For a recent workshop session, I borrowed parts of the opening lines from several of the essays in David Sedaris‘ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Little, Brown 2004). “Chicken in the Henhouse begins, “It was one of those hotels without room service, the type you wouldn’t mind if you were paying your own bill but would complain about if someone else was paying.” I invited writers to begin with the words “It was one of those of those hotels…”
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It was one of those motels with a scum-covered, leaf-lined, 3-foot-deep bone-dry pool out front. Aluminum lawn chairs with missing panels still gathered around it, as if hoping for a return to the glory days of motor lodges, those days when Mom and Dad and Junior and Sissy would stop after a long day of touring Yellowstone or Gettysburg, Mom’s hair as tall as a haystack and stiff as meringue, due more to Aqua Net than the flimsy chiffon she had tied over it. Junior and Sissy would fling their bathing suits on–plaid drawstring shorts for Junior, polka dots and ruffles for Sissy–jam their white middles into plastic swim rings and jump into a cloud of watery chlorine that reddened their eyes and made their noses drip, while Mom said you kids stop running and Dad said you kids listen to your mother, and I’m going to ask the manager where the nearest HoJo’s is and Mom sat reading True Confessions, a lipstick-smudged cigarette burning in the glass ashtray that said “Bide-A-Wee for a Small Fee” in gold letters.
The ashtrays were gone long before anyone believed the Surgeon General, and so were the round plastic tables adorned with burn marks and coffee rings, and families never stopped at the Bide-A-Wee anymore, not even to ask about the nearest Cracker Barrel. The sign out front still advertised the pool, but kids had spray painted over the “L” and so now it just read “Poo.” A pale Plymouth Horizon, which looked like it might have been some cheerful color when new–Robin’s Egg or Cobalt–sat a few yards from the door marked “Office” like an asthmatic waiting to catch its breath before going on. White curtains sagged nearly closed in every window and Laurie thought she had never seen anyplace so lonely in all her life.