Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

Clara the bull

1973, Student Mission Corps, our one-week training in San Antonio. This day we were doing puppetry. One of the instructors came up with a big hand puppet, the kind that covers your whole hand and extends down halfway to your elbow.

Holding the puppet up, he exclaimed, “This is Clara! Clara is a cow.” “No, wait a minute,” he said, and then he manipulated his hand inside the puppet. “I take that back,” he said. “Clara is a bull.” Huge laughs. Later that day, he was back with Clara, held it up and said, “Clara is a cow—no, a bull,” an obvious play for laughs on his previous success, but all he got were charity titters.

Someone at my table, I don’t know who, called out, “Well, don’t milk it.” Then the laughs.

4 responses to “Clara the bull”

  1. Mary-Beth Taylor Avatar
    Mary-Beth Taylor

    Love it…bull or not.

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  2. Kat Van Avatar
    Kat Van

    I read “puppetry” as “puberty.” It still worked. 😉

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  3. katvan77 Avatar
    katvan77

    I read “puppetry” as “puberty.” Still worked! 😉

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  4. danoinny Avatar
    danoinny

    I didn’t get why he was getting the bull-Ed insight from holding the puppet, but someone who is surprised at being funny off an ad-lib will do that. On the scale of funny, an ad-lib is the most when done, least when repeated. I was in community theatre, Shakespeare, as the fool, and in a scene where my friends showed up drunk and the setting was the audience, they knocked over mikes as they left, I said, look at them! Laughter, because the audience and I got lucky on an ad-lib. Don’t milk it. Perfect example.

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About THE BLOG

Thanks for making your way to the The Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies, the personal blog of Elden Carnahan. My dad has been composing these stories as long as I can remember, either on paper or aloud around the dinner table. “You should put all your vignettes together into a book so we can sell it,” my mother would suggest from time to time.

For Christmas 2021, my sister gave Dad a Storyworth account–an online writing platform that sends you a weekly writing prompt in the form of a question. After a year or so of questions, the responses are all assembled into a hardback book. Dad took on the challenge with gusto, answering scores of questions, which often lent themselves to retellings of some of his favorite vignettes.

We’re using this blog to deliver the stories to a broader audience. Some of the posts are direct answers to Storyworth’s questions; others are stories that he wrote for other purposes. I’ll try to provide context and explanation where appropriate. Many of the images accompanying these stories were produced using DALL-E artificial intelligence, using prompts related to the stories.

Please feel free to engage with us by leaving comments, and enjoy!

-April (daughter of Elden)

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