When he was sleepy, he was a sleepypotamus. When he was spitting up, he was a messypotamus (from Messypotamia, of course). And when he was cranky? Obviously, he was a crankopotamus. And when he woke us up in the middle of the night, we were all crankopotamuses together.

Nate inherited the (dozens of) plush manatees, but they’re not his thing. I await with interest the revelation of his totem animal. At the moment he loves penguins and turtles, but it’s still too early to say.

As for me, I still love hippos, but my collection has slowed way down since Sarah died. We saw a great wooden hippo puzzle while on vacation this summer, but in the end I just couldn’t bear to buy it.

I miss my wife.

The Lyrical Gangster

Behind the scenes

Contest results

Perhaps you recall the little puzzle that I announced last week. I was happy to see evidence on my stats page that a handful of people were making the attempt. But my dear friend Leigh threw her every spare moment into working on it. I should have known how she would react to the challenge; I remember how thoroughly Funny Farm possessed her soul last fall. Anyway, after innumerable hours of dogged detective work, she has identified all but one of the lyrics. That remaining one is nigh-impossible, so I name her the winner. Congratulations to Leigh, and thanks to all of you who tried!

The answers: Continue reading The Lyrical Gangster →

Sing it if you understand.

Behind the scenes, Thanks

Hey! It’s my 50th post. To mark the occasion, I thought we’d have a little contest.

You may have noticed that some of my post titles are song lyrics, or song titles. In fact, almost all of my post titles are song lyrics or song titles. Some of them are even from songs that have something to do with the subject of the post.

I’m curious to see if y’all can identify them.

Most of them should be easy, but there are a couple pretty obscure references in there. First person to identify them all, by title and artist, wins a Ghost Guides T-shirt. These are left over from when Sarah was running her own company, giving walking tours of the North End and telling ghost stories. We only have XL and XXL (I believe) but they’re pretty good-looking shirts. I’ll see if I can get a picture of one up here at some point.

The following early posts are not musical references: “Digesting,” “Out of the mouths of babes,” and “Reading.” If it’s a song that’s been covered, I won’t be picky about the artist. Google is definitely allowed, although I think it might be more fun to try it without and see how far you get. If you get stuck or wish to collaborate, feel free to use the comments area to get together. I have plenty of T-shirts, so team prizes will not be a problem.

Send your guesses to contest at my domain name, crankopotamus.com.

Have fun, and thanks for reading.

The Golden Age

Behind the scenes

Over at Lawyerish, I let it slip that I took Fashion and Decor in college. It’s true; I was a theatre major. That should help explain the long hair, anyway.

Fashion and Decor was a challenging class. It was basically a world history class from a design perspective. The first time around, I ended up dropping the class midway through the semester; it was hopeless. The second time I took it, somehow it just clicked. For a few glorious months, I had a clear timeline in my head of all the major artistic periods, from paleolithic to postmodern. It was amazing. I had taken social studies in high school, and art history and World Civ in college, but somehow it all came together in this one class.

Of course I’ve lost almost all of it, but I can still occasionally glimpse a flash here and there. I know what a cowl-neck sweater is. I know what an Empire waist looks like, and that it’s named after the First French Empire of Napoleon. I remember the ancient Egyptians wore kohl as eyeshadow to cut the glare from the sun, and perfumed cones on their heads to mask their body odor, because Egypt is very, very sunny and unbearably hot. When Sarah took me to Egypt, and London, and Florence, and Venice, I was able to hold my own next to her Master’s in Art History, all thanks to Professor Jim.

I remember there was a seventeenth-century hairstyle called the fontage, which was always accompanied by Jim’s outrageous faux-French pronunciation and a hand thrown up to the forehead, to suggest hair coiffed straight up, There’s Something About Mary-style.

There was a lot of French terminology being batted around, that semester. When Jim first mentioned L’Eminence Grise, I had no idea what he had just said. I leaned over to see how Dan had transcribed it in his notes:

LEMON-I-SCREEZ

And to this day, if you go up to Dan, or Keith, or Professor Jim himself, and say “lemon-i-screez!” he will laugh, and reply, “fontage!” and put the back of his hand up to his forehead.