Ventriloquist Quotes

You're alive!" Fezzik cried. The man in black sat immobile, like a ventriloquist's dummy, just his mouth moving. "That is perhaps the most childishly obvious remark I have ever come across...

With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

Bird’s mother-in-law sat quite still, the world’s most forlorn ventriloquist.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for the carnival,you dig? And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared... and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teethlike... little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it... but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street... shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it. And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up... beating at it with his fists... and sticking candles up it, but... nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him... "It is you who will shut up in the end, not me... "because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit." After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparentjelly... like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands... like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So, finally, his mouth sealed over... and the whole head... would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig? That's the one thing that the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked... and infiltrated and atrophied. So, the brain couldn't give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull... sealed off. For a while, you could see... the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes. And then finally the brain must have died... because the eyes went out... and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.

I had a dream about you. I was a ventriloquist trying to share your fashion secrets, but you wouldn’t talk. So we put on a strip show for the department store sale, and I was arrested for theft – I took away your dignity as a mannequin

But you would have lots of fun with me. For instance, I am the the greatest ventriloquist that ever lived, I am the first ventriloquist in the world!

I had a dream about you last night. It wasn't until after you sold me the talking car, I realized you were the world’s best ventriloquist.

Walking on the beach like a ventriloquist, I’ll make it sound like the ocean is calling out to you—through a conch shell.

He had given himself permission to enter me again, this time stuffing words into my mouth. He made me his real life ventriloquist doll, put his hands inside of me and made me speak.

When we can’t hold back, or set boundaries, on what comes from our lips, our words are in charge—not us. But we are still responsible for those words. Our words do not come from somewhere outside of us, as if we were a ventriloquist’s dummy. They are the product of our hearts. Our saying, “I didn’t mean that,” is probably better translated, “I didn’t want you to know I thought that about you.” We need to take responsibility for our words. “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken” (Matt. 12:36).

I’m like a ventriloquist chasing his own voice. I can whisper and shout at the same time, and this is the closest approximation I have to a description of love. I would offer you something to drink, but I’m not in the kitchen, even though it may sound like I am.

Among the many hypocrisies of the “religious” was the fact that they viewed god as omnipotent, but treated Him like a ventriloquist’s dummy by putting their words and crackpot beliefs, prejudices, and unfounded biases into His mouth whenever it suited their purposes.

I feel about my phone the way horror-movie ventriloquists feel about their dummies: It's smarter than me, better than me, and I will kill anyone who comes between us.

a silent concave of puppet buffoons neither eagles nor jaguars buzzard lawyers locuses wings of ink sawing mindibles ventriloquist coyotes peddlers of shadows beneficent satraps the cacomistle thief of hens the monument to the Rattle and its snake the altar to the mauser and the machete the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.

If she could get into the one here at The Texas Player’s Club, she’d drag Trace Corbin out by his ass, stick her arm up it, and do his entire set ventriloquist style if she had do.

..I've stopped trying to share charming anecdotes over dinner.. because we've all seen what happens when a smile creeps across my lips that you didn't put there.. I forgot that I had a voice long before you decided to become my ventriloquist and somehow in spite of your genuine longing to be loved you prefer it this way.

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind.

You never see a fat ventriloquist. Pepper was of the mind that this reflected the parasitic nature of the relationship, wherein the puppet leeches the life essence of the puppeteer. Which gave him an idea for a diet craze: the mass adoption of puppet sidekicks. Send the price of lumber through the roof. From time to time his mind turned to business ventures.

Our spiritual history is the history of God-ventriloquists! The truth is that the voice of God is the voice of cunning Man, the ventriloquist's voice!

Where there's a ventriloquist, there's a dummy.

No, because I am not a ventriloquist.

I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy, suddenly called upon to perform the whole act alone.

I remained motionless, like a ventriloquist's dummy whose ventriloquist has gone off to the local and left it sitting.

I looked like a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy who’d come to life in an assisted-living facility. No basketball was going to undo that.

I know that letter had something to do with me.” I talk out of the side of my mouth like a ventriloquist. “Someone’s a bit of a narcissist.

