Excelsior

Now that I remember the word, will I remember why I looked it up in the first place?Picnics, Bad Seeds, and Chekhov’s Gun.

I had a wonderful picnic last night with old friends in a park. Somewhere in our robust conversations, my mind struggled to find the word for the highly combustible packing material that was used to cushion antique breakables, tchotchkes, and kitsch treasures.

Peanuts?

No, that’s not it.

Crinkle paper?

Nope.

Wood wool? Shavings?

Finally I pulled out my phone and started a google search. You know how it us when enquiring minds won’t rest until we satisfy the thirst, and find the answer, no matter how obscure.

Finally, I found it. Excelsior.

Excelsior: fine curled wood shavings used especially for packing fragile items

I was ecstatic, finding the answer, quenching the thirst, winning.

But then I couldn’t remember why I looked it up in the first place.

What were we talking about?

I asked the group to help me remember our previous conversation, where this answer had been needed to fill in a gap, or lead to an interesting observation.

No one could remember. The conversations continued, and excelsior was left, on the tip of my tongue, just waiting for the next time I could use it.

What’s the point you may well ask? Let’s go down the rabbit hole…..

In grade 11, I was in a play called The Bad Seed. I played the janitor Leroy.

¹In the play, the lead character is a young girl named Rhoda, who is cute as a button, but also a bit of a sociopath. As the play progresses, so does her body count. Leroy, a bit of a bully himself, is the first to discover the true evil of Rhoda.

Leroy: You ask me and I say you don't even feel sorry about what happen to that poor little boy

Rhoda: Why should I feel sorry? It was Claude Daigle who got drowned, not me.

Rhoda to Leroy: You've figured out something that never happened. And so it's all lies. Now take your excelsior to the basement and put it where you can sleep on it ...

Spoiler Alert: excelsior, the fine shavings found in a gift box of old treasures, makes up the highly flammable bed that Leroy sleeps on. Now what could happen her? What could possibly go wrong?

TV Tropes notes that Rhoda’s red shoes and Leroy’s excelsior are examples of what they call Chekhov’s Guns.

And another rabbit hole emerges……..

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CHEKHOV’S GUN

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."— Anton Chekhov (From S. Shchukin, Memoirs. 1911.)

Chekhov, who was the master of the short story, gave this advice:

If it's not essential, don't include it in the story. The term has come to mean an insignificant object that later turns out to be important.

The excelsior is the weapon little Rhoda uses to murder Leroy, burning him alive in his bed of wood shavings.

Our production was full of overacting, myself being a chief offender. However, I do remember being upstaged by my friend Earl, who came up with some business that distracted the audience from my theatrical brilliance. Or so I thought in my teenage narcissistic mind. In high school I excelled at playing sub-human intelligentsia, further refining my shuffles and mannerisms with the lead role in Flowers for Algernon ( made into the movie Charly), where I was again a mentally challenged adult, who undergoes a science experiment, turning him into an arrogant genius, then tragically morphing back into his shuffling self.

My performance was memorable enough to win a $500 bursary, which I promptly used to buy a Marantz stereo system.

Apparently John Waters, in his book Role Models, claimed that he wanted to be Rhoda Penmark, the titular antagonist of The Bad Seed. “I wanted to be Rhoda. I pretended I was her. Why? I wanted to strike fear in the hearts of my playmates.”

1. Photo of Henry Jones from WB movie The Bad Seed