The Queen of Sheba Meets Ben Hur

      Things were not looking up.  In fact they were literally looking down. Down, down, down.  Sheba's trainer tried desperately to get her to look up, but she just couldn't.  She was so into the nuggets of braised pork loin that she didn't notice anything around her: barring earthquakes, a plague of locusts and least of all, her co-star, Nick Heatherton.  

Who was Sheba?  Well, let's say she's the unaccountable star of the commercial for Queen of Sheba cat food.  A long-haired Persian, she had a thing for taking long licks at her paws just when the Director needed her to give long looks at Nick, dressed as Ben Hur.  But cats will be cats, and this particular cat, a real Queen of Sheba if there ever was one, was a total diva, taking long and luxurious naps between takes, eating up all her props and then throwing up fur balls during the live action takes.  Even Spielberg would've thrown in the towel a long time ago, and he's had to work with extra-terrestrials.  [Forgive the pun but Sheba was no alien to pulling star status, down to her lilac-colored faux fur padded trailer fitted with toy mice stuffed with catnip and posters of Morris on her walls!] 

Poor Nick Heatherton.  Yes, that Heatherton.  Son of Joey Heatherton, of "Love-in `69":  she of the psychedelic daisy on her bellybutton-Heatherton.  Even with all that glorious notoriety, it took two casting calls and a call to the producer to get her son, Nick to play second fiddle to a cat with a fur ball problem.

But here he was fresh from a stint at Shakespeare in the Park and an audition for some foreign film involving cannibal squid sex scenes [which he didn't get a callback for] and all he had was this cat food commercial.  And frankly he thought, this stinks.  There was only so much braised pork loin and Ocean Whitefish and Chunky Chicken he could muster in this pint-sized studio in Culver City, California.  For an actor who dreamt of sinking his teeth into Richard III or King Lear on Broadway, the sight of his co-star perpetually sinking its teeth into cat-sized cutlets was enough to turn him into Hamlet's ghost.  

The one bright spot in all this was a nice 'spot' the commercial would get in the Oscars, where he was sure to get noticed, but he was told not to bank on it, as a rival dog food company was also angling for it.   So for now, the only angling being done was by Sheba, fishing into the crystal goblet with her talons for the chunks of chicken which were oddly not of the sea.

He stared down at his old pair of Adidas.  Imagine that.  Full-on gladiator apparel matched with these ratty sneakers.  The esteemed director, Spike Jonze (who agreed to cast him because he had a secret crush on Nick's mom,) wanted to give it some kind of hipster edge, as well as promising him a possible lead in a new indie flick he was helping produce, so this was another plus.  Yet Nick, old school and a lover of classic Hollywood films thought this concession to hipster cool a bit excessive and longed for a real costume change.  Little did he know that it would come with the lifestyle change he was about to go through!

"Spike ..."

"What's up, Nicky?"

"Spike, it's Sheba."

"I know.  She can be tough.  You know the old saw about how you shouldn't work with actors and animals ...?," drawled the lanky director.

"Man, she's drooling all over me!"

"Ah, shucks.  Someone doubled the dosage on her catnip ..."

"What? Oh jeez, look man, I quit ..." said Nick, walking off the set.

Four weeks later, Nick Heatherton would be on the next flight to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of America's best beer and an Uncle Potsy that he hadn't seen since he had braces on his teeth.  Him, not Uncle Potsy.  For Nick had thrown in not only the towel on his acting career (at least for the moment) but also, the same aforementioned towel on the cat that threw up all over the silk sedan chair in fake Ancient Egypt.

The Perfidian Fire Insurance Company

The Perfidian Fire Insurance Company was founded in Milwaukee, WI on July 25th, 1811.  A rash of fires had engulfed the city in flames that fateful summer due to issues with safety standards at the breweries.  It was an optimum time to be insured.  Flash forward almost 200 years later, and this tiny, family-owned company, not quite a corporation, relying on the wits and wherefores of its forebears in ages past had been run over by the likes of Prudential and All-State Insurance companies that couldn't give a whit about fire insurance, that had seemed quaint at best, and irrelevant at worst.

Yet in fact, the Perfidian, as the locals liked to call it, took refuge and comfort in the fact that the employees of this almost Victorian company, took pride in their personal form of customer service: making house calls and building inspections, logging everything into a lined ledger the likes of which hadn't been seen since Ebeneezer Scrooge tallied up this takings on Christmas Eve.  So fire or no fire, the Perfidian was still one smokin' company, whose one claim to notoriety or fame, or whatever you'd like to call it was that they didn't own one single computer.  Everything was either handwritten in a beautiful cursive script, or typewritten.  It made for very aesthetic record-keeping.

