Peeling Potatoes, Episode 65: Looking Past the Potato.

By Fruitloop & The Mayor when, after a week being Janita & Frank, they just want to be weird and do weird things. If you don’t understand, that’s ok. Just join us for the ride.

It was raining.

Everything was wet.

I mentioned this to the Mayor because I thought it was useful information. Apparently, after thirty-six years on the planet, I had finally discovered one of the fundamental properties of water.

This was greeted as an important academic breakthrough.

At Fruitloop University, we take these things seriously.

By the time we officially opened Episode 65 of Peeling Potatoes, the President of Fruitloop University had therefore established that water is wet, while the Vice President was still looking for scrap paper and threatening to resign from a position nobody had formally appointed him to in the first place.

Normal Friday morning.

Our topic sounded harmless enough: things that seem obvious until somebody asks why.

The Mayor immediately recognised danger.

He has developed this instinct over sixty-five episodes.

It has not helped him.

The Fundraiser Nobody Asked For.

Fruitloop University needed money.

Not desperately, I should add. The Vice President decided that bit all by himself. I merely informed him that he had been chosen to organise a fundraising event.

He immediately produced bread and water.

There would be no expensive dinner, no champagne and certainly no unnecessary extravagance. Guests would pay approximately two hundred dollars each, receive a slice of bread, perhaps some butter if finances allowed, and a glass of water. The remaining $199.25 could go directly to the university.

Five thousand guests later, Fruitloop University would be financially secure.

This is why he remains Vice President.

I allowed him to enjoy his business model for a while before telling him what the event actually was.

Mythical speed dating.

Silence.

For once, actual silence.

The Mayor confessed that he barely understood dating, let alone speed dating, and now I expected him to supervise romantic negotiations between mythical creatures.

Precisely.

The Fruitloop University Council had already dealt with the important matters. Posters had been distributed across several worlds, realities and places that probably do not appear on Google Maps. Samantha had presumably analysed something. Ignis had hopefully not incinerated the applications. Robbie had probably calculated the statistical likelihood of true love to seventeen decimal places.

Miranda, naturally, had told nobody anything.

The candidates began arriving.

Kevin was first. He is twelve feet tall, purple and lives behind a magical door that appears when people least expect it.

He was paired with Miranda the Mermaid.

There were immediate logistical problems.

Kevin is terrified of water.

Miranda lives in it.

Miranda cannot summon Kevin’s door.

Kevin probably cannot swim.

A lesser university might have identified incompatibility.

Fruitloop University provided name badges.

The Mayor decided Kevin would speak first. Miranda, he reasoned, would sit mysteriously across the table saying very little, which would make Kevin increasingly uncomfortable until the enormous purple monster finally blurted out something intelligent such as, “Hello. My name is Kevin. What’s yours?”

Her name, of course, would already be written on her badge.

This seemed promising.

Then we reached dinner. If Miranda invited Kevin home, what would she serve? There was considerable debate, an unexpected diversion involving sauerkraut and Riesling, several observations about relationships that I had not asked for, and eventually a menu appeared.

Tuna steaks.

Close enough to a T-bone, apparently.

Somewhere during this discussion, something rather more interesting had happened. We knew almost nothing about either of them, yet within minutes the Mayor had turned Kevin into a big, burly and slightly insecure monster, while Miranda had become delicate, sophisticated, mysterious and probably fond of caviar.

Nobody had told us any of this.

We had filled in the blanks.

Armour, Glitter and Other Protective Equipment.

Eric Longbeard arrived wearing armour.

Fiona the Fairy arrived wearing glitter.

They looked at one another.

“You are very small,” said Eric.

“You have a very large beard,” said Fiona.

The Mayor immediately disqualified both of them from twenty-first-century society.

The date continued anyway.

At first they were exactly what they appeared to be: a Viking and a fairy, one wrapped in iron and the other apparently responsible for a serious sparkle incident. But the longer we talked, the less useful those descriptions became.

Why was Eric wearing armour?

Perhaps because he needed protecting.

Why did we assume Vikings shouted?

Probably because nobody tells stories about the Viking who quietly came home, took off his boots and asked whether anybody wanted tea.

And would Eric believe in fairy magic?

Absolutely.

He would simply never admit it.

Somewhere in his childhood there had presumably been a mother singing lullabies to him. Somewhere behind all that iron and beard was a little boy who had once believed impossible things without feeling the need to apologise.

Fiona, meanwhile, might survive surprisingly well on a Viking ship. She could flutter between the sails, trim a few beards, annoy everybody with sparkle and possibly make the whole expedition slightly less miserable.

Eric might even enjoy it.

