None the Platts were particularly appreciative of the aroma of 'joss sticks' so we passed a White Owl between us and Lori to take the smell off as we all waited for the loving couple downstairs to come up for nourishment. The giggles were starting to kick in as they stomped their way upstairs and when Jenny breezed into the kitchen with that just-out-of-the-pool refreshed look we couldn't help proffering the bowl of walnuts that adorned the kitchen table.

"Nuts? Or did you have a handful already?"

"Yeah... Guess we put on quite a show for the neighbors... Surprised they didn't turn the hose on us... Sheesh.. Smells like you've been reading poetry down in the Village... What next? Chinatown and kickin' the gong around?"

Lori was way further gone than we were but still she was holding her guts in - snirking to relieve the pressure. Just needed a little poke from us.

"Best minds of our generation baby... now in the Economy Two-Pack!"

That got Lori slapping the table with laughter much to the bemusement of Eddie, who'd been in the bathroom and just joined us. He grabbed some sodies from the icebox in the back hall while Jenny took over the soup heating duties we'd gone and neglected. Once judged done, she poured the soup into mugs. shook half a sleeve of saltines into a salad bowl and opened the discussion to plans for the weekend.

In short, Eddie and Lori had planned on driving back to Philadelphia so that she could get ready to go back to college - she went to Bryn Mawr and needed help moving into her dorm - and hadn't really counted on running into Jenny. Eddie hopefully noted that he would have to return to finish negotiations on that Panorama story he'd come back East for in the first place. At least, we snirked, he'd have a leg up on account of the fact he was now sleeping with the editor.

"Who's sleeping with what editor?"

The Platts were home early and Jenny's mom had caught the tail end of our conversation as she was walking into the kitchen.

"It's a long story and you woulda had to have heard it from the beginning," we muttered. "So what are you guys doing home?"

"All I did was comment on the size of the orchestra's pianist," Jenny's dad innocently replied.

She recalled that the company had been British owned and was sold off at the start of the war as one of the conditions of England getting 'Lend-Lease' aid. During the war they built specialty tubes for the military and afterwards supplemented their line by making replacement tubes for electronic equipment still in widespread use but no longer being serviced by their original manufacturers.

They hadn't been able to adapt to the newer 'solid-state' electronics and she was 'very concerned' about the continued health of the company now that it was 'the modern-day equivalent of a buggy whip maker' - Evelyn really loved her electric valves. It didn't help that from her father she'd learned that it was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, having borrowed heavily against it's pension fund for operating capital, and that the Securities and Exchange Commission was looking into things.

We rode with Lori as she followed behind Jenny and Eddie down the South Shore and around the back fields of Brooklyn's endless rows of turn-of-the-century tract homes past the soon-to-be completed Verrazano-Narrows Bridge - one of those rare insignificant little City jobs the J Platt & Company had a hand in.

"When that bridge is done, it'll make trips to the mainland that much easier," crackled Jenny's voice over the radio. Along with the imported British sports car, Lori got a custom Ryerson transceiver set for a High School graduation present. The joys of being a second marriage child.

Jenny was one of those rare people that don't feel the need to jump into hyperspace drive when leading someone behind them - not that what little pickup her car might've had wasn't diffused by dragging that little utility trailer behind it - and we easily kept up with her across the Manhattan Bridge and Island and through the Holland tunnel and the industrial backwaters of New Jersey. Of course when we finally made it to Philly, Lori returned Jenny's courtesy by blowing through every goddamn yellow light along the way.

Still Jenny navigation skills got her to the Ryerson Electric Valve plant within a minute or two of our arrival. It was a reasonably kempt terra-cotta-faced building of the 'industrial loft gothic' style. Five tall stories looked over the sleepy neighborhood of Brooklyn-style 'brownstones' of painted brick. We had arrived at the end of Saturday's half-day shift so Lori was able to arrange a quick tour of the facilities, the end of which Jenny concluded...

"So basically... you're a specialty light bulb manufacturer..."

It was left to Lori to inquire about the health of the company seeing as she 'had standing' not only as the daughter of the company wheel but as a shareholder herself. When told the company's holding its own she asked about why they were dipping into the pension fund. To that she was told it was for tax purposes and that by borrowing against it they could write off return payments at a higher rate. Or something like that.

Lori breezily asked where her dad was and was told he was 'at a conference' down in Atlantic City meaning he was at the track so we continued on to the family's Berwyn estate over in what she called 'Marnie country'. She went on to explain that a movie of that name had been set in her neck of the woods. As she waxed rhapsodic on the 'hunkaliciousness' of the movie's co-star, Sean Connery, we explained that we had been laid up all summer on account of back surgery and missed that one and by the way don't expect us to do any heavy lifting.

The Lawson-Ryerson estate was one of those watered-down replicas of the White House that populate just about every 'Aryan Quarter' in the Republic - this one was done up in red brick with a light yellow trim. Inside had a sparse look, as if they'd sold off the more expensive pieces for taxes and rearranged the furniture hoping nobody would notice. We were introduced to her mom Doris - pronounced 'Dori' - who looked positively exsanguinated sitting in the pale blue of the parlor.

Getting no reaction from the blue-blood, we all trooped upstairs to Lori's room, which had all the visual density of teenaged pop-star fandom, with walls shin plastered in the standard array of posters and magazine tearouts with the graven images of Elvis, Rock Hudson, the Beatles and of course, Sean Connery to name the topmost layer. Basically our room at home.

With such a thicket of childhood accumulata, Lori sensibly opted to pack lightly taking 'only' a couple armloads of outfits from the closet, one of the beloved stuffed animals keeping vigil in her bed, her portable record player and a single spindle of forty-fives, her little Smith-Corona typewriter, some books, a few odd sundries in a couple suitcases and lastly her 'cube' refrigerator, cleverly disguised as an office safe with the dial of a combination lock glued onto the door.

So as not to be completely useless, we carried the plush toy armadillo for her, while Eddie handled the icebox, suitcases, record player, typewriter and... well actually, he carried just about everything didn't he? At least with Jenny's car and trailer, we all made it in one go and it was only a 'refreshing' six flights of steps to Lori's dorm room.

The evening got off to a fine start when we were grandly presented with a plate of smoked Virginia hamsteak and a side of scalloped potatoes. No matter, we try to respect the hospitality of strangers and since it was already Sunday in the Holy Land we weren't desecrating the Sabbath... much. We sat across from Mister Ryerson who had returned from his 'conference' with Master Lawson grousing how unfair it was that the government won't let you write off your losses when playing the ponies but is more than happy to tax your winnings. Apparently he had the misfortune of doing well at the track.

We were having a whale of a time trying to saw into the sheet of piggy leg made more fun by the fact that we were given a single place setting and our better half was stuck with the salad fork. Mister Ryerson tried to ignore us as he chastised Lori for poking her nose into the family business as well as for 'bringing this... 'menagerie' around'.

As our better half shoveled in a bite, we noted that we'd come along with Jenny and Eddie. Then she spat the bite of ham back onto the salad fork, declaring that it was salty enough to melt a snail. We swapped the rest to Eddie for his ration of potatoes quipping that at least our Irish side would eat well tonight.

Lori innocently replied that she just didn't want to have to be called to the bursar's office on account of her check being returned or something. That got a cough from Eddie but Mister Ryerson only mumbled something about how a factory was no place for a lady like her to be gadding about, don'tcha know.

Lori shot him her snittiest 'oh pul-lease' look and continued stabbing at her dinner. Mister Ryerson shook his head and with a wince at the sight of us, turned his attention to 'Yennifer' noting how she's certainly made a name for herself in the last month. Seems she's been all over the Philadelphia papers as well and 'we' don't take kindly to New York gold diggers around here. Turning to Eddie he confided on how he could 'certainly tell him a thing or two about her don'tcha know'.

Eddie sat there with Nordic reserve as Lori fumed, "You mean... you've been sitting on this information... while Eddie's been eating up inside, thinking she's been dead for the last goddamn year? Nice going, Olaf! Really... nice!"

"Y'know Jenn," we mused, "this house has the same layout as your grandmother's. Betcha this is the 'Excelsior' model..."

"Could be... Grampa chucked the molds and sold the blueprints when that business folded."

That got an indignant look from Mis'ess Lawson who assured us the property had been in the family for well over a century now, saying nothing about when the house was built mind you.

Getting back to the Ryerson three, Olaf decided now was as good a time as any to conduct financial business. It seems that when Eddie went and joined the Army he'd figured that the they would probably pay his way through school and there was no sense in letting his college fund go to waste so he'd exchanged the money for shares in Electric Valve stock and now that it looks like the stock market might be going through another downturn, it'd be a good time to squeeze some money out of the shares by selling short and could Eddie lend him the shares that were in his name?

"Gee dad... I never took delivery of any shares... so you can do whatever the hell you like with them as far as I'm concerned..."

"I certainly wouldn't do that if I were you Mister Ryerson," muttered Jenny under her breath as Lori, with disgusted silence, threw down her napkin, shoved away from the table and stormed up to her room. Eddie excused himself and followed after her, leaving us and Jenny to face the rest of the loving family.

"For the record," Jenny declared as she fished through her handbag for her press credentials, "I was supposed to meet with Eduard on behalf of Panorama Publications to negotiate a buy of of the film rights one of the serials we'd been running. I'd been otherwise occupied... and this was the only time on the East Coast he had left. At any rate... I'm more in the line of writing about shovels than digging with them. So... you're thinking of doing a short-sell with the SEC sniffing around for someone to make an example of, hmm?"

He swallowed hard when he realized Jenny wasn't just some doxie looking to make a score but a hard-bitten member of the Fourth Estate looking to make a score. Recovering his composure, he boasted "Let them sniff! My business is on the up and up..."

"Yeah... well you know the Feds... they tend to shoot first and ask questions when they feel like getting around to it... and if they start seizing company records you're hosed."

"Yahhh.... The thought had come to mind..."

"Looks like you'll be making another go," we quipped as a servant calmly slid closed the French doors to the foyer.

Seeing the pair of unclaimed compotes we observed how much it bugged us seeing food go to waste in the movie - like when a private dick is about to unwrap a deli sandwich in his room when he gets a call about the case and gruffly tosses the poor sammich in the trash - as we 'appropriated' Eddie's compote for ourselves. Hey... two heads, two dinner plates, two wine glasses, two desserts. Is it that hard to remember?

We never got to finish the compotes as Lori appeared in the doorway to tell Jenny she was going to need to make another trip. As she excused herself to leave we rose too, explaining, 'That's our ride' and thanking them for their hospitality, adding that if they were ever in Oklahoma they can pick their dinner while it's still grazing in the field at our spread.

Lori was fuming figuratively and literally as she crammed clothes and more personal items into her and Jenny's car between drags of a cigarette smoldering in one of those bean bag ashtrays she'd planted in the palm of some hapless garden nymph. Eddie was keeping a few paces behind her, calmly picking up articles of clothing she'd let drop to the ground in her absent-minded fury. One blouse caught Jenny's attention.

"Hey, I remember having a shirt like this... Grandmother took me into the City one time... Thought I could use something nice for formal occasions... I really hated shopping for clothes but for some reason I was in a good mood that day... Never did get to wear it anywhere on account of a growth spurt. Only thing from her I didn't have the heart to chuck away..."

Lori whisked the thing from her hands, shook it down to look at it, and making her decision, handed it back to Jenny saying,"You want it... it's yours... Only reason I got it was for lounging around... but then I had a growth spurt. Damn seam rubs 'em... Well... Here... it's yours."

Jenny started to say something about how hard it can be to walk away from 'kinfolk' but Lori had walked away, so she stuffed the blouse in the glovebox of her car and looked for someplace to sit while Lori confronted her brother on the subject of their old man's latest antics.

"I can't believe after all he's done to you... you're just gonna let him get away with taking what's rightfully yours?"

