Many an anemone sees an enemy anemone

[todayiamadaisy]

I'm trying to write an entry each day this November, and I was pottering about this morning wondering what I could write about today when - serendipity! - John came in with a box of paper. He works at the performing arts centre and does various bits and bobs for the local theatre companies, and, being a thrifty fellow, keeps old scripts and gives them to me to use as scrap paper for printing. Today's box of paper contains three incomplete photocopies of the script for a musical called My Favourite Year and a sheaf of pages of tongue twisters, obviously meant to be actors' warm-ups. Excellent! Let's limber up now, shall we?

We'll start with the oddly difficult two-word twisters like pacific lithographs and knapsack straps.

Getting slightly harder: The Leith police dismisseth us.

Getting slightly more disturbing: Freshly fried fresh flesh.

This one, to mix a metaphor, brought my tongue to its knees: The seething seas ceaseth and twiceth the seething seas sufficeth us. I seem to have a problem with sibilants; the syllables somehow switch themselves around in my mouth. I remember from my radio-presenting days that I could talk my way through any number of long and difficult words only to run into trouble when I got to an item about the Anti-Cancer Council (or the Anti-Cancil Councer, as my listeners know it).

But I think my favorite tongue twister on the list (and one that poses me no problems, except in typing it) is the sad tale of the two-toed tree toad:

A tree toad loved a she-toad
Who lived up in a tree.
He was a two-toed tree toad
But a three-toed toad was she.
The two-toed tree toad tried to win
The three-toed she-toad's heart,
For the two-toed tree toad loved the ground
That the three-toed tree toad trod.
But the two-toed tree toad tried in vain,
He couldn't please her whim.
From her tree toad bower
With her three-toed power
The she-toad vetoed him.

Well, that loosened everything up.