“The Rogues Gallery”

— Compiled, written, edited and posted here by TaleRocker – { Not the original TaleRocker } —> Begun on Sunday, July 19th, 2020 —> { +23˚C / +62˚F – cloudy and grey @ 6:51 am in Atlantic Canada — }

— After some discussion about how we should do this — Alphabetical? By Seniority? — We decided to put up portraits of anybody on our team who brings us a portrait suitable for “G” rated audiences . That left a couple of us out – But anyway – This should be easy – I don’t have to chase anybody down and demand anything from them, I’ll just wait for suitable portraits to show up in my “In” box —

— Nikki said Doug is our best portrait artist – Draelen isn’t bad, but he “loves everybody, flaws and all and captures their true essence – warts and all-” She tried several times to get a decent selfie – “the trouble is – they all look like what I see in the mirror when I first get up in the morning – with a little less grey hair maybe – but I look in the mirror and wince – ‘she’s aging’. Draelen saw this portrait and said, “Wow – Doug captured your timeless beauty better than I could -”  — Thank you, Doug!

— Nikki admits that her “Real-Life” in the Boston area of the U.S. of A. was pure torture – She’s the eighth child of eleven. Her parents were University Professors on their way to becoming Deans in their departments, and her older siblings valued ‘clever’ and ‘brilliant’ above all else. Clever ‘put downs’ were their favourite game. – She’s an emotional empath – and absorbed the pain, anxiety and self doubt of everyone around her and believed those feelings were her own. A few weeks after she met Draelen, he blurted out something like, “Maybe you’re one of those people who are so sensitive you pick up on thoughts and emotions of anybody around you -and you might even think that their self-doubts and anxieties are your own – maybe you have to learn to ‘step back’ and realize that you’re not the one in pain and realize that you’re a freakin gifted angel on earth.” She says his intelligence and emotional/spiritual support probably saved her sanity. He says he wondered how anybody as beautiful and sensitive as her hadn’t been scooped up and carried off to some multi-million dollar mansion before he entered her life – He also said he wondered what anybody as beautiful and loving as she is saw in him.

— Her parents felt pressure from her older siblings when she was born and they had run out of traditional family names and wondered what to name her. One of the oldest suggested they all vote for the name they liked best. On the first ballot, her then six year old brother submitted the name ‘Chucky’ and laughed. Chucky was the name of his best friend’s dog. She never heard the end of that. Everybody had a different name they wanted to name her and nobody wanted to hear the word, ‘compromise’ – it had become a contest among them to prove who was the most intelligent – Her parents couldn’t imagine there was a way out of endless arguments and the probability that anybody whose choice was dismissed or lost out in the voting would bear a grudge forever – until her father looked at all the names and took the first letter from each, rearranged them a couple times and spelled “Nichole”. Her stunned siblings didn’t expect that. Her mother said, “Hey – that’s a great name and you all win!” and had her husband take them all out for ice cream.

— Nikki should be a Bard-Healer. She has a fantastic and expressive singing voice and can bring almost anybody to tears singing “Memory” from the musical ‘Cats’. { In real life, she’s a Veterinarian. And can almost love sick pets back to full health by singing to them. Her Real Life husband, Draelen, was a Combat Medic in the Viet Nam ‘police action’ era and nearly had his leg blown off after 3 weeks ‘In Country’, then spent the rest of his enlistment as a Psychiatric Aide / specialist under the direction of a very progressive Psychiatrist in Hawaii – don’t ask him about his purple heart and bronze star – he’ll give you a five hour lecture on the evils of allowing the military any prestige and/or power at all.

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—Draelen said, “An Ex ‘GF’ of mine saw this shot and said, ‘This is what you would have looked like at High School Graduation, but with longer hair and greener eyes. So intense and full of literary ambition, trying to hide the fact that the woman you thought might be the long lasting love of your life just told you her parents don’t want to see her wasting her time with the direction-less son of an alcoholic who might be lucky enough to get into some community college – You were actually pretty scary back then. I thought you were capable of killing her parents and whisking her off to some uncharted island to live happily ever after as beach-combers – she would have liked that.” { Mary Ellen – his first serious summer romance – post graduation and pre -US Army and Viet Nam – had been visiting the area and lecturing on careers in Psychiatry at the University where Nikki taught Veterinary Science and worked with farm animals, stray cats and pit bulls – among other hard cases… Nikki introduced herself and when she realized she couldn’t hate Mary Ellen, invited her out to their house ‘in the country’ for dinner – Mary Ellen brought a bottle of expensive wine and drank most of it herself… }

 

 

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— { The *Original TaleRocker’s Comments: }

— Yeah, I was the first one here – I looked a little different back then, dressed all in black – Didn’t really know what I was doing half the time – So Doug and his daughter handed me a new suit of clothes, said I was the original Bard in residence and shouldn’t wear twenty year old rags – And Rachel made me promise to shave for my portrait … Yeah, we’re busy as, um, ‘heck’ { he sees Evelynn smiling in the small crowd gathered around us } lately – and that’s a good thing, I mean, it’s not a lot of fun to know that if we’re not hyper-cautious when we fix some old building’s drain pipe it might take the whole blinkin team a week or more to repair everything that fell into the hole we dug to patch a tiny leak in that silly drainpipe – But, er – ‘dang!’ – Things are lookin better every day -” He grins broadly.

— He won’t admit it in public, but I know he’s ‘danged’ proud of the whole gang of us…

 

— { *Original … When I first joined the team, I had a real job, working for a ‘respectable’ “I.T.” firm and didn’t want anybody to know I was ‘giving away my services’ to a project that seemed hopeless at the time. Especially the boss, whose paranoid tendencies allowed him to believe that everybody working for him would happily steal his technology and exploit it anywhere and everywhere, especially if it made him look bad or cost him the money that he should have been paying us. “TaleRocker”-‘s original ‘user’ suggested I take over his then unused ‘alias’ – He hadn’t been in the game world as ‘TaleRocker’ for quite a while – So I joined the ranks of volunteers who didn’t want their bosses to know what they did in their off time – And – while the Original player behind the TaleRocker Avatar still has @TaleRocker as his Twitter presence – For all intents and purposes, I’ve been “TaleRocker” or just plain “—T.R.—” here in the ‘Blog-us-sphere’ ever since.   —T.R.— }

 

— Agatha, one of the newest members of our team,  doesn’t say much, unless she really has something worth saying:

— Yeah, I got sick of hangin around ‘the old hacienda’ while my gregarious ‘better half’ { ? } – was out drinkin with the guys and stealing bawdy limericks any chance he could – So I joined the team – Yas can always use a decent healer to back yas up and patch yas up when things go sideways, right?

 

 

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