"What'd be the point? If I'd made a claim on those stocks, I'd probably have to pay taxes on them..."

"Yeah but it made mom happy and I did get some fun out of it... and I didn't hafta sit in a damned classroom all day. Don't know how kids can go through that..."

Still... the way he was talkin' about your girl there... Why don't you stick up for yourself with him?"

"Well if I thought he had a conscience, I'd say something. Look hon... I've known a lot of people like him. There's no point in confronting them 'cuz they just 'schluff' it off... Or worse... they get all religious and try and make it up to you just so they can square themselves with the man upstairs... and all the while they haven't changed a damn bit. No thanks... If he wants to think he's pulling one over on me, let him. I wouldn't want to do something and have you or your mom walking in on him after he's eaten a gun for breakfast 'cuz when his kind falls, they hit hard"

As Lori moved in for a hug he comforted, "Don't worry about me... I'm makin' good bread now and I get to have some fun while I'm doing it. Best of all, I get to help other people make a living doing what they like doing and you can't ask for more than that, can ya? You sure you're gonna be able to fit all that in a dorm?"

"Oh, I'm gonna give some of these to one of those 'scholarship' kids. You know how much I hate when they pick on someone for not having the right clothes."

Whenever some kid got dogged for not having good clothes growing up in Amityville, Jenny would whip out a tin cup and hit the offending party up for a 'donation' to a clothing fund, and more often than not they'd kick in, as her right hook was exceptionally gifted in the art of persuasion back in those days. Or so we've heard.

We didn't hear much from the back seat lovers as we took the helm for the ride home. Toll booth operator would have to drop the damn ticket when she got a look at us. Luckily one of us had the presence of mind to ask for another ticket instead of trying to bend down and pick the other one. Month and a half till we make that birthday appearance at the Worlds Fair if we don't chicken out beforehand. Funny enough, when Lori was being welcomed into the circle of her fellow dormies, one of them asked 'What are they?', all we could think to answer was 'We're photojournalists'. We made a note to try and remember some of the stuff people ask about us.

"There's another thing The South is screwing us on," opined Jenny after we woke her up outside of Jersey City to break a twenty for the toll. She'd long despised the Confederate States for 'using 'Jim Crow' laws to send poo uneducated Negroes fleeing North and 'Right to Work' laws to suck away the good-paying jobs we would've had to give them' and now, "We've had to pay our own way with turnpikes and now they're getting Interstates on our dime. We're taking the Lincoln aren't we?"

So we had a Saturday night to kill with nobody in the mood to do much of anything. Not wanting to go all the way to the village and back into the city Jenny found a payphone on Canal Street, took out her address book and went down the line. Ashleigh, Ezzie, Stacey and Janice were already out or had plans and Bitsey was staying in and droppin' in on Emily and Jamie wasn't even an option. In the end we returned home to pick up some sleeping bags and camping gear to spend the evening out on Platt Island.

Even in death the bleached remnants of the Platt manor cut a rakish profile against the winking lights of the South Shore. When the 'Long Island Express' crossed the outer banks it took a storm surge with it that floated the Federal-style manse off it's foundation and into the bay before water poured in from the broken plumbing lines and drunkenly deposited it on the floor or the Great South Bay. Over the years the house was stripped to its reinforced concrete walls, leaving a curious ribbed pattern on the outer walls that guided installation of the brick facing and empty crevices on the insides where the 'EZ-Instal' prefabricated decorative molding used to be.

As we approached the high side entry to the foyer, Jenny cut the motor, took out the 'shit-creek' paddle that came with her car and tapped 'shave and a haircut - two bits' on the wall to give any couple who might be using the place fair warning. The Platts still considered the property to be 'in use' and even hung a sign announcing that you were at the 'Platt Island Long Duration Exposure Facility' and that no trespassing was allowed, but for the last quarter century this was one of the South Shore's premier makeout joints.

Nobody answered her warning so we tied up and peg-legged our way to the servant's staircase as fish flopped around the submerged side of the foyer. Somebody just had a late supper. Making it to the attic storey, Jenny dropped her bags and gear and stripped down to her bikini, inviting the rest of us to do the same as Eddie lit a fire in the hibachi grill that had been left behind by some unknown revelers. We kept our shorts on but doffed our blouse to reveal the lacy black brassiere we like wearing when traveling. For an off-the-rack item, it fits us so comfortably.

After a few slugs of the beer that had been brought along, Eddie, goaded by Jenny, got curious to see what was underneath and after a couple more slugs we were in the mood to oblige, so we slinked onto his lap, peeled down the straps and wiggled the bra down to our waist. Getting a meaty handful of the goods, Eddie couldn't help observing that we must be all the fun of twins but only half the work. We replied that we get that a lot, but we still love when guys say that.

Eddie, finished groping the goods and like any red-blooded American boy presented with a bare female midriff, occupying his hands with trying to tickle it as we swatted them away, thoughtfully replied that he didn't want to put her in the position of a 'bravado' marriage then went into a story of a Samurai sent by his master to assassinate another Shogun. When he drew his sword on the Shogun in question, the fellow spat in the Samurai's face which angered him so much he was obliged to sheath his sword and retreat because he would no longer be killing in the service of his master but would be killing out of personal spite.

Jenny had a story of her own about the real-life mistress of Citizen Kane.

"Everyone thought she was only with him on account of his money... but when the stock market crashed in 'Twenty-nine and he was short of cash and his board of directors tried to squeeze him out of his business... she hocked her own damn jewelry so he could save his business and how did they pay her back? When he finally died a few years ago, the family sent a bunch of goons over to her house to take away every reminder she had of her time with him. Bastards couldn't even give her the decency of mourning him in peace... I never want to be the 'other woman'... No, thanks..."

Any privacy Eddie might've had to consider a response was broken when sound of an approaching motorboat separated itself from the background hiss of the bay. After a few minutes we heard the scrape of metal against concrete as the boat was nosed through the front door and slapping sounds as it was docked in the foyer followed by a bellowing thick-tongued woman's voice.

"Ahhh.... fuckin' A! Hey! Who's up there!"

It was Jenny's friend EsmÈralda with that Hungarian bodybuilder of hers in tow, looking to use the facilities. We shouted back and forth a minute or two before she and Laszlo finally made the schlep upstairs bearing food, drink and tunes in the form of one of those little 'Wondergram' miniature record players Jenny sent home from Europe as holiday presents to friends and a beach bag loaded Scandinavian 'pop' records. It seems old home ties died hard with her.

Laszlo made a crack about it looking to be a 'National Geographic' party as he peeled of his shirt and settled onto the floor, soon followed by Ezzie, who actually had the kind of undisciplined boobs you see in that publication - nipples looked like someone had waved a leaky paint bucket over her chests. Jenny replied that we were just vampires catching tan as she sent a bucket over the side to pull up some water 'for later when we need it'.

As Ezzie's Wondergram cranked out the kind of generic-sounding music you hear in beach movies when they don't want to pay royalties, Eddie and Laszlo sized each other up - in a friendly way at least. Laszlo may have had the exquisite sculpted brawn but Eddie not only had the standard army training but was also skilled in the martial arts and could not only flip Laszlo like an omelet but could do so in a way that let him land on his feet - no mean feat on an angled concrete floor.

The rest of the waking evening was spent mulling future plans. Ezzie had the week off and was spending it out on her family's island. Apart from her time with Laszlo, she'd spent a day puttering around the South Bay in search of the paddle that 'Surf Angel' lady had taken from a storage shed. It had come with an inflatable dinghy she and Jenny had chipped in for years ago and she was keen on getting it back for sentimental reasons. Amazingly enough, she found it amongst some rushes in the marshland around Islip, not much worse for wear apart from bite marks from 'some fish'.

Laszlo had his own worries. He had fled Hungary during the 'Fifty-sx uprising and currently was on temporary visas while he considered either returning to his homeland or throwing his lot in with some other country. Ezzie, incidentally had permanent resident status but had yet to take the oath so she wouldn't be of any help getting him into the United States till maybe next summer at the earliest.

Eddie figured that he'd probably be on location in Berlin and South America for most of the winter and spring assuming he can quickly get a screenplay out of Eloise's story which would leave June wide open on his schedule. What for he didn't elaborate as 'this wasn't the appropriate place to discuss that sort of thing'. Instead he noted how the buzz-saw appearance of Ezzie's record player gave him an idea of a filmed bit we might want to do for our appearance at the Worlds Fair. His company had a sawmill set laying around and some unused footage which got Jenny interested. She suggested one of those old-timey scenes where the villain ties the fair maiden to a log and sends her down the belt, only this time, the big saw would actually get to cut the lady in half, with blood and guts and everything.

Getting back to Eloise's story, Jenny noted that she might be in Dallas area sometime in November if he planned on doing any filming of the detention camp scenes. Eddie replied that he was going to try and use some military camp in Germany since they had so many of them around when he had been stationed there and it'd be easier to round up extras and equipment. The idea of seeing Kraut civilians milling about behind barbed wire always did give us a bit of the 'Schadenfreude' even if Jenny was part German herself.

Talk of 'old times' led to Jenny to observe, "It's only been ten years... but, don't it seem like Elvis has been around forever? And like it was only yesterday at the same time? Funny how time acts like that. Y'know... I still think the day is pretty much over by three... when school lets out? Wonder how long that'll last?

"I heard on the radio one time that those Beatles learned how to play listening to Elvis," Laszlo added. "Kids learning from kids... Don't that make me feel like a dinosaur!"

Which reminded Jenny...

"You know your show mate Heiner? 'Those Beatles' actually helped pull him out of a construction accident when they were in Hamburg. I was there... saw the whole thing..."

Seeing Jenny settle down next to Eddie as if finished with her story, Ezzie gasped and did that hands out gesture you either use to tell how big the fish you once caught was or when you're about to say 'Uh... you wanna flesh out the details of that story bomb you just dropped on us?'

"What... They were just another band playing one of the dive bars in Hamburg. They had the day off and I had a car so... well you know how if you got a car band people are your best friend. There's not much to tell. We were going by this building that was getting fixed up and I noticed the scaffolding wasn't set right. Stopped to complain but it was too late and the whole thing came down around us. It was lucky nobody got killed."

"Man... you always have the coolest stories but you never wanna tell 'em to anyone!"

"Yeah, well half the time they end with somebody nearly getting killed... and the rest of the time they just end badly. Anyway, I was always meeting famous people on account of mom working in Radio City. When you're in the can and you hear one of 'em doing their business in the stall next to ya, they kinda don't seem so special anymore... and I am not naming... what the hell was that?"

We all went to the low edge to look for the source of a thudding sound that manages to shake the whole building. Some hapless fish had managed to hurl himself into the dining room and finding it not to his liking, was trying to flip himself back outdoors. From the way his head kept poking out of and back into a window portal, it look like he wasn't getting very good traction. Eventually the stupid thing flopped his way over to the foyer and out where the front door used to be.

The roiling battle below us clearly got Jenny aroused. We remember her writing about this time she's caught a rat in some old hatbox down in Penn Station on her way back to college. One of her schoolmates kept a boa constrictor in his dorm and she thought it might like a nice fat 'Coney Island Red Hot' for the weekly 'feeding show'. Watching the bloody - New York rats die hard - half hour clash of titans, she wrote that it made her feel 'like a goddamned Roman at the Colosseum'.

To be fair, it looked like Ezzie was enjoying the floor show too but we really weren't paying much attention to her. We were watching Jenny wrap Eddie's arms around her like a mink stole, giving little pecky kisses to his hands before placing them where she wanted them. As he moved his hands to untied the straps of her bikini top, she had this look, with her head curled down and her arms drawn towards her body, like a snail about to draw into its shell. She was in fact going into her private realm and taking Eddie with her. As the two of them sank to the floor, we turned to see how Ezzie was getting along.

