The Shoe-Horn Effect

I am off to here, where I will be participating in the last class of the summer session, running from 6 in the p.m. until 9, whereupon I have been invited to partake of beer and conversation. All of which means it will be well into tomorrow before an opportunity arises to attend to this, which I have come to see as one of those shoe-horning activities that have become necessary in life, as in, somehow, you shoe-horn it in between other activities that simply will not go away. 

As things go, I will be none too alert much of tomorrow, having among other things on which to use the metaphorical shoe-horn, the Friday Morning at Peet's gathering, a drop-off of the Camry at the Toyota agency for needed servicing (what is that squeaking sound?), and a session in which my hair is mowed.
With any kind of luck, I will be able to pick up a shot of the Felix sign above the Chevrolet agency at the northeast corner of Figueroa and Jefferson, a sign I have seen since I was about five or six and which I note with some regularity during my teaching assignments across the street at the University of Southern California (an institution I parodied while an undergraduate at an unnamed state university across town in Westwood, with a bogus version of the USC Fight Song, thus: "Fight on for old SC,
Our IBM's print currency..."

But that was another time, or as Christopher Marlowe put it, "That was in another country."

The Felix sign, a mnemonic of an early cartoon character and rival to M. Mouse, has been voted a state monument, for which a gigantic hooray. Chevrolet dealers may come and gom but Felix must by state fiat remain. 

 Felix deserves to be up there with the famed Hollywood sign, the balding dome of the Griffith Park Observatory, and some of those cheesy sculptings of prehistoric animals rampant in the La Brea Tar Pits. This en passant, out-the-car-window shot of Felix does not do it justice; it needs to be got more properly. I'm already having fun imagining how a number of my blog mates would render it. Liz would catch the jaunty angle she captured outside Guthrie's Saloon in Bakersfield. 

Pod, of course, would render it as a mysterious, primal force. Lori would manage to clamber to the very top of the sign and shoot downward, appending a brief squib from McCavity, McCavity, defies the laws of gravity... And Ms. Lettuce would take it on in a way that would make us want to transfer the image to the obverse side of a twenty-five-cent piece, the first in an epic Landmark Quarters series.

It is all there, waiting.