The Goops

What's in a bedtime story? More than you might imagine. As we were growing up, my father introduced his version of imaginary creatures, the goops, into our household and family life. Created as negative role models to teach manners to Victorian children, the goops first saw life in books of moralistic doggerel published in 1900 and after. "But it was their bad behavior that led my father to adopt them for his own." In this episode you will also be treated to one of my father's Prince Bagel stories, a world he invented whole cloth for his children as we piled on our parents' beds to listen in wonderment.

"This was the mystery of the goops, and, in fact, the mystery that I never had understood about storytelling before.  The goops did not spring ex nihilo from my father's head.  They were an expression of his love.  The stories were told to somebody."

Best to listen to this episode in your jammies. 

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

Music

“Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” - Billy Joel

“Gymnopédie No. 3” - Martin Hederos

"My Blue Heaven" - Artie Shaw

"Spiegel im Spiegel" - Arvo Pärt

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Transcript

The Goops

My father was the storyteller in the family.  Since my mother did most of the talking, this wasn't immediately obvious, but there were times when she yielded the stage.  At the dinner table he would occasionally break into the pandemonium to tell a joke, at which time he would puff his cheeks out and put a cuteness into his voice that made us want to laugh even if the joke wasn't funny.  With his white hair, thick glasses, and white beard, my father looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Albert Einstein, with goopiness thrown in for good measure, a benevolent amalgam difficult to resist.  

The quality of goopiness was unknown to anyone outside our family.  My siblings and I shared imaginary creatures with the following attributes: 1) they were round, 2) they were feckless, and 3) they were fixated on food.  The characters themselves had their origins in a book of moralistic ditties designed to teach children Victorian manners, The Goops, and How to Be Them, but it was their bad behavior that had led my father to adopt them for his own.  In the Philipson household the goops, though energetic and loopy, were totally benign.  They would swim in the soup, slide down dessert spoons, jump from one turkey wing to another, and generally run riot in any restaurant we were frequenting.  Since we were the only ones who knew of their existence, we never suffered the consequences of their behavior.  And we were frequently the beneficiaries, for since the goops lived to eat, an existential condition they shared with the family dogs, they steered us to good restaurants.  When we were traveling in a new place and didn't know where to go, the goops would lead us to the best Mexican restaurant in town, a breakfast spot with a wonderful buffet, the annual town barbecue being held in the city park that night.  If we were planning to stop at a favorite bakery on a crowded street, the goops would open up a parking spot nearby. In an impressive display of gastronomic diplomacy, the goops negotiated the relocation of our favorite restaurant in L.A.s Chinatown to Pasadena itself!  In matters relating to food, the goops were solicitous of our welfare.  As primary food-dispenser in the family, Mother was the High Mogul Goop.  With their anarchic nature, the goops couldn't sustain a complicated hierarchy: the High Mogul was it.  Mom ruled the roost, and the roost included the goops.

 Since goops were round and bouncy, everything that had those qualities was goopy.  Bassets were goopy; seals were goopy.  Babies were goopy, especially fat-cheeked ones.  Al Capp's schmoos were goopy.  Barrel cacti were goopy, rounded rocks.  One of the smooth granite outcroppings that humped its back over Tuolomne Meadows where we went every summer was privately rechristened "Goop Dome."      

 When Mother got hungry—and therefore cranky—she behaved like a goop.  When we dove into the pot roast with indiscriminate haste, we were behaving like goops. My father, impervious to the bedlam of the dinner table, never behaved like a goop.  He plowed through his meal, consuming large quantities of food in a peaceful and leisurely manner.  At the opposite end of the table, Mother reigned over a series of psycho-dramas made up of loud talk, major teasing, occasional tears, explosions, frequent one-upsmanship, and much laughter.  This was closer to the goop ideal.  Dinner guests who came unprepared would sometimes leave the table white and shaking, but even this we took a perverse pride in.  We may not have been civilized, but, by God, we were vital

 And if my father didn't act goopy, he certainly looked it, especially when he was telling Prince Bagel stories.  This was done at the Meetings, unscheduled times when the four children piled on to our parents' beds. Prince Bagel was my father's creation, along with Princess Pastrami, Prime Minister Kishke, Gedemptefleish (Prince Bagel's horse), and the dragon.  While he was telling his story, Dad puffed his cheeks, slid his voice around the vowels to give them the goop quality, and occasionally tickled one of my sisters to underline a point.