"You like that primal stuff don'tcha baby," growled Laszlo as he worked his hands up and down her naked back with liberal reach-arounds to he breasts as feral EsmÈralda arched and ground her hinder into his loins in response. When his hands got around to loosening up her undercarriage we squawked something about maybe going downstairs to check on the boats or something but it seemed Ezzie had a better idea.

"Why don't you join us? Unless you just wanna watch. We don't mind either way."

Someone has been reading Eloise's serials and taking notes. This last week was the part about how her circle of friends would nominate a 'King and Queen Bee' for the evening's Bacchanal. As one would guess, the girls would pleasure the King while the guys would pleasure the Queen. Not bad for late Nineteen Twenties teenagers and they didn't have the security blanket of The Pill - it was either blind luck or Verna's mom in a vacant apartment.

With a boy - girl ratio of three to one there wasn't any point in naming royalty and we weren't in a power sharing mood so we all improvised and when we say improvised, we mean that we sat in Laszlo's lap and took turns making out with Esmé while he played with our boobs. It turned out that he liked to have a girl in his lap that he could wrap his arms around and squeeze, which if you didn't have a bad memory associated with that like poor Ezzie did can be pretty damn arousing what with the snakelike rippling muscles. We did have to remind him about our back surgery.

"No... I've done some spook work already... didn't care much for it. Anyway... I've known people trying to break into show business. I wouldn't feel right taking something I don't really care about from someone's who's made it their life's ambition..."

"Well I always looked at like, if it weren't for me maybe the picture wouldn't get made or maybe it wouldn't do as well..."

"Yeah, but all I'd need is some stupid director cussing me out... or some shitty critic giving me a hard time to walk away forever and you really wouldn't want to have a buncha people's livelihoods hanging on that, would you? Maybe if I saw a script first... Looks like the twins are up."

Sliding out from under a still sleeping Esmé, we exchanged the usual morning pleasantries. It seems Eddie and Jenny enjoyed or 'performance' with Ezzie and Laszlo, who'd gone to fetch breakfast by the way.

"Man, I don't think I could've made out with Ezzie like that," Jenny remarked, "but then I've known her a lot longer than you two have. Thought you two didn't like sharing spit..."

"Yeah... but everything goes better with beer! Say... was there some sorta fireworks going off or were you just shootin' at the fish?"

"You're never gonna believe who showed up after you guys nodded off..."

"Ewwww... Not the red-haired one!"

"Yea-up... Fired off some warning shots but Jamie insisted on taking her aboard..."

"Warning shots?"

"Blank rounds! I'm not a total psycho. They're in one of the bedrooms downstairs."

"She's got a posh flat in the city! What does she want to rut around our little hidey hole for?"

"Jamie said something about getting a last screw in. Seems dad's finally looking to fix up the joint."

"Got that figured out," Jenny declared. "Gonna build a sandbag canal and float her back to dry land. Remember I was telling you about that killer whale washing ashore last May? I remembered this National Geographic article where these fishermen make temporary canals out of sailcloth and got the bright idea to scale it up. Well nobody had any sailcloth but I was able to round up a bunch of sandbags and some shovels so a bunch of surfers got together and built a wall around the poor beastie. Fire department filled his pen with sea water and when the tide came in, we sent him on his merry fishie way."

Breakfast was exquisitely uncomfortable on account of Jamie and Emily joining our little tribe. Of course, Emily opted to dine topless even though we'd all put our boobies away for the morning. Hoping she'd take a hint, we made a show of averting our eyes. Yeah, we're stinkers. She started saying something about the aftermath of those hearings but Jenny cut her off with a firm, 'We'll get along a lot better if we don't talk shop', hinting that maybe Jamie should attend the afternoon mass at church. The rest of breakfast passed uneventfully, as did the rest of the day.

Monday was spent in the Panorama offices negotiating that buy of Eloise's story and wasn't Eloise surprised to see Jenny sitting the table. Actually, not really. She was largely incapable of emotional expression on account of that dose of lead poisoning her father gave her. Verna did blurt out something about us being damn near everywhere. As the meeting dragged on Jenny periodically excused herself to make some phone calls about a 'story she was working on'.

She was in fact canvassing the 'usual suspects' on Wall Street for any dope on the Electric Valve company. She'd even buttonholed the financial editor on the elevator ride up who thinking she was one of the secretaries looking for stock tips, warned her that the stock was a dog and that the hapless company served merely as a tax shelter for the Lawson family's trust accounts. Figuring he probably thought she was just some secretary looking for a stock tip, Jenny introduced herself as the 'new girl at the science desk', adding that she'd just spent that Saturday with the Lawsons and thought there might be a story to kick around.

What emerged after an afternoon of batting against the wainscoting was a minor curiosity of a column titled 'Suppose They Gave a Retirement Party and Nobody Showed?'. Apparently, when the Electric Valve company was ordered to divest itself of its American division, the board of directors made it look like a separate company was set up with assets, including the pension fund, apportioned between them, but in fact they merely shuffled papers around to become an American company with a British division. As fate would have it, their 'British division' and much of the surrounding neighborhood was wiped out during the Blitz, leaving a big fat pension fund with only a handful of retirees and widows left to draw on it.

Over slices of Jerusalem Pizza, Jenny went over a list of the company assets with Eddie. There were the usual patents, contracts and inventory as well as some real estate including the factory in Philly, the vacant lot in London where the old factory used to be and a brand new factory in Los Angeles that had yet to be actually opened but what interested Jenny the most were the shares of stock.

"If you're gonna take so many tax losses," she quietly concluded, "maybe you'd be better served taking your company private... Now... a public company with all its paperwork filled out and filed... I'm thinking that might come in handy. If I can get a syndicate together..."

"I take it," Eddie ventured, "that dear old dad won't have to change offices with anyone?"

"Won't even have to change business cards. He'll get the gold mine and the shaft. I'm only interested in the digging equipment... unless you want that LA factory. Could make a nice sound stage for an upstart production company. How's 'Ryerson International Pictures' sound?"

"It's got a ring to it," Eddie opined, "but then... so does a bathtub. Why don't we get this deal cleared before we send another one out of the bullpen. Besides... dad'll have to make his move before we can do anything anyway."

It almost went without saying that Eloise took a stab at mending relations with Jenny on behalf of her old man. Mister Drake, she insisted, was a kind and decent man, having essentially pulled her from the ovens of Dachau to which Jenny reassured her that no, she would've more likely have been sent to Ravensbrücke as that was the Nazi's main camp for women and that she was perfectly happy where she was working now.

Her encyclopedic knowledge of the German concentration camp system never failed to rattle us, nor did her little joke about how she'd lost family there on account of a second cousin falling out of the guard tower. We'd always remind her that his body had been found with a camera and notes.

It's almost like she dares people to like her. Not that we can blame her though. Many's the time, Jenny would take a recreational interest in learning some skill, like how to play the violin or take up a sport, only to have the instructor, usually one of those frustrated 'stage mother' types, try to 'influence' her into making it her life's vocation. She'd play along for a while but invariably, the lessons would end with something being chucked into the creek behind her house.

With the buy completed, and before the metaphysical school bell in her heart no less, Jenny suggested an early dinner at the Playboy Club on account of one her friends working there was looking to break into the picture racket. Eddie had wanted to hit the Rainbow Room for old times sakes, but was more than game for for rabbit. As fate would have it, we ended up not going as Jenny had called ahead and found that Ashleigh was throwing a little shindig for some of her neighbors at her pad so we crashed that instead.

She lived in a grayish tan E-shaped eight storey building across the street from The Garden. Nothing fancy, but slightly better that the usual tenement blocks around Eighth Avenue. Her 'penthouse' apartment looked like the nightclub set of one of those old Technicolor musicals, all angly 'Forties-modern furniture covered liberally with leopard and zebra skin throws. To match the cushions, all the doors in the joint were upholstered in pink leatherette and festooned with half a million or so buttons. We half expected to see Xavier Gugat in the corner warming up the orchestra instead of spinning lazily on the turntable of the High Fidelity set. It was the sort of place small town hicks think everybody in the Big City lived in, so naturally we adored the place.

At first glance, it looked like we and Jenny would be the only lady guests in a room full of man candy but seeing that everyone had paired off already, it was a fair bet we'd be taking home recipes and not phone numbers tonight. From Ashliegh's introductions, the gathered lot were the usual assortment of struggling actors, composers, decorators, a souse chef as well as set, fashion and costume designers working on Broadway and the Garment District. Needless to say, they were all Lady Desedemona fans.

Jenny introduced Eddie with a stern 'This one's mine ladies', which sent all the actors scuttling back to their apartments for head shots while we settled onto the sofa with a cocktail and a couple of dress designers who had taken a professional interest in our wearing apparel. That night we were wearing a customized number from Abraham Zapruder's line we'd bought last Novermber in Dallas, We explained further that we'd had some time to kill and remembered buying one of his 'Jennifer Junior's' outfits and boy were we puzzled to see so many reporters gathered around his office. They gave us their cards and wouldn't you know, their design studio was in the old Brisco Building.

It was a floating party with most of actors clearing out about an hour before their showtimes and a new shift of returning day jobbers taking their place and amongst them was none other than Doughnut Boy himself, squiring a buxom Elizabeth Tayloresque brunette he introduced as Phoebe.

She was having an animated conversation with someone we vaguely recognized as working in an art gallery down in the Village Bitsey's mum Elizabeth had some sort of interest in. We know that Janice had shown some of her works there. We could tell Jenny was pretty engrossed in her conversation on account of the squirmy way her body moved and how her head rolled a little from side to side as she went on about how close she was able to get that painting of hers to what she'd dreamed about.

Eventually they broke company with the promise on Jenny's part of a preview showing and she went to look for Eddie who was giving Ashleigh an informal job interview. She'd be just fine for the kind of pictures Trans International made but he'd love her a lot more if she could speak and more importantly, act in Italian because they sell a lot of their films in Italy. Well, wouldn't you know she was an Olympic-class Italian actress. Eddie sheepishly warned her that 'they've taken a liking to nudie scenes' and when she went to pull down the straps of her dress, he cut her off at the pass with an 'I'll take your word for it', and promised her a proper audition.

The evening promised to be an all-nighter and we were certainly up for it but we ended up leaving Eddie to fend for himself around the time the actors returned from their shows so that this one couple could make the last ferry to their summer place in The Pines out on Fire Island. We barely missed it by land but we were able to catch up to it in the bay, much to the bemusement of the skipper who gamely slowed down to let us pull aside and lighter a couple more fares.

Jenny would spend much of the week delivering on old promises. On Tuesday, she returned to the Van der Plaat estate to give Elizabeth and that fellow from the gallery a showing of her painting. It was the most harrowing, the most grotesque thing the two of them had ever seen and did she have any more like it?

On Wednesday, she and Stacey delivered the models and drawings of her 'Jenniferhouse IV' building for their presentation to the World Fair committee up in the Architects Building on Park Avenue. After a brief spiel on the features of the design she was asked if she'd had a building site in mind. Jenny unfolded a map of the Brasilia and pointed to an empty space in the central axis where the two main avenues diverge, suggesting it could be built as a hotel given its proximity to the sports stadium and race track. Word got back to the Brazilian ambassador to the UN and the next day Jenny returned to give him a personal showing for the cameras. He nodded diplomatically, thanked her for her interest in his country's capital and invited her to visit sometime.

We had the money, Jenny had the time, we all had our passports and the Brazilian ambassador was willing to grant us a press visa and Pan Am's Grand Central ticket counter was only a couple blocks away. They did give us a funny look on account of us not checking any luggage for an international trip. You'd think they didn't have clothing stores in the whole of Brazil or something.

Flight took longer than we'd imagined it would, though that's mainly because for some reason we just don't take as much consideration for distance when going north or south as we do when going east or west. Jenny's calculation that we could've flown to Rome with the same range helped a little.

