Ballad of Sexton Mountain
Dan Duval
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Let me tell you the story of Sexton Mountain Meadows.
Not too long ago, some developers built a whole bunch of yuppie hutches
on Sexton Mountain (which is actually a modest hill west of Portland.)
They built many overpriced homes, packed tightly together on postage
stamp-sized lots. In front of the development, they erected a stone
wall and embedded in its face 12-inch-tall letters saying
SEXTON MOUNTAIN MEADOWS
And the yuppies bought the hutches, and complained heavily about
how they were getting so little for so much money, and settled in.
And contentment reigned. For two or three minutes.
Until some wag discovered that removing the "T" from Sexton gave one:
SEX ON MOUNTAIN MEADOWS
And the passersby were amused and the yuppies were wroth. Their
neighborhood grouping, Sexton Mountain Association of Yuppies (or
SMAY) were unhappy and had the missing letter replaced.
Whereupon it was stolen again a few days later. And this happened
several times until even SMAY realized that they could not solve their
image problem that way. But, some clever yuppie figured, "Hey, why
don't we just paint the letter into place?" And so they did.
OK, it looked funny, but it worked -- it is indeed hard to swipe the
paint off a stone wall.
But not at all hard to paint over it. Which happened, of course. And
thus several months were consumed, applying layer after layer of paint
as yuppies battled the unknown force that was defiling their image.
So, they finally removed the Sexton part of the name, even though
the street entering the development still bears the Sexton Mountain
Meadows name. Even though the name on the stone wall is off-center
and the stains of the old name can be seen.
But imagination and cleverness are truly the bane of the yuppie!
For the "A" in mountain mysteriously disappeared, leaving
MOUNT IN MEADOWS
Obscure, yes, unless one was familiar with the earlier SEXTON debacle.
And yes, like the "T" of ancients days, a war raged over the presence of
the A.
And SMAY was very unhappy. They were tired of this long losing fight.
There seemed no other alternative, but to remove the sign altogether.
And thus it was done. There is now a large development of yuppie
hutches, packed together with no identity that the outside world
can discover. Their image is somewhat intact, but very beat up.
SMAY is in shambles, its members disallusioned.
But there is still that street sign leading into the development.
I wonder how long before the "T" in Sexton disappears from that sign?
[In case you are wondering, this is a true story. Only the name of SMAY
was changed to protect the innocent from banality.]
--
Dan C Duval Tek Labs;Tektronix, Inc.; da...@sail.LABS.TEK.COM
Hello. I'm Dan's signature line. What are you?