At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up.

They didn’t have to be a bunch of dazed dummies sitting on the ventriloquist’s knee. It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.

My eyes flipped open at exactly six A.M. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said -in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.

A ventriloquist was driving in the country when he was attracted to a large farm. He asked for and was given a tour. As he was shown through the barn, the ventriloquist thought he would have some fun. He proceeded to make one of the horses talk. The hired hand, wide-eyed with fear, rushed from the barn to the farmer. “Sam,” he shouted, “those animals are talking! If that little sheep says anything about me, it is a damned lie!

Because they were doing it for themselves. They didn't have to be a bunch of dazed dummies sitting on the ventriloquist's knee. It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.

We fell into our roles. Where there's a ventriloquist, there's a dummy. The latter word only sounds worse than the former. He disliked being told what to do. I disliked being pushed further into the shadows and speaking only through him.

Adirondacks must sit in those uncomfortable wooden chairs with the seats tilted so deeply backward that your knees sprang up like a ventriloquist’s dummy as the wood pressed into the back of your thighs. Otherwise, why would they be so named?

Richie had about a dozen different Voices. His ambition, he had told Eddie one rainy afternoon when they were in the little raftered room over the Kaspbrak garage reading Little Lulu comic books, was to become the world’s greatest ventriloquist.

Dr. Soprano has explained to me that some of this pain—which Edi experiences as pain in her joints—is actually being sent over by her organs as they falter. He described the liver as a kind of ventriloquist that speaks its suffering from nearby limbs and bones.

Then Montesquiou was mentioned, and somebody described his first love-affair, a Baudelairean love-affair with a female ventriloquist who, while Montesquiou was straining to achieve his climax, would imitate the drunken voice of a pimp, threatening the aristocratic client.

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy that he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ventriloquist, had ceased to have a personality, becoming just an arm stuffed up the puppet's back.

was the bad, easy, faux-tough-guy type of racist stuff his father loved to say just to piss people off. Ted hated that shit, found it offensive. But sometimes, against his better judgment, Ted felt something like a ventriloquist’s dummy, involuntarily speaking his father’s words. He might adopt an attitude or phrase out of the blue, like some sort of paternal Tourette’s.

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that looked all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in.

The temple prostitutes from Inanna’s district had come down to mingle in the streets, resulting in public copulations as some male citizens could not withhold their urges until they could find a tent. Spontaneous dancing broke out in the streets, led by the blue dancers and their traveling minstrels. The human dancers jerked and spasmed as if taken over by spirits. Their eyes turned upward, showing only the whites, and they uttered strange guttural sounds as if performed by a distant ventriloquist.

Ladies and Gentlemen. I should like to inform you on behalf of the nation state of Guyana, that we are going to resign from being a country. We can't make it work. We have tried. We have done our best. It is not possible. The problems are insoluble. From midnight tonight, we shall cease trading. The country is now disbanded. We will voluntarily liquidate ourselves. The nation will disperse quietly, a little shamefaced but so what. We had a go. Different people have suggested different solutions. Do it this way. Try that. Let me have a go. Nothing works. We are at the mercy of the rich countries. A team of management consultants from the United States could not find the answer, and for not finding the answer, we had to pay them an amount that substantially increased our national debt. We give in, gracefully, but we give in." And then he imagined himself, quietly and with dignity, putting his papers in his briefcase, bowing to the hushed assembly, returning to clear out his office and going for a walk with his wife along the sea wall. (The Ventriloquist's Tale

Like cold air passing through lips” I shall think of you as my ventriloquist, lying under the cedar trees. Your lips unreadable, my mouth daydreaming: journey, draining, geranium. My head heavy more with rhymes than sleep, resting on your arm, near the shadow’s edge. The fragrance of wood neither green nor brown, but shallow blue. Your compliments lodged in me like harvest mice nesting under leaves, foxgloves at our feet, the north winds singing. My ear as dumb as corn and too far gone, to catch your heart closing like a gate behind me.

