Part 5 Page 2

About a month after buying the rock polisher an obsession began to overtake me that I could not resist and could not explain. It was a feeding frenzy of buying every conceivable kind of jewelry-making equipment (none of which I knew how to work), literally hundreds of different of tools (none of which I knew how to use), and a bookshelf full of pamphlets, books, and manuals (none of which I bothered to read). I wasn't the slightest bit interested in jewelry. I didn't wear it or want to wear it, much less make it. The whole thing made about as much sense as if you, for instance, suddenly out of the blue starting to buy airplane engine tools, or thousands of dollars worth of surgical instruments, or closets full of taxidermy supplies.

I simply could not stop what I was doing, and I didn't tell anybody about it, not even Betty. It was like I had a brand new hobby: buying jewelry equipment. The moment I got my paycheck, I went straight to my jewelry supply catalogs (I had ordered dozens of them), and ordered more and more paraphernalia until my closets and drawers and bookshelves were crammed to either exploding or collapsing. I didn't even take things out of their packing boxes. Some things I ordered twice by mistake. To save money to finance this madness, I practically lived on spaghetti and lettuce. I wore holes in my shoes and patched them with duct tape. By the time the end of the month came, I would have barely enough money to pay the rent. My complete failure to have even successfully polished a single white rock did not stand in my way in the slightest.

I was so overwhelmed by this irrational buying mania that I forgot all about the second wishing day for the Lemures Stones (October the 5th), and when Betty called to remind me, I told her that I didn't think I should make another wish until the first one had been granted. It had been two months since the first wish, and I had sort of lost faith in the stone. It never occurred to me that I might be under the complete control of the Spell of the Lemures and that there was no turning back.

When the third wishing day arrived on November the 8th, I was in Florida making a television commercial for the Pepperidge Farm Bread Company, and my Lemures Stone was fifteen hundred miles away still sloshing around in a rock polisher. It wasn't available for wishing even if I had wanted to. The only wish I had at the time was to be back in New York so I could order a seven-hundred-dollar, one-hundred-pound, two-foot-by-three-foot, automatic-belt-feed, diamond-edged rock saw. (Seemed like a good idea at the time. Never can tell when you might need one.)

Bull Robot had grudgingly approved the commercial I had written to introduce a new line of frozen Danish pastries for Pepperidge Farm and was there with me in Florida being his usual literal-minded, haranguing self, worrying about every shot and predicting (I think, hoping for) a financial and creative disaster. He was turning what should have been a lovely trip to Florida at company expense into a 24-hour nightmare. Imagine the actor James Cagney as a psycho following you around all day and looking over your shoulder and muttering things in your ear. Click here and you'll get a good idea of what Bull Robot looked like.

Anyway, in those days Pepperidge Farm used the slogan, "Pepperidge Farm remembers..." to equate their products with the "good old days" (which are always assumed to have been better than what is going on in the now and then). I can take no credit for the slogan, for I inherited it when I began work on the account; but it was easy to remember and said just the right thing for the Company. (I remember being told by my predecessor when I took over the account that my most important job was to do but one thing: don't change anything. I didn't. But alas, sometime after I up and left, some idiot at the advertising agency, or maybe some dimwit at Pepperidge Farm, convinced somebody to drop the slogan and, in doing so, dumped their image by the roadside. Probably it was Robot. All during the filming of the commercial he kept harping about how could Pepperidge Farm "remember" anything that was frozen when great-grandma probably didn't even have a freezer. Nobody could get it into Robot's head that the remembrance of things past was of the good taste of homemade baking, not of grandma's deep freeze.

Our spokesman for the commercials was a wonderful actor named Parker Fennelley, who went by the stage name "Titus Moody" in the Pepperidge Farm commercials. He would invariably appear in the commercials driving an old-fashioned horse-drawn bread wagon and would deliver his pitch in an authentic Down East accent. How I, a Louisiana cracker, came to be the author of the words spoken by a crotchety old New Englander, is just one of the quirks of advertising, but it seemed to work. We got along fine and together created all sorts of "old sayings" that were made up on the spot and in the end created a library of New England farm dialogue that never existed at all. But it sounded good. And folks were gobbling up Pepperidge Farm bread like starving Maine-woods wolves.