 "One day Prince Bagel and Princess Pastrami were playing hide-and-seek in the castle.  They had already hidden in the stewing pots, the robe closet, the chocolate chamber, and Prince Bagel was trying to think of a new place to hide.  He went into the kitchen pantry and was looking around in the darkness when he saw the perfect place.  It was a wooden barrel, just big enough for him to fit himself into.  He jumped inside and crouched down so that Princess Pastrami wouldn't see him if she came into the pantry.  And what do you think he found, Blinkie?"  -- my father's nickname for my younger sister.

 "The dragon?" she hazarded.

 "No," my father puffed.  "The dragon was much to big to fit into a barrel.”

 "I don't know then," she said.

 My father let a moment pass.  "A cookie!" he said, bending the –ook to mimic the goop dialect.  "A chocolate chip cookie.  And not just one.  They were all over the bottom.  Prince Bagel had found the magic cookie barrel."  

 "What was magic about it, Daddy?"

 "No matter how many cookies you ate, there would always be more at the bottom."

 "We could use one of those," my mother put in.  "The way we go through cookies around here."

 "Ach!" my father burbled, "the goops would swarm it.  You'd never be able to get in there."

 Mother laughed.

 "Go on with the story, Daddy."

 "Well, you know how Prince Bagel is around cookies.  He started eating them, and once he started eating them, he couldn't stop."

 "That's like you," I said to Dad, punching him in his soft belly.

 "Shut up, Bobby!"  This could have come from any member of the family.

 "So Prince Bagel started eating chocolate chip cookies.  And he ate and he ate and he ate, and you know what happened?"

 "He got a tummy ache?"

 "That's right!  He got a tummy ache, but he also found that he couldn't get out of the barrel.  He'd eaten too many cookies, and he was stuck.  So he called out for Princess Pastrami, who was still looking for him, and when she came into the pantry, she saw Prince Bagel's head sticking out over the top of the barrel.

 "'That was a good place to hide!' she said to Prince Bagel. ‘I guess you win.'

 "'I'm stuck!' Prince Bagel wailed.  'I can't get out!'

 "Princess Pastrami tried to pull him out of barrel, but Prince Bagel had eaten so many cookies, he was stuck in there like when David caught his finger in the neck of the soda bottle and we had to break it and pour vegetable oil into the other end.”

 All of us laughed at the memory except for David, who took his revenge by kicking out at me.  I jumped clear of his swing.

 "Mommy, David tried to kick me!"

 "David, calm down or you'll have to go to your room."  

 "Send him to his room now," I goaded.

 "Shut up, Bobby!" David said savagely.

 Normally a fight would have ensued—I rarely backed away from a verbal baiting—but I was anxious to hear the end of the story.  I settled back down on the bed, and Dad took up the thread.

 "When Princess Pastrami saw that she couldn't get Prince Bagel out of the barrel, she called in Prime Minister Kishke, Gedemptefleisch, and the dragon.  They tried to figure out what to do.  The dragon was the first to come up with a plan.

 "'I'll just burn the barrel away with my breath,' he said.

 "'And what do you think will happen to Prince Bagel?  He'll burn up too,' Prime Minister Kishke said.

 "'Why don't we get the castle carpenter down here?' Princess Pastrami suggested.  'He could cut the barrel away.'

 "Prime Minister Kishke didn't like that idea either because it would ruin the barrel, and that was where the castle got its cookies from.  So . . .," here he paused mischievously.

 "So what did they do, Daddy?"

 "It was Gedemptefleisch who had the idea.  He said Prince Bagel would have to go on a diet until he got thin enough to get out of the barrel.  When Prince Bagel heard that, he started wailing like the roof had fallen in on him.  'I'll starve to death!' he cried.

 "'No you won't," Gedemptefleisch said sensibly.  'You'll just eat lettuce and carrots until you're thin enough to get out of the barrel.  I love carrots!”

“I’m not a horse!” Prince Bagel complained.

“You could stand to lose a few pounds!” the dragon said.  “And besides, one of us will stay with you to keep you company (and to make sure you don't eat any more cookies) until you can come out.'

