Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (16 page)

Anonymous

Once I Wasn’t.

Then I Was.

Now I ain’t Again.

Jane Smith

Here lies Jane Smith, wife of Thomas Smith, Marble cutter.

Monuments of the same style, $350.

H. J. Daniel’s

Epitaph for His Wife

To follow you I’m not content.

How do I know which way you went?

In Vermont:

John Barnes

Sacred to the memory of my husband John Barnes

Who died January 3, 1803.

His comely young widow,

Aged 23, has many qualifications of a good wife,

And yearns to be comforted.

In France:

Anonymous

I am anxiously expecting you — AD 1827

Here I am. — AD 1867

Wood

Here lies one Wood

Enclosed in Wood

One Wood within another.

One of these Woods,

Is very good

We cannot praise the other.

In England:

William Wiseman

Here lies the body of W. W.

He comes no more

To trouble you, trouble you

Where he’s gone or how he fares,

Nobody knows & nobody cares.

In Pawtucket, R.I. (on a boulder):

William P. Rothwell, M.D.

This is on me.

Comic book quiz: Q. Who was Clark Kent’s high school sweetheart? A. Lana Lang.

AT THE AUCTION

What do you think the very first G.I. Joe is worth? How about Orson Welles’s Oscar for writing Citizen Kane? Elvis’s tooth? (How much are the answers worth to you?
)

A
MERICA’S FIGHTING MAN
What would you pay for the very first action figure ever made? When G.I. Joe’s creator, Don Levine, put it up for auction, he was certain it would fetch a lot—perhaps even break records.

The former Hasbro executive and Korean War veteran designed the toy in 1963 as a boy’s answer to Mattel’s Barbie Doll. And to make sure boys wouldn’t be too embarrassed to play with a doll, Levine coined the term “action figure.”

Forty years later, he decided to put his one-of-a-kind prototype, made of hand-painted ceramic plastic and wearing hand-sewn clothes and boots, up for sale at Heritage Comic’s auction at the 2003 Comic-Con convention in San Diego. He expected to get about $600,000—which would have been more than any toy ever auctioned.

How much did he get? Nothing. The few bids the toy received didn’t even meet the reserve price of $250,000. A disappointed Levine put it back in his display cabinet.

But wait!
A month later, a comic book distributor named Stephen Geppi contacted Levine and offered him a whopping $200,000 for Joe #1. “I remember playing with G.I. Joe when I was a kid, and who’d have thought some 40 years later I would be buying the actual prototype,” Geppi said. “What a coup.”

AND THE LOSER IS…

In 1998 the American Film Institute rated
Citizen Kane
as the greatest American film ever made. Yet when the film was released in 1941, it won only one Academy Award—writer/director Orson Welles and co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Knowing that it would be highly prized in any Hollywood memorabilia collection, Welles’s daughter Beatrice decided to put the
Kane
Oscar on Christie’s auction block in June 2003. Ronald Colman’s Best Actor Oscar for
A Double Life
netted a whopping $174,500 when Christie’s sold it in 2002, and the auction house estimated that the
Kane
Oscar might bring as much as $400,000.

Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, has an alphabet of 267 letters.

But everything came to a screeching halt when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stopped the auction, citing an obscure 1951 Academy bylaw. They claimed that Beatrice Welles had no right to sell the Oscar because the bylaw stipulates that if an Oscar winner (or the winner’s heirs) ever offer the statuette for sale, it has to be offered to the Academy first…for $1.

The Plot Thickens

How was it possible that Ronald Colman’s family could sell their Oscar but Orson Welles’ daughter couldn’t sell hers, even though both prizes were awarded before 1951?

When Orson Welles died in 1985, the
Kane
Oscar was not among his effects. Believing it lost, his daughter asked the Academy for a replacement. They gave her one but made her sign a waiver promising to return it if she ever decided she didn’t want it.

Then in 1994, the original Oscar surfaced at Sotheby’s. It turned out that Welles had given the Oscar to cinematographer Gary Graver as a gift during the shooting of his unfinished film,
The Other Side of the Wind
, in 1974. Twenty years later, Graver, who had not signed a waiver (neither had Ronald Colman), sold the Oscar for $50,000 to Bay Holdings, who then auctioned it at Sotheby’s. When Beatrice Welles learned of the other statuette’s existence, she sued Graver and Bay Holdings and won.

