MIRANDA PEAR’S BRAZEN BEDTIME STORIES

Un-PC Fairy Tales for Grown Ups

By Maralyn Lois Polak

Copyright © 2001 Maralyn Lois Polak. All Rights Reserved

DEDICATIONS:

To my darling Monty, who has reacquainted me with the possibilities of having a happy, playful childhood at any age.

To Julian, my favorite little boy, who loves when his parents Michele and John read to him.

~*~*~*~

TABLE OF CONTENTS

These stories are grouped in loose chronological order, following the arc of Miranda’s life

Childhood: Dreams

Adolescence: Nightmares

Maturity: Visions

FOREWORD

By Arthur Sabatini, PhD

"Brazen Maralyn Lois Polak's Miranda Pear"

One thing smart adults know is that fairy tales are for us. A long time ago, before kids were invented, especially television bred American-type kids, fantastic tales and magical stories circulated among wise folks from all social classes. Shrewd village women, wily crones, and unrepentant wives loosened their tongues in kitchens and while working at spinning wheels. By the 1700s, audacious aristocratic ladies and their allies, like Charles Perrault, author of the first Mother Goose books, refined local stories and household tales into literary art in printed volumes.

Unlike the plots that we now think of as childish, these tales were embellished with scandalous twists and probing psychological asides. On the page and in performance, stories were conveyed with sly expressiveness and coded gestures. Details appropriate to time and place kept insiders apace of the real personages involved in curious and illicit play. The reasons for this were simple: the tellers of daytime and bedtime stories wanted to keep the record straight about what really happens on the primal ground of family life and between men and women, whether they were rich or poor. All families have values, tale tellers know, but families also have closets full of gruesome secrets. The souls of beauties are blemished and beasts are always beasts, even though they can become nice guys under the right conditions.

As for happy endings, fuhgeddaboutit. When you are an adult, the writing the walls of everyday life either say, 'whatja expect? or 'deal wid it.' And now it is 2,000. We are here in the techno-comfort zone of America. GLAM rules.If Little Red were around, she would own the rights to herstory. Conscientious Cinderella would be a CEO. Tykes would carry cellphones into the woods and definitely not take the rap for doing in predators. Princes are a dime a dozen; boogie men have websites. Stars are stars: nice to look at, but mostly dim.

Enter Miranda Pear. She is a New Jersey born brunette with a sweet affinity for household pets, a spiky attitude toward boys, and a smart mouth. As a child, she talks to flying mice and puzzles over her mother's collection of wigs. She pays attention to the obscure doings of adults and winds up with friends whose lives are full of more kinks than kicks. By the time she is all grown up, Miranda is lives in an apartment brimming with bric-a-brac. She spends her days amidst lamps in the shape of ladies, ceramic Scottie dogs, a platoon of Pez holders, and an eerie Oz doll house. "What an excuse for bad behavior," she finally says to herself before chucking some of her collectibles out.

Her middle name should be Savvy. She is as real as guts. She does not need a magic mirror. "She sees herself as someone with an overstated body and an understated wardrobe." She can make connections. Returning from a winter vacation, she finds her prized plants have expired. She reflects: "Cactus plants die from inside out, like a person." But she rebounds. Miranda always finds the light. Not everything is a sign. She knows that "Sometimes, a mouse is just a metaphor."

And this is what makes Miranda Pear so convincing, so contemporary, so necessary. She possesses a fierce introspective energy and is never short on insight. In these stories, which also include anecdotes, diary entries, parables, conversations, recollections, and runaway narrations, Maralyn Polak's Miranda Pear grows as a girl and a woman in a world gone wrong and pretty weird. Our world, that is, where you learn that after the first time around: "Don't go on to the same place on your honeymoon with your next husband. Optimism is a dish best kept fresh."