Because of the cold weather in New England at the time, the production department had chosen a location in northern Florida that had rolling hills and farmhouses, a scene that could easily have been located in the Connecticut countryside. Of course, we had to dig up a few palm trees and move them out of sight, but the film company shooting the commercial had bribed the property owners with a little money (as little as possible) and a promise of possible stardom (note the frequent use of the word "possible") by letting them and their children be seen in the commercial from about a half mile away peeping through the uppermost gable window of the barn. Their faces were about as recognizable as squashed bugs on a windshield.

The scenario to introduce the new frozen Danish pastries was to have Titus Moody drive the bread wagon up a country road toward a farmhouse on a hill, and to have, sitting in the seat beside him, a Danish actress dressed in traditional Danish costume to help him deliver the sales pitch. (Get it? Danish Pasty, Danish actress, Danish accent? Danish culture and American culture together on a horse-drawn wagon? Who could forget a commercial like that?) I wish I could.

The actress was tall, young, beautiful, blonde, and terrified of horses. The minute she got on the wagon she was struck mute. She forgot every word of every line. She couldn't get past the "P" of Pepperidge Farm. It was 85 degrees and she was shaking like it was Christmas in Copenhagen. I truly felt sorry for her. It was decided that when she was supposed to be speaking, the camera would show Titus Moody listening; and she could record her lines off camera later, far away from the horses. With much reassurance from the horse trainer, she reluctantly agreed to ride on the wagon, and the filming began. At this point it was my job to hold the hand of the client representative from Pepperidge Farm and reassure him that everything was going to be all right, even if it wasn't.

The director shouted, "Action!", and the bread wagon with Titus at the helm and the actress beside him meandered slowly up the road toward the farmhouse, the camera keeping a respectful distance so as not to show the actress with her eyes closed and her hands clutching the wagon seat in a white-knuckled death grip. At one point, to add to the atmosphere, a trained dog ran happily across the road barking and wagging its tail. I prayed to several religions and deities that there wouldn't be a bolt-and-runaway scene out of a Saturday western, with the wagon overturning and spilling everybody into a pool of trampled apple turnovers. I watched Robot on the sideline mumbling to himself. I assumed he was praying to the Devil for a disaster. This round, my God won. The horses were dog lovers.

Next came a scene where Titus and the Danish model were telling the farmer and his wife (actors, not the property owners) about the delicious new frozen Danish pastries. Halfway through the scene, somebody in the background yelled "Cut!".

"What the hell are you doing?" asked the director, looking at Robot, who was storming toward him making a chopping motion with one hand against his wrist.

"Cut, cut, cut," said Robot.

The director jumped up out of his chair, jabbing his finger at his chest. "I'm the one who is directing this thing. If anybody says 'Cut', I say 'Cut'."

"Who's paying your salary?" asked Robot.

"You're violating union rules," said the director.

"What union? The Ate-Up-With-The-Dumb-Ass Union?" asked Robot. He reached for the box of pastries the farmer's wife was holding and shook it at the director. You could hear the pastries thunking back and forth inside. I thought of the Lemure's Stone tossing around in the rock polisher. And of my wish.

"What's supposed to be keeping these things frozen?" continued Robot. "We've got a hundred-year-old horse-drawn wagon wandering around in the blazing sun with a box full of frozen pastries that would be fruit soup by now. Is there a portable electric generator on board and a freezer? What century are we in? Nobody is going to believe this thing."

Amanda Pandayear waved her hand in the air like a school kid asking to go to the bathroom. "We could have an extension cord running out of the back of the wagon and the farmer's wife could plug it in..."

"Amanda!" said Robot, clinching his teeth together and moving his lips like an animated talking horse. "Were you dropped on your head when you were a child?"

"Just once," said Amanda. "Why?"

I patted Robot on the back."Try a little willing suspension of disbelief, Bull. We managed to sell about a million wagon-loads of frozen layer cakes and people weren't calling in asking, 'Where's the deep freeze?' Nobody in their right mind is even going to notice."

"I'm not in my right mind?"

"It depends on your definition of right," I said. "And your definition of mind."

"Watch it, Jack," he snapped.

"I am. I just hope the client isn't. You're not married to this one's sister."

Robot folded his arms and sulked. I thought about him biting into a nice road-apple Danish. (To any city folks who might ask: a road apple is farm talk for a ball of horse manure.)

The final scene was a corker.

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