Please note first of all that strange encounters proliferate in my odd little universe. This is how it has always gone down, so maybe I'm just used to it.
The woman who works in the photo equipment room at school has taken to talking to me via her stuffed cat hand puppet. The puppet is wearing a Santa hat. She debuted him on Tuesday night, post-Thanksgiving vacation. At first I thought she only wanted to address us once via hand puppet, and then would set about the business of getting equipment, in her own voice. Once I realized she really intended to channel the whole transaction, I was only a little freaked out. It's a testament to my own threshold for insanity that this only strikes me as vaguely strange, except for the fact that she can't complete a sentence without dissolving into hysterical laughter. If she wants to parlay this small-time schtick into a gig on the ventriloquist circuit (wherever THAT crazy train's depot may be) she's going to have to learn how to play straight woman a little better. Puppets can only carry so much of the show.
To be truthful, I thought it was a dog, but I'm hopelessly oriented to all things canine. Instead, it just turned out to be a very fat, sort of misshapen cat, which I discovered when I referred to...er, him...as a dog today, and she said, "He's a CAT! Get it straight!" *Please also note that this lady reads her Bible when she's not doling out negative carriers and contact printers. This puppetry is fully endorsed by the Holy Trinity - heaven help us.
But hey, I need my enlarging equipment. If I have to talk to a puppet to get this accomplished, it's cool, and good things happen, such as her forking over the goods even when I forget my little blue equipment rental card. "I can go there with you," I told her today. "You have no idea," as she flapped her cat puppet in my direction, giggling. Her reaction indicated that perhaps most people are not as receptive to this method of communicating, so she seemed grateful, and meowed a couple more times. Then she showed me pictures of her real cat on her digital camera, and clouds, because she likes to take pictures of clouds. "See, I like to see what I can see in 'em," she said. (The clouds, that is.) It is, as they say, all good.
For me, it's just another shrimp on the lunatic barbie, mate, and a humorous psychotic break in my otherwise lately sort of ponderous day. As Jimmy Buffett once presciently wrote, "If we weren't all crazy we'd all go insane."
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