Thursday Cakesman was born in the town of Rural, Ohio in 1981.  It is rumored that along with his mother’s afterbirth came a tiny, lapel-sized, clip-on microphone.  Soon after he was born, his mother noticed his bellybutton was shaped exactly like Texas.  She took this as a bad omen and immediately had it filled in with skin from his left thigh.  At the age of two, Thursday had already produced a ten-minute audio retrospective on his pet frog, Alphonso.  Unfortunately the tape was destroyed when it was eaten and regurgitated by his cat, Smomp.  In 1986 the Cakesman family was forced to evacuate their home due to a horrific ant infestation.  The infestation was said to have begun after Thursday broke a story about a bag of barbecue potato chips that had spilled on the carpet in the living room.  The Cakesman family moved to Colorado Springs that same year and enrolled Thursday in the local, fundamentalist, Christian public high school.  Although Thursday was extremely bright, he was often bored in school and received poor grades.  One school report read, “When Thursday is called upon to answer a question he always holds his hand up to his ear and says ‘Hi Jane, I’m afraid we have a bad connection.  Back to the studio!’”

Thursday spent most of his free time interviewing Colorado Springs locals and blasting the interviews on the loudspeaker, which he had rigged on top of the Cakesman roof.  He was particularly fond of the town’s professional ice cream scooper, a young girl named Alsie Homat.  During 1991-93, Thursday interviewed Alsie somewhere between 4000-5000 times and the interviews were often ice cream related.  One particularly controversial report involved mice that were found dead in the ice cream parlor’s pantry, encrusted in a pool of spilled caramel sauce.  The mice were apparently bloated to three times their usual size.  When autopsied, they were found to have died from over consumption of Brownie Fudge Delight—Wednesday’s daily flavor.

In 1993, a local morning radio DJ named Annoy was driving down the Cakesman’s street when he heard one of Thursday’s reports about declining skunk populations blasting from the loudspeaker on top of their roof.  At that same moment, he hit a skunk running in the road and it was instantly killed.  Annoy was surprised by the report’s accuracy and decided to knock on the Cakesman’s door to see who was reporting on these events.  Annoy offered Thursday a job as junior reporter on the spot and he quickly accepted.  Soon Thursday was one of the top reporters in Colorado Springs.   He reported on such topics as puberty, gardening tips, and the economy.  He soon moved out of his parents’ house and Alphonso the frog became his legal guardian.  At the age of 14 Alsie and Thursday married.  They lived in a tiny studio apartment where the stove doubled as a sink.

When he was 16, Thursday moved to Denver where he worked at Denver’s hottest AM news radio station, 560 KRAP.  It was there he met the infamous billionaire heir—Jonathan Reservoir.   Cakesman and Reservoir soon bonded over their shared love of rainbow chasing.  They were often seen chasing rainbows across the Colorado plains, with Cakesman reporting on their every move.   Reservoir destroyed dozens of BMWs on these dangerous missions, but he always had a backup waiting in the garage.

In 1998 Thursday and Jonathan joined the local United Atheist Youth (UAY) chapter.  It was there Thursday met Janna Braunstien, a brace-faced, jokester who would become one of his closest friends and partner in crime.  One night, Thursday, Janna, and another friend named Beatrice decided to throw a midnight pajama party at Thursday’s 560 KRAP radio station offices.  During the party Janna decided it would be funny to a raid the office supply closet.  She found a sheet of 24 nametags that each said, “Hello my name is…” on them.  In the space for the name she wrote, “I eat pee.”  She wrote this on every nametag, peeled them off and stuck them all over the walls of the office.  When Thursday discovered what Janna had done, he screamed in horror and hurled a computer at her face.  Unfortunately, he missed, and the computer went tumbling through a glass window and down six stories to the parking lot. 

When Thursday returned to work on Monday morning, he confessed to the mess and was promptly fired.  However, Thursday was a master negotiator and somehow managed to convince his employers to let him continue his reporting work elsewhere.  He was traded to a news radio station in a desolate town called Columbia, Missouri.  In return for their trade, 560 KRAP received a ceramic, peacock cookie jar. 

Alsie relocated to Columbia with Thursday, and there they became one of the town’s most notable couples.  They were often seen out on the town, hobnobbing with various cross-eyed Missouri celebrities.  Thursday won 16 new awards while working in Columbia—one of them which was an in-depth investigative report concerning Jonathan Reservoir’s fear of metal utensils.  Reservoir became furious when he got word of this report and arranged for a hit man to kill Thursday and Alsie’s beloved frog Alphonso.  Fortunately, his plan was foiled when Alphonso took his own life the night before the hit man was to sneak into Thursday and Alsie’s home.  Unbeknownst to his owners, Alphonso was dying of lung cancer and was only given a year to live.  His suffering had become unbearable and he crawled into the dishwasher after a Tuesday meatloaf night meal and was cleaned to death. 

In 2006, Thursday and Alsie relocated again— this time to Houston, Texas where he was offered a job as a cowboy/reporter.  Unfortunately, Alsie, now a professional spy, was forced to move to Aspen Colorado for six months to work on a mission meant to catch Republicans in various acts of hypocrisy.  While Alsie was gone, Thursday dipped into a deep depression and spent his days eating cold steak in bed and showering in his cowboy boots.  Eventually the steak ran out so he began eating lint from the dryer to survive.  By the time Alsie returned to Houston, Thursday had lost his job and was eating his beloved cowboy boots.  Alsie quickly nursed him back to health and he began freelancing for a local CBS affiliate, which he continues to do to this day.

