An uneventful and rainy day here in New York, punctuated only by a trip out to Huntington for my semi-regular writing group. My prompt this week, such as it was, was a recipe for a high-rising pancake in GQ. This wasn’t exactly my choice, but we draw inspiration where we can. Not so sure about this piece — I had fun writing it, and I think these exercises are good crafting skills regardless, but it’s not something I see much hope for developing. It’s a silly little disposable semi-story, and as such I have no problem posting it here:
“The High-Rise Pancake”
So this was it. They were kicking Jerry out of the architectural program, and he would be lucky if he didn’t lose his scholarship and get booted from State altogether.
Designing an apartment complex that resembled a pancake, complete with a light, fluffy interior to a butter- and syrup-coated exterior, probably hadn’t been his smartest move ever. But was it really his fault that the griddle had malfunctioned, then exploded, in class? It was just a short circuit and a splash or two of buttermilk batter; no permanent damage had been done. Imagine if he had followed his original model’s design specs and included blueberries!
But according to his professor, Jerry didn’t take his studies seriously, and this was just the final straw in a long line of…well, many other straws. Enough straw, perhaps, to build that cabana shaped like a giant straw hat that Jerry had designed for the first midterm. His professor had called that impractical, too, however, and she certainly hadn’t appreciated the coconut rum and orchid leis he had unsuccessfully tried to distribute in class.
“It’s all about setting a mood!” he had insisted.
“You can’t drink in class and your building has no doors,” his professor countered.
And so that was that. No one in the degree program had any appreciation of art, of whimsy, of the avant-garde. You couldn’t make a building look like a pancake, or a hat, or even a eighteen-foot-tall Scarlett Johansson — both for anatomical and legal reasons, apparently. The only thing the dean and his subordinates cared about was practicality, efficiency — dull, dry buildings no better or different than the dull, dry buildings already all over campus.
“Maybe you should move into the art department or something,” his advisor suggested.
“My scholarship won’t pay for that,” Jerry said.
“Son, you convinced the scholarship board you had some talent for architecture. Either they like you a lot or they’re clinically insane. Convincing them their money and your time are better applied somewhere else should be easy by comparison.”
“So you’re saying you wouldn’t want to live in a giant pancake?”
The “ending” is more than a little rushed — enough that it deserves those air-quotes — but again, I had fun. Oh, and yeah, Scarlett Johansson was on the GQ cover. Again, we just go where the muse decides to lead us.
Do you think there are Marvel vs. DC arguments in the Johansson/Reynolds household, with the former playing Black Widow in Iron Man 2 and the latter soon to be Green Lantern on screen? I’m sure there must be, right?