Being loved is the most important thing for Miranda Pear. But, life has other ideas. Even before leaving for college in the late 1960s, she learns some lessons. "Death first came to Miranda Pear in the form of a goldfish," one story begins. Death (the bastard) will ring the bell more than a few times for Miranda as the years pass. When she moves to the city of Dorkadelphia, she meets a guy who wants to be a mortician. But he goes crazy. Marriage, divorce, jobs. She is a writer. She eats so much spicy food she calls herself a "garlic pariah." Tarnished princes, unfaithful blue-eyed hairy talkers, guys who have friends named Nicky Suspenders come her way. They all have stories.

Miranda Pear lives with, sleeps with, loves: a monster, a swami, a composer, a Hogmalion (a pig-man), a bi-polar boy journalist pilot, a Guru, an Internet buddy. "No man is an island," she finds out, "But some men live on them." No matter, Miranda perseveres. She adopts stray pups, consults astrologers and therapists. She decides never to name a cat after a lover. She hangs with her confused friends. One woman meditates for larger breasts; another has a husband who can make Tiramisu from scratch, in chocolate cups and with raspberry zabaglione. One day she meets God on a park bench. He has a job as a janitor. Miranda listens to him and everyone else's observations. She asks a million questions. On her own, she gathers more ideas than tsotchkes .

In barbed and ironic prose, Maralyn Polak talks the talk that tale tellers of the past once winked away. This is the way the way we live now. Miranda savors the spice and survives the slime of contemporary life. She does not merely go along for the ride, either. The Miranda Pear theme park is what you wake-up to everyday. And although some of her journeys are dark, she is never content unless the result is poetry and she can flick on the bright lights and start dancing.

Other recent story tellers and poets — Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Salman Rushdie, and Italo Calvino - have used magical tales to explore our lives and times. As you can imagine, some of these works are not exactly for children. Neither is garlic. Anne Sexton's poetry collection "Transformations" is more bruising than "Silence of the Lambs." Coover's "Pinocchio in Venice" will never be made into a movie for the family network. A wonderful study of the fairy and folk tale genre is Marina Warner's "From The Beast to The Blonde: Fairy Tales and Their Tellers," New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

You can learn things from Maralyn Lois Polak's brazen tales. Like, the other night as I was reading, I thought that if the bedbugs start biting, Miranda Pear would probably tell me to talk to 'em, bite 'em back, then love 'em. What a girl. Miranda is a peach. I mean, she is nonpareil. I mean, roll over Mother Goose, there is new lady to reckon with around here.

ARTHUR J. SABATINI, PhD

Phoenix, Arizona

e-mail - ieajs@asu.edu

MIRANDA PEAR AND THE FLYING MICE

Maralyn Lois Polak

In a corner of the basement of their house, Miranda Pear’s mother had a metal wig-stand with five wigs.

Frizzy black.

Straight brown.

Red with bangs.

Blond tousled

And dark brown curls, just like her Mom’s real hair, for muggy days when she just wanted to look like herself, only better.

Don’t ask why. Just don’t. Miranda’s Mom is a nice lady, but she has her quirks. Quirks are odd things that made Miranda love her Mom for being … her Mom.

The funny thing is, Mrs. Pear didn’t wear her wigs much any more. "Moms don’t have much time for wigs, Miranda. I just get a short haircut, and run my fingers through it, and that’s fine. But I had fun with my wigs. Sometimes I felt like a movie star."

Now that Miranda was 7, Mrs. Pear promised someday soon, she could play dress-up with the wigs.

There was one big problem, but Miranda and Mrs. Pear didn’t know about it yet.

In each wig, a tiny mouse had made a nest. But these were not ordinary mice. These mice flew.

Oh, you say, how can mice fly?

With wings, silly.

Long ago, the ancestors of these mice had climbed up up up into a tree and mated with birds. That’s how they got their wings.

If you think that’s strange, remember way way back, even the dinosaurs had a flying creature called the pterodactyl. Every once in a while, such wonders happen in Nature.

And every once in a while, the flying mice came down to earth, to burrow into houses, because people just would never believe mice could fly.

Right now, however, the flying mice in Miranda’s basement — Phineas, Andrea, Arianna, Mimosa, Marissa, and Lily, plus lots of Little Ones — were worried. They were worried if Miranda played dress up with the wigs, that would be it for their fabulous nests. They didn’t want to leave. Would you?