We were met at the airport by her grandfather and a reporter and photographer he introduced as 'Manuel' and 'Lucinda', further explaining that he'd been keeping himself busy as a guest lecturer at the 'Universidade' for the better part of the year and they had tagged along because they wanted to meet 'the famous Lady Desdemona'. To think our parents were always worrying about us getting bothered going out in public.

To give an idea of the way she plans ahead, we should note that as soon as the usual greetings an introductions were over, the first thing Jenny did was to inquire at the pilots desk about getting the special maps with navigation aids against the day she'd return 'under her own power'. Even more interesting were the notes she recorded on the ride into town. We had been chatting with the Brazilians about our home state and they had enthusiastically asked if there were still cowboys and indians. We told them that on our ranch many of the cowboys were indians but that our capital city was only a few years older than theirs as was pretty modern in its day.

Jenny, taking in the ultra-modernity around her contrasted with the still primitive jungle visible on the horizon, noted in her recorder how interesting it might be to film jungle savages running along the highway medians and through the open spaces. After a long pause Jenny added that wouldn't it make for a good story if the 'savages' were more 'civilized' then the inhabitants. Maybe have the city's elite turned out to be cannibals, sort of like Rome before the fall. Or rather, we suggested, like the Berlin, 'Germania' that Hitler wanted to build before that pesky war he started got in the way.

Lucinda suggested maybe a Fidel Castro type that talked about Americans like Hitler used to talk about the Jews to which Jenny quipped that in the future, dictators will win elections by running against the United States. That got them asking her about the current military government that had taken power last April. Jenny mumbled something about our county having to send the army into Mississippi so she really wasn't in a position to comment. When they brought up the recent crack by French President DeGaulle about Brazil not being a 'real country', Jenny merely inquired if Brazil was capable of defending her borders. That sat for a few moments till they realized who she was taking a shot at. From their laughter we knew she would get a sympathetic write-up today.

The chosen land was a vast but barren patch of prairie between the east and west lanes of the 'Via 'Oeste' with only a thin coat of grass and a few trees separated by a service road from the more developed 'Praca do Buriti' park. As Jenny unfolded a 'popup book' model of her building she'd stashed in her portfolio bag for the trip out, we started crooning 'Oooo-klahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain...' in as hammy a fashion as we could. It was windy, it was plainey, we couldn't help ourselves.

We also couldn't help wondering how far in advance Jenny had prepared herself for this seemingly spur of the moment trip as she drew a draftmans knife, a can of rubber cement, a sheet of clear acetate and a sheet of black construction paper from that snail bag of hers and asked to borrow our camera. Luckily for her we still had the Hasselblad with changeable backs we'd brought along yesterday to get some pictures of her shaking hands with the Brazilian ambassador.

Putting on the Polaroid back, she mounted it on a her granddad's surveyors tripod, she hoofed several paces into the Praca Buriti park,, set down the tripod and the camera towards the building site, took a single shot and returned to the truck with her exposed picture still percolating under the developing 'skin'. Propping the developed picture on the dashboard, she took out her handy dandy camera lucida and mounted it onto a clipboard holding the sheet of construction paper. After studying the picture for a spell, she carved out areas where the foliage intervened to make a series of masks and mounted them to the sheet of acetate.

With her masks ready, she returned to the camera and took a few exposures of the building site with both Polaroid and regular film backs, changing masks each time. When done she schlepped back to the truck with the camera and tripod in hand to take the final exposures with the building model. Since it was a morning sun, she took the final exposures with the building mounted on a surveyors stake facing the park.

It seemed like the Moshiach would come before the Polaroid shot developed and we all clamored for a look when Jenny finally peeled off the picture. Not bad for someone who wasn't all that big on photography.

The rest of the morning was spent in the Plaza of the Three Powers getting artsey shots of the dramatic architecture and dramatic shots of the artsey architecture, the most memorable of which was the one where we posed for in front of the 'Siamese' twin legislative towers. For Lucinda, Jenny did a series of poses where she pretended to eat out of a the bowl dome that was their senate.

For lunch our Brazilian hosts insisted on taking us out for pizza at the hopefully named "Manhattan Pizzeria". Granted, we were the only people in the place, the joint still looked like they had twice the store for the business they were getting. The cafe tables were generously spaced out and even the warming oven was a long walk from the cash register and the pizzas-by-the-slice counter. At least you got a little floor show watching this short fat fellow waddle back and forth between the counter and oven to heat up each order the lady rang up.

With the run of the place, we took a table next to the front window by the 'downtown' wall, the other wall having a photo mural of Midtown, and settled into our lunch. Before we could dine, Jenny insisted on getting a picture of her slice of pizza posed next to her tourist map of Brasilia to join a long line of predecessors in the White Metal Cabinet. We'd never been out of the country before and had no traditions to build on so we just started hoisting our half-slices, only to have Jenny swat them back down so we could all say grace.

Tradition... what are you gonna do?

"So what do ya want me to do about that bridge of yours? Canal Zone people keep getting calls from marine casualty lawyers thinking I'd took on a little extra cargo and I kinda think it's starting to bug them."

"Yeah... that's something I wanted to talk to you about... I think that gonna be back on... Anyway, I got the research I needed done... and I think I can round up an architect to sign off on the plans. You gonna be here long?"

"School year doesn't end till December. If you coulda said something in July... but then I suppose you've been pretty busy. Geeze, a heart attack?"

"It was the worst suntanning accident in history," Jenny deadpanned before changing the subject, "Say... you remember that WPA project you did down in Dallas back in the 'Thirties?

"The little park with the colonnades? Yeah, what about it?"

"That's where Kennedy got killed. One of mom's socialite friends wants me to look into that... from the science angle. Haven't definitely agreed to do that yet, but I did want to ask if anybody's been sniffing around the office for blueprints in the last couple of years."

Whatever answer Grampa Platt gave we didn't take down as we were enjoying the reactions of our hosts who likely woke up thinking 'We're just going to meet some minor pop star today'.

"Oh yes, we're twins. Just like you two..."

We'd kind of figured Manny and Lucy might be related in the familiar, but not intimate, way they acted towards each other. It was mostly the brother pestering sister with sister yelling the Brazilian equivalent of 'Quit it, fag!' while swatting back at brother kind of stuff we're familiar with from our childhood.

"Fraternal twins... now that's gotta be weird..." Really. How many times do you have two eggs in the skillet when you're expecting company? That's just strange.

"Eh... at l least when we got presents we didn't get the same thing twice. Or have to share. We didn't get a lot growing up but we had a big family."

"We did all right present-wise.. Hanukkah was eight days of clothes 'you'll grow into bubbies'. Birthdays we'd get the good stuff on account of the indians on our ranch worshipped us as gods."

No foolin'. We even have an indian name, 'They Who Look Both Ways'.

As it turns out, our hosts were Brazilian indians on their mother's side, hailing from the vast Amazon jungle region. They noted that apart from a few years in the suburbs of Rio when their father got a government job, this was their first time living in any sort of 'big city'. As much as they missed their old village, the clean, new buildings and wide open spaces appealed to both and they planned to stay on here 'after University'.

Their interest returned to Jenny who had her building model set up again as she studied the Polaroids she took. Looking at the city map she considered whether she should turn the building so the flat side faced the little park. It seems the lot was looking to be too vast for the effect she was hoping for at a scale that'd be buildable in a city that as of yet, had two maybe three buildings taller than twenty storeys outside of the government complex.

Even though, through Jenny, we had some idea of the inner workings of the communications industry we were still surprised to find that our pizza heater-upper had recognized her building from an article in the local paper. There had also been a quick mention on the evening news and he was somewhat amazed that we'd come all the way here from New York so quickly. Naturally he wanted to know how his pizza compared to it's Manhattan namesake. Like a sommelier discussing vintages, Jenny held forth on how the pizza chefs of New York learned their craft from the Mother Pizzeria known as Lombardi's, whose owners came from the 'old country', concluding that this was closer to the Italian source and certainly was made with more and fresher ingredients.

The early afternoon was spent inspecting the newly minted housing 'superblocks' and when we say 'newly minted' we're not being figurative. They were literally cutting the ribbon on a new school as we pulled into one site for a closer look. Jenny whipped out her trusty press pass and we almost got through before the man at the gate asked for a second look on account of it being a New York issued card. He was only mildly curious as to why anyone would come all the way from the United States for a local story and let us through when Jenny explained that she was actually an architect and did press work between projects and this was a nice way to 'kill two stones with one bird'.

We'd actually been to one of these school openings with Jenny a few years ago. It was a sprawling single storey multi-winged affair built on reclaimed swampland in some upstate New York city. The architects had done the working plans for Jenny's remodel of the J Platt & Company headquarters. There was an interesting back story to that project in the fact that the residents of that town had been voting down school budgets as a protest and to force the state to kick in more money. It was a wonder the thing got built.

The wonder before us wasn't nearly as impressive but then it was a neighborhood school and the high muckie-muck making with the speeches was keen on emphasizing that it had been completed well before the start of the next school year. We figured that translated to 'we'd really meant to be ready for the start of the last school year but things ran way behind schedule,' but we're not ones to spoil the party, dull as it was. At least the lunch ladies had a decent spread laid out in the cafeteria once we'd slogged through the tour. This government sure wanted to make a good impression on everyone today.

We'd put on our camera gear in the hopes of blending in with the rest of the press gang but it wasn't too long before we got the usual assortment of double takes, dropped utensils, curious stares and whispers. Curiously, for a bunch of big time reporters, nobody seemed to want to say anything to us but one of the little kids from the chorale dragged in to serenade the tour tried to talk to us but since she only spoke Brazilian and since our translators were hanging around Jenny, all we could do is shrug and say that we could only speak English. We ended wandering over to the window to to get a picture of some trees being planted in the courtyard outside.

A few minutes later Jenny tracked us down to announce that she'd been invited to appear on a local panel discussion show to debate urban issues with some Brazilian experts if we didn't mind sitting in a TV studio for a spell. For a twenty-five dollar a day 'office girl' that was quite a vote of confidence and we had no objections save for maybe we might want to get a change of clothes and a shower in. It seems the clothing stores in the City of the Future weren't ready to take American Express cards and nobody brought enough travelers checks so Jenny's granddad floated us enough 'cruzados' for the duds and for a nice tropical number Jenny wanted for a friend back home.

As 'at home' as we were in the campus darkroom, such was Jenny inside the assemblage of concrete and steel boxes that made up Brasilia's 'Radio City', answering a studio aide's inquiry as to whether she'd ever been in a TV studio before with...

"Oh, I used to do the weekend surf forecast for NBC's LA affiliate... the summer before this last one. Had a running gag where after I did my spiel with all the surfer lingo the weather guy would go 'you have no idea what you're talking about" and I'd reply all cheery-like 'Not a clue Tom!'. It was fun while it lasted, but... it was a summer job and for the fall season they shuffled some on-air people around and I really wasn't looking for a TV job... So I got to write off my board as a business expense... I have some numbered slides for my part of the presentation if you want to give to Telecine..."

After getting a couple set pictures for posterity, we watched the show from up in the control room, employing Manny and Lucy to translate for us and incidentally, to check on the person translating for Jenny - it seems that Brazilians spoke, of all things, the language of tiny Portugal. Her co panelists were 'Tino' Valentino, a staff architect with the firm that designed Brasilia and Yolanda Wega, a rather shrill harpy of a social scientist from Rio, who was taking up the anti-Brasilia sword for the evening, leaving Jenny, who was introduced as 'one of the youthful architects of the future', to argue both ends against the middle.

Suffice to say, she handled herself quite well and made good use of her slides. The Dickersons, for all their passion, effectively neutralized each other's arguments leaving Jenny to get in nuanced digs like, 'There's really no point in comparing Brasilia to Rio because in another five or ten years they'll have torn down most of Rio and replaced it with something not as good and then where would you be?' or 'Brasilia is the culmination of city planning ideas kicking around since the industrial revolution of the last century... Nice to see they finally got one built...'

