SADIE

My family has always like to play "store". My grandfather had a confectionery store long before I was born, and my family owned four flower shops about 20 years ago where we all worked (that's why I look like this)...and my brother has owned card shops and now three diners with another one set to open in the fall. I think what we all REALLY like is the cash register. My brother once bought one when Hornes Dept. store was closing, and it was as big as a dog house. ( Woof just asked me what a dog house was ). That big monstrosity had ten drawers, hundreds of buttons and keys, and it never worked. It weighed about a thousand pounds and was stored in my basement until some big butch friends were here one day and were coerced into dragging it out to the curb for the junk drive.

My brother is ten years younger than I am, and when he was about nine or ten we used to play store...I was obviously still into it at nineteen or twenty. My brother would set up his little store in our gameroom and I would go up and down the stairs....each time coming to the store as a different character. I of course already had a vast array of costumes that I'd collected (and still do), and I'd change outfits every time I came to his little store. The characters were funny, or unusual....all with different names, and each one would "buy" one of his toys, or knick knacks, pay him, and then return to the upstairs after his little cash register rang them out. Mr Jones might have a cane, and a scratchy voice, and old Mrs Green might have on one of my mother's dresses (if she wasn't home), maybe a cute little number from my new wig collection etc. They were all polite and gentle shoppers. Then there was Sadie.

Sadie wore a reddish pink chenille robe and a stocking over her hair. She'd first screech down the stairs " ARE YOU OPEN?" to which a meek little voice would say "yes " and down I'd roar. Sadie would yell at him about his prices, tell him to speed it up, grab things from all over the room...like the cash register or the chair he was stilling on, and generally disrupt the whole little store before stomping back up the stairs yelling that she'd be back again later.

Now my sense of what was funny as a nineteen year old was evidently different from that of a ten year old. On his 40th birthday, my brother told me of his terror and nightmares about Sadie. I have to confess that I'd never given the whole scenario a thought....for 30 years or so. He admitted that he didn't actually have nightmares, but that he did spend a lot of time thinking about Sadie...that maybe she'd turn up at his graduation, or apply for a job in his card shop when he was first opening the business. I might note here that my brother has also been known to hide in the bushes near his house in a giant green lizard costume...or arrive at his neighbors door with a huge rubber boa constrictor dangling from a garden rake.... Now since he has grown children and is a well adjusted middle aged man,(ahem) I've decided that it's time to dig up that chenille robe and have lunch at his diner one of these days. I'll let you know how that goes. One of his childhood friends told me once that he never remembered Sadie, but that he did remember when I'd sit in a closet in the basement with a turban and a crystal ball and read fortunes. Even I had forgotten about that one. No wonder my mother still sometimes mutters " I don't know where we ever GOT him."