Metallage

Metallage (me-tal’-la-gee): When a word or phrase is treated as an object within another expression.

Your “shoe business” sounds like “show business.” All these years I thought you were a performer of some kind. When you talked about the shoes you sell, I thought you were talking about shows you were appearing in: “Loafers,” “Heels,” “Dockers,” “Mules,” etc.

I imagined that “Loafers” was a play about a group of wealthy people who had a club called “Loafers” where the loafed around and thought of “lazy” things to do. One of my favorite fantasies about “Loafers” was the time they paid the wages of everybody at “Eat it!” a small sandwich shop on the town green. The show followed each employee on their gifted day off. Sadly, when they started loafing, all the employees suffered from PTSD from various traumatic experiences they had in life. When they were busy at work they didn’t have time to think about their life’s horrors. The owner, Stewart Smackadakolus, in violation of a number of laws, had his employees work seven days per week, so they all seemed tired, but otherwise ok. But, ironically, Mr. Smackadakolus was probably affected the worst by the day off. When he was nine years old he had killed or wounded everybody in his neighborhood. His father had left a locked and loaded Thompson sub-machine gun in Stewart’s toy box. This is hard to comprehend, but it happened. He said he put it there because nobody would look for a machine-gun in a toy box. Stewart found the gun when he was looking for his Tonka truck in the toy box. He yelled “Banzai!” and ran out the front door into the street. He pulled the trigger and “hosed” the neighborhood down with hot lead. When he ran out of ammunition, he dropped the gun and burst into tears.

Stewart’s father was jailed for 25 years for 12 counts of second degree murder, an amazingly lenient sentence. It was determined that Stewart was too young to know what he was doing and he was released and was never criminally charged. Eventually, he went through state sponsored, post high school, sandwich-making training. He opened “Eat it!” and used his sandwich-making training and the business acumen gained from his paper route and selling Christmas cards to handle the financial end of the business. He had been an avid pet owner, so he was good at managing his employees. In short, his small sandwich shop was a success, but he was haunted by his past.

The Loafers felt sorry for him and bought his sandwich shop for 10-times what it was worth, and then, gave him the paid-off mortgage to the property. Stewart was so grateful, he gave The Loafers, free sandwiches for life. Stewart is seeing a psychologist and slowly digging himself out of his trauma.

POSTSCRIPT

So, I spent all this time making up stories that would fit the imagined titles, based on shoes, not shows. Now I see how stupid I was. I guess my hope that you were in show business motivated my whacky behavior, but you’re a shoe salesman. Maybe I didn’t want to know. Now, here’s the really crazy part: my “Shoe Business Stories” have been bought by Hulu. A movie based on “The Loafers” will start streaming in mid-December.

We should be amazed!

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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