DD and her girls have a tradition of telling stories around the table after dinner. When we were there recently, the subject that Mimi gave us was “arts and crafts”. Once the subject has been given, each of the other people at the table is supposed to come up with a funny little story inspired by that subject. The winner is the one who tells the best story. Hubby and I enjoy playing this game with them when we are there, but the subject of “arts and crafts” just left me stumped. So I guess it’s been simmering in the back of my brain ever since, and this twist on it just came to me.
Note: Obviously, this is a little more elaborate than it would have been if I’d just been making it up as I went during the after-dinner story telling. I guess that’s that fiction writing class I took a few years ago kicking in.
Em and Lil were friends who enjoyed doing a wide variety of crafts, like quilting, ceramics and flower arranging. And the friends were always looking for new projects. So when Em saw an ad in the newspaper for an Arts and Crafts Show in a small town about a half hour away, they decided to go see what new ideas they might glean.
But when they arrived at the address listed in the ad, it was a big, plain-looking building with no obvious signs telling them this was the place. When they looked around for some other place the show might be, this was the only place on the small main street of the town that had anything going on, with lots of vehicles in the parking lot, so they went inside.
They stopped dead in their tracks when they walked through the door. This was definitely not an arts and crafts show.
The huge building enclosed a race track and men were driving go-carts at break-neck speeds around the track. At just that moment, a guy leaned across the fence surrounding the track and waved a checkered flag as one of the carts whizzed past. There was a loud clamor of hoots and whistles, a smattering of applause and some high-fives … someone had won a race!
Em and Lil looked at each other with a what-the-heck-is-going-on look. Lil said to Em, “Wow, are we in the wrong place. This definitely isn’t an arts and crafts show. And, look! What’s going on out there?”
At the back of the building there were huge doors that were open to the property behind the building and through it Em and Lil could see a pond. And on the pond were two rafts, with a man with a long pole on each. The men were using the poles to steady their own raft while trying to knock the other guy off of his raft … apparently playing “king of the mountain”. There were other guys, some wet, some dry, standing around the edge of the pond cheering the men on.
When Em saw what was going on, she began to laugh. Lil turned to her amazed. What was so funny? Em was able to stop laughing just long enough to say, “Well, obviously we aren’t going to be attending an arts and crafts show today, so why don’t we go have lunch at that little cafe up the street and I’ll tell you what I think is so funny.”
Once they were seated in the cafe and had placed their order, Em explained how they had been mislead by the ad for the show.
The advertisement had had a small misprint that had made a big difference.
It wasn’t meant to advertise an Arts and Crafts Show … it was advertising a Carts and Rafts Show!
Then Lil laughed too.
An interesting afternoon in a totally different way than they had expected, caused by the temporary inattention of a typesetter and his placement of a very important “C”.
