A Rain of Frogs 

Zeitgeist is the Right Geist

The baby was named Oversight. Sophie Rae Shufflebeam picked her up from a dumpster behind the Pick ‘N’ Pay. She had been shopping for olives. Presumably some young mother-to-be had evacuated her bundle of joy and was not thrilled by the prospect of returning home to inquisitive parents. The baby, Oversight, had been saved for Sophie Rae’s arrival by the dumpster’s missed pickup that week.

“Wow, just look at you,” exclaimed Sophie Rae.

The baby gurgled happily and bonded with its new mom.

From home, Sophie called the trash haulers and they confirmed the missed pickup. Traffic was heavy on the upper west side. They were sorry and would be right over. Sophie Rae’s boyfriend, Brent, wasn’t any more thrilled by the baby than its biological mother had been. Brent sulked.

Sophie Rae loved scented candles. And she loved Brent. Chastity was Brent’s big thing this month; he ate only unstuffed black olives and avoided swallowing watermelon seeds. On Sophie Rae’s home front sex was for now off the menu. She lit up another candle and felt the need to nurture. And voilà, the next day there was Oversight.

“I’ll call her Oversight. ‘Cause they missed the pickup, see?” explained Sophie Rae to Brent.

“Om,” replied Brent, reaching for an olive.

Sophie knew a little about art; it was Good and Good For You. The closest she had come to Art was Phyllis Klosky’s graffiti improv group, The Phyllis Teens. That was high school; this was life and she mapped, right then and there, a career in Art for her new daughter.

Oversight was a comely child and, with time’s inexorable passage, grew to a normal young woman, quick of wit and suitably proportioned, delectable in every evocative dimension. Her adoptive mother only once mentioned that her studies in Art History would never turn into a paying proposition unless Oversight taught Art History.

“That’s alright, Ma,” agreed Oversight, “First I must be a Name.”

“You have a name,” said Sophie Rae.

“I will change it,” said Oversight. “Mom,” there was a pause. “I need a niche.”

Her mom, Sophie, caught the child’s drift at once. Together they Sought A Venue.

Brent’s flirtation with Chastity had extended itself into an eighteen year affair, so with free time, Sophie went with her only child, now also eighteen, to haunt the kitchens of performance art.

Oversight’s first presentations were favorably received. Naked, she danced expressively while upon her body a pair of slide projectors did a quick cut dissolve of color panels illustrating the Kama Sutra she and Sophie had nipped from the pages of coffee table art books. Performance nights were open studios; the artists had to wait their turns and were expected to furnish applause for the other hopefuls. This gave Oversight, now named Ova, and her mother time to apply serpentine designs to the young woman’s body. As an artist, Ova/Oversight was her own finest creation. This was attested by the swelling of attendance on the nights Ova performed. The management of the performance space, a free-wheeling artists’ cooperative always short on funds, decided to headline Ova and her work Shanghaied by Sisyphus.

Shanghaied by Sisyphus was a parable on the Futility of the Creative Process, Betrayal and Ultimate Surrender, loosely based on the allegorical myth of a Greek condemned to push a boulder uphill for all eternity. As the lights were dimmed, Ova pushed and writhed under a barrage of squirming color. Ova had substituted a scrap Volkswagen for the rock.

After some weeks, Sophie Rae noticed her daughter’s enthusiasm flagging. “It’s those funky guys, right?”

It was those funky guys. Eager faces now grown familiar crowded the performance space on successive nights as Ova straddled her Volkswagen and the projectors flashed ochre, sepia and serpent-toned greens and blues. From the avid attention riveted on the young woman’s perfect body, she correctly guessed these were not foreign car mechanics. These were perverts with sweaty palms. They were why Sister Wendy was on TV and never made personal appearances.

Lydia, the performance coop’s maîtresse de salle, instituted the practice of patting down ticket holders for contraband towels and lubricants. Attendees were allowed to bring along their contraband for an additional donation at the door. The performance space prospered.

The patting-down was popular, too.

Word got around and soon there were new faces and some forbidden cameras made it past Lydia’s inspection. The dream of getting a Name ended in a flash of photographic strobes as a uniformed officer switched on the house lights during a particularly energetic evening as Ova/Oversight actually rolled the Volkswagen off the stage and three were injured in a mad stampede for the exits.

“Oh, no! Look!” The pictures made the next morning’s editions. There, caught by the camera’s merciless lens, was Brent hastily buttoning a Plymouth Duster duster, a hand-loomed cottage tweed specialty, to cover his nakedness.

“Mom, do you think I went too far?”

Daughter and mother agreed: they should have used the hand brake. Night after night after that small knots of overcoated theatergoers brandishing towels clustered forlornly before the shuttered performance space. To a man they agreed Art should illumine a higher level of existence or help us achieve realization as human beings. Being unrealized raised their dudgeons. But to no avail.

“Mom, I need another niche, I think.”

Sophie Rae agreed. Brent had never returned home after that night, so she felt free to travel. The Midwest beckoned.

Ova recalled a pictorial essay of a show by students of the School of Visible Arts. One item was a cocktail dress made entirely of deli meats.

“Cold cuts, mom. That’s my niche.”

“It’s not everyone’s idea of a little black dress,” said Sophie. “But we can string pearl onions for a necklace.”

“The cold cuts speak. Semiotics and poststructuralism. The cheese is my idea. The onions are only accessorized,” said Ova.

Overcoated onlookers thronged to Sisyphus Sliced, which premiered at the Milwaukee Temple of Labor. It was December, an unheated space, and the overcoats stayed buttoned.

Cheese deforms, even in the peel-back slices, and the heat reflected by her mirror ball prisms caused a dripping catastrophe. The deli meat dress slid past Ova's knees. Spicy Genoa tallow flowed, her body glistened and the police arrived, this time accompanied by the Health Department. The optimum charge the prosecutors could devise was follicle abuse. This was to place a Latin word at the top of the indictment. The incriminating evidence was Ova’s total lack of body hair, which she shaved daily to prevent complications from mixing Velveeta and provolone with the hard salami and bologna plastered to her body.

Follicle abuse was new and strange, even in Milwaukee. The case was thrown out of court.

Sophie Rae reconciled with Brent, off olives and returned from celibacy.

“Chaste makes waste,” said Brent.

Ova taught Art History, for she now had a Name.

The dumpster baby returned to New York with her adoptive parents. Sophie Rae Shufflebeam lit scented candles and Brent sent out for pizza, no olives. And they all lived happily ever after.

 

RESOURCES:

Mother of all Art History Links pages http://www.art-design.umich.edu/mother/
Inside Art http://www.eduweb.com/insideart/

Technorati tags: Magical Realism, Sci-Fi, Art