Finding Miss Wega a 'Jacobite', Jenny reminded her that for all Jane's waxing rhapsodic about the qualities of Greenwich Village, Harlem meets the exact same criteria and that's considered a fetid slum on a par with the favelas up in the hills around Rio. Anyway the Village these days is crawling with Madison Avenue ad executives taking their three martini lunches and out-of-towners looking for an 'adventure' in the Big City. Oh there are still a few Bohemian poseurs left to carry the flag of nonconformity, but the real artists have since relocated to the cast-iron district downtown.

For now Jenny was the glittering tropical fish between two angry piranhas that have for the most part snapped at each other, although her building model took a swipe from 'Tino's cane intended for Yolanda with profuse apologies from Tino to follow. The model was designed to be collapsable and was soon snapped back into place as Jenny continued with her presentation of historic housing types and her modernized take on them.

"...and this is what is known around Boston as a 'triple decker. These were located in working and middle-class districts like Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. The small-time property investor could live on one floor and rent out the other two. These buildings were usually open on all four sides although sometimes they're paired together and since many of these were being built around the time the Model-T was coming out they often included room for a full driveway."

The next slide showed a model apartment building that on account of the stairway tower and balconies that carried their outline in a ribbon around the side, looked like a letter 'E' on stilts. It was one of her finer works even if it did remind everyone of...

"I guess you could say this is my homage to Frank Lloyd Wright. Well... I like that sort of rock formation and I needed something you could hang flower boxes from and I like my outside walls to have a little texture to them. Makes you feel like you're getting your money's worth... Now Boston is a snowy place so I added a penthouse floor with a sloping roof so the owner could have a covered roof garden... maybe rent it out to college kids. Y'know... city planners never seem to take into account the local climate in their designs..."

She called up the next slide with floor plans, noting how the service utilities like furnaces, water heaters and air conditioners lined the stairway side of the basement level garage.

"That way if some tenant gets careless while parking the old DeSoto, he'd only smash his own utilities... assuming he managed to get past the concrete bollards. Oh, you'd be surprised what people can do when they put their minds to it... Now the way I've done these, you can flip the plans for every other building and pool the driveways. You can even join the two and make a six unit building. Next slide please..."

The next slide showed her 'six-plex' which dropped the stair tower in favor of a proper lobby.

The next slide showed a photo of what looked like a typical three storey English 'cottage,' stuccoed on the first storey and half-timbered on the upper and attic storeys.

"The competition was to provide specialty housing for injured war veterans... men who lost their legs or use of them and having to get around in a wheelchair but otherwise didn't need a lot nursing care... Now... I could have gone with some modern design but I figured that if you've given as much as you have for your country maybe you ought to have a little something of what you were fighting for. I sort of imagined one of them sitting by the fire with pipe in hand... like this couple I knew in college. Anyway... the English climate doesn't really lend itself to flat roofs and Tudor details didn't cost all that much. Let's go inside..."

The next slide showed the path to the porch which, on account of the residents having to use wheelchairs, had no steps yet still looked like like a porch. The next slide showed the foyer with stairs that wrapped around an elevator that kept the Merry Olde England theme going. The next slide took us into a kitchenette where one of the residents was reaching up from his chair...

"Note those brackets under the cabinets. We put those there so that a person in a wheelchair could reach up and pull the whole cabinet down.... friend of mine, next slide, came up with this counterbalance system... and get what he wanted without having to ask someone to get it for him..."

"More than anything else, I think that's what won the judges over. It wasn't a big project, maybe a couple dozen one bedroom units and a half dozen three bedroom family units spread amongst a handful of buildings... but when you see the look of wonder... and even pride on some of the men's faces... now I didn't get into architecture for a great big pat on the back... but it sure is nice when you get it from the people who have to use your building... at least until the furnace breaks down or the roof starts to leak or something like that."

If Jenny couldn't end a story of her work without a little self-deprecation, we couldn't finish the telling of this little jaunt without someone crawling out of the woodwork, or the audio booth in this case when 'Poppy' at the mx board came out to recall...

"That's the little girl who saved my life! I was a singer then and I was real fussy about setting up my own microphone. She comes in saying she needed to get my autograph on something... well I was a little punk back then and I high-hat her... it turned out she wanted me to sign some sort of waver for the electricans union... You know, so they don't drop a sandbag on me."

"So anyway, I signed her little waiver thing and she left and I went back to my microphone... I must've spilled something on the floor because as soon as I touched the mike, all fifty thousand red hot watts from the transmitter was coarsing through my body and I couldn't let go... I thought I was a goner but little Jenny managed to kick me out of the way. Kicked me right in the seat of the pants!"

"Well it was a really nice microphone. Couldn't let the poor thing fry, now could I?"

There were offers of supper and drinks but Jenny had a promise to keep with her aunt Elizabeth so we were obliged to have our 'dinner in the diner' on the flight home. Breakfast too, it's a bear of a trip. Still we all got a good nights sleep and made it to New York with plenty of time to clean up and get ready to schlep that painting Jenny was to unveil down to Elizabeth's little gallery in The City.

The cast-iron district was a somewhat forgotten area of Manhatten taking up the space between the last skyscrapers of Downtown and the first skyscrapers of Midtown with its borders further defined by the Little Italy on one side and a phalanx of bonded storage warehouses forming a nearly solid wall along Sixth Avenue. Elizabeth's building was a particularly winsome stack of colonnades in a grayish blue that reminded us of weathered slate that, we were told, used to house a factory for 'big and tall' Sephardic Jewish menswear that has since moved to a new plant out on Long Island.

Inside was the quiet chaos of Art being assembled and installed to the evocative creaking sounds of the knotty pine floor. Besides Jenny's new painting there were other examples of her work including a series of cast iron plates she'd done back in college that cost her that year or so of Janice-short hair and a meticulously staged photograph depicting the aftermath of the brutal murder of some 'working girl' and her child. That was the one where the blood-soaked bodies were being wheeled past a table that had an an especially luminous easter basket set out for the kid.

There was an curious undercurrent of violence in several other works on display which included a meticulously painted blow up of a comic strip panel depicting Miss Kennedy's perspective of her husband's assassination. In the sculpture department there was a goldfish bowl perched on a block of melting ice with an explanatory note from the artist stating that the little fishies lathargically swimming about are of a species that can tolerate the chill. Also being set up were two independent works, a switchblade dangling from a chain over a red disk on the floor and a curved metal arc that looked like a single shaped plate, but in fact had room for two people about to get inside, one a well endowed man wearing nothing more than the Negro skin God gave him, the other an equally well endowed lady in a monokini, we recognized as Phoebe from that party at Ashleigh's.

Another 'living sculpture' piece of note was one titled 'The Boob Toob', which consisted of a lady wearing little more than a bikini bottom and tasseled stripper pasties doing a little shimmy dance behind a television set 'tuned' to an image of her torso to tape recorded sounds of a raucous 'burlie que' show mixed with the fakey sounds you'd hear in a movie when someone is tuning in a radio or TV. A comfortable chair was provided to view the 'show'.

Poking our noses behind a curtained off area, we could see that there was one of those miniature black and white 'surveillance' cameras with a wide angle lens mounted in back of the television cabinet and aimed at her direction. The lady, who introduced herself as an 'electronic artist' going by the name Heather Robinson, was still fine-tuning her video setup - she had the video on a delay line so there would be a noticable lag as she wiggled about but it wasn't yet giving her the effect she wanted - so we offered our optical and electronical hands in the efforts.

After she was as satisfied as she was going to get, we wandered back to Jenny who put us to work opening cans of Campbell's soup, instructing us to leave the lids attached and bent upwards to a suitably artistic angle. These were laid out at around ten o'clock for members of the press and invited preview guests to enjoy as well as to become part of the exhibition themselves with the instruction to return them when they were done on account of the empty cans were going to be sold for a dollar apiece at the end of the day. Naturally some wag in the back would have to ask if the sporks came with them and the answer from Elizabeth was why yes, yes they did.

After a last minute reshuffling of the old time posters of 'bad girl' movies themed to the show's title 'Ladies You'll Talk About - The Angry Young Women of Art' on account of a couple of them getting damaged, the doors were thrown open at ten-thirty to the general public. The first one through the door was a hurried-looking man brandishing his press card like someone enjoying its novelty. Apologizing for being late, he introduced himself as Andrew Warhola, adding that he had been called that morning to act as Panorama magazines's arts reporter for the show on account of the girl they usually used wasn't available. Explaining that this was an art show and not the first day of school, Elizabeth ushered him to the press area and offered him a can of soup.

"A little joke at my expense, eh," he observed dryly. "You laugh, but I really do love the stuff."

With a title as provocative as the 'Angry Young Women of Art', it was almost inevitable that the everybody was asking what the artists were angry about, with varying degrees of condescension. How the artists fielded questions seemed to have a direct correlation to the quality of their work - the more 'earnest' ones with obvious titles like 'Rape #13 ', covering some pressing social issue like bigotry, poverty or suburban dislocation or whatever was near and dear to the artist's heart tended to have lousy press rapport. The better artists played to the questioner either seriously or satirically or both.

Our favorite, Heather Robinson, when asked what she was angry about replied that she wasn't so much 'angry' as 'mad... maaaad... mmmaaaad I tell you!' before explaining her creation and how it was intended to filter the 'real' through the 'unreal' of the televison image. She mentioned that she was 'working' the art show circuit adding that her piece was also available for private parties.

The 'Twomb' creators spent much of their time on the security of the living participants, noting that on account of the way they sat inside, each was responsible for protecting the other, demonstrating by inviting a reporter to 'get a meaty handful' of one of Phoebe's breasts. A good laugh was had when the boobie drew back and a dark-skinned hand reached out from the hole to slap the reporter's hand. Nobody wanted to touch the subject of Phoebe's protective role so no demonstration of that was made.

The artist behind the flickknife piece explained that she worked for a company that made training filmstrips and was struck by the accidental beauty of a frame showing nothing more than a utility knife on a red surface. The 'anger' in her work was on account of her suffering from belonephobia, a fear of sharp objects.

The Jackie Kennedy painter wasn't there but left a typwritten note explaining how she needed to channel her grief over the assassination into some creative effort. As for why the big cartoon, she wrote something about it being on account of the way media trivializes human experiences. That and she used to ink panels for one of the comic book houses and was familiar with the format. The work was untitled and unsigned, but we could dope out from the brief biographical notes saying she was a housewife with two kids living on the 'suburban South Shore', that someone must've had a peek inside that box marked 'Jennifer's Junior Prom'. We couldn't think of anyone in the press who'd ran with a picture of the exact moment Jack Kennedy's head exploded and the cartoon blood spray was too close to what really happened for someone to have just imagined it.

Not that she was easy to track down for a reaction. It seems that to keep away from everybody, Jenny had been making like she was just one of the people helping out with the show. Eventually Elizabeth caught wind of that and tried to nudge Jen out of her figurative shell by telling her that everybody' had been asking about her painting and that maybe she ought to get some good publicity for once. When Jenny protested that she didn't want to make a lot of fuss on account of Janice not being in the show, Elizabeth pointed over to the Jackie Kennedy piece. We timed it and from the time she stood in front of the painting to when she mouthed 'that little shit', it took exactly thirty-two and a half seconds of staring before Jenny realized what we'd figured out and yeah, she was pissed.

With Janice having the good sense to not actually be there, Jenny tamped down whatever anger she was feeling and put on a pleasant smile to greet the select group of admirers gathered in front of her painting in her own inimitable way. Can of Campbells in hand, she sidled up to the crowd and between bites of chicken noodle soup she confided, "Hope one of you brainiacs have some idea of what this all means... because I can't figure it out and I painted the damned thing!"