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair into my sister, where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled violin, where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no more dead lovers than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions, where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists, where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be torn down swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle, I understand only this: It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast. from "The Origami Fields

All moveables of wonder, from all parts, Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs, The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig, The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire, Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes, The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows, All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things, All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats All jumbled up together, to compose A Parliament of Monsters.

That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can’t remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I’m in a funny mood all day. I don’t say much. I don’t feel like it.

Strict Time There's a hand on a wire that leads to my mouth I can hear you knocking but I'm not coming out Don't want to be a puppet or a ventriloquist 'Cause there's no ventilation on a critical list Fingers creeping up my spine are not mine to resist Strict time Chorus: Toughen up, toughen up Keep your lip buttoned up Strict time Oh the muscles flex and the fingers curl And a cold sweat breaks out on the sweater girl Strict time Oh he's all hands, don't touch that dial The courting cold wars weekend witch trial Strict time All the boys are straight laced and the girls are frigid The talk is two-faced and the rules are rigid 'cause it's strict time Strict time You talk in hushed tones, I talk in lush tones Try to look Italian through the musical Valium Strict time Thinking of grand larceny Smoking the everlasting cigarette of chastity Cute assistants staying alive More like a hand job than the hand jive Strict time

He began doing trick voices: he would knock on his chair and call from “outside,” sending his parents to the door when no one was there. When the noted ventriloquist Harry Lester played Chicago, Bergen went to see him. Lester was impressed with Bergen’s ability and gave him some tips, free of charge. Bergen decided to create a dummy to complete his act. The face would be modeled after a neighborhood kid named Charlie who sold newspapers.

LIFE 'Tis not just about existing But needing, more than wanting, Life is real, Life is earnest 'Tis not about the past, but of the returnedst... Birds, bugs and beasts Grass, trees and flowers, Teach me how to feel And mend all the scars... Go round and come around O distant time, Let me find and be found By the love's sorrow one last time... Though I know the seasons fade and return And with a mere mournful number, Life sometimes takes a dreadful turn Before we rouse, we have doned a cloak of a skeptical struggler... But you see, 'Tis not just about grief and pain But an art, a ventriloquist a Whose threads are already strained... So let's be up and doin', O heaven and earth, take me in... O heaven and earth, take me in...

I’m not your puppet, and you’re no ventriloquist

On Sunday evenings, there was a comparatively vast array of radio shows from which to choose. Frequently I would lie in my bed with my father, who would pull the covers over our heads and pretend that we were in a cave. This is how we would listen to shows such as Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve with Harold Peary, The Fred Allen Show, and The Edgar Bergen Show. As a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen had Charlie McCarthy and the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd as puppets. For us the last show of the evening was always Your Hit Parade sponsored by Lucky Strike Cigarettes, starring Snooky Lanson, Gisele MacKenzie and a host of other well-known singers of that period. Although my father was a strict disciplinarian, on Sunday evenings he usually relaxed things and we would enjoy our time listening to the radio together.

hey. Your lips didn’t move when you said that. Are you a ventriloquist?

Socrates, or rather, his ventriloquist, Plato, actually thought. He believed death was the end of the story. But this was not a source of anxiety for him, and it doesn’t need to be for us either. It is instead a motivation to love this life as much as we can for as long as we can, to enjoy it to its utmost as far as possible, and to help others do the same. If all of us do that, we will live on after death—not in a personal consciousness once our brains have died, but in the lives of those we have touched.

Then he (Lemon) leans in to Little Minegishi's corpse and takes hold of the back of the head, nodding it up and down like he's operating a puppet. "Lemon, you are a useful train," he says, doing his best ventriloquist act.

A large part of the otherwise intelligent public still labor under the delusion that the ventriloquist is endowed by nature with the power of throwing his voice … but what the ventriloquist really does is to imitate as exactly as possible a sound as it is heard by the ears after it has travelled some distance.…

Ignore him," Patrick instructed the agent. "He's what happens when the ventriloquist dies and the dummy keeps talking.

WRITERS ARE "SPIRITIAL VENTRILOQUIST" WHO HAVE THE ABILITY TO MAKE PAPER TALK!

