CHRISTMAS SHORTS
2007

I. Petticoats and Projectiles
...is the title of the chapter of my NaNo that I was working on when Ted and Oliver broke from the action in the penny mart and started bickering over the sexual nature of a tinny Christmas carol on loop. AAH. Starring Teddy Mercher and Oliver Brandt from War of the Roses, my mostly failed NaNoWriMo, and set in the aforementioned convenience store.

On a stretch of abandoned boardwalk on the Jersey shore, TED-- scruffy and in his late twenties-- rides a grocery cart like a scooter down an aisle of a dingy convenience store draped with limp holiday decorations. OLIVER (a meticulously-dressed man of the same age) follows, torn between not wanting to be seen with TED and having to take absurd items out of the cart every other minute.

OLIVER: Nnng, not this one again. There’s something fishy about a place that plays a song like this incessantly.

TED: Birdy, you mean. The writer chick had some fetish.

OLIVER: (With raised eyebrows) What makes you think it was a woman?

TED: Come on, ‘my true love’? No self-respecting man would croon about his true love.

OLIVER: Michael Bolton, Barry White, Elton—

TED: Case in point. Exhibit B: Why were those lords a-leaping, eh wot? (Talking faster and faster in a fussy English accent) Why Jack be nimble, I’ll just take a quick nip over the candlestick after this smidge of brekkers, bally ho, wot wot, etc., stap me whiskers old fellow I seem to have—oh hang on, maybe a guy did write it.

OLIVER: Say what now?

TED: You’re the one who brought up Elton John.

OLIVER: Enough! It’s an innocent, if overplayed, Christmas carol. My niece’s class is pantomiming it Friday!

TED: (Under his breath) Nine maids a milking… milking what? (Beat, then with a wicked grin) Acting it out, you said? Maybe I will come to that, keep you company…