Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (25 page)

Ultra-Short Stories

Ernest Hemingway is famous for his economy with the written word. In novels like
The Old Man and the Sea
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, his sentences are spare and his adjectives sparer. But his sparest work? Just six words: “For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

Legend says that “Papa” Hemingway wrote this poignant line after being bet $10 that he couldn’t write a story of six words or less. Even if it doesn’t seem to meet the criteria of a real short story, there are two things to keep in mind: one, that the bet was all about writing a story of six words or less. Two, over the years numerous literary experts have included this “story” in their accounts of micro-fiction.

The “story” doesn’t have a plot, resolution, or a back story of its own, but it does show how effectively a few words can deliver emotional impact—and make you want to know the rest of the story.

Hemingway wasn’t the first to find extremely short-form fiction pleasing. From
Aesop’s Fables
to Chekhov to O. Henry and beyond, writers have long packed punches in what is referred to variously as flash, micro, sudden, postcard, short-short, quick, minutes, furious, and skinny fiction.

Even if Hemingway didn’t consider the “baby shoes” story his masterpiece, it’s pretty close to genius for economy of scale. While writing less rather than more might sound like working less rather than more, nothing could be further from the truth. Flash fiction is rarely, if ever, composed in a flash of inspiration.

In the past several decades, the shortest fiction has enjoyed a renaissance among serious literary writers, but its most ardent practitioners are usually fantasy and science-fiction writers, which is where the term “nanofiction” probably gained popularity. Nanofiction, or “55 Fiction,” is strictly limited to 55 words.

55 Fiction developed from a writing contest run by
New Times
magazine in 1987 and must contain at least one character, a setting, and a plot that includes conflict and resolution. Drama, suspense, and shock are important elements, too. Many devotees of “55 Fiction” try to include a “last sentence shock.”

Next in line of increasingly longer short fiction is “The 69er,” consisting of—you guessed it—69 words. However, its slightly longer (100-word) counterpart, “The Drabble,” has a more interesting back story.

The Drabble has the distinction of being the only literary genre to grow out of a
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
publication. In the British comedy troupe’s 1971
Big Red Book
, Drabble was a word game where the first person to write a novel wins. While this was of course a tongue-in-cheek jab at the popular board game Scrabble, where players compete to build words for points, Drabble captured the imagination of British science-fiction circles, and during the 1980s at Birmingham University, the first 100-word Drabbles were born.

Very short stories aren’t written just in English. In France, they’re known as
nouvelles
, and in China, there are lots of names for them: “little short story,” “pocket-size story,” “minute-long story,” “palm-sized story,” and the “smoke-long story” (one cigarette’s worth of reading). But the latest innovation in short fiction comes from Japan: cell-phone novels. These backlit books aren’t just read
on tiny screens; they’re composed on them, too. A new generation of cell-phone novelists has sprung up, and now that group is doing what all aspiring novelists do: trying to get their work published in print editions.

Most “flash fiction” is a bit longer, from 300 to 1,000 words. Its proponents think that anything over 1,000 words is a short story (or at least a “short short”). If this sounds a bit picky, remember—these are people ready to pick a story down to its bones.

Like a good poem, a good flashfic story can have a “lightbulb” quality, illuminating an image, an emotion, or an experience so that its intensity stays with the reader. But a good flashfic story isn’t necessarily a poem. A poem doesn’t have to have a beginning, a middle, and end—flash fiction does.

Although some types of very short fiction originated in the genre communities (science fiction, suspense, and so on), today these shortest of shorts aren’t given short shrift by the best writers. Venerable authors like John Updike, Francine Prose, Amy Hempel, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond Carver tried their hands at flash fiction, proving that Hemingway’s idea was no flash in the pan.

Thalberg was president of MGM Studios in the 1920s and ’30s. He sought to make films more respectable, and not just profitable. After he died of pneumonia in 1936 at age 37, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences began presenting the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. It’s a lifetime achievement award presented at the Oscars to a well-established director or producer. Past winners include Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and Billy Wilder.

Emma Peel

Choosing one Golden Plunger-worthy sidekick was tough—there have been so many great ones through the ages: Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson, Ralph Cramden’s Ed Norton, Frodo’s Samwise, Lucy’s Ethel, Andy Taylor’s Barney Fife, Mary’s Rhoda, Batman’s Robin, Seinfeld’s Costanza . . . the list is so long! In their own unique ways they all did what every great sidekick must do: made their star brighter without making their own
too
bright. Some simply provide comic relief; some give an otherwise aloof star opportunities to show emotion; some provide sexual tension; some even help highlight a star’s negative aspects, thereby making the character more human. (Think of Dr. Watson and Holmes’s cocaine habit.) It’s a difficult job—but there have been many masters. But we chose one of the most unique sidekicks in history.

