Saturday, August 23, 2008

Mr. Dressup-what is really in your tickle trunk?

I was about 2 when my family decided to take in the town fair; not our town, someone else's town.  Our town was too small for a fair, or a hospital, which is why I was not delivered in my home town.  Instead my first breath, and my first near death expiriance took place in a town where the local paper mill provided most of the jobs and a foul stench that earned the coveted tile of "stinkiest town in Canada."  So if you are ever in Ontario, and feeling a little like you want to vomit, you may want to swing by... airsick bag in hand.  I am not sure what town we were in for this fair but it was evidently quite the hot bed of entertainment because the popular host of everyone's favorite tv show was there.  The loveable Mr.Dressup.  I had seen enough of his shows to know that he had a magic trunk that produced a different costume every time he opened it.  And for reasons that I can not fathom, my parents let my brother and I sneak into His tent, and for reasons that I can explain, we could not resist seeing what He had in his trunk.  It was at that moment when a very angry Ernie(his real name) burst in, eyes bulging, his face contorted with rage.  I have no memory of what happened next, possibly I have blocked it, due to the trauma.  My brother never got over it.  I continued to watch the tv show, always straining to see the contents of the tickle trunk whenever he opened it.  It became a proverbial Pandora's box for me, forbidden to know what was really inside, only ever seeing what he wanted me to see, his costume for the day.  Years later I would wonder why it didn't seem strange to anyone else that a little boy with no parents lived in a tree house alone in His back yard and spent so much time playing "games" with a grown man... this was around the same time that I noticed that the Smurfs lived in a communist cult like world and that there was only one girl, and all those blue brothers, who were totally subservient to Papa, and somehow smurfett managed to get pregnant... but I digress. Mr.Dressup, although a gifted artist(his sketches were excellent) clearly had issues, and maybe his secrets were buried there at the bottom of this trunk, buried beneath the disguises that we all wear, the clown, the good daughter, the rebel.  And that is pretty much life, we all have parts of us that we really don't want people to see, but eventually the contents of your tickle trunk will be strewn across the front lawn for the whole world to see, if not the whole world, than at least some curious toddler,in a tent in a small town fair, who now has access to the entire world... 

4 comments:

Keshia Larsen said...

I'm sitting here wanting to write some profound comment to your latest entry, but all I can think about is how much I never really did like mr.dressup... I was more of a Fred Penner fan. However, it is true, we all have our own "tickle trunk", and so many of us try so hard to hide the contents only to find that if we let more people peek into them, we'd realize that we're never alone in this world, and the contents of our trunk is often quite similar to the contents of everyone else's.

Koolk said...

I never ever gave Mr. Dressup a thought. I guess that is why I have friends like you...I don't even recall watching him that much (as you know my memory). I look forward to more thought provoking blurbs.

Kel said...

Hahaha..creepy Ernie and his plethera of costumes...

Halo BW said...

Interesting!

https://www.cekaja.com/info/jajaran-rekomendasi-tempat-ngopi-terbaik-di-bandung