I have company. Some of my best Great Dane friends from the neighborhood.
Ma's going to tell them my favorite story. How she grew up. I'm giving them one bone each, just one though. I have to save them.
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We finally settled down and got comfortable.
Imagine life, living just one block from the renowned Coney Island Amusement Park, she started....
It was even better than you're imagining.
The exciting carousels, roller coasters, ferris wheels, water slides, and who could get enough of the “spooky houses.”As a kid I thought Coney Island was the best place in the world to live. I was so lucky.
All was good. Best of all were my wonderful friends. I knew all the sideshows and the people who ran them. My friends were the people visitors called freaks. They weren’t freaks. Maybe oddly different, but a kinder, merrier group I’ve never met.
Of all the circus people, one of my very best friends was Slimshadow. Slimshadow was 9 ft. tall and skinny as a rail and he always had his 8 inch brown spider, Cookieface, with him. She was as well known as Slimshadow.
Hairy Harriet the bearded fat lady and I were just as close. Weighing in at 650 lbs. with a beard 5 ft. long she was as happy-go-lucky as could be.
What a happy time that was, though things had a way of changing quickly in the Coney Island underground, which is what it was called by the folks that lived there.
Another popular attraction was Jasmine the Snake Lady who could make her body do anything a snake could. She was as long and slim as Slimshadow and for this reason she thought they should be together forever. She hated Hairy Harriet and even little Cookieface. She wasn’t fond of me either.
While taking a walk down the boardwalk one day, I met Hairy Harriet who had been coming to find me. She was moving fast with a worried look on her face. She said Slimshadow was nowhere to be found. Cookieface had somehow relayed to her that the snake lady Jasmine had wrapped herself around him and rolled him away. Cookieface was so scared that she was hiding in Hairy Harriet’s beard while leading the way to her master.
They took off in a run with me following, while wondering how a 650 lb. bearded lady could run so fast. We went through parts of Coney Island I didn’t know existed, and came to a passageway that Hairy Harriet couldn’t get through. I was about to tell her I’d go ahead to see if he were at the other end but before I could get the words out she had hit the wall so hard that it cracked, then fell, leaving a hole big enough for her to enter.
We found Slimshadow at the other end with Jasmine still wrapped around him tightly. She was yelling, telling him why she should be his closest friend instead of Hairy Harriet. Slimshadow was just as loud while being twisted into a pretzel, telling her that if she continued to act this way she would never have any friends.
Upon looking at this sight, Hairy Harriet ran over and pulled Snake Lady so hard that she almost broke in two. But when Hairy Harriet finally calmed down, sadness had come over her. She was actually feeling sorry for Snake Lady Jasmine. Hairy Harriet slowly sat down. Her and Slimshadow had a long talk with Jasmine.
Cookieface and I stayed on the sideline, not knowing what else to do, but soon enough we were called over and were all lounging carefree while the Snake Lady happily told “her” stories of long ago.
During more than one of those tales, Cookieface perched on a foot and looked up at me. After a while we shared its meaning with Jasmine and she laughed loudest of all.She also promised us that she would never be jealous and mean again. She kept her promise.
I’ll never forget that day.
It wasn't long after that my friends moved on. I was lonely for a while but I met new friends. They were also known as freaks to outsiders, but definitely not to me.
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