Phutatorius

They — and by they Those In The Know understand exactly who I'm talkin' about — are finally putting aside the cartoon drawings and computer animation and are reviving a live-action Kool-Aid Man figure for TV spots later this fall. On a lark last week I went to a closed audition for the job of the Man in the Pitcher Suit.

How I got the invitation in the first place is a longer story: let it suffice to say that (1) Iron Maiden just so happened to be filming its last Boston show, (2) some of the folks in Kool-Aid's PR division happen to be old-school metal fans just like I am, and (3) they took due note of the fired-up fan on their DVD who, yelling "OH YEAH!" at the top of his lungs, knocked over a speaker tower during the encore performance of "Run to the Hills."

At any rate, I can now say from experience that the Kool-Aid Man pitcher suit, once they've filled it up with the Flavor of the Month, is one extremely unwieldy costume. And unless you're a former Olympic gymnast or martial-arts expert, you simply won't have the balance required to stand up inside it for any length of time. That said, I owe substantial props to the folks at Kool-Aid for giving me a second chance after I fell off the sound stage and shattered my first outfit. The do-over went a bit better — I did crash through the foam-brick wall on cue, and I uttered a suitably smarmy OH YEAH! just as I passed under the boom microphone. The problem was, I had too much momentum when I came into the room. I reeled across the set, leveled two child actors (the equivalent of a 7-10 split, for you bowlers out there — I couldn't duplicate that effort if I tried), then pitched into the far wall, which was made of sturdier stuff than the first. Plywood, I think.

I can't imagine I'll get a callback; in fact, the grapevine says Bart Conner's agent had the whole gig locked up before any of us even arrived. Still, I can chalk the whole day up to experience. The afternoon tour of Kool-Aid's facility was a riot, the equal of anything Roald Dahl could have dreamt up for Wonka. One great window into history is the original pitcher suit, which I was privileged to see in its display case at Kool-Aid Central.

Legend has it that this suit was reported stolen from a hotel in East Berlin during the four-city "K-A Man Behind the Iron Curtain" promo tour back in '79. The perpetrator of the theft — so the story goes — was an East German dissident who put it on and made a run at the Berlin Wall with the hope of smashing through to freedom. His gratuitous cries of ACH JA! drew the attention of border guards, who shot him dead at fifty yards' range. His Plexiglas armor never touched the Wall's reinforced concrete, postponing for ten more years resolution of the question of what happens when Western commercialism (the irresistible force) collides with the steely will of the Communist bloc (the immovable object).

Again, so they say — the pitcher suit I examined was indeed riddled with bullet holes on its front, but the shots could as easily have been fired by Hi-C execs on one of their guns-drugs-and-sex corporate retreats, for which they are so well-known in the kiddie-juice industry. Saboteurs have made off with the pitcher suits more than once; all it takes is the nerve and sagacity to get into the building. The bustin' out is easy.

Dear United States Postal Service:

My brother-in-law and I chipped in to purchase a vintage coffee maker in an online auction two weeks ago. The product was to be mailed to me, but I never received it. The auction seller clued me in today to a tracking number for the package, and I was able gather online your assurances that the product was indeed "DELIVERED" on May 12, notwithstanding that I have not seen hide nor hair of it in the week since.

The next step here, as I saw it, was to contact the residents of the five other units in my building, as one of them might have signed for and received the package last week, but forgotten to pass it along, as happens from time to time. I soon learned that two of my neighbors saw an unidentified man walking off our porch with a box sometime last week. They were not in a position to stop him, and it sounds like he was a large man.

On to the Post Office then, for a consultation — which takes some measure of determination, as none of your Customer Service Reps cares to answer the phone when it rings. But my own persistence and singularity of purpose ultimately won me a moment's congress with an operator, who informed me that the "Delivery Confirmation" level of service entitles the postal carrier to leave packages on porches, without making any real effort to ensure that the package is securely placed within the building. Had the auction seller sprung for the next tier of "delivery" service and purchased insurance, I was told, the mail carrier would have been required to obtain my signature before leaving the package to the wolves.

I think it's terrible policy for mailmen to leave packages outside of homes in urban areas, then blithely declare over the World Wide Web that they were "DELIVERED." What is "delivery," if the intended recipient never receives the goods? To take one example: I call for a pizza and am promised "free delivery." The delivery man throws the pizza into the River on the way to my house. He then presents himself at my door and asks for payment for the pizza. When I complain that the pizza has not arrived, he tells me, "well, if you had asked for it, we would have provided you with a guaranteed free delivery. At a dollar's extra charge, of course."

