Fredania woke one noon and pushed his blond spikes out of his blue Mickey Mouse sleeping bag and looked around. Where was the rest of Seventh Deli? Had they abandoned him, just as Shelley did?? But then he saw a note written on the back of a Gatorade label, pinned to the outside of his sleeping bag. (Pinned with an alligator quill to the top of Mickey’s nose, as a matter of fact. A cruel deed, indeed.) “Cool!” thought Fredania. “Glitter pen!”
The note read: “Bob cancelled the next couple of gigs. Melvin needed some down time to work on his levitation, and S.P.A.M. is getting measured for a new cape, in Braves colors. See you next Friday!”
The note was signed---well, okay, it wasn’t signed, but there was a little drawing of a stick figure with bagpipes, or else a little drawing of the back entrance to Neiman-Marcus. Fredania wasn’t sure which.
“Cool!” thought Fredania. “I’ll go home and visit Auntie Em.” But when he tried to think of the name of “home,” so many towns came to mind that he wasn’t sure which was the right one.
“Cool!” thought Fredania. “Then I’ll head to South of the Border and see if the monkey’s back yet.”
So he rolled his fiddle, his bow, and his extra shoes--the special ones--inside his sleeping bag, tied it with his very last frond, and slung it over his shoulder. Luckily for him, at that very instant, a bus pulled up at the side of the road, for that’s where he’d been sleeping after he was rolled from the Purple Prowler during the night. (Well, Bob needed some room for his sewing kit. That’s why.)
“South of the Border!” Fredania told the driver, who was wearing a plaid serape. (McJuarez tartan, hunting, in muted shades of purple, orange, and lime.)
Fredania was still a little sleepy, so he dozed off on the back seat of the bus, with his spikes staying all nice and messy, cradled on Mickey’s tum-tum. He woke when the bus driver called out, “Hokay, we’re heere!”
“Cool!” thought Fredania. “Won’t Bob be happy when I tell him about finding the monkey!” But nothing looked familiar, and he ended up in a sombrero shop. On the floor was a large, very large, hat.
“Cool!” thought Fredania. He pulled off his sandals, got out his fiddle and the “special” shoes from his sleeping bag, and, hopping just a little to keep his balance, tied them on. He danced in circles around the big sombrero, fiddling himself a jig to dance by. Then, while all the people on the street applauded and shouted, “Ole!” he put the sombrero on his spikes, held tight to his fiddle, clicked his taps together three times, and squenching his menthol-blue eyes tight, chanted, “There’s no place like Moosejaw, there’s no place like Moosejaw...” and in the flash of a slow dissolve to black and white, found himself exactly there!
He kept the sombrero and later gave it to a girl who played the bodhran in an undercover band, because she reminded him so very much of his Auntie Em. In her younger days, of course.
What? You didn't like it? Oh, you DID!! Good! Still, you need to go back to the thingie, right? Oh, well, okay! In THAT case, go BACK to the thingie then!