Having opened the floor to discussion, she filled in details like, that this was a near-literal 'transcription' of a nightmare she'd had while on a train ride, that the pigments were made from soil samples, the models were her cousin Bitsey and a friend of the family and she'd been influenced by the German Expressionist artist E L Kirchner but she isn't a proponent of any particular style. She also warned that if any favoritism was shown to a certain reporter it was not because he was a world famous artist but it was on account of him being a stringer for Panorama publications and that she was a loyal 'company man'. Needless to say, she treated everyone more or less equally, even if Andy did ask an awful lot of questions about her days as Lady Desdemona to the point where Jenny had to playfully but firmly remind him that she was on the editorial staff at Panorama.

There were some questions about whether maybe the recent scandal she wbeen going through were somewhere into the painting but Jenny countered that she'd had been done with the painting before any of that stuff happened and the poor thing had been sitting on its easel through mopst of the month unviewed and nearly forgotten. It's been that sort of summer. Someone offered that maybe it was an expression of a woman's fear of the city's growing violence. Jenny shrugged and said that she'd have to take his word on that and that she just painted it because she thought the imagery striking.

As luck would have it, Bitsey and her friend Brenda not only managed to show up at the gallery just in time to miss getting in on the fifteen minutes or so that the art press devoted to Jenny's painting, but they showed up just as Jenny was on the phone to EsmÈralda, getting directions to her house in that bit of Manhattan that wasn't an island to bring her that dress she'd bought for her.

"Yeah ," Bitsey added, "we waved to you, but you must not have seen us."

"No didn't see you... Fire Island? Bit optimistic aren't you two? You know them Islanders don't much go for the womenfolk over there... Exceptin' maybe for the womenfolk..."

"Oh gawd Jen, Brenda wanted to look at the ocean!"

"Yeah, I'm from Memphis..."

"Uh huh... Just remember Bitsey, this is the Nineteen Sixties. You don't hafta buy a cow when all you want is a glass of milk... m'kay bubbie?"

With that we were out the door and motoring our way to Marble Hill to look for what Ezzie described as "Professor Rotwang's house". What we found was a three and a half storey house with the same sort of barn roof as Jenny's sandwiched between two huge apartment buildings. Since the first storey was a garage, we at least had a place to park. The inside was done in tiki tropical, you know, rooms full of wicker and cane furniture and windows hung with diaphanous curtains that waved in the breeze from cars hissing by. An island retreat in the Big City.

The bathroom however, looked like a temple to the former first lady with maybe a dozen portraits on the walls, sink and shelves and a thick stack of magazines by the john, not to mention a scrapbook of newspaper clippings lovingly mounted in a trivet on the shelf above the tank.

"A little obsessed with Miss Kennedy aren't we?" We couldn't resist giving Ezzie the business. "Awful lot of Jacqueline for such a little room don'tcha think?"

"Oh... my one aunt Greta... you know, the wierd one... thinks I look like her so she's always giving me magazines and stuff. Had to put it somewhere. She's getting on so I kinda hafta humor her."

Yeah... sure. That room was way too lovingly arranged for an obligatory display.

We tried to tell her of that day we spent with her but Jenny kept swatting at us till we gave up. However we'd gotten out enough between swats that Jenny had to tell her anyway so we won that round. Ezzie just shrugged it off since she knew that Jenny's mom's parents were friends with Miss Kennedy's dad. She wasn't going to queer getting a dress all the way from Brazil on account and at least Jenny could fume over Janice poking into her private files while she did a color sketch of Esmé in her new dress.

Since it had been since before Janice was married that she had talked to her last, Ezzie went throught the motion of calling the J P & C exchange to reach her. Having done that, she went throught the usual 'long time no see' routine before explaining that she been gone down to that art show where they had her painting and had to look her up. After laying down a base coat of BS about how 'store bought good' the painting looked and how she was a rabid collector of Jackie Kennedy stuff, Ezzie worked her way aroind to mentioning how she's seen almost every picture of the assassination and couldn't figure out how Janice had come to doing a picture from that perspective.

With that thick tongue of hers, you could believe almost anything she's saying and Janice went for it as completely as that fish that got Ezzie's tongue. It helped that she'd asked about what Jenny was up to on account of them not seeing each other for such a long time. It also helped that Jenny could keep a still tongue as Janice poured out the whole story of going through the White Metal Cabinet looking for childhood pictures to get copies made and finding Jennifer's 'junior prom' photos and naturally, since Jenny didn't have a junior prom, she had to go through the pictures and see what they were.

Ezzie, in a conspiratorial voice, asked, "Well... what were they?"

"The whole damn thing! The right side of his face is blown clean off!"

"Oh, wow! What do you suppose Jenny is doing with them?"

"I dunno... She probably got 'em from N'eddie. Y'know she's working full time for Panorama now."

"You don't say... must be some of that Warren Commission stuff. Did you happen to find LBJ's cancelled check to that Oswald guy?"

"No... just pictures and a movie reel..."

"Oh man... a movie!"

"....and I didn't see what's on the movie reel. It's probably what the pictures were from."

"Oh she'll probably kill you... but I won't squeal on you... Would be nice to see that movie though..."

Jenny hung up right then and there leaving Ezzie to explain that she was on a party line and that somebody else in the building wanted to make a call so she had to get off the line.

Before she could say anything Jenny said, "I know whenever someone says you don't want to see something, you wanna see it more but believe me... you don't want to see that! It's practically combat footage.."

"What are you doing with it?"

"Mis'ess Kennedy wanted me to look at it. Guess she doesn't trust the rest of the Kennedy family... I don't know... I wasn't really all that thrilled with the idea... guess this is a way out for me. Still... she's not the kind of person who rates this sort of thing... Oh well...what are you gonna do?"

What she ended up doing was driving down to apartment building, leaving us to circle the block a few times while she went inside. After maybe a half dozen orbits she reemerged from the building and taking the helm for home, reported that she'd conveyed her apologies and mea culpas to an assistant of Miss Kennedy, who was out of town for the weekend, to decide whether or not it was worth relaying further. At least it was out of her hands now.

The last Sunday of summer was spent poolside at N'eddie's place with Janice and her kids splashing about in blissful ignorance while Jenny, N'eddie and Andy laid out the feature article for the art show. It seems an informal straw poll had been taken amongst the reporters and they had voted to 'black ball' Janice's painting, leaving Panorama the sole magazine to even consider any mention of it. A lot was riding on a phone call and Janice was the poor sap who was going to have to take it. When it came, Mister Warhol was given the exquisite pleasure of calling her over to the phone.

"Uhh... Janice? There's a lady who wants to speak to you about your painting... Say's her name is Jacqueline."

From his delivery, she probably thought it was someone looking to buy it as she took up the receiver. Judging from her end of the conversation it was almost the same call Ezzie made, first compliments, then curiousity and finally Janice's confession before handing off to Jenny.

The joys of sisterly revenge.

We didn't spend all summer with Jenny. On Labor Day she spent it with us. We were helping out with the grand opening sale at Avi's tentative foray into retail, 'Amityville Modern Electronics'. He had started the business to sell off a couple derailed boxcars full of radios and TVs the family had obtained in trade for an otherwise too small to be worth developing pocket of natural gas one of our irrigation wells managed to find instead of water. We're Jews. We know how to make deals.

Jenny was there on account of a deal she'd made last spring with the Levigne Agency to promote that Norelco Carry Corder she'd shown us last June. She was supposed to make the rounds of youth gatherings like the surf party that one evening to show off the thing but with her leg injury, wasn't able to follow through. By way of payback, she managed to talk Avi into setting aside some floor space for a table display and an in-store demonstration. To sweeten the offer, she agreed to make a personal appearance as Lady Desdemona. The girl knows how to make a deal.

On the strength of Lady Desdemona's drawing power and Jenny's personal recommendation, Avi had ordered twelve dozen units, an optimistic order for a product that only just saw its 'official' debut at a electronics show in Chicago earlier last month. Now, with the doors about to open, Avi nerves were giving him the 'oy veys'. You know, 'Oy vey, why do these cases have to be so big? Oy vey, if they don't sell where are we gonna put 'em all?' 'Oy vey, why did I have to order so many?' 'Oy vey...'. At least Avi had the Norelco sales rep's shoulder to cry on. This was the Carry Corder's Long Island debut and he was chain-smoking his nerves away.

And it's not like we didn't have a load on our shoulders. Before Avi had agreed to the Norelco promotion, he had been the bright idea to have us show up as the 'Stereo Sisters' in support of those car stereo players he'd picked up last June. To that end we were to deliver a spiel on the merits of the Muntz Stereo-Pak four track stereo cartridge system - in perfect unison of course. Needless to say. we never had much of a chance to practice so we were given the task of checking each Carry Corder box against a packing list before the customer took it home. In addition it seems that Norelco had introduced an interlock feature that prevented you from accidentally erasing your recordings in the middle of their production run so we had units with the feature, units without but with the space to add that feature and units without that couldn't have the feature installed.

Lady Desdemona was a glittering green cucumber as she double-checked the recorder she'd picked out for demonstrating. In addition to those demonstration duties, she was also pushing a 'deluxe starter kit' we'd put together that, for an extra thirty-five bucks, got you the Norelco AC power adapter, ten more blank cartridges and a custom-made adapter to let you use regular stereo headphones instead of Norelco's stenographer's headset. We had a few of those headsets with the matching stenographer's foot switch and Norelco's telephone pickup coil for recording calls along with a supply of blank cartridges and the needed C-batteries in wire baskets hung from a spin rack set up next to her table of wares. At least the incidentals buyer would be well taken care.

Business was about as low-key as we'd all expected for the last day of summer vacation. The first paying customer was a little old lady who showed up maybe a half hour after opening, looking to replace one of the tubes in her Arvin portable radio. So the Ryersons ended up making that first dollar fifty-seven sale for us. She had no idea who Lady Desdemona was, but was happy to let 'little Jennifer from her first grade class' demonstrate the ease of use of the Norelco Carry Corder while she waited for her radio. Maybe she'll get the grandkids one for Christmas.

Still, before the store had even opened, Jenny had a firm sale in her column when she convinced Elizabeth that the dozen and a half cabinet-damaged but otherwise functional Emerson TV sets from that original shipment might form the basis of a design competition for the gallery that incidentally, might make for a colorful spread in Panorama.

Business picked up around a quarter to noon around the time we'd suggested maybe sending out for sandwiches and while Desdemona's testimonial was the big draw, those Muntz decks were holding their own saleswise. The kids were getting their own cars these days and wanted tunes for the drive to and from school. The decks were players, with no recording capability and we weren't going in the record business, but we did include 'a choice selection of five titles from the Muntz catalog' with each player. Not too shabby for eighty-nine ninety-five, installation included.

"I'm so glad you asked that," Jenny trilled as she changed the cartridge in her machine, "I got this tape from these English musicians that was playing in a club down the street from where I was singing..."

You can pretty much see where we're going with this, but we should note that the recording was actually made during her European tour on a portable reel to reel recorder and transferred to a cassette cartridge. John calls Paul over saying that he thinks they're stuck inside a Norelco tape recorder. Paul agrees while George speculates that they might be in Long Island now. Ringo Starr, a lucky inclusion to the recording as Pete Best was still officially their drummer at the time, further narrowed it down to Amityville asking who do they know there. They all shouted greetings to either Jenny or Lady Desdemona then went into a jocular argument about whether it was Jenny or Lady Desdemona before finally settling on Jenny Desdemona.

Such was the power of even a peripheral association with the Fab Four, that we sold just about every last unit on the promise that Jenny would make a copy of that recording for anyone who wanted one. To that end, Jenny trooped those wanting a copy upstairs to the J P & C offices to use the 'duplication station' she and Avi had put together so The Company could produce and distribute training tapes. Essentially the system was a power strip attached to a table with outlets to plug in ten 'slave' recorders and one 'master' player. It had been the intent to finish the system with unsold unmodifiable units but there were none to be had, so everyone got the fun of breaking in their own Carry Corder.

