“Triple/Triad Goddesses” was what Yost had written in the Two Teddy Bears Journal under the heading “TIAV Masks”. An arrow indicates that this is a description of a mural in the Other Space Museum on Eleanorel Avenue in Los Angeles. Or more likely, the mural is in the museum’s coffee house*, since that is the setting of a story in which “5 characters meet at the Other Space Museum Coffee House”.
This is the first part in a series of posts about the unpublished, and mostly unwritten, “Travesty Is A Verb”, a story known as “Five Tales Never Told” within a certain close-knit community of Geranium Lake Properties fans (you know who you are). When I say “mostly unwritten”, I could easily drop the adverbial modifier, because the only thing Yost wrote were two short pages of notes about the story. Pages which are currently missing from the TTBJ.
The disappearance of the pages was a mystery for several years, until a letter and a package from Teradactyl “You can call me Terror” Addams was received by the GLP archive. In the letter, the person who had been christened Eunice Bilfinger by cruel parents, explained that it was Yost himself who had removed the pages, which he then mailed to the artist David Edward Byrd**, probably in February 1995. From the start, Yost planned “Travesty Is A Verb” to be a collaboration with other artists, with the possible involvement of five artists in total, each contributing illustrations to a different story. Yost’s intention was plainly stated in the notebook pages:
“5 characters = 5 stories”
“Aunt Stork, Montaigne, Alice, Blake & Jack Loki each tell a story”
Aunt Stork is the ancestral great aunt of the Inultaru, the sister of Mother Jackal. A collaboration between Yost and Terror Addams produced a portrait mask of Aunt Stork in a GLP panel we had never seen before. In her letter, Terror tells us that Yost was delighted with the panel–he told Terror it belonged among the best of the GLP masks–yet he was not convinced that the mask had succeeded as a portrait of Aunt Stork. However, the moment I saw the image, it became my favorite Aunt Stork mask.
Of the other four characters in “Travesty Is A Verb”, Montaigne is the 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Blake is the English poet and artist William Blake. Alice is of course Alice Aroumbeyski. Jack Loki is Our Hero, Alice’s boyfriend-soon-to-be-fiancé.
Luckily for the supporters of the archive, Yost took a photo of the pages before he tore them out, because Byrd declined the project and (we assume) never returned the pages.
*The location of the coffee house has changed since the nineties; originally it had been in the museum itself, at number 6020 Eleanorel Avenue. In 2005 it was moved to the Beleaguered Annex of the museum, at number 6014. Then four years later, the museum’s newly-arrived Director, Dr. Inaya Milojevik (successor to Eminent Space Cadet Upfield Airman, who had been the museum’s Director since its founding in 1969) moved the coffee house into the Belabored Annex at number 6012. (There is a third Annex, on Crescent Drive, named Beset.)
**Byrd and Yost had met during Yost’s time working (four months in 1982, seven or eight months in 1983, two months in 1984) in Los Angeles, as a valet parking attendant, gig poster artist, prepress technician, and illustrator for Warner Brothers.
Vraicking 