Humor/Satire / The affair
Mrs. Young was Dr. Harrison’s assistant and receptionist, who had been with him for years. She was almost as old as Stonehenge and not as well preserved. She was half deaf and wore glasses with lenses the size of a telescope. She did not like children and particularly did not like Pogsy, Mikey, Tommy, Monty and me. She had seen too many of our catastrophes come to pass and disrupt her well-established office routine to have ever developed any kind of affection for us.
Mrs. Young woke up one morning in early July, got dressed as she normally would to go to work, fed her scrawny black cat “Arthur”, walked the one half miles to Dr. Harrison’s office, entered through the back door as she always did, prepared some tea precisely to the doctor’s taste just as she had always done, organized her appointments for the day, placed the house call schedule on Dr. Harrison’s desk, sat at her desk, leaned back in her chair and died.
That morning, Dr. Harrison left his house and decided to stop by Billy Madsen’s house to see how he was doing after having his tonsil’s removed a few days before, walked a few blocks to his office, entered through the back door as he always did, hung his jacket in the back room, put on his white smock, placed his stethoscope around his neck, poured himself a cup of tea that Mrs. Young had prepared, as she always did, and entered the front room where Mrs. Young’s reception desk was, said “Good morning Mrs. Young” without looking at her and walked in his office to review the house calls schedule.
It suddenly dawned on him that Mrs. Young, who always was very polite, had not responded to his morning greeting, he stopped for a minute but discarded the thought quickly to get ready for the first patient, Jennifer Peacock..
Dressed as she was going to a fashion show, Jennifer Peacock walked briskly along Longwood lane, turned on Main Street and headed for Dr. Harrison’s office. Once she reached her destination, she opened the front door, said a brief hello to Mrs. Young and installed
herself on the small divan directly opposite from the doctor’s examination room. She picked up an old copy of May Women’s Own magazine, and started reading the article about Peter Finch and Audrey Hepburn and the film “The Nun”. As she was looking at the glamorous pictures of Audrey Hepburn, she made the comment that Audrey Hepburn was a very stylish woman. Not receiving an acknowledgement from the very deaf Mrs. Young, she repeated louder: “Don’t you think that Audrey Hepburn is sophisticated and stylish?”
No answer. Jennifer Peacock was not a woman you could totally ignore and she took her eyes from the magazine to look at Mrs. Young and saw that she was sleeping. Jennifer could not believe that she could be so rude as to sleep on the job, in plain view of the patients and while being paid to do her work. She repeated: “Mrs. Young! Wake up Mrs. Young!” Not getting a reaction from Mrs. Young, Jennifer Peacock rose to her feet and approached the old receptionist to attract her attention; she then walked towards the desk and, with her right hand, gently shook Mrs. Young shoulder to wake her up.
Mrs. Young could have cared less, as she was as dead as Queen Victoria, her only answer to the nudge was to slide sideways on her chair and slowly fall in a pile under the desk. Realizing the situation was grave, Jennifer Peacock proceeded to let out a scream worthy of one of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula’s victims. Hearing the blood-curdling scream, Dr. Harrison put down the day schedule and dashed out of his examination room just in time to catch Jennifer Peacock performing one of her favorite fainting scenes…
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Definite humor in the piece and a good setup, but it reads a little clunky.
Mrs. Young woke up one morning in early July, got dressed as she normally would to go to work, fed her scrawny black cat “Arthur”, walked the one half miles to Dr. Harrison’s office, entered through the back door as she always did, prepared some tea precisely to the doctor’s taste just as she had always done, organized her appointments for the day, placed the house call schedule on Dr. Harrison’s desk, sat at her desk, leaned back in her chair and died.
The repetition of “as she normally would,” “as she always did,” and “just as she had always done,” is overkill. The long list of events, if streamlined, would punch faster and the joke is still preserved by the abrupt action at the end. In other words, you don’t need to pad the sentence. And while you want to make the next sentence parallel to preserve the rhythm, it could also be pared down. Just structuring a series of verbs strung together by commas will be enough to create that parallelism—you don’t need the extra phrases repeating how everything is “just as it always was.” One mention should be enough.
Dr. Harrison doesn’t need to reflect on the oddness of Mrs. Young’s not responding. It adds to the satire if he just goes about his business while his secretary is dead in her chair.
The absurdity is heightened when Mrs. Peacock enters. I’d suggest sustaining the tension—the longer you can keep her being dead without discovery, the funnier it gets. What if Peacock were examined by the doctor, someone else comes in and talks pleasantly but without expecting a response to Mrs. Young, and Peacock comes out to make her next appointment before the slumping/screaming/fainting happens? Seeing how long you can keep the gag running without it becoming absurd (e.g. Weekend at Bernie’s) might be a good exercise.
This is very promising—the comic ideas are there, and with a little work on comic timing through revision, it’ll be on fire. Good luck.
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‘Mrs. Young could have cared less’ – what could she have cared less about then? I think this is an Americanism – but to use it in describing an English story would sound wrong. Surely she couldn’t care less – else the situation would not be worth comparing!
Aside from that – it was a bit too formulaic. Mrs Young did this, then that, and then that and died. The doctor, did this, did that, and sat down. It needs a bit more life to it really.
The premise is good – I wonder how the 5 kids will see these things playing out, and how their innocence of youth will colour the read of the story.
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