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Jack is a graduate of Rutgers University where he majored in history. His career in the life and health insurance industry involved medical risk selection and brokerage management. Retired in Florida for over two decades after many years in NJ and NY, he occasionally writes, paints, plays poker, participates in play readings and is catching up on Shakespeare, Melville and Joyce, etc.

Monday, May 22, 2023

05-22-2023 - Chrissy's Eighth Episode, Turning Negatives into Positives, Empty Seats in Miami, Two Nominees for Florida's Hall of Shame, and a Party Switcheroo

 

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The Eighth Episode of the Chrissy Frost Saga Revisited

This is it.  The finale of the 2017 Chrissy Frost Stories.  The earlier seven episodes can be visited on this blog's postings of May 3, 8, 14, and 18, accessible from the Archives off to the right.  Today's posting includes three very slight revisions from the 2017 version, each shown in red.

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Chapter 8:  Birthday Party A Chrissy Frost Story

Jack Lippman

(“Chrissy Frost” is an entirely fictitious creation.  My apologies go to anyone who might happen to share that name, and I know there are some of you out there.)

It was quite a gathering.  Everyone was there to celebrate her 75th birthday.  Herman Blotz, her agent from New York had flown down.  Sam Fink’s widow, Estelle, was sitting alongside of Dr. Tobias Fink, the shrink specializing in off-beat remedies who had cured Crissy’s elevated cholesterol problem.  Actually, he was a second cousin of her late husband.  In fact, this evening, he was wearing one of Sam’s old maroon blazers.  Dr. Lopez was there too, as was the antique expert who had confirmed that the tin bell Chrissy always carried in her purse was actually four hundred years old.  Seated at the head table with Chrissy was Cleopatra Cohen, now a Regional Director with the Drug Enforcement Agency.  Of course, Chrissy’s sister-in-law, Stella, dressed to the hilt was there too, running from table to table, showing off her jewelry, most of which wasn’t real.

Some of the folks from Valencia Heights where Chrissy and Stella still lived were there.  Chrissy didn’t play cards or do much in the place, but they all were proud that the brightest star in the galaxy of performers who entertained at the weekend shows during the “high season” at the many retirement communities in Palm Beach County was one of their own.   The MC who had introduced her when she made her first Florida appearance in a retirement community was still around and had donned his old tuxedo.  He stepped up to the microphone and a hush came over the audience.  “Ladeeeeez and  Gentlemen,” he intoned, “Presenting, Miss Chrisseeeee Frossssssst!”



A pink spotlight settled on Chrissy who stood, waving at everyone. “Time After Time,” they shouted, and Chrissy complied with the song that had made her famous from West Palm Beach to Boca Raton.  The applause was deafening.  After doing a couple of encores (“You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Goldfinger”), Chrissy looked over across the ballroom and was amazed that she had made so many friends in South Florida.  And it all started back when she was sitting tearfully in Herman’s crummy office in Manhattan and that poster with the palm trees advertising the Sunshine State caught her eye. And here were at least a hundred people who thought enough of her to have made four and five figure donations to a cancer-fighting charity to enable them to be with her as she celebrated her 75th birthday at Mar-a-Lago.

The lights dimmed and the dance music the orchestra was playing ceased as a spotlight fixed on a door off to the right.  And through it he walked, a little stouter than most expected him to be, but wearing his elongated red tie and his tangerine-colored mop. 

“Chrissy,” he said, “People call me all the time telling me how truly great you are, and now I can see what they are talking about.  Too bad we didn’t meet a few years back when I could have put you on a really major TV show.”  By now he had walked across the ballroom, as the smartphone cameras clicked away, right up to where she sat.  Putting his hand, which was a bit sweaty but not really small as some folks have said, on her back a little too tightly, he looked down at her and said, “I have a great surprise for you on your birthday, Chrissy!”  He looked toward the door at the left of the ballroom and pointed at it.   As a spotlight focused, four uniformed guards came into the room, leading two men in orange jumpsuits.

“Nutsy!” Chrissy screamed, running up to the shackled newcomers.  “You almost killed me on that beach, you son of a bitch,” she cried out as she tried to spit in his face.  Nutsy, still agile even after two years of his prison sentence, quickly ducked, her spit landing just above the knot of the long red tie worn by the man who had thought he was doing Chrissy a big favor by getting Nutsy flown in from Leavenworth Federal Prison for the evening, along with Rocky who was attempting to smile at Stella. 

After he finished wiping the spittle from his chin, he tuned to Chrissy, his face turning the color of his hair, “I thought I was doing you a favor, but I guess you’re just another bimbo.  Get out of my damn place!  Whoever let you ever book your damn event here in the first place?  You got no class!  But don’t try to ask for a refund.  We don’t give ‘em, baby!”

“No one talks to me that way,” Chrissy answered as she swung her cane, which she always carried but rarely had need for, at him.  It struck him at the bottom of his long red tie and he bent over in pain.

Meanwhile, Cleopatra  Cohen had gotten up and grabbed Chrissy with one arm and dragged her away, latching on to Stella with the other.  “We gotta get out of here fast, girls!”

Flashing her DEA badge and shoving aside the bewildered security people in the room, Cleopatra Cohen headed for the door with her charges and once outside, jumped into her waiting SUV and headed over the bridge crossing the Intracoastal Waterway.  Thirty minutes later, she dropped them off at Valencia Heights.

