After thirteen years of training in Noh theater, the night before his first professional appearance he accepted a job as a software engineer at Samsung. The dealbreaker was all that damn stomping - it absolutely murdered the feet. Years later, he continued to incorporate elements of bunraku into the handsets which few people noticed, but those who did, greatly appreciated it.
Eileen pounded her fist against the bathroom countertop, making all the little amber pill bottles jump in surprise. "BLAST!" she muttered fiercely. It was the inconvenience on top of humiliation, that's what made it so damn aggravating. Age. It absolutely killed you until …well… it killed you. She glared at the counter again through a different level on her trifocals. There was the collection of pill bottles, the denture paste and the kleenex and the tall can of aquanet. What was NOT there were her teeth. She had to get her drivers license renewed in half an hour and she’d be damned if she’d be a toothless little old lady in her picture.
However, seeing no other option, she knotted a blue scarf over her white hair, set and curled, and was locking the back door on her way out when she saw something small and white on the pavement where her great-grandkids had been playing the evening before. With further inconvenience and humiliation, Eileen bent over enough to pick it up, and even managed to straighten back up to inspect the thing.
They were pointy. They were plastic. They had been sitting on the filthy ground all night and half the morning.
So complete, so widespread, and so disarming were his charms, that he could not pass a lady on the street without flushing her face and stealing her breath, could not touch a flower without it exploding into a cloud of dizzy pollen, and could not put a pipe to his lips without it shivering, then curling itself into a tight knot with sheer ecstasy.
Plastic Pipe II
Levitationism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Levitationism was a popular vaudeville act in the early 1900s, involving the illusion of causing items to float by use of concealed or transparent string. Levitationists would often levitate solicited items from the audience, such as gloves, snuff boxes, or cravats.
The illusion was famously exposed when noted French levitationist Josephe Pujol was asked to perform for the Archbishop of Ste. Rouen-Caste. The archbishop, who was drinking heavily, was so delighted with Pujol’s skill that he demanded Pujol repeat the entire act several times. After a few hours, Pujol ran out of the necessary transparent twine and was forced to levitate the final object of the evening (an unusually shaped pipe belonging to the archbishop’s father) with plain white thread. The thread was easily visible and the enraged archbishop expelled the entertainer from the manor abruptly and with some violence (by many accounts grotesque).
The egg now looked like a surgeon, no two ways around it. Everyone said so. Marla sat, fuming, crushing her first place ribbon for Best Egg Decorating in her fist. "I specifically wrote ‘censored’ on the mask that is gagging him," she spat furiously at the judges, who smiled in polite confusion, then swiftly moved on to the second place recipient. "GAGGING!" she called after them, to make sure they heard right. Marla’s parents were unable to attend the contest that day, so Mrs. Chapel was unable to explain why she had first asked Marla not to write "I Am The Iraqi War Dead" on her egg.
After thirteen years of training in Noh theater, the night before his first professional appearance he accepted a job as a software engineer at Samsung. The dealbreaker was all that damn stomping - it absolutely murdered the feet. 
So complete, so widespread, and so disarming were his charms, that he could not pass a lady on the street without flushing her face and stealing her breath, could not touch a flower without it exploding into a cloud of dizzy pollen, and could not put a pipe to his lips without it shivering, then curling itself into a tight knot with sheer ecstasy.
The egg now looked like a surgeon, no two ways around it. Everyone said so. Marla sat, fuming, crushing her first place ribbon for Best Egg Decorating in her fist. "I specifically wrote ‘censored’ on the mask that is gagging him," she spat furiously at the judges, who smiled in polite confusion, then swiftly moved on to the second place recipient. "GAGGING!" she called after them, to make sure they heard right.
