I wish I had a plot. I do not mean a plot of ground; I wish I had a plot for a novel or a play. I know for sure that I have plenty of characters, but so does a dictionary. A dictionary is not really good reading or entertainment.
However, like any good Southerner, I have observed and interacted with many “characters” in my lifetime. I seem to remember that someone has said that in most places people tend to hide or to shield those who “march to a different drummer,” but in the South we put them on the front porch and pay homage to them.
I think we do cherish our characters. They do not have to be dysfunctional, like a Tennessee Williams cast, but they can certainly be colorful
I would like to have a plot that would carry my characters to a Broadway stage. If I could write a Broadway play, I know several people I would put in it.
I would have a mother and her daughter, who is about 8 to 10 years old. They enter and exit the scene frequently. The mother has all the lines and pays little or no attention to the daughter, who just follows her around. But the child’s only method of locomotion is turning cartwheels. In and out she goes, always in cartwheels. No one thinks it odd or bothers to comment. I actually knew a child like that once; she was my granddaughter. Although she has grown beyond that stage now, I’d like to see that character on stage.
What a card
I would surely put my bridge foursome there, upstage and to the side. Their bridge game would go on regardless of the plot unfolding around them. They — or we — don’t play silently or seriously. And sometimes, not even sanely, skipping from subject to subject and mixing up antecedents until one has to guess what, or whom, is being discussed.
I fear rules are not ironclad. Once when I was playing a hand and my partner, as dummy, was laying down her cards and commenting on what she had, our opponents decided to show each other their cards. “Hey!” I cried. “You can’t do that!”
Would you believe I was the one who was promptly upbraided and have never been allowed to forget that I lost my cool?
We are pretty bad about dropping cards when arthritic fingers cannot hold on to them. Some days we spend a lot of time searching the floor. Sometimes the missing card ends up across the room, where it gets dropped while the player looks for her purse. Recently one of the “girls” fell out of her chair trying to pick a card up from the floor. She knocked over a lamp, which nearly hit me in the head. Just as I caught it, our hostess cried, “Oh, look out for my lamp!” My threatened head? Not to worry.
And, yes, sometimes, but rarely, someone will trump her partner’s ace.
One of our fearsome foursome does not like the surface of her card table, so she leaves her pretty cut-work tablecloth on it while we play. The trouble is that the tablecloth will slip off when we play, so the hostess then thumbtacks it to the table. The table does not wish to accept the thumbtacks. I tell you, it is somewhat unsettling to come in the door and find your hostess attacking the thumbtacks on the bridge table with blows from a huge hammer!
I know other characters, too. There is a man who knows everything. If you ever need to know anything, just mention it in his presence. Whatever the subject, he expounds on it with pompous authority.
There was a woman who lived in Columbus during my youth. I called her “the painted lady.” She painted her cheeks with mercurochrome instead of using rouge. Mercurochrome has been removed from the market because it contains mercury. Come to think of it, that may be what was the matter with the woman.
We also had a savant in Columbus who knew everyone’s car tag number and whether or not they had paid their taxes. He telephoned a number of prominent people over the years to inform them their taxes were delinquent.
I’ll bet there is not a single one of you who cannot match my list of characters or surpass it. My trouble is that no one will give me a plot.
Betty Boyls Stone is a freelance writer, who grew up in Columbus.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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