To pass the time between each dubbing session, Lady Desdemona put on a little show to give a live recording demonstration. Recalling Jenny's recent jaunt to Brasilia, The Lady took up a guitar and strummed an impromptu rendition of 'I'll Cry Instead' in 'the Brazilian style'. Since it was a work in progress, each group of ten ended up with different versions of the session as their turn to get a copy came up. We had initiated a layaway program so we could hold those Carry Corders that needed that record interlock part until they could get properly modified. Their buyers were the last to get copies and thus got the whole Lady Desdemona session.

We spent spent the next couple of weeks with Jenny on visits to the Worlds Fair. With the weather cooling down, she was keen on getting some use out of the season ticket they'd given her.

On one of those visits we had a couple engineering executives from Japan's Sony corporation in town at the same time Jenny had Janice's kids in tow. Amazing how those giant lollipops - you know, the ones where they wind a long strand of candy in a circle - can calm fidgety juveniles. And Janice's kids were pretty well behaved too.

But seriously, Janice's girls were pretty well mannered compared to the flibbertigibbet that spawned them. They actually seemed interested in what was basically an overblown industrial trade show with concession stands and were positively entranced by the display of 'raw' television picture tubes. As one of our charges told them about how the tubes are sprayed with a coating of phosphor so that the cathode 'ray gun' could illuminate the screen, we could see from Jenny that she was coming up with one of her inspirations. When she asked to borrow one of their lollipops we sidled up to the Sony men and warned them to pay attention to her as she looked down the stick end in silent contemplation.

Handing back the lollipop, she took out her note pad and made a couple sketches of what we figured to be a sucker-shaped picture tube. From the profile sketch, she had the cathode ray shooting its beam into the phosphor screen at such a low angle that, if this ever got made, you'd have a TV you could hang the on the wall like a painting. To that end she made another sketch where the cathode beam had to negotiate a mirrored corner before hitting the screen, adding a note to Avi wondering why this couldn't be made.

Going by the hand gestures our Sony boys were making as they muttered to each other in their mother tongue, they had the idea she was hashing out a handheld design. Giving them a look at her sketched, Jenny detailed her concept of a set you could mount above the fireplace but she was intrigued with their idea of a book-sized TV and suggested a production technique where the tube parts would be stamped out like a casserole dish and welded together. Since they showed interest in her ideas, she let them keep the sketches and mentioned that upcoming 'Art TV' design contest her aunt's gallery was holding. They in turn suggested that if she were ever to visit Japan they would be most interested in any more of her ideas.

As fate would have it, the Platt family would be in Japan for the Olympics not only on account of Evelyn's work for NBC but for a project Trans International was working on for a Japanese TV network that got tossed into Jenny's lap as a favor from Eddie. They were hoping for a nice little film to run before the telecast with the cachet of an Hollywood film company behind it.

Traffic is heavy and running at double speed down some Tokyo expressway so he tries his luck with the subway. It's crowded and people are irritated with the smokey torch so Hiro gets off at the Ginza to take in the dazzling light show while he gets his bearings. In the meantime the opening ceremonies, actually footage from the Rome Olympics, have started and he sees this on the TV sets in the window of a department store so he gets running again and makes it just in time to light the Olympic cauldron and take his seat in the stand where his wife swats him for nearly missing the games. It was brilliant stuff for only a two weeks of lead time and save for some cut-ins of various Olympic events, came out mostly as written.

We had helped with some of the writing of this and so we got to join Jenny to watch some of the production of this little masterpiece. We particularly recall the afternoon sitting in back of a Tokyo highway department service truck during the second unit filming of the fast. traffic scene and the bemusment on Hiro's face upon viewing the 'magic' of his shots of running in place in the confines of a sound stage processed into the scene. We in turn, were amazed and amused to be given the privilege of stomping through a devasted cityscape leftover from one of those Gozilla pictures we and Jenny loved so much. The White Metal Cabinet would receive many slides of us and Jenny dancing a waltz in the ruins of Tokyo with each other and the Great Lizard himself.

Not one to snub a friendly invite, Jenny made a courtesy call to the Sony offices but was told that the engineers were still out of town. She left and returned a half hour with two of those giant lollipops stuck in a plastic snail-shaped bonsai pot she'd found at a nearby store and asked that they be left at their desks with a note she'd written apologizing for having missed them. The office manager didn't get the meaning of the gift but understood the meaning of the gesture and with a bow, took her offerings inside.

We watched the opening ceremonies from the press box with Jenny who'd managed to find someone we'd met at that TV station in Brasilia. It really was getting to be a small world after all. Meeting later at a rooftop beer garden, we compared impressions of the reconstructed Tokyo as if to continue their discussion about Brasilia, whose population Jenny noted, could be transported in a couple of Tokyo's subway cars, what with the way they pack 'em. She wasn't being figurative, during rush hour the station attendants literally had to shove people in to get the doors closed.

"Maybe you could try putting up your building here..."

"I looked into it. You gotta jump through a lot of hoops... for one thing, you gotta get permission from all of your neighbors... and the properties here are so small... geeze, you'd spend twice as much time assembling your lot as you would building on it. It's only just getting to the point where the construction companies are big enough to cut through all that. Still... The Company has a few contacts from back in The War keeping an ear to the ground."

"So what do you think of the architecture?"

"I don't really... nothing really bad... mostly warmed over Western styles and I'm not really big on the Asian stuff. It's the energy of the place that gets you... Mind you... those two arenas by Kenzo Tange could give your man Oscar a run for his money... There's some good work. Positively store bought! Say... have any of you had a go at of the local cuisine. I've been living on grilled cheese sandwiches for the last couple weeks myself."

"I tell you Miss Jennifer... I like to think of myself as a brave man... but the 'chit' they eat here scares the colhões out of me and I've eaten piranha... Meu Deus... the ungodly creatures that stare up at you from the plate... and still wigglin'... just gimmie a nice cow..."

"Don't ever let them talk you into this thing called fugu," we warned. "They get this fish made outta nuthin' but poison, find the least deadly piece of it and hope for the best... We tried some, but franky we've had goldfish better tasting than..."

"The cuisine here seems to be entirely based on a double-dog dare." Jenny concluded. "I shudder to think of what they put on their pizzas... That raw fish wrapped in electrical tape probably... or maybe those frogs we used to hafta dissect in biology class. Haven't seen any escargot joints so I guess the snails are safe over here. Now... if they could just get that giant lizard problem licked..."

"Yeah... seems like every couple of years like clockwork... say what'd you New Yorkers do with that gigantic monkey that went through town?"

"Funny you should mention that. My grandad has space in ESB. Saw the whole thiing from his window. Germans came down from Yorkville... made sausages out of the meat. Glue factories got the bones. As for the skin... they sent that over to Brooklyn to make into baseballs..."

"What'd they do with all the hair?"

"Yeah ," we concluded, "you know your town's got it made when some monster stomps through it. So... whaddya want us to sent through Brasilia? Don't think they've done giant turtles yet..."

"Atomic killer snails," Jenny countered, "We could have 'em coming out from under the Congress Hall... break right through the domes..."

"Mutante Caricóis! Walk briskly for your lives!"

"Oh no... these are hoversnails... floatin' on clouds of radioactive snailslick!"

"I bet they take out the French embassy to avenge their little compadres... and it's no good throwing salt at 'em because they just sniff it up it like cocaína..."

"Yeah," we added, "they mainline saline solution right through the eyestalks. Guess you'll have to kill them with copper pennies..."

We explained that snails don't like to touch copper because it gives them an electric shock. The hoary things we pick up hanging around Jenny - and N'eddie. She's the one who told us about the heroin junkies that shoot the stuff right into their eyes on account of the drug being no longer effective through the veins. We'll stick with good old-fashioned Alqué Holla.

With our dinner and drinks finished our Brazilian host offered a ride to our hotel but history was repeating itself in that we were heading for the airport and the long flight home. That birthday appearance was coming up and we wanted the next couple days to work out our act with Jenny. Waiting in the lounge, we soon felt the usual curious stares from the natives that quickly pointed elsewhere if we looked back. Nobody said anything to us but when Jenny sat down next to us, they turned their curious stares to her direction. After a few more minutes of silence, a girl finally whispered to her friend a bunch of Japanese words ending with 'Lady Desdemona'.

We just had to give Jenny the business for that. Making as big a scene as we could, we did this 'Who? What? Where? Wowie! A famous person!' exaggerated excitement thing as we looked around to see who they were talking about. Finding Lady Desdemona with head in hand from embarrassment, we immediatly declared that she's our 'mostest favoritest singer' in the whole world and begged her for autographs. She looked like she was ready to kill us, but there was method to our meanness and as we figured, those Desdemona fans cleared the bench and gathered around their idol with pens and paper in hand.

"Oh that's all right," Jenny replied, "I'm no Greta Garbo... I'll do autographs. I'll even get my 'peecture' taken with a 'beeg' prizefighter..."

She's not kidding. The White Metal Cabinet has a 'beeg' folder of pictures of Lady Desdemona posing with members of the US Olympic boxing team taken in Rome that first time she replaced Janice on an Aquanetters summer tour.

No pictures were taken tonight on account of nobody having their camera on them, so she just did autographs. Being the curious sort, Jenny asked how they'd come to hear of her 'little dog and pony' act. It seems their English professor used her lyrics in class discussions.

"And to think... here I was hoping that maybe one day I'd get to be the 'simulated picture' in a color television ad!"

They in turn asked her what she was doing in Japan and she told them of her Olympic project to which they followed up by asking what she thought of their country.

"I'd wanted to see more of it because I've been studying to be an architect... I was talking to one of the TV people here and said something like you'd never know there'd been a war here and there were still whole sections of European cities that had yet to be rebuilt. I was six when the war ended and remember seeing newsreels of all the bombed out cities so it's pretty amazing what you've accomplished here... and as a free people no less."

No mention was made of Tokyo's 'giant lizard problem'.

It had been a good year and a half since we were first approached with the idea of making a personal appearance at the Worlds Fair and despite strong objections from our parents we were pretty gung ho with the idea of closing some sort of metaphysical circle in our lives. Besides, we always did have a bit of the show business bug and it sure was nice to have something to look forward to and make plans for all this time. With everything we had batted about including the Monday morning radio interview to plug our appearance and even that final 'venue visit' to work out our 'act', the full weight of what we were about to go through didn't really hit us until the moment Jenny pulled us up to the vendors entrance and the attendant waved our car onto the grounds.

Holy crapoli! This was really gonna happen!

We didn't pack much. Just a couple microphones, loudspeakers, amplifer and a sound board along with a 'old-fashioned' stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder - no flacking for Norelco on this outing. We were told there would be a projector and screen waiting for us so at least we didn't have to pack those for the movies we wanted to show. To be on the safe side we did and we were duly rewarded for our preparedness, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

If our hearts were starting to drum that Wipeout song, at least Jenny, pipping the horn as she passed Fair employees heading off to their pavilions, was having the time of her life as sheedged down the service road that went under the World Fair train station. Being a little fidgety, we opened up the shoebox of giveaway postcards we'd had made of us dressed up like the Dolly Sisters dressed to the nines in a rakish English riding outfit modified for our physique. We'd wanted to use a version of the 'Meet the Brillsteins' poster we'd done up like the similarly named Beatles album - you know the one where it's just their heads in a shadowy setting - but Jenny reminded us that if anyone wanted our autographs, our chicken scratches wouldn't show up so good on such a dark background. She's always thinking about those things.

Our state's pavilion, sandwiched between the big Federal Goverment building and the city of Hollywood's recreation of Grauman's theater, took the understatement route in offering a nice landscaped picnic ground with benches, tables, a bandshell and a sheltered area. Boxed lunches were available for sale at a kiosk near the entrance. Only a giant relief map and a replica of the state seal let you know you were in Oklahoma territory.