Are you telling me you want this? That you want to get married?” She arched a brow, and he couldn’t hold her gaze. For the first time in his life, Leo found himself truly nervous. Here was a situation he couldn’t hit, wrestle, or order into compliance. Baring feelings was all well and good, but talking about them sucked. But there came a time in a man’s life where he had to suck it up and gush, especially when he was a blind idiot for a while. “Would I be going through all this trouble if I didn’t want to get married? Listen, Vex, I know we got off to a rocky start. In my defense, you’re a little much for any man to handle. Not that I mind,” he hastened to add when her second brow shot up. “I like who you are, and I’m a big enough man to admit I might have reacted poorly when you declared I was your mate and that I couldn’t escape.” “I said what?” Again, she gaped in open surprise. Then laughed. Pretty damned hard as a matter of fact. He frowned. “Don’t you dare deny it, Vex. You had me all but in front a preacher within five minutes of us meeting. And it scared me. But you were right about us belonging together, even if it took me longer to realize it. You are the one for me, Meena. The chaos to balance my serenity. The colored rainbow to enrich the grayness of my current life. I want you, Vex. Catastrophes and all. I just hope, even after what I’ve done, and the fact I might sometimes have a stick up my ass, at least according to Luna, that you’ll forgive me and still want me too.” He ended his gush of words and stared at Meena hopefully, and a little fearfully, given she once again stared at him slack-jawed. Would she say something? She did, just not from her lips. No, Meena’s voice came from behind him. “Oh, Pookie, that has got to be the most beautiful thing I ever heard.” Either Meena had some mad ventriloquist skills or… Leo froze as he stared at the woman in front of him, a woman that he realized the more he stared was Meena and yet not. This one wore her hair in soft curls around her shoulders, a tiny scar marred the tip of her chin, and her scent… was all wrong. However, the body that jumped on his back and the lips that noisily kissed the flesh of his neck? That was his Vex. What the hell? “Who are you?” he asked. The Meena clone grinned and waved. “Teena, of course.” “My twin,” Meena added against his ear. “Identical twin?” “Well, duh. And it’s a good thing too, or I’d be a little miffed right now that you just said all those beautiful things to her.” “I thought it was you.” “Apparently. It happens a lot, which I totally don’t get. She looks nothing like me.” “I feel like such an idiot.” He tried to crane his head to see the Meena clinging to his back, but she slapped her hands over his eyes. “No, you can’t look. It’s bad luck.” “But…” “No buts. Although I will say yours looks awfully delicious in those pants. But it will look even better when it’s naked and wearing my teeth marks.” “Vex!” “I know. I know. Don’t start something we can’t finish. Consider yourself warned, however. As soon as that priest says I do, your ass is mine. All mine.” Such a low, husky promise. “Come on, Teena, you are just in time to help me get into my gown. Can you believe my Pookie arranged all this?” The pride in her voice made him smile, but he did have to shake his head at the whole twin sister thing. With one last kiss on his neck, Meena whispered, “See you in a little bit, Pookie.

How strange it would now — like speaking without a voice. Is that what music is then, a ventriloquist with his doll ?

It's like my old Aunt Joan always used to say: if you're going to end up fighting monsters, Pirate Captain, try to stick to ventriloquist's dummies who have gone alive.

Although lions are poor runners they are good ventriloquists. They are the only creatures I know of that make any real use of that trick. If their prey is near by they can roar as if they were a mile away. In this way they deceive the animal they are stalking until they are within comfortable striking distance.

My eyes are like telescopes I see it all backwards: but who wants hope? If I ever catch that ventriloquist I'll squeeze his head right into my fist.

To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye. “What’s same?” she asked. She looked at Alex nose-to-beak. Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Co-lor.” “What’s different?” Pepperberg asked. “Shape,” Alex said. Since he lacked lips and only slightly opened his beak to reply, the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.

