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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - Stage Manager: You no doubt remember Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. Nice, quiet town, unfamiliar with the gaze of public scrutiny. At one time, perhaps, but no more. I have been asked by the city fathers, in my capacity as spokesman and conscience of our little town, to offer an apology from the citizens of Grover's Corners to you for our recent scandalous behavior. Like many small-town folks, we in Grover's Corners care very deeply about the war effort. And it was that effort we believed we were assisting when we fell for the smooth talk of a traveling salesman. Over here is our Town Hall, and this is where the stranger, while he spoke honeyed words of our patriotic duties, brought an assortment of calendars out of his suitcase. Each was created in a small town like our own and featured, each month, a tasteful photograph of one or more citizens of that town in the buff. Naturally, we were shocked. Had these people lost their senses? No, the stranger assured us. Each town had produced the calendars—with his help—in an effort to raise charitable donations. The people of Deerfield, for example, had let themselves be photographed in their natural states to battle the influenza. Rochester had set its sights on rickets. And we, the stranger told us, would be participating in a furtherance of the war effort. Well, the phrase "the war effort" is a siren's song to the good people of Grover's Corners. After far too swift and far too polite a debate, we agreed to the stranger's terms, and the messy business began. This is Elm Street. Yonder is the home of the widow Foster, and out back is her garden. There she stood, naked as the day she was born, for the camera of that wandering salesman, next to the heliotrope she tends to year-in and year-out. Old Mr. Foster loved that heliotrope, and he loved the naked bosom of his dearest Barbara, that day exposed to a gentle breeze and a gathered crowd of children. Over here on Main Street is the bank. Up there is the window of the office of banker Cartwright, the richest man in town. He was also the only man brave enough to go full frontal nude, on the condition he be given the privilege of the month of January. The first month, he believed, befitted a man of his stature. His "stature" turned out to be less than impressive, though, standing in his home before a roaring fire in nothing but his socks and garters. Here's the Presbyterian Church. The Protestants took more readily to the calendar than the Catholics. The tenor section of the choir posed in a sort of boudoir setting, stretched on velvet couches, draped in gauzy veils. Who knew Grover's Corners had such things? Who knew the Presbyterians had such things? The Methodists, maybe. But there you are. Lives you would never guess at are lived behind closed doors. The choir was April, the month of rebirth. And right here's a big butternut tree. You remember Rebecca Gibbs. Here in the Gibbs's home, she lost much more than her youth to the traveling salesman. He was a charmer. A young girl of eighteen she was at the time, and had a sweetheart in France. No more, though. The sweetheart hasn't been back to Grover's Corners since the end of the Great War. Rebecca works at Morgan's now, serving up ice-cream sodas. Her month was August. We burned the calendars in huge bonfires, but few were thrown in with that month intact. Many a wife and mother in our town have searched in dresser drawers and under beds, but have not found where the men and boys stashed Miss Gibbs. We're sorry. We hope this apology squares us with you and with the Office of Postal Inspection. The stranger's charity was, of course, false, and when he skipped town with the negatives, he took our innocence with him. We ask for an end to the editorials and jokes. We are not, as one wag remarked, a "nudist colony waiting to happen." We're just a small, naive town. Well, here comes Constable Warren on his rounds. Good night.
OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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