Motterstown Portraits: Part 1, Jeremy DuWintyr and the Doomed Ocean Liner

I will begin to record this series of admittedly crazy childhood story dramas with what was essentially the end. This is a hopeless tale of tragedy, chaos, and minor finger injuries. I now present...
Jeremy DuWintyr and the Doom of the White Paw Line.

But first, some background info. I began to write and "direct" the Motterstown saga using stuffed cats, dogs, and off-brand American Girl doll props when I was around 9 or 10. I took this much too seriously, as evidenced by my choice to recall this as a 22 year old adult who really ought to, at this moment, be having life changing experiences like traveling, romance, and academic achievement, not writing about moldy stuffed cats. Anyway. The story of Jeremy DuWintyr and his wife Mary was written when I was about 12. No written scripts exist, so I will repeat it from memory.

We meet our hero at the middle-aged downfall of his existence (see: 6th grade film class, Death of a Salesman). The year is...sometime vaguely Victo-Edwardian. Except that World War II is perpetually going on, with dogs acting as the Germans. Have I lost you yet?

Jeremy, envisioned as a tall, dashing blonde man (portrayed by a fat orange Boyd's Bear tabby cat) was raised in opulence, experienced a whirlwind romance, and wedded his beloved Mary (a demure Ty orange cat) in his youth. He was the proud father to a bajillion Beanie Baby kittens, one of whom was always named Flora, and another, Amelia. Jeremy was employed as a successful architect when the war broke out (it always breaks out sometime in these stories, get used to it). Now, at this point in the story, I stopped for a while to make up the dramatic twist. Would his wife die in childbirth in a bomb shelter? Would he rise to political power and be assassinated? Would he instigate a covert rebellion against the forces of evil? Would he realize that there was humanity even in the slobbery jowls of the enemy and work to reunite cat and dog kind?

Nah. I was 12.

I decided to copy/youthfully plagiarize the real life plot of the Titanic disaster, for the 80th time. I set to work determining the intense psychological melodrama that would occur inside my character's head. Jeremy had lost his fortune in some sort of investment gone wrong. While desperately searching for money, he was commissioned by a sinister source to build the next spectacular ship in the fleet of the White Paw Line.

Yes, I called it that. CRINNNNNGGGGGGGGGEEEEE....

Alas, Jeremy ordered the ship to be built too quickly, and with shoddy materials. He knew that the vessel was doomed from the start.
If this were a soap opera, here is where you would hear the "DUNH DUNH DUNH!" noise. Jeremy's reputation was at stake, and he was forced by his employers to take his family aboard the cruise of doooooom.

My best friend and I played this scene with our "actors". We posed his wife on the laundry basket ship and made her exclaim, like Barbara Stanwyck in the 1940's version of Titanic, that the ocean liner was "chahming!" and then before that poor, furry little plush thing knew it, she was being lowered out of a balcony because that sucker was going down. Women and children were lowered into the "life boat", and real, honest to God tragedy struck at that very moment, because my finger became caught in the rope-and-wicker laundry basket contraption, and the skin started peeling off, causing the innocents to PLUMMET TO SUDDEN DEATH. It was very possible that the only sort of death a stuffed animal can befall could have happened in this situation. The toys fell into the yard where my friend's dogs pooped, and they could have been trashed.

But where was Jeremy, you ask? If you're still reading this and haven't unfriended me from Facebook for being insane? Irony of ironies! The men survived, and the women and children perished. I resolutely envisioned that Jeremy, disgraced for life, hanged himself upon reaching shore. I did not act that one out, because I knew even at that tender age that my parents would have whisked me away to a mental health treatment center if they had found a limp stuffed cat hanging off their bannister with a suicide note attached to his poly-fill paw.

This was not one of my lighter plots, obviously. It was schemed during one of those summers unique to preteen girls when the combination of hormones and haze causes you to watch endless cycles of daytime soap operas and read historical fiction (if you were like me) with a repentant heart. Levity about these games would come later on, when I understood that life was played out in subtleties instead of dramatic plot twists and inevitable chaos.