So what does all this mean?  Well in point of fact, The Perfidian is where our hippie chick heroine, Noelle Christmas trundles off to work each day.  [At this point, you must be wondering if that's a made up name.]  We assure you, it's not.  Not quite.   In reality, her real name is Noelle Snow White Christmas, a burden she's had to bear each day at roll call in school; a burden she's borne beatifically, as she'd decided at 24, that she's finally loving her name.  I mean, no one else in Milwaukee could admit to having such a name, although it's a well-known fact that the Christmases had changed their name when they arrived in America more than 200 years ago from Grimalkin, for fear of witch hunts.  Noelle is proud to say that she could trace a faint line all the way back to the Saxe-Coburgs in Germany, to Prince Albert, the so-called architect of that first Christmas, hence the new appellation that stuck for generations.  Still, at first, it did seem to her a bit redundant that hers was not only a derivative of Christmas, as in Noel, but that she was also named after a beloved Disney character who was a kind of live-in maid/Mommy/girlfriend to more than a half-dozen little people.  Which brings us up to date to the present.  July 25th, 2011 was not only the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Perfidian Fire Insurance Company, but also the date set for the company's yearly Christmas in July annual event.  To this end, Noelle, unofficial head of company festivities, was in charge of coordinating these fun times, much like a cruise director onboard a ship.  She relished these times as well as looked at them with utter panic as she realized only a few weeks before that she hadn't a stitch to wear, despite all her forays into dressmaking and that she needed more than a fairy Godmother.  She needed a good thrift store to find something fun and appropriate for a festive mid-year cool Yule in the midst of sweltering 3-digit degrees of separation:  it was in the heat of such days that she wished she could separate her mind from the heat that enveloped Milwaukee and her skin like a bandage.  So, a trip to the one and only thrift store called The Silver Scream was in order, [named appropriately as it was, as the brainchild of a Norwegian immigrant who loved old Hollywood films, and was an art student at that, combining the scream of Munch with the silver screen.]  Noelle devoured fashion magazines the way most people had cereal for breakfast, so it was a no-brainer in that fever-addled brain of hers that she needed to get the latest gladiator sandals to go with the cute little summer rompers she had hoped to wear for "Christmas in July & 200 Years of Perfidian's Glory, 2011."  But she wanted something authentic to wear, as any old rip-off from Payless wouldn't do.  Besides, she was a size 10 and they never carried her size anywhere!  This was her cross to bear.  She had to either swallow her pride and sneak into the Men's Section of any department store, or get creative, as she had brilliantly put it, and go to the Hollywood-themed thrift store to search for the elusive gladiator sandals of yore.

Noelle & Nick : How Not to Meet Your Perfect Match in a Size 10

Vintage clothing stores.  What's not to love, right?  Unless it's 100 degrees in the shade and you're both reaching out for the last pair of Gladiator sandals and you're feeling sweaty, stinky, not to mention mean and nasty.


Which is basically what went down at The Silver Scream on a muggy, Saturday afternoon where our hero and heroine inevitably meet right next to a tag that read: "formerly worn by Charlton Heston in the film Ben Hur."  Okay, let's backtrack a little as that's what's commonly known as TMI or in this case, not that much information.  When you're a down-on-your-luck actor like Nick Heatherton (yes, son of that infamously famous go-go dancer from the love-in `60s tv show!) newly moved in, to a small town in Milwaukee, WI on a scorching day in July, and you're missing La-La Land (sort of) and all the auditions you're not being called back for, the sight of a hole-in-a-wall thrift store specializing in old Hollywood costumes is like finding a Dairy Queen in the middle of the Sahara during a particularly painful drought.  So you can imagine what it was like to see his favorite pair of film sandals in the plain light of day, within grabbing distance, pulled from his eager grasp by this rather grabby stranger.  Striking in a throwback hippie way and smelling of sweet honeysuckle but yes, grabby.  So what was a gent from the land of Angels supposed to do but be angelic, right?  Wrong.  


She may have had her paws on the little buckle that pieced the fragile wisps of leather together, but Nick held on to the soles with everything left in him that was good and holy, as he could almost hear the chariot wheels screetching to a halt.  Except, they weren't wheels.  They were the screetch of a woman who knew the price and the value of everything (which, in Oscar Wilde's point of view would not make her a cynic, but a good vintage shopper.):


"Excuse me, but I saw these first!," came the shriek from the hippie chick.


"Oh yeah?  Prove it.  I can tell you the exact scene from Ben Hur where these babies get chucked out of the chariot ... " 


"Film geek are we?," she snorted.  "That still doesn't give you first dibs.  I was here in this exact spot first, with my fingers right here on this ancient buckle.  And if I pull, you might as well kiss the whole thing bye-bye."


"Geek?  GEEK?," he shrieked in not so mock indignation.  "Have you checked out the infinite radness of this Brian Jonestown Massacre shirt signed by noone else but Anton fricken Newcombe himself? (as he stretches to point the autographed armpit)  It practically reeks of rad-ioactivity!  And you have the audacity to say I am some little film geek, Miss Hippie Chick?  And what would someone like you want with the great Mr. Heston's gear, anyway?  Besides, it's a size 10.  Why would some chick want a humongous pair of size TEN sandals, anyway?"


"I happen to need it for a special party ensemble I am cobbling together," she said, seething outwardly but inwardly ready to cry.


"Cobbling?  Who says that, Gepetto from Pinocchio?," he said, mockingly.


"It's a word apparently you wouldn't use, because you're too busy showing off your autographed armpits!"


"Ha!  You think you're so funny," he said as he made a grab for the ankle sandal strap.


"Whaa---?," she lunged forward to get a firmer grip and fell over the visual merchandising display of a chariot and into Nick's cave, or rather his chest.


The scent of honeysuckle suffused his nostrils with something heady and sweet and momentarily forgetting where he was, and why he was, he let go of Charlton Heston's personal effects and reached out to break her fall, enfolding her awkwardly in his arms.


"Rad-ee-o-activity?," she lay in a heap, laughing hysterically.