Preparing for tomorrow's Traveling Worm Show, I'm feeling inarticulate. A bendy bus is an articulated motor coach, often used for shuttling to major events. Marathons. Balloon festivals. Graduations. My old red dictionary indicates articulated means having joints. Hookah-smoking caterpillars?
A caterpillar is not a worm. A worm cocoon is not a chrysalis, but the term for an egg case.*
Not a basket case, but I've got a few too many billiard balls in the air and not enough pockets. Thank heaven baize rhymes with maize.
Sitting in the nap room, patting the back of the most reluctant napper with my left hand, and doing a fiendish Will Shortz crossword puzzle with my right... Six letter attendee of the Potsdam Conference?
S T A L I N doesn't work. Maybe Potsdam was WWI. I used to know history, but now Yoosta sounds like a small unreliable car make imported from a developing nation.
Yoosta know that smart skinny Ivy League sickly President's name. Can see his face on the page of Presidents in the old encyclopedia, Vol. 14, Pil-Raf. Died in office. Was Teddy his VP? What was his name?? No. I'm getting way out there, standing in my field. Awkwardly going left or right.
Yet again, I look up gee and haw. Grateful I'm not driving a team of oxen. As unsuited as I am to sing worm songs, I would be a greater failure mushing an Alaskan sled team of huskies or malamutes. Nice to visualize when it is ninety-nine degrees, though.
*Each adult worm can produce 3-4 cocoons per week. Each cocoon will produce 3-4 surviving hatchling baby worms. Plan to skip through the hermaphroditic sex life of worms pretty fast with the audience of 6-12 year olds. More interesting to me is that worms don't parent. They don't drive the kids to ballet class or sit on the soccer sidelines. They don't pack lunchboxes.
© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder
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