The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish Page B

Book: The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish Read Free Book Online
Authors: Kris Radish
Tags: Fiction, Literary
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biweekly
Post
prints close to 75,000 papers and is considered the most popular paper on the East Side of Milwaukee.

          Assistant Chancellor William Bevens said he saw the paper while he was drinking coffee this morning with his wife and almost had a heart attack.

          “Ms. Boyer seems to find the most interesting subjects for her newspaper,” he said. “What they did is legal, and they are an independent paper, but I would be lying if I said I'm glad they printed the streaker's photo.”

          When students on campus were asked what they thought about the photo, the most common reactions went like this:

          * “Cool!” [literally]

          * “Did anyone get his phone number?”

          * “I'll never miss another issue of the
UWM Post.


          “Hey, just a couple of years ago there were veterans protesting all over the place and now we have streakers,” said Chad Gromley, a senior majoring in business. “It's news, man.”

          Past issues of the
Post
have contained controversial stories about professors and their long-ago student-work experiences, humorous looks inside locked campus bathrooms, and interviews with female college students working their way through school as prostitutes.

          Boyer said a framed copy of the photo will be hanging in the lobby of the newspaper office in case anyone missed the issue.
    —30—

 
     
    The Elegant Gathering: Chris
     
    Oh, for chrissakes. If I had a camera right now, I could take some pictures that would get me enough money to pay off the mortgage. Alice has on a pair of shoes that belong in the Wal-Mart Hall of Fame. I haven't seen shoes like that since 1972. Poor Alice. Her ankles are taking a hell of a beating out here. I can actually see them swelling. If we would have thought this through for more than thirty seconds, I could have bought her a pair of Nikes, which is exactly what I will do the minute we stop—that is
if
we stop. But hell, we left the house so damn fast, who thought to bring something serious like tennis shoes that were actually made for walking?
    This is the kind of thing our mothers warned us about when they said to make certain we always wore our best underwear if we were going someplace. I've always wondered about that. Did our mothers have one pile of underwear for staying at home and another for going out in public? I never saw the staying-at-home pile. My mother did have wonderful underwear, a trait that was definitely not passed on to me.
    My God, I used to watch her folding her little white brassieres, now there's an antiquated and formal word—
brassiere,
when was the last time you heard that? Anyway, she folded everything that came out of the washing machine as if she were fondling pieces of cloth that had touched the cheek of Jesus. Socks, hankies (she ironed the hankies), hell, my father's work pants, all my brother's geeky plaid shirts. Folding clothes for my mother was a religious experience and those brassieres, she would fold one cup softly into the other and tuck the straps inside that cup and then lift it onto the pile of her pink underwear as carefully as if she were feeding a sick baby.
    My mother looked great in her underwear, too. She worked for a time as a model after she ran away from home in the late 1940s. One night I caught her trying to burn a bunch of sexy old black-and-white photos that showed her reclining, naked I think, under pieces of silky, see-through lacy satin. My brothers loved to see her run from the bathroom to her bedroom in her panties and bra. Once my father caught them and rapped them upside the head with his slippers. Then he stood there just like them, grinning as my mother ran past him and slammed the door. Last I heard, just before we hit the road out here, she was still streaking down the halls of the condo in Florida.
    Maybe it makes perfect sense that I, Chris Boyer, became her bra-burning daughter from hell. For half of my

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