Story of a Young Actress Named Geoffrey

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Story of a Young Actress Named Geoffrey


by Jeremiah Smith

A delightfully silly romp through the life of an actress with the unlikely name of Geoffrey. Unsuitable for mature audience.


Cat 1
The Birth

I was born in a small village called Upper Bottom. My father, Samuel Fanning, and my mother, Dorothy Fanning, were simple village folk, and only their Wealth, inherited from my late grandfather Joseph Severus Fanning, saved them from middle class poverty.

I was a small child, barely 5 feet and 8 inches at birth, but I quickly grew to my imposing height of 3 feet and 7 inches by the time I was three years old. My mother had been understandably stressed, having to bear a child near twice her own size, but as she later told me, I was an easy child to bear.

As a young boy, I much enjoyed playing in the fields of Upper Bottom, climbing the trees in our forest, and fleeing in terror from farmer John Hodgeswick-Troughton-Sente’s dogs with all the other children of the village.

By the time I was twelve, my parents accrued enough Money to buy our family entrance to the Wealthy working class, and I was therefore pulled out of St. Jill’s Unprestigeous School for Young Girls and put to much nobler work at Upper Bottom’s only mill. I was happy there, but soon the miller’s advances, particularly the revolutionary work in robotics and hydraulics, cut my apprenticeship short and I was forced to look for another employment elsewhere.

However, my lack of skills quickly showed in whatever I tried doing, and with no other recourse, I decided to become an actor at the tender age of twenty-seven months and fourteen years.


Cat 2
The Act

When I joined the travelling company of actors, singers, and lawyers, I decided to draw on my experience at St. Jill’s Unprestigeous School for Young Girls and, remembering fondly the nights with all the other boys at school, started my life as a female in-personator. I was fast accepted by the group’s lawyers, who had at some time previous been spurned by the actresses and wished for female company.

My experience allowed me to enter the female person much faster than any other female in-personator of the time, due to the mainly upper class upbringing of most actors which tended to produce sturdy, masculine men and sturdy, masculine women, their bodies hardened from their academic studies at various universities, as only these seedy organisations were willing to pay for the studies, whereas I, who had spent his tender youth at a near-working class standard school, had my body worked to gentle femininity thanks to my few years of work at the mill.

Quickly, I became the star of the troupe, especially after my lower middle class roots were revealed. I was loved by the audience, I was loved by my fellow actors, and I was adored by my fellow actresses, several of whom later used my working class mannerisms to create successful careers for themselves.


Cat 3
The Decline

Still, as the saying goes, all things must come to pass, and by the time I reached my thirtieth year of age, I was no longer the up and coming boy actress I used to be, opting instead for roles of maids and lovers, my days of crones and matrons over. I had also received a letter from my parents a year prior that my uncle Josephine had bequeathed me a substantial amount of Money in his will and died less than month later. Put together with my comfortable earnings on the stage, I had more than enough Money to buy myself a small farm in the country.

I celebrated my last night as an actress by performing Will Shakespeare’s Romeo in his traditional white bridal gown. The director chose for this performance the older, less polished version which omits the happy ending and delays Juliet before she can tell Romeo she’s leaving with Rosaline. This then meant that my meaningless death on the stage left the audience in tears, and poor Rosaline had to leave under the barrage of potatoes and books — our performance drew audience from all walks of life.

Afterwards, I retired to work at my new farm at the Bare Bottom village, which had been established by the luckless expatriates of my birth village of Upper Bottom. I was not accepted by my fellow working class members at first, but they warmed up to me when I revealed my acting skills and my acting costumes, which I had previously locked in a diamond encrusted box and left in the third attic of my new house.

My death came as a complete and unexpected surprise to me, just two months after I reached my forty-sixth birthdate. It came to me in the form of my long-time friend and former co-actress Carreigh Stiltkins and left in the form of my mathematics teacher Ms. Charles Ange-Wought. As my body was, at the time, home to seven deadly diseases, eight of which had been previously unknown, my death came as no surprise to me.

In conclusion, after I had left my mortal coil behind, I entered the blue light and


PDF version of the story (which is greatly recommended due to the visual aspect of the story) can be accessed here.

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Comments

Very strange ...

... and worth a kudo for that alone. If it has any meaning at all then it escapes me :)

Robi

The meaning

It has none!

P.S.: Oh, and Geoffrey says thanks for the kudo. It’s very tasty.

Comment in Lieu of Kudo

The algorithm used to generate this story quite escapes me, thereby forcing me to comment rather than simply hit the easy-to-use kudo button. For without knowing what the story is, how could one decide whether it was good or not? I say algorithm, because neither a plot nor story arc are evident, so something else must be at work here.

I'm rather imagining a board game, where with the roll of the dice, and the move of the piece, you land on a square which allows you to pick a card. Various decks of cards supply pronouns, verbs, nouns, or numeric descriptors. You fill in the words between as best you can. Some squares on the board require you to invert the meaning of the prior sentence. Others to switch the subject and object. Landing on the one black square requires you to discard the paragraph before the prior one, completely. The green square costs you a single sentence. Landing on the red square requires you to append all the accumulated discarded text from your opponents.

Whoever has the silliest and/or longest story at the end, wins.

By the way, if this story is the result of winning the game, I'd be curious to see the losers.

Hey!

So there I am, spending months joking that I write random, incomprehensible gibberish; then what happens? :)

Well, there's a beginning, a middle and an end; there's some semblance of plot; I doubt an automated spelling or grammar checker would find much wrong with it; but still...

You must have been in a very weird mood when writing this!

 

Bike Resources

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't...

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

rand(witty_title);

I blame two things - Tipping the Velvet (which I am reading at the moment and was watching today as I was reorganising my bookcases) and a BBC document about Monty Python. I will say no more on this subject.

P.S.: Geoffrey asks if it was you who left the kudo here and wants to thank you if you did.

P.P.S.: Please, don’t leave any more kudos, they can’t be healthy for her.

the pdf didn't really help me

rebecca.a's picture

for reasons i can't put my finger on, this was oddly appealing, in a very, very odd way. it's vaguely duchamp bicycle-wheel.


not as think as i smart i am

Story of a Young Actress Named Geoffrey

A fun story, even if a bit untamed.

    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine
    Stanman
May Your Light Forever Shine

Boy becomes Girl

Unless I have missed something I can assume
it takes very little to make some people
happy. Boy wants or is girl. Goes to girl
school with boys.

Deliciously complicated...

Deliciously complicated... as if Rube Goldberg decided to take up writing TG fiction.


The girl in me...
She's always there and she's presently quite baffled.

This sounds like my favorite bit of nonsense verse

Aljan Darkmoon's picture

Ladies and Gentlemen! With a whispered shout
I’ll tell you a tale I know nothing about;
The admission is free, so pay at the door,
Now pull up a chair and sit on the floor.

One bright day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back to back, facing each other,
They drew their swords and shot each other.

One was blind and the other couldn’t see,
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
Another blind man came to watch fair play,
And three mutes came to shout “Hooray!”

A deaf policeman heard the noise;
He came and killed those two dead boys.
He lived on a corner in the middle of the block,
In a two-story house on a vacant lot.

A blind man with no legs walked up to see,
and kicked the lawman in his knee.
Then a paralyzed donkey trotting by,
Kicked the copper in the eye.

He crashed through a wall without making a sound,
Into a dry creek bed and suddenly drowned.
A long black hearse came to cart him away,
But he ran for his life and is still gone today.

I watched from the corner of the big round table,
The only eyewitness to the facts of my fable.
But if you doubt that my lies are true,
Just ask the blind man–he saw it, too!