“The what?”
“The lebkuchen spice one.” He held it up for me. “This one.”
“You’re making that up. What’s a lebkuchen spice? It sounds like a cross between a Keebler elf and a stripper. hello, my name ees Lebkuchen Spice, and I vant to show you my cooooookies.…”
“Don’t be rude!” Boomer protested. As if the cookie might be of ended.
“Sorry, sorry.”
The pre-movie commercials started, so while Boomer paid rapt at ention to the “exclusive previews” for basic-cable crime shows featuring stars who’d peaked (not too high) in the eighties, I had a chance to read what Lily had writ en in the journal. I thought even Boomer would like the Shrilly story, although he’d probably feel really bad for her, when I knew the truth: It was so much cooler to be the weird girl. I was get ing such a sense of Lily and her twisted, perverse sense of humor, right down to that classic supercalifragiwant. In my mind, she was Lebkuchen Spice—ironic, Germanic, sexy, and o beat. And, mein Got , the girl could bake a damn ne cookie … to the point that I wanted to answer her What do you want for Christmas? with a simple More cookies, please!
But no. She warned me not to be a smart-ass, and while that answer was totally sincere, I was afraid she would think I was joking or, worse, kissing up.
It was a hard question, especially if I had to bat en down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I’d probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas. I could play the boo-hoo orphan card and wish for my whole family to be together, but that was the last thing I wanted, especially at this late date.
Soon Coll ation was upon us. Parts of it were funny, and I certainly appreciated the irony of a lm distributed by Disney bemoaning corporate culture. But the love story was lacking. After all the marginally feminist Disney heroines of the early to mid-nineties, this heroine was literally a blank piece of paper. Granted, she could fold herself into a paper airplane in order to take her stapler boyfriend on a romantic glide around a magical conference room, and her nall rock-paper-scissors showdown with the hapless janitor showed brio of a sort … but I couldn’t fall for her the way that Boomer and the stapler and most of the kids and parents in the audience were falling for her.
I wondered if what I really wanted for Christmas was to nd someone who’d be the piece of paper to my stapler. Or, wait, why couldn’t I be the piece of paper? Maybe it was a stapler I was after. Or the poor mouse pad, who was clearly in love with the stapler but couldn’t get him to give her a second look. All I’d managed to date so far was a series of pencil sharpeners, with the exception of So a, who was more like a pleasant eraser.
I gured the only way for me to really nd the meaning of my own personal Christmas needs was to leg on over to Madame Tussauds.
Because what bet er barometer could there be than a throng of tourists taking photos of wax statues of public figures?
I knew Boomer would be game for a eld trip, so after the stapler and the piece of paper were safely frolicking over the end credits (to the dulcet tones of Celine Dion piping “You Supply My Love”), I shanghaied him from the lobby to Forty-second Street.
“Why are there so many people out here?” Boomer asked as we bobbed and weaved roughly forward.
“Christmas shopping,” I explained.
“Already? Isn’t it early to be returning things?”
I really had no sense of how his mind worked.
The only time I had ever been in Madame Tussauds was the previous year, when three friends and I had tried to collect the world record The only time I had ever been in Madame Tussauds was the previous year, when three friends and I had tried to collect the world record for most suggestive posings with wax statues of B-list celebrities and historical gures. To be honest, it gave me the heebie-jeebies to go down on so many wax gures—especially Nicholas Cage, who already gave me the heebie-jeebies in real life. But my friend Mona wanted it to be a part of her senior project. The guards didn’t seem to mind, as long as there was no physical contact. Which made me expound upon one of my earlier theories, that Madame Tussaud had been a true madam, and had started her whole operation with a waxwork whorehouse somewhere near Paris, Texas. Mona loved this theory, but we could find no proof, and thus it did not transform into true scholarship.
A wax replica of Morgan Freeman was guarding the entrance, and I wondered if this was some kind of cosmic payback—that every time an actor with a modicum of talent sold his soul to be in a big Holl ywood action picture of no redeeming social value, his sell out visage was struck in wax and placed outside Madame Tussauds. Or maybe the people at Madame Tussauds gured that everyone loved Morgan Freeman, so who wouldn’t want to pose with him for a quick snapshot before stepping inside?
Weirdly, the next two wax gures were Samuel ll. Jackson and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, con rming my sell out theory, and also making me wonder whether Madame Tussauds was deliberately keeping all the black statues in the lobby. Very strange. Boomer didn’t seem to notice this. Instead, he was acting as if he were having real celebrity sightings, exclaiming with glee every time he saw someone—“Wow, it’s Hall e Berry!”
I wanted to scream bloody murder over the price of admission—I made a note to tell Lily that the next time she wanted me to fork over twenty-five bucks to see a wax statue of Honest Abe, she should slip some cash into the journal to cover my expenses.
Inside, it was a total freak show. When I’d visited before, it had been nearly empty. But clearly the holidays had caused a lot of family-time desperation, so there were all sorts of crowds around the unlikeliest of gures. I mean, was Uma Thurman really worth jostling for? Jon Bon Jovi?