HUMOR
The Passion Of The Limbo LordLOS ANGELES 04 March 2008 |
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The first and only time I ever found myself star struck, I wasn’t even meeting a celebrity. Well, he was somewhat of a celebrity, but he wasn’t in the movie business and he was about three thousand miles away from Hollywood.
It was in Jamaica. My parents took us to a resort there for vacation when I was in grade school. I remember being very excited to go to the Caribbean because I wanted to find out once and for all whether it was pronounced Care-a-BEE-anne or CARRIB-ee-anne. Once we arrived, however, I soon discovered the trip would be exciting for more than just that one reason.
We got to our rooms in the resort early in the afternoon, and we each found a slip of paper shoved under our door. It was an itinerary for the offered entertainment; shows and activities mostly.
Scheduled for the third night of our stay in Jamaica was an entertainer called, simply, “The Limbo Lord.”
When I saw this, I nearly fainted. The words called out to me, jumped right off the page. For reasons I can no longer comprehend, the Limbo Lord was one attraction I felt I had to experience.
I felt so strongly about witnessing this man’s act that I crossed my fingers and wished to fast forward through the first two days of vacation in order to get there more immediately.
This was a sacrifice I was willing to make in order to more quickly satisfy my curiosity for the ancient art of the limbo.
I tried to keep busy for the first two days. I got my hair braided by a rotund, constantly giggling woman. She used such an enormous amount of grease in my hair when she braided it that, when we got back to Illinois, I had to wash it with dishwasher detergent seven times before it even began to come out.
I decided it was worth it because I knew I could wear it to school the first day after vacation. Everyone would know I’d been somewhere tropical and they’d be wild with jealousy.
I talked about the Limbo Lord with the giggling woman while she braided my hair. I asked her if she knew of him, and she said of course she did. Excited by her answer, I probed for any information I could get about him.
“The man can bend like he’s not a human,” the woman said in her thick, hardy, Jamaican accent.
This was an obvious bit of information, but still, hearing it from the mouth of someone who knew him personally made it seem like a revelation.
The night before the show, I rambled on and on about how I’d heard that the Limbo Lord was really good and that he could bend like you wouldn’t believe and how amazing it all was.
My parents, who were totally unimpressed, pretended to be engaged.
“With whom are you going to go to the show?” Mom asked, with her aggressively perfect grammar.
“I’m going with Jenny and Krista,” I announced, happy to prove I didn’t need them.
I had made friends around the resort easily because I was still young enough to think it was okay to walk right up to someone and inquire about her availability as a best friend.
“Well, I hope you girls have a nice time,” Mom said.
“But remember, if the Limbo Lord is wearing loose shorts, it’s best to look away,” Dad reminded me.
It bothered me that my Dad would make fun of this limbo master. I had already created an image of him in my head, and he was amazing.
If something did pop out of his shorts while he shimmied under that limbo bar, it seemed to me that we’d be lucky to have been among the people to witness the exposure. This was no ordinary flash of vulgarity, it was the lewd mistake of the Limbo Lord.
That had to mean something.
The Limbo Lord did not wear shorts. It turned out, he was a flamboyant gay man wearing a paisley jumpsuit, seemingly designed specifically to accommodate the physical demands of the limbo.
He had a matching hat.
He started his performance with an explosion of fire on either side of his body. I imagined the fire to be symbolic of the passion he felt for the limbo. It was a very exciting kick off.
The giggling woman was right. This man could not possibly have had bones in his body, the way he was bending. He slipped under a bar that, I swear, was no more than three inches above the ground.
By the end of the show, my jaw was on the ground and I could barely move. It was stunning to see what I had seen, a man scrunching himself into a right angle for me, just for me, just for my entertainment.
It made me feel like a queen with a jester.
After a long, heavy round of applause, the Limbo Lord announced that, in addition to being a limbo master, he was a also an accomplished psychic. He read palms, and he would be happy to read any of ours for only ten dollars right after the show.
A limbo master and a psychic? I couldn’t believe my ears.
It was the luckiest, most profound day of my life. I ran to the door on the side of the stage, waiting for my mind-reading limbo lord to emerge. I thought it inexplicable that the rest of the audience had quickly dispersed, uninterested in meeting this man.
The moment he came out was the moment I was star struck.
I couldn’t speak. All I could do was stare at him with buggy eyes, like a little girl with a mental disease.
He held his hand out to me the way the Queen of England might, perhaps expecting me to kiss the back of it. I took his hand in mine and stuttered at him.
“I have t-t-ten dollars.”
“Wonderful,” he said, and he sashayed over to a table with two chairs, instructing me to follow with a curl of his index finger.
The Limbo Lord told me that, by reading my palm, he could see many things. He predicted love, and loss of love, things like this. Probably picking up on my disinterest in the subject of love, he switched quickly to the subject of death.
“A close friend of your mother and father will die within a year,” he said.
“Which one?” I asked, very much engrossed.
“A heart condition renders him weak, but his name I cannot speak,” the Limbo Lord said.
Such lyrical language!
That night, I broke the news to my parents.
“Do any of your friends have heart conditions?”
“Yes, Richard does,” they said.
“He’s going to die this year. I’m sorry.”
“Lenore, why would you say a thing like that?” My mother scolded.
“The Limbo Lord is the one who said it. I’m just letting you know as a favor so you can prepare for your loss,” I said.
That year, I looked in the obituaries every day, searching for Richard’s name. I questioned my mother and father about the status of his heart condition, hoping there would be some bad news every time.
I would have settled for a slight decline in health, but he stayed the same all year.
When eleven months had passed, and Richard only had one month left to get his act together and start dying, I began to worry. I was pretty sure it took longer than a month to die from a heart condition.
In the back of my head, I knew I might have to face the possibility that the Limbo Lord was no psychic, that he was a sham. He had no paranormal powers.
The month ended.
My mother made me cupcakes because she could tell I was feeling down.
Richard had not died, nor had any other friend of my parents.
It was a major disappointment.
The Limbo Lord might have had a superhuman ability to wiggle under a bar, but he was also a con artist. I knew I had been taken.
While I licked thick, chocolate frosting off the top of a cupcake, I vowed that I would never again allow myself to be as star struck as I’d been in Jamaica. And that I wouldn’t ever trust another suspiciously flexible psychic, no matter how passionate he may be about the limbo.
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