What. The. Hell. Why did you get me?!  I am hideous.  You gave me bangs? You know I can’t keep them down.  I have that cowlick thing!  I looked fine before you cut me up! I am a mistake! I am the illegitimate love child of a mullet and mom hair.

Why are you even bothering to blow dry me?  You know I’m only going to get all puffy in about 20 minutes.  Don’t you remember—I’m the one who makes you look like a crack whore no matter how hard you blow hot hair all over me.

Shit.  It’s fucking raining.  This day is over as far as I’m concerned. There is no way I’m going out tonight.  I repeat: We are not going out.  Fuck. Why are you doing this to me? Are you purposely trying to humiliate me?

Oh, god.  You’re letting that guy you brought home sleep over?!  Are you fucking insane?  Do you know what I’m going to look like in the morning?  Please, for the love of god—sleep with a hat.

Just admit it, I’m ruining your life.  You know it’s my fault that guy never called you, and I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean it. Just shave me.  You would be much better off without me.

            I was like a kid in a candy store.  Except instead of candy it was cheese.  I was in an enormous cheese shop in Marseille, France drooling over the hundreds of cheeses surrounding me.  Unfortunately, I was returning home to Brooklyn the next day and there was only so much cheese I could sample while I was there.  I had to bring some home with me.  But would it survive the trip? 

            Although France is only a 6-7 hour plane ride to New York my trip was going to take more than 24 hours.  I had to take a train to Paris, spend the night in the airport, fly to Dublin in the morning, endure a 4 hour layover and finally depart for JFK.

The woman in the French cheese shop had promised me the cheese would be fine during the 24 hour trip back to the states.  But it seemed the French had different ideas about freshness.  Someone told me they kept their milk in the cupboard.  And when their cheese got moldy they just cut the mold off.  My friend who I was staying with did not even have a freezer!

I was nothing like the French.  I threw containers of yogurt away the minute they reached their sell-by date.  I feared gastrointestinal illness like the plague.  I prided myself on my no-vomit steak which had been going on for years. 

But despite my intense fear of unrefrigerated foods, I wanted to bring back French cheese so badly.  I imagined the scene clearly in my head: I would invite a small group of friends over for a gathering and arrange the fancy cheeses on a plate with a long baguette. 

“These cheeses are French,” I would say. “You know, like from France.”

Then my friends would ooh and ahh and devour the cheeses, praising me for being so cultured and sophisticated.

“Oh, you have such great taste,” they would say. “You’re a real French girl now!”

On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t share the cheese at all.  Maybe I would enjoy it each morning for breakfast with some grapes and strawberries and a fresh glass of orange juice.  I would savor each bite, closing my eyes in dairy ecstasy.

I decided to buy 20 Euros worth of cheese—three large slices: one cow, one goat and one sheep.  The lady in the store vacuum packed the cheeses and I stuck them into my suitcase next to a water bottle to try to keep them cool. 

Later, while sitting in my tiny airplane seat I thought about the cheese in its strange vacuum packed container.  Was it okay?  Was it being smashed into a pancake under hundreds of pounds of matching luggage?  Was it growing mold? Deadly bacteria?  Could the baggage handlers smell it as they moved it from one plane to the next?

“Who puts cheese in a suitcase?!” they would think.

“Cheese in a suitcase is crazy! And it stinks!”

*********************************

As soon as I was back in my apartment in Brooklyn I ripped open my suitcase and pulled the cheese out.  I furiously cut it out of its vacuum packed protective gear and rolled it out of the butcher paper.  It was a little smushed but it still looked like cheese.  It still smelled exactly like it had a day earlier in the heavenly cheese store. Stinky and yummy.

But was it alright?  It had been traveling, unrefrigerated for more than 30 hours now.  Would it make me violently ill?  Should I eat it? Or should I be safe, throw it out and waste the 20 Euros I’d spent?  I put the cheese in the refrigerator and decided to think about it for the next few hours as it cooled.

In the meantime I decided to do a few Google searches in order to inform my decision to eat or not to eat the cheese.  A few of the search terms I used were “unrefrigerated cheese”, “got sick from cheese”, “brought cheese back from Europe” and “cheese in suitcase.”  The results of my searches only confused me further.  I perused message boards where people mentioned leaving cheddar cheese in a hot car for three weeks and then feeding it to their children.  Others mentioned filling entire suitcases with salamis and bries after trips to Europe.  Still others wrote about taking long camping trips where they seemed to have survived entirely on blocks of Parmigiano-Reggiano.  One thing was clear though—I definitely felt a little less crazy now.

After a few hours I was starting to get hungry.  I thought about what I had read online and how much time I had spent worrying about this cheese.  I decided I was going to eat it.  If I was going to get sick, I’d only be in bed for a day, maybe two.  There’s no way it could kill me right?  The cheese was nice and cold now.  I cut off a small piece and took a bite. 

It was salty, creamy perfection.  I grabbed a piece of bread and married the cheese to it in a simple, sloppy sandwich.  If there was a deadly bacteria in it I didn’t really care in that moment.  I devoured most of the cheese in one sitting.

The next day, I was still in perfect health.  I figured if I was going to get sick from the cheese it would have already happened.  I was free!  Hooray!  A weight had been lifted from my shoulders! But then I realized that that weight would soon settle on a different part of my body—my thighs.

http://corneliacuddle.blogspot.com/

A new audio file I made today.  Starring siblings “Justine” and “Bobby.”  Voices by Joanna Brown.