More Esther Von Vandervester

An excerpt of my entry in the contest for the FSM t-shirt yesterday…

“Now that the Great Oracle Squib has indeed put into play the contest of wit and strength, if a blood descendant of Esther’s [namely me] does not end up with said Most High Garment, all colors we currently enjoy will fade to medium-ish brown and everyone will start playing Zamphar’s Greatest Slidewhistle Hits on loudspeakers on all known corners of Earth. (On Sundays the playlist will switch to “Loud Crying Babies on Airplanes, ” alternated by “Nails On Chalkboards I Have Loved,” and “Wild Hogs On Helium.” One third of Earth’s people will go crazy and jump off high buildings. One third will sit glued to re-runs of “Fishin’ With Bud & Betsy.” The final third will take up bowling.”

Nee Von Vandervester

Above is a direct descendant of the cat who was spared on Esther Von Vandervester’s 16th birthday.  And below is my latest entry in Squib’s great big blue shirt competition.  What do YOU think happens next to Esther?

“At breakfast on the day of my great-grandmother, Esther Von Vandervester’s sixteenth birthday she flounced to the table dressed in navy silk to find a gilt-wrapped package to the left of her croissant plate — a bit marmalade-smudged on the ribbon but largely untouched by the uglinesses that her life of ease and privilege had theretofore sheltered her from.

As her milky-white hands reached to untie the ribbon, her 81-year-old dad choked on some bacon, keeled back onto a very surprised cat and died.

The cat escaped injury.

It wasn’t until a week after the funeral that Esther recalled the gift but it was nowhere to be found. No one remembered having seen it, not even the bossy chef who didn’t miss much in the household.

Esther suspected the butler — she was pretty sure she’d seen him stealing eggs from the coop the autumn before. So she went through his dresser drawers that afternoon while he was out at his knitting club. And lo! She found said still- wrapped package under his copies of Nottingham Knits, next to his undies and Chinese fans.

In her room a minute later, with door locked, she tore the wrapping off to reveal an obviously ancient book. Cotton Dyeing Today.

“How strange,” she mused, just before angry raps rained on her bedroom door…”

Because of Esther Von Weenerchopper

This lady, a poet whose wonderful whacky blog I enjoy has a contest going on to win a new blue Flying Spaghetti Monster tee.  Entrants have to write why the shirt should be theirs and no one else’s.

This is what I just submitted… 

Surely the shirt should be mine because in February 1943 my great-grandmother Esther Von Weenerchopper, sole founder of the Hot-On Cotton Company est. 1926 — at risk of being shot on sight (or worse,) trudged eighteen miles at night during the worst blizzard in sixty-two years to smuggle into a Warsaw brothel the only known copy of “Cotton-Dyeing Today” beneath her still-ample-but-somewhat-shrinking breasts, under her threadbare cloak,  past numerous stations of SS guards — not three hours before she finally succumbed alone in her unheated room on an unupholstered old Lutheran church pew that served as her bed,  to the ravages of pleurisy — not be found until six days later by her only son who had finally escaped a Russian Gulag after nine years of unlawful incarceration, blind in both eyes, deaf in his right ear and without benefit of his left big toe, (direct results of the inmate riot and ensuing carnage which so enabled his escape two months earlier,) after which the Nuns-of-Perpetual-Glad-Tidings found him in a ditch and helped him get back to Warsaw.

Only from that single copy in existence of “Cotton Dyeing Today” are we, in these modern times able to dye such a fetching time-honored shade of blue on Flying Spaghetti Monster tees.

Now, shouldn’t that tee be mine?!