I am Marjorie Hughes, but many of you may know me by my nickname, Miss Comportment.
I’ll be your host on this trepidatious journey, the underbelly of this little swath of the universe, the place we’ve all come to know and love, River Road.
Before we embark together, however, let’s ask the very pressing question: Why am I here? I am of all literature in this small, forsaken town? Why am I being elected to take you through this?
Because once upon a time (oh how I love that delicious phrase …) I was an English major at Ithaca College. Directionless, romantic, young, naive.
All I ever wanted to do was read the greats you know … Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, Hemingway.
Romance, you know. I could get lost in their passages. They’d wash over me like the summer rain, sweet drop by sweet.
I felt fed in ways I’d never been fed as a child growing up here. It was unimaginable.
I had found my romance and life after afternoons with a book alongside Cayuga Lake. And everyone said Oh, Marjorie, she’s is most likely to become a poet. Or at least my sorority sisters had dubbed me that from quite early on.
What they didn’t know was the true nature of these verbal impressionists. Their transgressions are more interesting than any words they’d put to a page.
And so began my love of gossip, in the great tradition of Mark Twain, or rather, Samuel Langhorne Clemens as he was known to his family.
And so I became Miss Comportment.
Wardrobe malfunction? I covered it. Untoward behavior in public? I had the skinny.
Nothing was off limits from my pen when I put it to paper.
And now dear listener, I am back on the case in the driver’s seat for what promises to be a very nutty summer.
Stay tuned!
Gunnar Olafsson