 "So that's what they did.  It took about two weeks, but finally Prince Bagel was able to squeeze himself out of the magic cookie barrel, which made everybody very happy because," and here the cheeks puffed out, "they hadn't had any chocolate chip cookies in all that time."

 "What about Prince Bagel?" Alice asked.  "Did he like chocolate chip cookies after that?"

 "Oh sure," my father said.  "He just never ate them in barrels any more."

 "Well, I guess he wasn't meant to be a chip off the old block," I said, laughing hysterically at my own attempted wit.    

 "Shut up, Bobby!" 

 What I learned as an adult was that my father had been treated to his own imaginary character, Mr. Koko, made up for him by his father when he was a little boy. Mr. Koko lived on the crib in Lake Michigan, a water purification pumping station for Chicago that looked from the shore like an immobile ore steamer.  Mr. Koko, it seemed, was a troublemaker, but he was very strong and he could jump.  That was how he travelled from the crib to shore, where he inevitably got into mischief. It seemed that only Joe could control him because he knew the location of the sensitive spot on Mr. Koko's elbow.  The mere threat of tickling Mr. Koko's funny bone reduced him to submission.  

 And so my father passed his version of imaginary beasties down to his own children, but his creatures were far from being relegated to the realm of fiction.  More was woven into our lives than the whimsy of a bedtime story.  The mark of a Philipson as we were growing up was understanding the goop ethic.  It followed us throughout our lives.  Even after we had left home, each of the children had an honor guard of goops, though the majority stayed with the High Mogul.  (The idea of personal loyalty to anyone but the High Mogul Goop was a foreign concept.) The size of the honor guard depended on the quality and variety of cuisines available in our place of residence. When I lived in Paris and Washington, I had platters of goops swarming over every restaurant I visited. My years in the Peace Corps were particularly tough ones for my honor guard.  In Bouar, a prefectural seat of the Central African Republic that had no restaurants, I was reduced to an honor guard of one.  They were frequently rotated but complained loudly nonetheless.

 I'm fuzzy on how even this measure of discipline was maintained.  The goops were not respectful of authority; only Mom held their unswerving fealty.  Recognizing this, my father ordered a personalized license plate for her car that read, MS GOOP.  The photo of my mother squatting next to the plate shows her looking both amused and exasperated.  Although she recognized the goops’ innate joie-de-manger that trampled over courtesy, Mother accepted her position of High Mogul with good humor.  She said that the title would go to Alice after she had passed on, but Dad maintained the goops wouldn't accept the new regime because they were afraid of my sister's tail.  (This was another of my father's conceits. He characterized Alice's occasional fearsome flashes of temper as the whomping of her tail.)

 It turned out as my father had predicted, though not for his stated reason.  My mother did die, well before my father's whimsical imagination began to lose its creativity.  And yet it was she who had kept the goops alive.  Once my mother had passed from the scene, so did the banter and laughing between my parents.  This was the mystery of the goops, and, in fact, the mystery that I never had understood about storytelling before.  The goops did not spring ex nihilo from my father's head.  They were an expression of his love.  The stories were told to somebody.  And so I came to understand that there was more than one way for that world to pass.  When the storyteller said his final good-night, that was when I thought the stories would end.  Their silence would come with the stilling of his voice.  But that's not how it happened.  It was the audience that evanesced: the loved one who died, the children who became adults.  

 Wisdom teaches us to accept the fact that life is impermanent.  Are there not cycles to comfort us in our own trajectories?  A new generation of Philipsons came on hand, and they too must have been told stories – but not of the goops.  The childhood of David’s sons, Joe and Danny, were severed from us by an acrimonious divorce.  Alice and Petra raised their daughter 400 miles from Pasadena in the brave new world of same-sex parenting. Maya knows of the goops and loves them for their loopy selves, but they were a much less visible part of the household in which she grew up. When Joe and Danny rejoined the family as guarded adolescents, they had a theoretical knowledge of the goops, but these creatures needed the womb of a child’s mind to properly develop. Their world is goopless. 

I have no children to whom I can pass Prince Bagel, Princess Pastrami, Mr. Koko, and the goops.  Living the life of a single gay man, I conduct no meetings, preside over no bed times. These are not realities that I regret; they are choices that I made.  The irony is that I seem to have inherited the mantle of narrative.  My own storytelling is far different, less rooted in love and family.  And yet, and yet . . .