National Lampoon’s Cicada Adventure
I am dating Clark Griswald, of National Lampoon fame. Okay, my guy might be a lot more enlightened, he wears less
plaid and I have never seen him on a roof with a staple gun. But this weekend I stood back and watched Clark in action.
Over the past week or two, you have seen many references to cicadas in WOTD. The bugs have infested Cincinnati – they are everywhere. Clark has a fireplace in his apartment and in preparation for the bug infestation, he asked his landlord if he should do anything to stop up the chimney so bugs wouldn’t get in. His landlord, who is Portuguese and did not live in the house the last time the cicadas descended on Cincinnati, told him it wouldn’t be a problem. (I have nothing against the Portuguese, but it seems unlikely that in a country almost 4,000 miles away from Cincinnati that they have the same bug problems.)
Needless to say, bugs have entered Clark’s house.
On average, there are 4 to 6 bugs a day in Clark’s house. You can be eating in the dining room and you hear some high-pitched mating chirp coming from his living room, and when you look, sure enough, there’s a bug on the floor, the curtain, etc. Clark’s cats now sit, crouching in anticipation, by the fireplace waiting for the next cicada to come inside. Walking in his living room is for me, a girl who is very afraid of cicadas, like walking through a landmine field.
This weekend it went too far. We kept hearing the mating call of the cicada but it did not matter how much we looked – we found no bug. “It’s like he’s throwing his voice,” Clark said. And then he looked to the corner of the room. “He is throwing his voice. He’s in the piano. The resonator, which is used to amplify the piano strings, is throwing his voice.” We both leaned in towards the grand piano and sure enough, there was a cicada inside.
So far you might be thinking to yourself, “You are being too hard on your boyfriend. He does not sound too Clark Griswold-like.”
Yet.
A grand piano is a big piece of furniture. There are lots of hiding places in it for small bugs. (Hell, one of Clark’s cat hides inside it when Clark is vacuuming.) And so Clark, being the creative and handy guy that he is, slowly began to disassemble the piano. First he took off the stand that you prop your music on. Then off came the lid that goes over the piano keys. Then he took out all of the actual piano keys! No bug. He got a can of oxygen that you can spray into small places (like you would to clean a computer keyboard) and started spraying away. At last a bug appeared.
But, you see, we were looking for a noisy little sucker of a bug. This bug was near dead. We were not done yet.
(Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: “Worse? How could things get any worse? Take a look around here, Ellen. We’re at the threshold of hell.”)
So Clark kept spraying the oxygen. When he sprayed inside the actual body of the piano, underneath the strings, inside some holes, he found the cicada. All of a sudden it started chirping like it was under fire. And I assume it was, kind of.
Short of taking the rest of the piano apart, there weren’t many options for Clark. So he went to his toolbox and got some contraption that is half scissors, half tweezers and reached inside the piano. And he came out with the cicada. About 45 minutes after the search began.
(Clark Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: “That’s all part of the experience honey.”)
I received the following message in response to this Blog: (I made some of the text bold myself for emphasis.)
“Great Cicada story! I could picture the whole story unfolding in my own living room (if I only had a man, a piano, and some cats left). ‘Sounds like a fun, lively household!”
