Where is the fox.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Margaret A. Robinson

I could not even join a sports team, because, at the age I should have been trying out for varsity, I hadn ’t kicked a ball or swung a bat since Little League.

By the time my peers began to consider which college to attend, I’d become so used to answering the question, “When are you going to go back to acting?” that I really expected to make a big return to show business. But the harsh reality is that contacts dry up fast in that world. Also, it costs a lot of money to go back and forth to New York City, especially when you have no income and have to begin worrying about paying rent, buying food, gas, etc. Unfortunately, at that point in my life, I had nothing else. By the age of eighteen, I had to seriously consider the fact that I was a Has-Been.

Nothing fills me with dread as much as the shows on VH-1 about former Child Stars who became drug addicts, or are still plugging away, desperately seeking to recapture that glimmer of fame. Eddie Munster is an old man. He still goes to conventions dressed up in his old costume, hawking autographed photos. Scott Schwartz, the kid who stuck his tongue to the flag pole in A Christmas Story and starred with Richard Pryor in The Toy, started doing porno. For the more legitimate, mainstream performers like Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan, I look at what these poor kids

Where is the fox

Margaret A. Robinson

when I can ’t see her long tongue lapping a drink from the leafy pool in my birdbath

has she registered with a political party does she attend home-and-school

night to fight against sweetened drinks in vending machines as bad for her cubs

is she friends with the doe and four fawns who also troop through

my yard or the buck with his full rack of antlers looking like an insurance

advertisement does the raccoon advise the vixen on mascara

length of eyelash have they agreed it’ s silly to shave their legs

will the fox catch a neighborhood cat will she lie down with a lamb chop

topped with mint and a paper ruffle where do her feet foxtrot at night?

Margaret A. Robinson ' s new chapbook of poems, about breast cancer and love, is called "Arrangements " and is available at the Finishing Line Press website. Robinson teaches in the creative writing program at Widener University and lives in Swarthmore.

have become, and I have to think that maybe, just maybe, if the people around them had waited to thrust them into the very adult world of the performing arts, they ’d have a better foundation on which to build a decent life. Maybe not such a famous life, but a good, decent, normal existence.

These days I cringe when I hear friends talk about signing their kids up with a modeling agency. You know, the one where you pay thousands of dollars to have a “ portfolio ” made, and the agency promises to start sending your kids on “ auditions. “ I always react badly when people suggest my kids have what it takes to “ get involved with show business. “ Don ’t I know that my son has the personality and looks to be on a sitcom and become America ’ s Boy Next Door? Of course he does. Don ’t I see that my daughter is beautiful enough to sell oodles of Pampers or Gerber ’ s baby food? Of course she is. But that will never happen.

Children should be children. They should play, learn, get scraped up and brushed off, lose big games, win bigger ones, dance with a sweetheart, lose him or her to someone else, get a better one later, have big sleepover parties, and grow up without the pressures of having a career, or the expectations of an entire small town to be successful.

BJ Schaffer is dead.

He was just a commodity. A face in a photograph, a television personality, a small blip on the bright, vast universe of Entertainment. You can know everything there is to know about him on the handful of web pages that still mention him, or bear his likeness.

Me? I’ m a guy who worked at a gas station to make ends meet while I went to the Police Academy. I scrubbed toilets, worked landscaping and mopped laboratories late at night. At 34 years old, I’ m a police detective who makes his living putting bad people in dark places. I’ m a father to two children, and I can tell you that their love and admiration means more than the vacant adulation of the masses on any level. It’ s been a long, curving road toward the man that I am now, and to be honest, I sometimes struggle with how to tell people that I used to be on television. It’ s an embarrassing subject. My life is not a famous one, and unless you ’ ve been where I’ ve been, you might not understand why I’ m glad for that.

Bernard J. Schaffer is a police detective in the Philadelphia Suburban Region. He is a lifelong resident of Montgomery County. His previous work has appeared in “American Police Beat Magazine, ” “Comic Zone, ” and “The Enemy Blog.