Graver was not pleased. “He gave it to me and told me to keep it,” he said in a newspaper interview. “She never saw it before in her life. Orson had given it to me and she went to court and said, ‘I want it.’”

But Beatrice Welles got a taste of her own medicine when the Academy forced her to withdraw the
Kane
Oscar from the auction block. She is now stuck with two Oscars, her father’s original and the duplicate, together worth exactly…$2.

STAYIN’ ALIVE

In 1977, 23-year-old John Travolta strutted into disco history in the film
Saturday Night Fever
. Besides being a blockbuster hit—the film made $145 million at the box office—it also enjoyed critical success. Gene Siskel, the Chicago film critic known for his “thumbs up” TV show with Roger Ebert, declared it his favorite film. In fact, he loved the film so much that when the famous white polyester suit Travolta wore came up for sale at a charity auction in the 1980s, he leapt at the chance to own it. His final bid of $2,000 beat out Jane Fonda. The suit was his.

To ornithologists, the word
lore
refers to the space between a bird’s eye and its bill.

Though some chuckled at Siskel’s purchase, Siskel got the last laugh. In 1995 Christie’s sold the suit at auction for $145,500— the highest amount ever paid for an article of clothing at that time. Ironically, the record was broken in 1997 by the $225,000 paid for Princess Di’s blue velvet evening dress—the one she wore the night she danced with John Travolta at the White House.

*        *        *

OTHER CELEBRITY ITEMS UP FOR AUCTION

Elvis’s tooth.
In July 2003, Flo and Jesse Briggs, owners of a hair salon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, put the King’s tooth up for auction. The tooth purportedly once belonged to an old girlfriend, Linda Thompson (the Briggses got it from Startifacts, a company that sells celebrity memorabilia). Minimum bid for the tooth: $100,000. Number of legitimate bidders: 0. The tooth was pulled from auction.

JFK’s boxer shorts.
Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s personal secretary and her personal attendant auctioned off 300 “intimate” items belonging the Kennedys, including a yellowed pair of President Kennedy’s World War II Navy-issue cotton underwear. (No, not
that
kind of yellow.) They sold for $5,000. Also in the auction was a pair of JFK’s pajama bottoms, which went for $2,000.

Carly Simon’s secret.
As part of a charity fundraiser, Simon offered to reveal who the song “You’re So Vain” was written about. The catch: She agreed to tell only the highest bidder…and he’s not allowed to tell anyone else. NBC exec Dick Ebersol paid $50,000 for the privilege (he also gets a live rendition of the song, a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a vodka on the rocks). Now he knows…and he’s not telling.

El norte: Norway consumes more Mexican food than any other European nation.

WEDDING TRIVIA

From the
Bathroom Reader
archives, here are a few tidbits about the best day in Mrs. Uncle John’s life
.

Bridal shower.
If a desperate bride’s stingy father refused to give his daughter a dowry, friendly townspeople would “shower” her with gifts, allowing her to marry the man that she wanted.

Largest number of people married at the same time.
In 1995, 35,000 couples exchanged vows in Olympic Stadium in Seoul, Korea. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon presided over the ceremony.

The thriller’s gone.
Actress Elizabeth Taylor has been married eight times (so far). Her most recent wedding took place in 1991 at the home of Michael Jackson. Jackson paid for it. Cost: $1.5 million.

Tying the knot.
The phrase originated from the traditional girdle worn by Roman brides during the wedding ceremony. The girdle was tied together with hundreds of knots. (Untying the knots was the responsibility of her new husband.)

Longest engagement on record.
67 years, by a couple in Mexico City. (They were finally married in their 80s.)

White dress.
In modern America, a white dress is commonly thought to be a symbol of purity, but originally it signified joy. In Japan, white is used for mourning, but Japanese brides can still wear it—to show they are “dead to their parents.”

Milk bath.
To purify themselves before their wedding, Moroccan brides bathe in milk.

July 29, 1981.
The wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana was televised. Over 58 million Americans tuned in…even though it was on at 4 a.m.