On October 2, 1965, British TV viewers sat down in front of their sets and watched the following scene unfold: An impeccably dressed, 40-ish British gentleman in a black bowler hat and carrying an umbrella/walking stick arrives at the apartment of an attractive, dark-haired woman in her late 20s. She is dressed in a tight, black leather body suit and is holding a fencing epee. He pours tea. She makes him duel her for cream for the tea, and during the sometimes seemingly real battle the two engage in witty verbal repartee rife with sexual tension. She is clearly the better fencer, but he is more devious—and he wins when he tricks her
and “ties her up” in a curtain . . . and then smacks her on the bottom with his epee. “That was very, very dirty,” she says . . . and so began the partnership of star secret agent John Steed and sidekick Emma Peel in the off-kilter, darkly humorous, surreal British spy series,
The Avengers
.

Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel gets our award for not only being a great sidekick, but doing it in a way that reached beyond the television screen. Emma Peel was a breakthrough character for women in television. Before “women’s liberation” was a household phrase, she was a hero to young female viewers around the world. Before then, playing a female sidekick to a secret agent would have meant being easily frightened and prone to fainting, and being saved from bad guys by the star every week. And while sex appeal was certainly a part of her character, Peel was no fainter: during the three years she was on the show, she saved Steed as often as he saved her.

In that same episode, titled “The Town of No Return,” Mrs. Peel (she’s a widow) mentions that she has just finished writing an article for a respected science journal, disposes of two dangerous criminals with martial arts moves, knocks back a few brandies, and finishes the show driving off on a moped . . . with Steed sitting side-saddle behind her. Steed was the star of the show, so he of course performed a bit more of the bad-guy-beating, but Peel was clearly his match in many ways, and he obviously liked and respected her—and it made Steel (played by Patrick Macnee) seem more human and likeable.

Rigg wasn’t the first sidekick to John Steed:
The Avengers
debuted in 1961 with a male partner for the spy. In 1962 Honor Blackman, best known as the Bond girl “Pussy Galore” in 1964’s
Goldfinger
, became Steed’s first female sidekick as Dr. (of anthropology) Catherine Gale. Like Peel, she was attractive, independently wealthy, intelligent, and knowledgeable in martial arts and weaponry—but, while the show was very popular, it hadn’t matured yet. Steed was portrayed as a trench coat-wearing macho man during this period, and the humor had not yet developed the level of sophistication it later would. In any case, in 1964 Blackman quit the show when she was offered the role in the Bond film.

That year more than 60 actresses showed up at Associated British Corporation studios in London to audition for the part. Among them was a 26-year-old actress from London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, Diana Rigg. She had never seen the show before. But did she get the part? Not at first. Another actress, Elizabeth Shepherd (she has played small parts in numerous films, including 1978’s
Damien: Omen II
) got it, but one-and-a-half episodes into taping for the 1965 season the producers decided she wasn’t right for the part—and Rigg got the job.

The Martini

The martini has many creation myths, but most historians of potent potables agree that its precursor, “the Martinez,” was first mixed up somewhere in California in the mid-19th century. Whether it was in San Francisco for an old miner en route to the town of Martinez, or in the town itself, the story always includes a miner placing a gold nugget on the bar and asking for “something special.”

The San Francisco variation involves the bartender at the city’s Occidental Hotel in the 1850s or ’60s. He published his recipe in his 1887
Jerry Thomas’ Bar-tender’s Guide
, and it included a maraschino cherry, a small wineglass of sweet (red) vermouth, Old Tom’s Gin (sweetened), and “gum syrup” if the guest “prefers it very sweet.”

That teeth-aching recipe eventually evolved into a much more bracing cocktail. By about 1910, the gin-based martini had made its mark. Today, a strictly classic martini consists of unequal portions of gin and dry vermouth (in a ratio of somewhere between 2:1 and 15:1) served chilled, in a conical stemmed glass, garnished with either a green olive or a lemon twist. The only deviation allowed is less vermouth . . . more on that in a moment.

A martini is a “short drink,” meaning that it consists primarily of alcohol, and that’s what gives it its tingle. (A “long drink” involves alcohol with some type of nonalcoholic mixer like soda or juice.) When you order a classic martini from a bartender, you’ll get a cold glass of the hard stuff, making it hard to believe that any work got done when the three-martini lunch was a staple of the businessman’s day.