Chapter 9 - Reinventing Fashion

A word of warning: Although I'm fairly sure my sister and cousin are the only people who read this, the following chapter contains some rather crude language. Pardon me if I bring offense, I am not a vulgar man but, I assure you, my work is.

Current U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall

Langley Chelmsford held a press conference when he was chosen to design the costumes for Persephone. “I am honored to have been chosen for this most difficult task. In fact, this is the most difficult costuming assignment ever: to create clothes for the inventor of fashion. Persephone’s clothing must be absolutely free of all influences. There can be no Japanese style embroidery or turtleneck collars. Even the very notions of “shirt” or “dress” have to be abandoned."

This choice was extremely controversial, especially in the world of fashion, as Langley Chelmsford was not a fashion designer at all, but a rather infamous poet.

"Only a poet would be able to unlearn enough of history--to ignore enough of influence--to be able to understand what must take place in order to create Persephone's clothes. And only a buffoonish hothead with no regard at all for human decency would be able to do the job correctly," was Oliver Fagin Thomas’s official (and only) statement on the matter.

Langley had first become famous when he read his poem "Heil To The Chief" at a presidential inauguration. He had not been invited to read this poem on this particular occasion. He had not been invited at all, although a man by the name of Boggs Henry had. Boggs Henry was the Poet Laureate of the United States that year and, like most Poets Laureate, no one knew what he looked like.

What really happened that morning will probably never be known. That Langley Chelmsford actually kidnapped Mr. Henry has not been proven, although irrefutable evidence exists that he knew of the Poet Laureate's little known weakness for gin and large-breasted women.

When the master of ceremonies introduced Boggs Henry, and Langley Chelmsford approached the microphone no one suspected a thing. Although some have said they remember thinking he seemed handsome for a poet, no one seemed to think it odd that a member of the ceremonies would chain smoke on stage either. It was not until he actually began to speak that world realized something was amiss:

Heil to the Chief

Let us tear the stars and stripes
And bend the stripes into a swastika
And pin the stars
to those tightwad kikes
those diseased fags
those brainless niggers
those lazy wetbacks
the sluts who kill their babies
and the welfare sluts who don't
and the evil a-rabs
don't forget the retards and the poor
and the kids who can't do chin-ups

Let us shred the constitution
And spread it out on the floor
To soak up the piss and shit
Of the fat southern pigs
Who use the Lord's name in vain.
And while were at it
Let us elect as our Chief a
Syphilitic with one testicle
Who rapes his sister and eats the fetus
Who keeps little boys in a wading pool
And make sure he fiddles.
Who would notice another horse in this senate?

To punctuate the ending, he drop-kicked the microphone into the crowd and thumped off stage. Although the incident was the focus almost the entire world's attention for the rest of the day, the news did not break until the next morning that the author and performer of Heil to the Chief was not Boggs Henry at all and another three days went by before the real poet was located and identified.

Chelmsford made his next public appearance on a television talk show where spoke passionately about the country needing to be exposed to poetry again, and how the president was coddled prince who didn't know anything about the real world except how to spend money and destroy things. He refused to read any more poetry saying the world wasn't done digesting the first one yet, but he didn't seem to mind when three weeks later his first collection of poems, The Maiden with the Golden Cunt Hair became the top selling book of poetry that century.

Like most things having to do with Langley Chelmsford there are a lot of theories about how he became connected to Oliver Fagin Thomas, and eventually Persephone. It is widely assumed Thomas, like the rest of the world, first heard of Chelmsford the night of "Heil to the Chief" and was so impressed that he had to have the poet in his staff. Anyone who does even the smallest amount of research into the subject, however, will find a large number of coincidences, including that the two were in the same third grade class, and that Chelmsford spent at least two summers in Moscow while Oliver was living there.

A book, Secret Friendship: Langley Chelmsford and Oliver Fagin Thomas was published around the time the two men were turning sixty. The book has a lot of interesting anecdotes, such as Thomas spent considerable energies trying to cheer Chelmsford out of a severe childhood depression, and that Oliver had shown his friend early drafts of the Persephone. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the book also puts forth the preposterous notion that a connection of a sexual nature existed between the two, and now no one even remembers who wrote it.