Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Nurse Ratched’d by Denise, this weekly event celebrates the gathering of writers encompassing the complete spectrum of skill, intention and pent-up drives to add to their fifteen minutes of rhetorical notoriety.

The fun in this format, imo, lies in the near limitless parameters imposed on the author. Other than the eponymous number of sentences, we’re free to write whatever amuses us. For me, it is to practice writing, in general, and create scenes and impressions against a variety of backdrops, or in what the movie franchises so modestly refer to as the (-Franchise here-) Universe. Today, we’re off to our favorite fictional world of strip clubs and Radcliffe Unverstiy department chairs, fast cars and faster airplanes where we might find Ian Devereaux and them.

The prompt word this week is:

VERGE

“I’m tellin’ you, Devereaux, holidays ain’t what they used to be,” Lou Ceasare, standing behind the bar of his establishment, the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge, looked through the open shelves of liquor bottles that served as a divider between the Lounge and the Strip Club.

It was the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving and the club was half-crowded with students and businessmen; one group seeking a last minute Adults-Only fix before returning home for the holiday and the other, delaying their return home for the holiday.

I’d given my admin, Hazel, the day off and after a morning of sleuthing on the internet, alternating between LexisNexis, eHarmony and Ancestrydotcom, decided to have a late lunch before driving up to Cambridge, where my very close friend, Dr. Leanne Thunberg, promised some holiday-themed consciousness-raising.

Individual bottles of liquor not being at the top of the list of sound-proofing materials, I could enjoy the show, on the verge of the testosterone-mandated camaraderie and celebratory fist-bumping, as a new dancer, Crsytal Dale, in an admirable, if not slightly insane, display of creative dance, took off her full-on Pilgrim costume; only then did I notice that Lou had help behind the bar, a woman with multicolored hair, a touch of ink and an expression like Jane Goodall’s face on her first morning in Tanzania.

Nodding in her direction, “Who’s the new help Lou, if I knew you were hiring, I’d of brought my resumé,” Lou, his laughter, the burgeoning rumble of a domestic dispute between grizzly bears, looked over the top of his bifocals, “I was short on help and your buddy at that Café joint said I could give her a call.”

Looking up from cutting lemons into slices you could read through, the Bartender said, “You been told, Lou, you been told, I got a sociology paper due and I need a walk, not an apartment, on the Wild Side;” a silent two-count and they both laughed loudly enough to throw off Crsytal’s finish, her capotain flying into the dividing wall, nearly dislodging an eighty-five dollar bottle of Green Chartreuse; I decided the forty-five minute drive up to Radcliffe should be just enough time for my mind to transition from one world to the next.

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