Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

In the Closet

In the Closet

On Election Day, I work in a “Town Hall” which is a voting precinct in Wisconsin. There are about 200 registered voters in our Township and I am the only male presence in the mix of about 10 workers….The ladies give me a hard time and there is a lot of joking that goes back and forth.

Yesterday was the midterm elections and a little over half of the registered voters showed up. I never cease to be amazed by the diversity of our voters…even though the numbers are not great the mix of socio economic, educational levels, ages, professions and backgrounds is striking. I always know how an election is going to come out when the evening is over because this microcosm never fails to predict who the winners will be in the election. This election was no exception…it was uncanny to see our results last night and see the semi-official outcome on the news media this morning.

I love to see incumbents get defeated….I don’t care what political party they represent… Politics are so corrosive to the characters of politicians that we do them a favor by voting them out of office every couple of years….They love the National Limelight and it becomes an addiction that they can’t tear themselves away from….Since you can’t expect a hog to slaughter itself the voters have to do it before a politician’s brain begins getting fried by the power of the office.

Anyway I have this lofty title “Chief Inspector” which means that mine is one of the names that goes on the blame line if there are any administrative deficiencies that crop up. Since I’m retired now the ladies were wondering what I did with all my free time and I told them I restored old cars and trucks and wrote romance novels. Well they loved the second part of that and wanted to know more…did I have a pen name and I told them “Percy Goodfellow.” That really got them cranked because it sounded like a gay name and wanted to know why I chose……”PERCY!”

I replied that in my formative years I was influenced by writers like Dumas, Sabatini and the Baroness Orczy and that Lord Percy in the Scarlet Pimpernel was one of my favorite characters….Anyway old ladies can be ruthless and they made much ado about my pen name….Then they wanted to read a novel I had written and I decided they were getting too close to the fact that what I write often contains sensual prose and maybe I had tipped my hand a little too much… Can you imagine how a rural farming community would react to a sensual prose writer?" .They would probably want to add my name to the sex offender list…

Fortunately they are not very computer literate and I think my deep dark secret is still safe.