Secretly.

Fruitloop University does not currently offer couples therapy, although the Vice President has previous experience counselling vampires and zombies, so expansion remains possible.

Science Meets Magic.

Then Antoinette arrived.

She is Andrew the Alien’s sister.

This was news to the Mayor.

Andrew apparently has a family.

Antoinette believes everything requires a scientific explanation. Her date was Winston the Wizard, who believes almost exactly the opposite.

Everything can be solved with magic.

This looked like a disaster.

It wasn’t.

Something changed in the conversation. The Mayor stopped joking.

Not completely, obviously. We are not animals.

But he began to think about what might actually keep two completely different people interested in one another. Not agreement. Not similarity. Not even necessarily understanding.

Conversation.

Not the daily machinery of it — who is buying milk, where are the keys, did you feed the dog, why is there an unidentified object growing in the refrigerator — but the kind that begins with genuine curiosity about another person’s world.

Antoinette could spend years trying to understand Winston’s magic. Winston could spend years turning Antoinette’s science into something that looked magical. She might ask him how he had done something and he might refuse to tell her. He might ask why bubbles appear in boiling water; she could explain the science, and he could put it on stage and charge admission.

A functioning relationship and a business model.

Fruitloop University approved.

And then, somewhere between the alien and the wizard, the Mayor spoke about his father.

On the morning of the day his father died, they still tried to talk. His father was eighty-four, dying of cancer, and still attempting to string together a conversation.

That stayed with me.

A little later Winston was making bubbles again.

That stayed with me too.

Perhaps there are worse foundations for a relationship than having something left to ask.

The Potato Problem.

Our final couple was Sparkle the Unicorn and Percy the Pirate.

Sparkle likes rainbows.

Percy likes treasure.

Sparkle has never been on a ship.

Percy has never met a talking horse, although Sparkle would probably object to the terminology.

There was one further complication.

Every time they tried to talk to one another, they ended up discussing potatoes.

I did not explain why.

Mainly because I didn’t know.

The Mayor stared at his notes.

Why potatoes?

Did they both like potatoes?

Too easy.

Did they both hate potatoes?

Still too easy.

Was Percy secretly a potato farmer?

Possible, but disappointing.

Could Sparkle turn potatoes into gold?

Better.

The Mayor tried history, economics, agriculture, treasure, South America and the unfair treatment of the humble potato. He attacked the problem from every sensible direction available to a man sitting in Fruitloop University discussing a pirate, a unicorn and a root vegetable.

Nothing worked.

Then he stopped.

“I’m applying logic and not magic.”

There it was.

Sixty-five episodes.

A pirate.

A unicorn.

And eventually even the Mayor realised that logic had become part of the problem.

The potato did not need solving.

It needed moving.

Behind it were rainbows, ships, treasure, adventure and two creatures who might actually find one another interesting if they could only stop discussing root vegetables.

The Mayor, as Custodian of Potatoes, accepted responsibility.

He would manage the potato.

Peel it, if necessary.

Possibly eat it.

Anything to get the conversation moving.

Second Dates.

At the end of the evening, somebody had to decide who deserved another chance.

Unfortunately, that somebody was the Vice President.

He chose Antoinette and Winston.

Science and magic.

They did not agree. They did not belong to the same world. There were obvious complications.

But there was something to talk about.

The remaining candidates were shuffled around. Miranda might do better with Percy; at least they both understood water. Kevin and Sparkle suddenly looked rather interesting together, mostly because both were strange enough to stop worrying about how strange the other one was.

Eric, Fiona, Percy and Miranda remained under review.

This is a university.

There are procedures.

By the end, I was not entirely sure whether we had run a fundraising evening, a relationship experiment, a philosophical inquiry or simply given a twelve-foot purple monster several opportunities to embarrass himself.

Probably all four.

The catering still needed work.

Bread and water will not be repeated.

But something had happened during all this nonsense. The creatures who seemed easiest to understand at the beginning had become less obvious the longer we stayed with them. The Viking’s armour began to look less like aggression and more like protection. Science and magic found things to say to one another. A monster became insecure. A fairy became useful on a Viking ship.

None of them had changed.

Only the story we had given them had.

We do this rather often. We see the beard, the armour, the glitter, the job title, the accent, the age, the strange habit or the apparently obvious answer, and we quietly decide that we understand what is in front of us.

Usually the interesting bit begins a little further in.

So, should you ever find yourself at a mythical speed-dating fundraiser hosted by Fruitloop University, sitting opposite somebody entirely unsuitable while the Vice President watches from the next table and eats the catering, there is really only one piece of advice I can offer.

Look past the potato.