Wobegon Boy Gets To The Bottom Of Things

Wobegon Boy uses an airliner restroom and the warning printed above the toilet inspires our best storyteller to meditate on the meaning of that warning. Flushing a toilet is an appropriate metaphor for this blog. If this is a (fair & balanced) frozen pump handle, so be it. it.

[x Salon]
"Do Not Flush While Seated On Toilet"
By Garrison Keillor

It is rather haunting, the notice above the Flush button in the toilet on the airliner, "Do Not Flush While Seated on Toilet." One imagines the engineers of the toilet running tests with flush dummies with big flat butts and the suction ripping the stuffing right out of them, and the engineers thinking, "Oh criminy, you mean we wasted three years on this sucker?" So lawyers were brought in to write the warning, which had to be short enough to be printed in large type so that geezers would see it, who are the ones most likely to flush while seated.

So they limited themselves to those seven words and eliminated "Flushing While Seated May Suck Your Colon Out Of You And Cut You A New Orifice While Changing Your Gender In Ways You Don't Even Want To Think About."

I sat down on the closed toilet seat to ponder this and saw that, from the angle of the sitter, the warning notice is not all that prominent. A person could sit there and not notice those seven words, or mistake them for something innocuous such as "Do Not Flush Wallet Down Toilet" or "Use Only As Much Toilet Paper As You Need," the sort of signage that's written by morons for idiots, and so — distracted perhaps by sudden turbulence or feeling rushed because others are waiting — he presses the Flush button and suddenly feels the toilet grip his hinder like a python seizing a rat. He tries to pry himself loose. No go.

Now the flight attendant is tap-tap-tapping on the door. "Are you all right?" she asks.

The man on the toilet, Mr. Murphy, doesn't know how to answer that question. He is, basically, all right in that he is an economist with a shining résumé, is married to a noble and resourceful woman, has three excellent children who are drug-free and on the upward path, and he is flying to Washington to interview for a high-level position in the Department of the Treasury.

On the other hand, he is trapped in the toilet.

She persuades Mr. Murphy to unlock the door. She tries to yank him off the toilet by his wrists and then she lifts up his shirttails and tries to break the seal by inserting her elegant fingers between the toilet seat and his posterior. But he is well and truly stuck.

One last yank and she accidentally pushes the Flush button again and it makes a great flubbery sound that shakes the aircraft, and now poor Murphy feels his innards being pulled downward. He faints. And when he awakens, the plane has made an emergency landing in Schenectady and six men in yellow phosphorescent coats are cutting the toilet with an acetylene torch. They lift him out, the seat still stuck to him, and right here, as he's being carried to a gurney, his luck runs out.

A passenger shoots a video with a cellphone and that is the image that makes its way around the world via the Internet. It doesn't appear in the Times or the Post or the Tribune, but everybody and his cousin sees it, what appears to be a Parker House roll on a plate with arms and legs.

An economist should not get stuck in a toilet seat. That is a basic unspoken rule of life. And so "ECONOMIST IN TOILET" is the headline in the Enquirer, and so a promising career is cut short and poor Murphy must go into exile and teach accounting courses at a secretarial school in Costa Rica.

People do what they are told not to do. It happens time and time again. Here on the frozen tundra, it is known as the Tongue on the Frozen Pump Handle principle. If you put your tongue on a pump handle on a bitter cold winter day, the tongue will freeze to the handle and you will stand there, helpless, unable to cry out for help. Not that it would do much good — most pump handles these days are in remote rural areas. We've all been warned against doing this and yet we all know that eventually we will do it someday. Somewhere there is a pump handle waiting for me.

I've always expected tragedy to strike around Christmas. A joyful season and all ye faithful have come and then, yikes! You flushed the toilet while sitting on it and your life will never be the same.


[Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the weekly radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1980s "A Prairie Home Companion" became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of Americans listening to Keillor's folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor's words) "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average." Keillor ended the show in 1987, and 1989 began a similar new radio show titled "American Radio Company of the Air." In 1993 he returned the show to its original name. Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature "A Writer's Almanac" in 1993. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005). Keillor's most recent book is a new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty. His radio show inspired a 2006 movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman. Keillor graduated (B.A., English) from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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