Lulu/Loren
Lulu/Loren is a pink hippo that plays music. Our friends the Hamiltons gave her to Button when we first got her back in June. At first, the toy's name was Loren, because their daughter, Loren, picked the toy out (and we named the horse that their son, Sam, picked out for Gabe after him). But, over the course of the summer, Gabe decided that this hippo looked a lot like the character from "Ni Hao, Kai Lan" named Lulu and started calling her that, instead. The cartoon Lulu is a rhino, though, so I was resistant to naming the toy that just for the sake of my fussy accuracy.
Today, however, I decided that it worked into her backstory pretty well. See, Lulu/Loren has a split personality and two completely different characters to go along with it. Loren is sweet, cuddly, and likes to play folk music to crowds of small children in parks. She is earthy and pleasant and if you met her at a party, you would entirely forget that you had ever seen her before the next time you met her.
Lulu, however, you would be hard pressed to forget because it is impossible to forget the face of the woman who broke your will to live. Lulu is a FREAK. She's a latex dominatrix (the cartoon character has a thing for balloons, so I figured this was the next step in that obsession) with a penchant for pain and a bias for ball stomping (or a commitment to cramming, if you're a woman--note: this would have been a slightly more palatable ____ for nipple electrifying, but I couldn't think of any word that means "something you love to do" that begins with an "n" and I'm too lazy to look something like that up, too). And she does her work pro bono. And often even if you're not into that kind of thing. She'll pick you up at a bar, take you home, get you liquored up, then do things to you that your therapist will wish he/she could forget. Don't EVER trust a pink hippo if she asks you back to her place for a night cap. She's up to no good.
Obviously, this character might have some problems integrating into the bedroom story arcs. She certainly has some interest and appeal to me, as a storyteller, but I'm thinking her "thing" might be a little age inappropriate. I mean, I don't KNOW. From what I hear, these kids today know about all kinds of crap I didn't find out about until I was in college, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see what Gabe's been picking up on PBS Sprout.
Stan Johnson
Stan is the biggest of the pigs that we picked up for Mom's 60th birthday surprise.
I'm not a fan of pigs. Frankly, I'm a little put out by the fact that two of Nick Jr's new shows (Olivia and Toot and Puddle) revolve around pig characters. Pigs should not be characters. It's as simple as that. Only clowns beat out anthropomorphized pigs for creepiness, if you ask me. Don't get me wrong. I like bacon and pork products just fine, but I prefer to never, ever think about where those foods come from. I grew up around pigs. There is NOTHING that smells as bad as a pig. Well, that might be a bit severe. The smell of burning blood is worse. Stetson cologne is worse. But that, for the life of me, is all I can think of that beats pig smell.
So, not surprisingly, I gave this pig a back story that I'm almost certain I'll never incorporate into anything--unless he's the butt of some sort of terrible act, as in the swine flu story.
Stan Johnson is a pencil pusher working--perhaps ironically, I haven't decided yet--in the air quality division of the E.P.A. He is a low-level employee. The most important thing he ever does is process paperwork that might, if it makes it all the way through the red tape, clear a business to receive a small portion of government aid to help them make upgrades to their facilities to meet air quality standards. He has an average wife and two average children, all of whom are so boring and average that people routinely avoid them for fear of catching their ennui. He lives in a suburb filled with other average, boring employees who do similarly unimportant things. He drives a hatchback. His biggest ambition in life is to play on an office softball team, but, so far, nobody who organizes such events has asked him to play, and he's too shy to ask himself.
Ah, dammit. Now I feel sorry for Stan. Frick! Hopefully it passes before I feel it's necessary to spice up his life a little bit so he doesn't commit suicide after a brief, but frantic, office shooting spree.
Moving on.
