We had so much fun at the Greenfield Meeting House. The audience was diverse -- and included a state senator, a television personality and author, a group of clients and staff from Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation facility, and an artistic kindergartner. Among others. More than seventy people showed up and the stories were flying like bats in the barn.
The story that stole the show was told by Roger Swain, aka “The Man in the Red Suspenders,” aka the host, for many years, of The Victory Garden on PBS.
Words on a page can’t come close to doing justice to Roger’s story, delivered deadpan, of course, in the Yankee tradition. He prefaced it by saying it had been getting him through dinner parties for years. He calls the story, “The Electrocution of Eva Whitney.”
Short version: Eva Whitney, a woman of substance, offered to help Roger in the garden by shelling the peas he picked. He set her up in an aluminum folding chair -- which fit her snugly. She held a stainless steel bowl between her knees for shelling the peas, into which she shelled the peas. And they set to work.
Evidently, after a while, Eva grew dissatisfied with the location of her chair. Maybe it was on a slope and a bit tippy. Maybe the sun was in her eyes. Rather than get out of the chair to move it, she scooched it along while remaining seated and with said stainless steel bowl between her knees.
Evidently, she didn’t realize the wire that ran around the garden just a few inches from the ground was a woodchuck deterrent, hooked up to, Roger guessed, about 5000 volts. Or maybe she just didn’t notice it as she scooched along.
Anyway, on the last scooch, the leg of the chair touched the wire. The voltage ran up the chair, through Eva’s right arm, down her body to the pea bowl, across the bowl, up her body to her left arm, then down the left chair leg and into the ground.
This, Roger observed, was in the early years of the space program.
Eva launched. It was a wonderful launch, Roger said.
And when she returned to earth, she had a smile on her face and, miraculously, all the peas were still in the bowl.
Speaking of smiles, Lily, who is six and loves stories, won the prize for the biggest smile of the evening, even though she had quite a bit of competition.
Here’s Lily, and a view of the Meeting House crowd.
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