He walks out the paddock door; his gait is gangly, brisk. Your first thought is the one everyone has -- Jack Sprat is still lean.
“Oh, sure,” he says, sitting angularly on a nearby bench. “I still hear it all the time — lean, boney, lanky, gaunt, scrawny. But however you say it, that’s me,” he says, an ever present smile accenting the lines in his drawn cheeks. Traces of an Elizabethan accent still sparkle in his speech.
He extracts a smoke and lights it. The smell of the nearby stables pervades the air. Sprat has worked these last twenty years as a hot walker at the track at Santa Anita. “I had to get away,” he sighs with a trace of sadness. “Ma Goose might as well have been Ma Bell by the time I left. The operation had gone corporate. I could see the writing on the wall. Think about it – they’ve all sold out, haven’t they? -- Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, the comic book twits. How could we not be next?
“I would’ve ended up like Beauty and the Beast – sanitized and commercialized. They were lovely people, you know – the Beast played piano nicely and Beauty could sing, and we’d sit around evenings at their place and pass the time over cocktails. You can imagine how they felt about being turned into a plastic toy kids use to clog up their parents’ toilets,” he sneers, flicking his ash. His teeth are a smoker’s yellow. “But if I left Goose, what then? Cartoons? The old cat-and-mouse stuff? Sticking the firecracker up the poor cat's ass? Not me,” he says, shaking a close-cropped head.
So, when others would have gone with the program, Jack Sprat walked. “Ma Goose begged me to stay – begged me. But you can’t buy my art and you can’t buy me.”
What of the famous partnership with his ex-wife — the Nichols and May, the Burton and Taylor of the Goose register?
“Oh, back in the day, it was ideal,” he smiles nostalgically. “We were the top two-man act in the industry. Our numbers were better than Jack and Jill’s every year.” He scoffs lightly. An early publicity still shows them together — she, in pigtails, with spoon, hovering over a banana split, he leering behind her in a derby hat, his needly fingers reaching around her for the banana.
“You see, originally, I was a solo act, but it wasn't going anywhere. My rhyme went something like this;
“Jack Sprat can eat no fat
It aggravates his ulcer
When gravy’s passed his way, he asks
“May I have something else, sir?”
“So, they came to me and they said, ‛Jack, this isn’t going anywhere, how about a partner?' And in walks Dora and I thought to myself, ‘That’s a lot of woman’.”
A wedding picture shows her resplendent in white, beaming, happy, as her gnarled, tuxedoed husband stands beside her, knobby wrists and hands extending far past the sleeves. Sprat’s eyes sadden. “But she became so self-destructive -- lard, tallow, all the time. I said, ‘There are medical procedures now,’ but she cut me off. Then, one night I found a piece of suet hidden under the sofa. That was the end. I couldn’t watch her hurt herself anymore.”
Three thousand miles away, Dora Sprat is sweating. Not the dissipated moisture of the stout, but the glowing, vigorous shine of an athlete. A stunningly short black dress covers much of the middle of her more-than-ample frame. Her hair is a radiant purple, her eyes flash from under glitter shadow. An archipelago of studs, hoops, and bangles runs down her right earlobe. On stage, she moves in every direction at once as she vocalizes growlingly over thumping bass rifts and distorted power chords. Her fans throw pork rinds. She snatches one out of the air with her generous lips and the crowd goes wild.
Her band, Big Ass, is the hottest item in Williamsburg today.
Sitting at a table between sets, she swirls a frozen Kahlua, then gulps it down lustily. “Oh, he got quite testy at the end. He’d hide my food, wanted me to eat crudités with him. ‘Dora, you’re killing yourself,’ he’d whine. But look at me!” she commands. “This is my body! This is how God made me! I’m getting bigger all the time and I’m just beginning to live!”
So, when Jack split for California, she stayed East and joined the music scene. “These young people don’t judge you the way others do,” she says, as a second drink is placed before her. She makes quick work of it. An album, Lick Me Clean, is due next year.
She is unafraid to show her bitterness. “I wanted to stay with the Goose people, sure,” she says. “All those musty children’s books – it was old, man. We were finally going to have a big payday. But Jack wouldn’t hear of it — he was true to his art, he said.” She laughs derisively. “They tried to pair me with Wee Willie Winkie but it didn’t work. He was small, really, rather than skinny. It’s not the same thing.”
And are the rumors true? Is marriage to Jack Horner around the corner? “We’re good friends,” Dora smiles coyly. “But I love his plums!”
Back in California, a jockey leads a laconic mare past the bench where Jack Sprat sits. “I don’t worry about the future,” he says. “I like what I do. And I have plenty of options.” A film deal was said to be in the works, but now looks unlikely. “Roseanne was interested, but no one will touch her now, so then it was going to be Melissa McCarthy. They wanted Joaquin Phoenix to play me, but I said, ‘But he’s not lean.’ I said, ‘Malkovitch, how about Malkovitch? Or Bale?’ but they said, ‛Too dark.’” He shrugs and his skeletal hands light another smoke.
Does he stay in touch with the others? Absolutely. “Jack’s passed. He and Jill hung it up a while back. By the end, Jack just couldn’t function, the sauce, y’know. Here’s something you don’t know -- they weren’t even supposed to tumble down the hill like that, but Jack was so deep in his cups that day he stumbled and fell, and it worked so well they kept it in the act. The old woman who lived in a shoe, she’s good. She owns an Italian restaurant in the Bronx. The dish and spoon work for her.”
He takes another drag and contemplates his old colleagues. “Of course, there’s also Tom, the Piper’s Son.” His eyebrows arch reflexively. “He’s doing 18 months in federal, securities fraud. He was trading pork bellies and doing alright, but his old ways resurfaced. They found incriminating messages from him on the phone of a Congressman from upstate New York. But they went easy on him, knowing who he was and all…”
He sighs and collects himself. “Still, I’m alright. I still do personal appearances — mummy and daddy want all the little nippers to see me. Mall openings, school auditoriums, that kind of thing. I lecture the kids on good eating habits. And I’m doing public service spots about eating disorders. Want to hear one?
“Jack Sprat still eats no fat
You'd think that he'd get pallid
But he stays well and rosy-cheeked
On veggies, fish, and salad.”
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