venture?! Have you suffered a silent stroke? First let me be clear that the idea for Algae’s screenplay was conceived by my son alone and based on true life experience that the family lived through when our local mortician mistakenly thought he’d won the Nobel Prize. That a traitor like Popkin who probably passed atomic secrets to Trotsky over tacos might have in any way contributed as much as a comma to my wunderkind’s scenario ranks in credibility alongside accounts of the Loch Ness monster. As for that dipso Miss Hydra Waxman, the Internet tells me that she has never appeared in any film of a millimeter above eight, and then under the name of Candy Barr. Incidentally, are you aware your instructor Silverfish was fired from editing a Hollywood movie because Henry Fonda was repeatedly cut in upside down? Algae also said the camera you provided him with, far from being new, ran in fits and starts as a result of being heaved at a nineteen-year-old lifeguard when she refused your advances. Is Mrs. Varnishke OK with you hitting on the female help? By the way, I apologize for disparaging your wife’s circulatory system with my sometimes too accurate wit. Given the myriad blue tributaries that mark her topography, I couldn’t keep myself from commenting on her similarity to a road map.
Finally, let this be the termination of any contact between us. All further correspondence should be mailed directly to the firm of Upchuck and Upchuck, Attorneys-at-Law.
Au revoir, meatball.
Winston Snell
Mine Dear Mr. Snell:
I only thank God He gave me a sense of humor so I can take a little joshing without immediately running right away to one of those gun magazines where hit men are so easy to hire. Let me do you a favor and clear up for you some facts. I never once in forty years looked at another woman except for Elsie, which candidly was not so easy as I’m the first to admit she’s not a dish like those zaftig courvers who pose in God knows what positions for magazines you probably wait drooling on the docks for as the boats arrive from Copenhagen.
Secondly, I’m just curious—where did you get the idea that that little vontz your son was a wunderkind? It could only be that you’re a typical cigar-sucking money maven who surrounds himself with namby-pambies who yes you and fill you full of bubbe meisehs you like to hear and the minute you leave the room, believe me, they roll their eyes. When Elsie and I had the candy store and I had a cretin who jerked my sodas who I kept on out of the goodness of my heart for his mother, she had a hip replacement, the doctors made a mistake, she wound up with a Chinaman’s liver—anyhow, this poor troll, the soda maker, with his double-digit IQ, towered like Isaac Newton over your Algae mentally.
That, by the way, was the summer Elsie’s nephew Benno won the spelling bee. “Mnemonic” the kid spelled, he’s all of eight. This is what I call bright, not your blond Midwich cuckoo who’s had every advantage in every private school with the expensive tutors and still he can’t remember who he is without checking the name tape in his T-shirt.
Meanwhile, instead of threatening with the lawsuits, tell instead your shysters if they check carefully, they’ll see that while you have a single print of the film that made both Weinstein brothers run like a couple of land speculators to throw sixteen million rugs your way, we have the only existing original negative up here in a bungalow. I just pray nothing happens to it, not that Mrs. Varnishke hasn’t already gotten a chicken-fat stain on the opening shot.
Moe Varnishke
Varnishke:
I read your last letter with a mixture of pity and fear, the Aristotelian recipe for tragedy. Pity because you obviously are unaware that by holding the negative to my son’s film you are guilty of a little social lapse called grand larceny, and fear because I had a prophetic dream last night wherein, after your prison sentence, you vividly caught a