Over the next week, when their friends tried to contact Chrissy or Stella, they found their house completely emptied out and no trace of either one of them.  In fact, when anyone inquired about either of them, all they got back were sideways shaking of the head.

Meanwhile, in what she thought was a luxuriously furnished DEA safe house somewhere in Lower California, Chrissy sat doing her nails.  Turning to Cleopatra, she asked “How come the government has the money to keep this wonderful place down here in Mexico while they never had enough to run a decent operation in the States to catch those drug smugglers?"  

Cleopatra smiled.  “Whoever said this place was a government operation?  And what do you think ever happened to those forty million bucks worth of drugs we captured on the beach?"

Chrissy finally understood.  “If I’m hearing you right, we can never go back to the United States,“  she replied.

“That’s right! And since they’re building a wall, that would be pretty difficult anyway.   Chrissy, you’ll have to learn to sing in Spanish!”

And she did.

* “Una y otra vez, me digo que soy, tan afortunada de estar amandote … “

*“Time after time, I tell myself that I’m, so lucky to be loved by you …”

 JL

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 How a Negative Becomes a Positive

A story in Thursday's Palm Beach Post pointed out that while Republicans feel that they will easily defeat Biden in Florida in 2024, some national Democrats feel that the Republican adoption of MAGA principles there will serve as an example of how fascism can endanger democracy and motivate independent and undecided voters in other more competitive States to vote for Democrats. Their seeing an 'Urban-style' leader close-up promoting fascism on their doorstep, as DeSantis provides for them in Florida, can be a crucial wake-up call to the rest of the country, if the Democrats use it properly.  What clearly is a ‘negative’ in Florida might turn out to be a ‘positive’ for Democrats nationwide. 

Check out the article BY CLICKING HERE.   Or copy and paste https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/18/biden-may-not-win-florida-but-states-maga-policies-could-help-him/70169062007/ on your browser line.

JL

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After Spring Training, Southeast Florida Lacks Baseball Fans

During the first month of this year’s baseball season, league-wide per-game attendance averaged 27,267 according to the baseball statistic sources. Not a bad number, considering each team plays 81 home games.  

Unfortunately, the local Miami Marlins took three home games to come up with a total attendance of 25,014 last week, or about 8,340 per game.  Those are great numbers for spring training games, but not for regular season games.   

Marlin attendance will probably increase this summer when they start letting hundreds of day camp kids in free for afternoon games.  Also, their ‘bark in the park’ afternoons do not include counting dogs in their attendance numbers which I am sure they would like to do.  The worst thing that could happen would be for the Marlins to qualify for the playoffs, playing before a sparsely filled stadium, with the upper deck still in mothballs, for all to see. This would be an embarrassment for the team and the region it represents.

The best move for them, as I see it, would be to move to Mexico City.  (After all, the American League has a team out of the country, in Toronto!)  They might start off playing half of their home games there, where there already is a fine new baseball stadium seating 20,000, a very adequate number considering what they presently attract.  If that works out, their full schedule can be played there and a bigger stadium built or the present one expanded.  Adios!

JL

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Flipping Party Affiliation Again

A few years back, fed up with the ineptitude of Florida's Democratic Party, I switched my voting registration to 'No Party Affiliation.'  I am now switching back to the Democratic Party because of importance of the battle against the Republican foes of democracy in which we are engaged.  That demands an 'all hands on deck' mobilization and sitting on the sidelines no longer serves a purpose. 

With this in mind, here's a quote from David Leonhardt' 'Morning' opinion column in today's New York Times in which he included the words of Times' Washington correspondent, Carl Hulse:   

“There has been a sea change in the way Democrats view and talk about the Supreme Court.  Democrats used to respectfully disagree with the justices. Now they call them illegitimate and corrupt, partisan and extreme.”

That's another reason why I switched back my registration, our politicized Supreme Court.  Enough Democrats must be elected to change its composition so that it is in sync with the interests of the American people.

JL

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Two Disgraceful Floridians - And You Thought DeSantis Was Bad

Two names in Florida’s history should serve as inspiration to its current governor who apparently is dedicated to eliminating embarrassing details from the Sunslime (not a typo) State’s history.

One is Confederate General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, who after the war became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and whose statue was  removed in 2021 from being Florida’s contribution to the Capitol Building’s Statuary Hall in Washington.  (It was replaced with a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune.) 

The other is Florida Governor John Milton, who was so dedicated to the Confederacy and all that it stood for, that in 1865, he committed suicide rather than see Florida rejoin the United States after the South was defeated.  He made the same decision as was made by two other war criminals, Hermann Goering and Josef Goebbels, at the end of the Second World War, using a bullet rather than cyanide poisoning.

I wonder if paintings of these two traitors are hanging somewhere in the present governor’s offices, as he battles to destroy democracy in Florida, under the guise of providing more freedoms, regardless of how undemocratic the results of doing so might be.

JL

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 Housekeeping on the Blog

Email Alerts If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted.  (You can pass those email addresses to me by email at   jacklippman18@gmail.com . ) 

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it

If you want to send someone the blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or by providing a link to that address in your email to them.   I think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which the blog will be forwarded, along with a comment from you.  Each will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now are reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the ‘sidebar’ features such as access to the blog’s archives.

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.comor clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link. 

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.  

Have a nice day!

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