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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.
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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.
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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
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One of Ogdred Weary's finest.
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