The Further Adventures of French Sailor
By
Steven Hunley
French Sailor was told by his doctors to give up spinach and told to eat plenty of fruit. He does. He eats bananas, tangerines, papayas, mangoes, limes and lemons. Tropical fruit. South of the Border fruit. It is almost December so the fruit is from Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Again, fool that French Sailor is, he eats too much. He has a strange desire to wrap a napkin around his head, which he does at once. In it he places a banana, then one baby lime and one baby lemon for color. Then, for some odd reason, he puts on his mom’s lipstick, going over his natural lip line to widen and accentuate his lips. He looks in the mirror.
“Mon Dieu!” exclaims French Sailor.
French Sailor can no longer paint between the lines! When he realizes what he has done he says,
“Sacre blue,” a typical French expression in a situation such as this you have to admit.
Then he piles more fruit on his head and wraps a red towel around his butt and ties it in a knot near his hip.“Boom chicky-boom-chick,” he says to the mirror, though I don’t know why I’m sure. He goes outside and joins an incredibly long conga line extending from his house to Hollywood, a distance of 3,353 miles, (or 5, 396 kilometers for our intrepid Frenchman) When Lucy, who is in the same line complains about her sore feet, Ricky replies,
“Stop crying Honey, what are a few extra steps when you’re dancing the conga?”
He dances there nonstop to a beat provided by Xavier Cugat, playing Chiquita Banana, setting a record and getting a passing mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. In Hollywood he is touted as the “Brazilian Bombshell” though in reality he is a French sailorman, not Brazilian sailorwoman. He becomes neurotic trying to decide which persona to use, but patriotism wins out and he returns to Quebec.
“Vive La France,” he is reported to have said when he left, his Gaulic nose quite prominent. It seems he gave up fame and fortune to live a simpler life.
When he finally got interviewed by Walter Cronkite, and Walter asked him why he did it, the translation was this: “A sailor’s life is the life for me.” Though it may be pointed out, one can never fully trust a translation, they sometimes are, like life itself, full of misunderstandings and confusion. He understands this. For such is the life of French Sailor.
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