Soupie
Soupie is the "Build-a-Dinosaur" that Gabe got to pick out during our vacation this year. Remarkably, he is still Gabe's favorite stuffed animal. Soupie has actually become a pretty important part of our everyday lives. Gabe is getting to the point where he protests when we put him down for bed at night or for naps. Up to this point, he's always been quite good at both, but now he's learning that, while he's sleeping, there COULD be fun and important things going on in the house (there aren't, of course, because I'm living in it), and it's taking us longer and longer to get him prepped for bed every day. So far, the only thing that we can say that persuades Gabe enough to sort of want to go upstairs to bed is "But Soupie really misses you. He wants to cuddle and hear you read him a story." So we give Gabe a book when we tuck him in next to Soupie. To date, we've never heard him actually "read" any stories to his toys, but I'm looking forward to that day. It will be nice to hear something over his monitor that isn't "Daddy! Downstairs!" followed by crying, screaming, or shrieking.
Soupie is the mild-mannered alter-ego of . . .
Dinomime
The superhero costume is the only one we bought for the dinosaur--and it is, obviously, where his alter-ego name comes from. We were calling him Super Dino! when we first got him, and Gabe was only saying the Soupie part, so the name stuck. Soupie has a moderately successful career during the day holding the position of batting coach for a Double A minor league baseball team (suck it, Marvel and D.C., no journalists or multi-millionaire day-jobs here!) called the Clubbing Insulting Nickname for Underprivileged Indigenous Tribes (this was the actual name. The owner figured he'd save himself some trouble down the line and skip over the names like the Redskins or Chiefs or Braves or Indians and call a spade a spade--in the strictest non-racist sense of that phrase, of course. The "clubbing" part he added because they were a baseball team, obviously, and "the fighting" was such a tired descriptive word when referencing sports teams. Unfortunately, he hadn't given possible acronyms much thought, so he's currently involved in at least two well-documented legal battles with groups that find the t-shirt logo of an Eskimo beating a seal pup with the phrase "Clubbing I.N.U.I.T.s!" entirely insulting. And rightly so!).
And Dinomime is a superhero! But not just ANY superhero, he's the world's only dinosaur superhero, which makes him pretty special.
Interestingly, the concept of Dinomime is one that was created something like 15 years ago by a friend of mine. For one reason or another, my little group of close friends decided that we were going to make up a team of comical comic book heroes and villains (Why? "The Tick" was popular then. That's about as close to an excuse as I can come up with, except that we were bored and we weren't really the type of group to spend our down time chasing women or getting stoned or doing any of the normal things that groups of college aged boys of the "normal" persuasion usually do).
Most of them were a bit lame and unmemorable. There was Muzak, with the ability to always find a good song on the radio (provided there WAS a good song on the radio, of course, there were limits to his power). Or Olfactory Man, with the power to hear!
Some of them were a bit more memorable, though still strange or silly enough to only be memorable to people with brains like mine. There was The Chubby Coy--the old leader of the good guys, think something like Yoda or Splinter from the Ninja turtles, except he was a talking carp. Or Terrible Unger (he'll fill your belly with hate!) who was the leader of the bad guys and was a talking ham sandwich. And then there was the character whose name I shortened to make the screen name of my first internet account on aol (Parkcow) and whose name I have continued to use on email addresses and screen names ever since. I won't, however, discuss this character in open dialogue. If you REALLY want to know what it stands for, email me and I might share. It's a little embarrassing and more than a little rude.
There were more, of course. LOTS more. I think we had something like 25-30 of them at one time. I'd have to try and find one of our lists (if one still exists) to even remember 1/3 of them. But the only one that I think bordered on genius character creation was one my friend Brian came up with, Dinomime.
Dinomime had the ability to make the things he mimed come to life (obviously, his battle cry was a play on Jimmie Walker's catch phrase--he'd yell "Di-no-MIME!" when entering battle). Invisible box, you're invisible no longer! Need a rope to pull something closer? It's there! Something else that mimes do? It's real! The only problem is that the T-rex had tiny, miserable, mostly unuseable arms and hands, and so did Dinomime. So he'd end up ham-fistedly creating all sorts of weird crap whenever he tried to mime it.
The mental image still, to this day, slays me. I'm not ashamed to say that. Tiny, useless dinosaur arms mis-performing mime is hilarious to me. If you disagree with me, you are wrong. And possibly have no imagination. I'm sorry.
Anyway, because the only two friends in our group who could draw comic book style art had no interest in drawing our comic book, it never got past the brainstorming phase.
But Dinomime lives on in Gabe's bedroom! Hurrah!
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