So Says The Mouse In My Hair

Mr. 500

Well it looks like mysterious #500 has no desire to show himself. But since I was all excited about doing something, I’m going to do it anyway. If you happen to be #500, and are reading this, please do not feel insulted at all the scandalous, possibly libelatory, things I’m going to say. You forfeited your right to an actual history a long time ago. And if you like this one better, feel free to use it, just don’t forget to say that I am your source.

So without further ado, is the life and times of Mr. 500, better known as Leo.

Born in 1978, Leo grew up in a small rural area of eastern Wisconsin. His father was a molecular biologist, who taught classes at the local community college where he met Leo’s mother, a janitor, one night as she was singing while mopping up a leaky toilet in the men’s room. He told her that he could make her a singing sensation, and the rest is history.

As a child Leo developed an exquisite taste for the local cheese, which to this day remain “fromages.” For many years, he had intended to inherit his ailing grandfather’s dairy farm, but his life bumbled off on to a dramatic side track (as lives are apt to do) one day in late ’96.

The actual details are a little sketchy, but as with all good stories, it’s worth talking about. As far as I have been able to piece together, it was around this time that Leo was first introduced to political science. It was his senior year in high school, and this interest manifested itself after Leo discovered that he had a crush on his current events teacher during the hooplah surrounding that year’s presidential election.

The crush never amounted to anything (though he still sends her Christmas cards each year), but his political fetish bloomed. Just about the time he was thinking about running for the local school board, he heard something on the radio about a woman named Monica Lowinski, and that night he had a dream, a vision really, so sacred that he will not speak of it to anyone.

But this dream, this vision, molded the course that he was on. He denounced his still ailing grandfather, and ran off to New York, the news mecca of our culture, to learn the ropes of what he now understood to be his calling in life: political cartooning.

And that’s where he is today, renting a flat in the big city, he has a drawing board and a pencil, and is perfectly content to read newspapers and watch CNN and FNC, and to apply his old fashioned Wisconsin humor to anything unlucky enough to cross his path. Alas for him, there is not so much money in this sort of life style, he’s been forced to take a second job as a soda jerk in a 50s style drug store where the women all wear poodle skirts and the young men don’t want to be square.

This is far and away not the life he envisioned for himself living in Wisconsin and tasting fromages, but when life goes the way you planned it, you know you must have taken a wrong turn back there somewhere.

I still intend to keep track of future readers who hit future special numbers. If you would like me to invent your biography, just be the lucky number (100x where x= any number ever) and e-mail me your name, and tell me how you want it to end. you can find me at selizawalden@yahoo.com

posted by Sarah Eliza @ 11:45 AM