And so we come to the crux of it, a point I raised to the Wife several weeks ago when I walked up with her to the Mass. Ave. Post Office to mail my nephew's birthday present, and we declined insurance — the Postal Service's sale of "insurance" generates a bit of a warped incentive structure. In any other context, it's called a "protection racket." One envisions Internal Memoranda in your offices along these lines:

To: All Mail Carriers
From: The Postmaster General

Revenues from our package insurance program have dropped considerably in recent weeks. We attribute this decline to increased consumer confidence in our delivery capabilities. To put it bluntly, you folks are not losing enough packages. Please take all necessary steps in the coming days to remedy this situation, or layoffs will ensue in short order.

In short, I'm out $120 on this deal, because you people are sloppy and stupid. So thanks for nothing.

[Phutatorius]

I should add that this sort of thing didn't happen when Clinton was President.

The Wife and I spent a quiet couple of days in Provincetown last weekend. Largely uneventful — pleasant weather, long walks and bike rides, overindulgence in Portuguese fried doughs and Gruyere cheeses — but I should say I came home with an issue stuck in my craw.

Allow me to set the scene: a reasonably bright Saturday morning by the seaside. The Wife and I ambling down Commercial Street, past the cafes, the cabarets, the hundred B & B's, the epigrammatic T-shirt shops. Then, suddenly, it crops up on the right: a signpost, all but leaping off its moorings and into the street to tell me that there are "SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY." As if that was something I, or anybody else, needed to know — or that these poor little ones need to be told every time they leave the house. Really! To think that you would see a SLOW CHILDREN sign here, in Provincetown, Massachusetts — America's supposed bastion of tolerance! The bad feeling, the smugness, the discriminatory animus emanating from this sign took some time for me to shake. In fact, it very nearly ruined my lunch.

So Susie can't master her multiplication tables. Or Billy can't get the feel of writing in script. Maybe Little Fred jest plumb don't go in for book lurnin', and that-there kickball don't come off his foot right. So the townspeople can go and stick signs in their front yards to ridicule them, just because they're not like "reg'lar folks?" Didn't anybody read To Kill a Mockingbird? Boo Radley was a good guy — and I daresay a hero for saving Scout like he did — he was just misunderstood.

These kids have a hard enough time in life, facing regular abuse from their more up-to-snuff peers, living near heavily-trafficked thruways as they tend to do. You would think that here in the 21st century society could get past stigmatizing SLOW CHILDREN, but the beat goes on. Even in P-town, apparently.

Last year I worked at the federal courthouse in South Boston's Seaport District. From my desk I could look out the window at the Children's Museum, which is notable from a distance for the gigantic blow-up Arthur the Aardvark figure that stands guard atop its roof.

At that time, however, the bespectacled Arthur was a far-from-imposing sentinel, as through most of my year at the courthouse he was barely inflated to half-capacity. As a result, Arthur kept his vigil in a sort of awkward slouch, straining at the wires that held him in place. All the hallmarks of abdominal cramping were there. I used to sympathize with him on Wednesdays, after wolfing down one of those buffalo chicken wraps from the court cafeteria.

At one point when I was looking for work earlier this year, I found myself speaking with the attorney who represents Arthur in trademark matters ("brand management" is, I believe, the term that he uses to describe his practice). I remarked to him that Boston's Arthur Colossus had looked a bit worse for the wear recently: Is he doubled over in pain because of some plot development in his books that I don't know about? Has he, I wanted to know, been diagnosed with hepatitis?

Whatever the reason for it, I ventured to say, allowing that Affable Aardvark to wither away, hunched over, buffeted by the angry Seaport winds, on top of a building for months at a time is not an approach that I personally would find consistent with healthy "brand management." The attorney agreed, and he thanked me — no doubt, with tongue in cheek — for my critical input.

As some of you know, I started work again several weeks ago. My new office digs are in the Seaport, and my window fronts on the Children's Museum. It's a different angle on Arthur — I sit twelve storeys higher, the building is further away, and it is positioned such that I am now looking at him from behind. That said, as I regard him from this new perspective, Arthur's condition seems much improved. I hear he is taking regular interferon treatments, and he is certainly looking much more robust for it. He sits up perfectly straight — with the posture of a buck private on his last day of Basic, one might say — and from his perch on the roof he is able at last to give a spirited greeting to the children who visit the Museum, as his hoisters no doubt intended him to do in the first instance.

All is well, I say, that ends well. I don't doubt that I played some small part in the Aardvark's convalescence. But you all know me — I don't hunger for credit or accolades. It just warms my heart to know that I contributed.