We barely had time to unload our grip before we were whisked by one of the little VIP trams over to the press office for pictures and publicity. Given the jocular questioning from the esteemed members of the fourth estate, we just knew there'd be loads of 'Double Header at the Fair' headlines in the next editions. At least we got a hand-delivered proclamation from Robert Moses himself declaring today, 'Shoshanna and Ariel Day' and season tickets for next year's Fair for all our troubles. Two season tickets.

We returned to find Jenny and that girl from the art show, Heather Robinson, at work with the setting up of our PA equipment. The pavilion manager came out to tell us the bad news that hoodlums had chucked the movie projecter that was supposed to be there for us into a pond and slashed the screen set up for us before being chased off by the Pinkertons. They'd shown up in that short period where Jenny had to take her car back out of the fairground. Good thing she stowed our equipment inside the concession stand. There's always people that have to ruin everything.

Although the gates opened at eight-thirty, most of the pavilions wouldn't open till ten so to kill the time before there were enough people for our first 'show', we amused Heather and Jenny with the story of the goldfish swallowing trick we used to do in college.

"You see... I'd hold up this little goldfish bowl to show that it was a real fishie I'd be tucking in... Then I'd pop it in my mouth and take a sip from this metal tumbler to 'wash him down'... Only I've really just spat him into the tumbler..."

"At the same time I take a drink from my tumbler as we wiggle around a little bit... then I 'realize' I've got something in my mouth and spoot the little fishie back into his bowl! Always gets a laugh at parties. Too bad they wouldn't let us do that here..."

"Yeah... swallow one goldfish for real... and everybody gets sore at you..."

It was maybe a quarter after nine when we looked out the window of the concession stand where we'd been getting ourselves ready to see a nice healthy crowd milling about the sheltered area.

"You think maybe they're looking to kill some time before all the good exhibits open?"

Very funny Jenny.

She and Heather went out first to get the crowd ready. Heather switched on the PA equipment and laid out our microphones. Jenny did crowd control and warmup, gathering the people together and aiming them towards where we were going to be - you know, like at a birthday party when it's time to bring out the cake. By way of introduction, we had worked out with Jenny a little story for her to tell about our creation that ended with the punchline 'in his infinate wisdom he created two people that liked it that way'. We should've known somehow her introduction wouldn't come out that way.

"We often here people talk about how what kind of luck they had in the way they were born... like how lucky they were to be born an American or wealthy or white... or they say how unlucky someone was to have been born a Negro or poor... as if we were sitting in some waiting room somewhere getting birth assignments handed to us... Here, you'll be a Brazillian and you get to be a Rockefeller... I really don't think it works that way..."

"Sometimes... if you're really lucky, you meet someone in this world so special you can say that if today was your last day on this realm, at least you had some time with them. In my life I've met two..."

With that she cued Heather to start the tape and Jan & Deans 'Surf City' song rolled with its signature chorus 'Two girls for every bo-o-oy!'. We rolled out of the concession stand on this nifty little toy called a 'skate board' - basically a tiny little surfboard with roller skates screwed to the bottom. Lori had unloaded it on us back during the move to her dorm and we'd been practicing on it for the last few weeks. It was the latest thing from California!

We're no strangers to looks of pity in life so we were pleased with the general look of amazement as we rolled to a stop, took up our mics and said our helloes. We gave a little biographical information about ourselves and our life 'on the farm' in Oklahoma before we went into one of the little 'bits' we'd planned. We did four of these 'shows' during the day so the order of the bits and some of the specifics changed with each show and we forget exactly what we did when. There were a few Norelco carry-corder owners in the crowd so there are recordings of our show out there.

The first bit we'd come up with, 'The Flycatcher,' was a sonic retelling of our goldfish trick. One of us would be talking while the other is distracted by a 'fly' buzzing about. Jenny voiced the fly as Heather panned it between the speaker till it was snatched up and swallowed by our better half while we kept talking like nothing was happening. As the tape recorder played the echoey sound of dripping plumbing, Jenny's fly buzzed around angrily as it rattled through our digestive system, banging the plumbing on its way. Getting to our side, the plucky little fly buzzes up our esophagus and is freed with a cough.

The next bit was another sound bit called simply 'The Tennis Game'. All we did was look left and right as an unseen tennis match plays. We'd look in unison for a spell but eventually we'd get out of phase and end up looking at each other. After a 'dramatic' pause we'd resume looking back and forth at the game.

Our favorite gag was the one we did was a sort of tribute to the humor of W.C. Fields and involved having a pair of telephones brought in. One of us would excuse ourselves to make a phone call and dial a number. Soon enough the other telephone would ring, we'd answer it and sure enough, it was our better half on the line.
The premise of the bit is that we talk to ourselves on the phone like we weren't sitting next to each other through the whole bit. The 'funny' starts when we say that we're with our sister at the Worlds Fair and wouldn't you know she's with her sister at the Worlds Fair too. We ask if she'd like to speak to our sister and she does so we pass phones between us and continue speaking. When done, we ask for the other sister and pass phones back. We ask to speak to both sisters and the phones get passed around again. This continues through different levels of complexity and telphone cord tanglement. The last time we did the bit, it ended with the ring of the AT&T's new 'picture phone and the movie screen coming up to show us saying hello to ourselves.

We also showed the original edit of that Olympic film project which included the segment we had helped to write and while it was filmed, had never aired in Japan. That was the part where Hiro is joined in the torch run with various 'national characters' of Japan including, two Samurai, a Geisha girl, two Sumo wrestlers, some Kabuki dancers and finally someone wearing a Godzilla suit. It got cut on account of someone at the last minute thinking maybe it wasn't a good idea to show warriors in an Olympics film and also on account of it running a little long and the network deciding our part was the best place to put in some announcements. Stock sport footage was substituted to match their voice-over guy's words.

Our prepared spiel and filmed material took maybe ten or fifteen minutes of our time. Most of the day was spent just talking with the audience and fielding the same questions over and over again.

"No we wouldn't... there's just not enough parts to go around."

"We wouldn't want to have been the Hilton Sisters, always wondering... Yeah, it's better this way..."

"Well, we're Jewish so our concept is a little different... but if we aren't together, we'll have a pretty good idea where we've gone too."

"Depends on how it's spread... A blood infection we'd both get. A cold maybe one of us will get and the other doesn't. A heart attack or a stroke... well, we don't like to think about that too much."

"We both get the same signal when that fills up... that too... and we get the same signals from that too... Oh yeah..."

"We have three of them so we get extra cranky..."

"Yeah we do all right for ourselves... You'd be surprised..."

'Y'know... we never thought about that. Hey Jenny let's see your fingers... Huh... Whaddya know. You learn something new every day!"

"Our lawyer could probably file a habeas corpus... but you know the DA would just charge the other one with being an accessory. Anyway... we know 'people'... We wouldn't hafta worry too much about that if you know what we're sayin'..."

"We both have one... had to pass the tests on our own."

"Parking tickets yeah, but no moving violations. We do get pulled over a lot on account of the cop wanting to get a look at us."

"We're not poor, so we can pay our own way... but if one of us doesn't want to see a show or something we'll try to get in on one ticket."

"...ear plugs and a sleeping mask, or I'll bring a book."

"We have a seamstress but otherwise, we just get something a couple sizes bigger..."

"Damned if we know... We were babies then..."

"We live on a ranch so you learn to step lively pretty quick..."

"It feels like nothing really..."

"A tugging sensation maybe... Like pulling the dead skin off a blister?"

"We don't notice it much... but when one of us stubs a toe and gets to hopping around, it's like fifty pounds of dead weight just broke loose inside your skin."

"That's the thing with twins... Either they treat you like the you're same person or they overcompensate the other way..."

"Oh I've known them for so long, I don't even think about it... I figure they know who I'm talking to. Yeah, I can tell them apart... Yeah, even on the phone. Wouldn't you two like to know..."

"We know who we are... we try to pick stuff that compliments each others interests."

"No, we've not part of any circus... and no, we wouldn't want to be. We're doing this sort of as a favor for our home state..."
"Because... they're full of clowns... and clowns are... evil... Yeah, real nightmare fuel..."

"We were thinking photojournalism or going into filmmaking. Either way... we know somebody in the business..."

"Yeah, there have been people who've been mean to us.... but we've got friends and they'll stick up for us... and if someone really bugs us, we can just double head-butt 'em. That shuts 'em up real quick. You really don't wanna mess with hard-headed farm girls."

Eventually we'd get tired of standing, so after cueing Jenny to start herding people into a line we'd end the show by offering to autograph those giveaway postcards at a table set up for us. It's amazing how many Fair swag completists there were out there. They'd try to scam a couple extra cards to trade. We'd tell them there was bound to be a bunch of people who take a card out of some sort of pity and chuck 'em as soon as they were out of our line of sight. That was just a guess on our part but we did get an awful lot of 'what brave girls you are' comments from the old ladies.

Between shows we'd have a cup of coffee and a smoke inside the concession stand while Jen and Heather reset the equipment for the next show. Even though we could've gotten a free boxed lunch from our pavilion, we ended up getting burgers at one of the Brass Rail stands on account of us being in the mood for grilled cow patties. After the third show we were pretty fagged out so we took a 'Siamese cat-nap' in one of those 'rest alcoves' at the Simmons Beautyrest pavilion and yes, that was the caption on the picture taken of us there.

Our last show started well into the evening and ended up being a birthday party in front of an audience. Jenny had dispensed with her introduction and instead presented us with a sheet cake done up to look like that Chinese 'Yin Yang' symbol. After blowing out the twenty-five candles arranged in a Star of David, we passed slices of cake around to whoever wanted some. No birthday party would be complete without presents and a few of the other pavilion were kind enough to send us items from their gift shops. There wasn't anything to write home about except that the Thailand pavilion gave us a lovely pair of their native dolls 'with compliments of the Kingdom of Siam'.

Even with that nap, we were pretty much done for the day. We still had some of those postcards left over so while Jenny and Heather packed away our equipment, we signed a few more autographs and tried to squeak out a few more answers to the same lot of questions. When the cards finally ran out, we stood up, thanked everyone for helping us celebrate our twenty-fifth birthday and asked if there was anything any of them wanted to know that hadn't been asked yet.

"I do have a question if it hasn't been asked yet..."

It would have to be Walter Drake at the end of a long day. This better be good.

"We've had our fair share of sisterly squabbles when we were younger... and there was a time when we couldn't speak to each other on account of an ear infection... but no, we've pretty much gotten along fine. Why do you ask?"

We had a pretty good idea why. Looking around we could see that Jenny had one of those hand truck with extra wheels and a switchable handle that let you turn it into a luggage trolley. Looks like they'll get the car loaded in one go. Mister Drake continued.

"But you've had disagreements in the past that you've had to work out between yourselves..."

"Well, we kinda don't have a choice. Having a choice makes all the difference. Yeah... we could be fighting every six ways till Tuesday and we're still gonna be stuck next to each other."

"OK... So what do you do when you have a choice?"

"We make a choice... Not to be a hardass but we've been around the block enough times to know who's worth our time or not."

"Haven't you ever been wrong about somebody?"

"We've been unsure about some people at first.... but they show themselves soon enough..."

"So if someone's been wrong about you..."

"We know where you're going with this... Look... we know we're an eyeful for some people and we can take a little kidding around at our expense... one Halloween we went as those Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp... But if you're gonna go for the throat or 'pull rank' on us, it's pretty much off to the camps with ya. Don't pass go. Don't collect two hundred dollars."

He stood silent for a spell as if trying to find something else to say but we could see he was looking for Jenny to see if she had any reaction.

"Your friend said to meet us at the Rheingold pavilion," whispered Heather as she left us to help Jenny with our equipment.