sovay | Mysterious, ambiguous, sensational, ridiculous

The fantasy-prone heroine of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) is an aspiring novelist and not very successful proprietor of a small bookshop which is lately out of copies of the best-selling bodice-ripper Always Opal, an obvious riff on Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber: "I was appreciating Opal's hot affair with Monseigneur de Montrouget and you interrupted me just as they were about to—" Alternatives proposed to a disappointed customer do not meet with success. The new Russian novel The Dniepier Goes Rolling Along is equally kidding Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don/The Don Flows Home to the Sea, but I have no idea what My Heart Is Like a Trumpet is riffing on. "Mary Myrtle Miven's latest . . . a sort of idyllic love story about two horses. Very tender and poetic." I feel I should be able to detect the joke from the available information, but I got nothing. When the love interest entered the scene with an armload of unwanted ARCs, I was faintly surprised I had never encountered a copy of Fun with a Chafing Dish at a library sale myself.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wonder! When I type "My heart is like" into Google, it offers up "a truck," "a zoo," "a wheel," "a stallion," "a river," "a singing bird," "an open highway," " house," and "paper" ... which shows a good range, but not a single musical instrument! Where are the lutes, pianos, drums? Never mind the more violent, dramatic metaphors... where are the fires, volcanos, and hurricanes?

Fun with a Chafing Dish seems like something one could induce a right-wing civic group to ban...

You'd get most of them irate with just the fun!

LOLLL so true.

"an open highway," " house,"

In my sleep-deprived condition, I ran these two phrases together and now I feel My Heart Is Like an Opera House is a legitimately intriguing title. I would want to know how!

Fun with a Chafing Dish seems like something one could induce a right-wing civic group to ban...

It really does. Perhaps we should astroturf it.

My Heart Is Like an Opera House really needs to be on the pile of ARCs along with Fun with a Chafing Dish

Oh, of course the chafing dish is suggestive! It features in that fine old sea-song:

My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night
Out of this union there came three
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me!

Of the alliterative pair,

One’s on exhibit as a talking fish
The other was served in a chafing dish.

So there you have it; sex with an unnaturally natural being. I think chimeric counts as Queer.

And I want Edward Gorey's illustration of that Chafing Dish.

Nine