Indescribably filthy jokes are perpetrated by a ventriloquist with the aid of a puppet. (Quoted from the Bulletin of The Juvenile Protective Association, May 1921)

A ventriloquist was on stage at a bar in a small town. He was going through his usual run of dumb blonde jokes when a large blonde in the second row stood up and shouted, “I’ve heard just about enough of your denigrating blonde jokes! What makes you think you can stereotype blondes that way? What does a person’s physical attributes have to do with their worth as a human being?” The ventriloquist looked on in confused amazement. “It’s jerks like you who keep women like me from being respected,” she continued, “and from reaching my full potential as a person because you perpetuate discrimination against not only blondes but women at large. All in the name of a few pathetic jokes.” Flustered, the ventriloquist began to apologize. The blonde interrupted, “You stay out of this, mister. I’m talking to that little shithead on your knee.

Warren sat down beside me, gloating smugly. This was disconcerting, as he’d done such a good job with the face paint that he didn’t really look human. Instead, it was like sitting next to an extremely obnoxious ventriloquist’s dummy.

A single homogenous line of development is to be found in history only if history is made a dummy upon which to practise the skill of a ventriloquist.

Malevich didn't mean to put himself at the center. He said, 'Art doesn't need us and it never has.'" "He's speaking for art like a ventriloquist with a dummy." Marina laughs. "He has his hand up art's ass.

The pretending had started small–I’d imagined myself as a Girl Scout, or a ballerina, or a world-famous ventriloquist. You know, attainable things. But Mom hadn’t had the money or time to make those dreams real, and I never would have fit in anyway.

Too many people act like a ventriloquist dummy sitting on the lap of another dummy with both dummies talking about other dummies who were smart enough not to be in the auditorium or even consider buying a ticket to the show.

It was a rare dummy that invested itself too much in caring for humans, deaf to their input and condescending to them as a rule.

Ventriloquism was once sacred. Priests spoke from their stomachs, believing they were communing with the unliving, who set up shop there.

Some of them get it in their heads that they are closer to God... It could get you burned at the stake centuries ago. Throwing your voice is close enough to consorting with demons, though your voice stays where it is. All that’s different is your lips don’t move.

You talk this game about what the ancient Greeks did, ghosts in the gullet, and all that. Hucksterism, sure. I can appreciate a good scam. But to the people who came to see it—to see us—it was holy.

You want to play innocent? That the kind of person who spends their lives projecting their voice into a lamb or lizard isn't into some kinky shit when the lights go out?

Ventriloquism is not a physically demanding hobby. High school athletes tended to spend their weekends fingering something other than a dummy's eyes

A ventriloquist wants to be someone else. Ventriloquists wish to speak but want to blame someone else for the consequences of their words.

If you want to become a saint, live to please others, if you want to become a god, live entirely to please yourself.

The Church of Contentment and Prosperity Now offering the best stage shows in America declaring peace with the enemies of God. With flashing lights, stage smoke, visualizing tantalizing sights of women dancing on stage, flags waving, artist painting, preachers more like ringmasters of the ventriloquists' dummies taking it all in like a rock 'n' roll show for a fee of actors and celebrities called deacons and elders all in the name of some manmade Jesus!

MUTANT BLAZON My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun. To look at them will mean that I go blind. His mouth beside my ear—they form a gun. Each breath: a bullet targeting my mind. My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun. His throat: a fist to silence mine designed. His reason: a ventriloquist’s illusion. No tenor in the end could hearing find. My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun— Too close for any vessel with a mind. Survive or get to die—that is the question. No longer have I any will to mind. My rapist’s eyes remind me of the sun— Not dead, not living, neither keen nor blind; A daily haunting; memory rebegun; Disaster in some future undivined. I write, rewrite, a “sonnet” about rape To hunt that voice I wish I could escape.

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair           into my sister, where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a crumpled           violin, where I stand creased and lusting for paper, where I have no           more dead lovers than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for directions, where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists, where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can be           torn down swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle, I understand only this: It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast. — Sabrina Orah Mark, “In The Origami Fields,” The Babies. (Saturnalia; 1st Edition edition, November 15, 2004)  

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

probably a ventriloquist. You’ve seen one of those before, haven’t

Who’s the ventriloquist, and who’s the dummy?

She loved any acts which were a bit old fashioned, like ventriloquists, jugglers and, on one memorable broadcast, a cavalcade of clowns from Scunthorpe who arrived in a small car and flooded out on to the stage.