But the flying mice had an even bigger worry — Scientists. There was a Mouse Shortage, and suddenly, mice were being kidnapped. Regular mice were being studied left and right in laboratories. For this horrible experiment and that. By scientists who thought they were helping people.

"It’s good for humanity," the scientists always said.

But these scientists had no idea how unhappy they were making the mice. Some mice got sick and died. It had to stop.

Scientists had made mice smoke dangerous cigarettes and drink vile-tasting drinks.

Scientists had made mice fat, and starved them skinny.

Scientists had put mice on treadmills and sent them into outer space.

Scientists had tinkered with mice-genes to change mice behavior. They had made it so some boy mice would never break up with their mice girlfriends, ever, and that was called monogamy. Now scientists were trying to transplant that mice gene into people so they would stop wandering and the divorce lawyers would either go out of business or have to get work as Internet day traders.

Scientists had even turned some mice green so they glowed in the dark. Somehow they had given mice a glow-in-the-dark gene from lightning bugs.

Where would it all end?

"Wicked," all the flying mice in Miranda Pear’s basement squeaked in unison.

"No scientist is gonna mess with my genes," snorted Phineas Mouse, the patriarch of the mouse clan in Miranda’s basement, his little whiskers wiggling furiously.

"We have to do something. Let’s tell Miranda," they said, vowing to talk to her.

So they did. And here’s what they told her.

Miranda, they said, the latest mouse outrage was the worst so far. Scientists were actually trying to make mice MORE intelligent so they could… work with computers. Imagine, a real live mouse at the end of a wire attached to your computer, a mouse transformed into…what scientists were calling a ‘Smart Mouse.’ Yuck.

This was inevitable, the mice said. Americans were getting lazier and lazier. Even the best parents were restless being tied down year after year helping their children do their homework. Eighteen years of that? Bo-ring!! Clearly these live mice were intended to do class assignments and term papers so kids could stay outside longer and play more sports!! It wasn’t fair!

Naturally this evil fad had started, where else, in Japan, where a rich industrialist had just paid a record $90,000 for a real Dueling Beetle with a built-in sword that made its enemies into mince-meat.

Dueling Beetles were just the latest wrinkle in Japan’s bizarre fascination with the insect world. The previous fad, live scarab beetles chained in pairs that wealthy women pinned to their scarves, ended unhappily for the women but happily for the beetles when the enslaved beetles began nipping their owners, who set their pets free and now the country was nearly overrun with the jewel-like bugs.

"We’re bugged," Japan’s billboards clamored and complained. The public pressure grew so great, Scientists were next considering upgrading the live beetles into electronic eavesdropping devices for sale to China, Taiwan., and Korea. Rumors have it that Boris Yeltsin bought a truckful, which was then driven to Moscow and judiciously installed to keep his legion of enemies in line.

Well, it was just a baby step away, scientifically speaking, from Live Beetles on Leashes to Smart Mice for your computer.

And if Scientists got ahold of the flying mice from Miranda Pear’s basement, no telling what they’d do — probably graft the miniature wings onto tiny pigs as a symbol of hope in a world fraught with uncertainty…Can’t you see the TV commercials now? IF ONLY PIGS COULD FLY. WELL, NOW THEY CAN! AND SOMEDAY, SO CAN YOU!!

So, Miranda, can we count on you? Phineas implored. Don’t give us away. Please don’t.

"I promise," said Miranda. And of course she kept her word. That’s what kind of girl she was. Already, she knew that some things are best left untouched; let them stay just as they are.

And so, in a corner of the basement of their house, Miranda Pear’s mother has a metal wig-stand with five wigs. And in each wig, a tiny mouse has made a nest. But these are not ordinary mice. These mice fly.

THE END

© 2001 Maralyn Lois Polak. All Rights Reserved. These stories and

illustrations may not be reproduced, copied, reprinted, transmitted,

or disseminated in any medium. Miranda Pear(TM) is a registered

trademark belonging to MLPolak. All illustrations by Marlene Goodman,

co-created with Maralyn Lois Polak.

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