Most decadent decorations?
For the 1850 wedding of his daughter, Louisiana plantation owner Charles Durand bought a shipload of spiders from China and released them along the mile-long road to his mansion. Then he brought in sacks of silver and gold dust from California. Using bellows, his slaves blew the dust onto the webs the spiders had built, creating a sparkling canopy, under which 2,000 guests walked to reach the altar that he’d built in the front yard.

The E. Coli bacteria has the fewest chromosomes: 1 pair.

HOAXMEISTER

Think everything you read in the newspaper or see on the news has been checked for accuracy? Think again. Sometimes the media will repeat whatever they’re told…and this guy set out to prove it
.

M
ONKEY SEE, MONKEY SAY
Joey Skaggs’s career as a hoax artist began in the mid-1960s when he first combined his art training with sociopolitical activism. He wanted to show that instead of being guardians of the truth, the media machine often runs stories without verifying the facts. And in proving his point, he perpetrated some pretty clever hoaxes.

HOAX #1:
A Cathouse for Dogs

In 1976 Skaggs ran an ad in the
Village Voice
for a dog bordello. For $50 Skaggs promised satisfaction for any sexually deprived Fido. Then he hosted a special “night in the cathouse for dogs” just for the media. A beautiful woman and her Saluki, both clad in tight red sweaters and bows, paraded up and down in front of the panting “clientele” (male dogs belonging to Skaggs’s friends). The ASPCA lodged a slew of protests and had Skaggs arrested (and indicted) for cruelty to animals. The event was even featured on an Emmy-nominated WABC News documentary. But the joke was on them—the “dog bordello” never existed.

HOAX #2:
Save the Geoduck!

It’s pronounced “gooey-duck” and it’s a long-necked clam native to Puget Sound, Washington, with a digging muscle that bears a striking resemblance to the male reproductive organ of a horse. In 1987 Skaggs posed as a doctor (Dr. Long) and staged a protest rally in front of the Japan Society. Why? Because according to “Dr. Long,” the geoduck was considered to be an aphrodisiac in Asia, and people were eating the mollusk into extinction. Although neither claim had the slightest basis in fact, Skaggs’s “Clamscam” was good enough to sucker WNBC, UPI, the German news magazine
Der Spiegel
, and a number of Japanese papers into reporting the story as fact.

All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

HOAX #3:
Miracle Roach Hormone Cure

Skaggs pretended to be an entomologist from Colombia named Dr. Josef Gregor in 1981. In an interview with WNBC-TV’s
Live at Five
, “Dr. Gregor” claimed to have graduated from the University of Bogota, and said his “Miracle Roach Hormone Cure” cured the common cold, acne, and menstrual cramps. An amazed Skaggs remarked later, “Nobody ever checked my credentials.” The interviewers didn’t realize they were being had until Dr. Gregor played his theme song—
La Cucaracha
.

HOAX #4:
Sergeant Bones and the Fat Squad

In 1986 Skaggs appeared on
Good Morning, America
as a former Marine Corps drill sergeant named Joe Bones, who was determined to stamp out obesity in the United States. Flanked by a squad of tough-looking commandos, Sergeant Bones announced that for “$300 a day plus expenses,” his “Fat Squad” would infiltrate an overweight client’s home and physically stop them from snacking. “You can hire us but you can’t fire us,” he deadpanned, staring into the camera. “Our commandos take no bribes.” Reporters from the
Philadelphia Enquirer
,
Washington Post
,
Miami Herald
, and the
New York Daily News
all believed—and ran with—the story.

HOAX #5:
Maqdananda, the Psychic Attorney

On April 1, 1994, Skaggs struck again with a 30-second TV spot in which he dressed like a swami. Seated on a pile of cushions, Maqdananda asked viewers, “Why deal with the legal system without knowing the outcome beforehand?” Along with normal third dimension legal issues—divorce, accidental injury, wills, trusts—Maqdananda claimed he could help renegotiate contracts made in past lives, sue for psychic surgery malpractice, and help rectify psychic injustices. “There is no statute of limitations in the psychic realm,” he said. Viewers just had to call the number at the bottom of their screen: 1-808-UCA-DADA. In Hawaii,
CNN Headline News
ran the spot 40 times during the week. When people called the number (and dozens did), they were greeted by the swami’s voice on an answering machine, saying, “I knew you’d call.” Skaggs later revealed that the swami—and his political statement about the proliferation of New Age gurus and ambulance-chasing attorneys—was all a hoax.