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Every day, including set-up and take down, during the 2010 SHOT Show, I would pass the statue pictured below, outside a restaurant that we finally got to visit on the last day of the show. Trendy and pricy, but the food was good and so was the company. In the many years since I've been going to SHOT, the industry's premier trade event, we have tried to get our "crew" together for at least one meal-usually on the last day of the show. There have been some memorable ones, for good and bad, including one in Dallas in the early 90s in which we were all pretty well convinced we had stepped into a reenactment of an episode of "Fawlty Towers." But back to the Egg Man and eggs in general. I was explaining the restaurant to a friend after I returned and she said, "But you don't like eggs!" "True," I said. Or at least-truish. I've always been a fan of Mr. H. Dumpty. And, while I've never liked eggs that you can tell are two distinct parts (say, hard boiled, soft boil, or-shudder-coddled), I don't mind eggs in other things and have a fondness for my mother's frittata and the occasional dish of (very dry) scrabbled eggs with a side (of very burnt) bacon. Humpty, though, has always been a favorite. So I was glad to sit down next to him after dinner and rub his brass head. I didn't even mind that my friend Joe Waldron snapped the picture, even if it had been a long, long day in a long, long week. When Joe sent the picture, the message line read "Humpty Peggy." Humpty Dumpty, it turns out, has been around for centuries. It's likely that he began life as a nasty-sounding cocktail-a mixture of boiled brandy and ale, which sounds really, really bad. Then he became a synonym for a small, clumsy person. He eventually morphed into a nursery rhyme, possibly as a riddle, in which, without the now familiar likeness, the child was to guess what couldn't be put back together again after a great fall.
Lewis Carroll also appropriated Humpty, who appears in Through the Looking Glass, lecturing and hectoring Alice over the meaning of words. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to meanneither more nor less," he tells her. As we begin a bumpy ride to this year's mid-term elections, it's a good idea to keep these versions of Humpty in mind-the nursery rhyme's hapless, unfixable accident victim, the political cartoon's more sinister "king's men," and Carroll's semantics twisting bully. When Scott Brown upended Massachusetts' political world, putting the Democratic Party into a tizzy, if not an outright fall from the wall, it was seen as a signal that the "king" and his "men" were in trouble. So, too, have the recent announcements by a number of long-time office holders that they will retire this year rather than seek reelection in a shaky political landscape-a clutch of Humpties not so much falling, as leaping from the wall. But it's wise to remember that the egg-like Humpty himself-is
a pretty durable symbol and an even more durable and versatile
staple. It takes, as the cliché goes, a lot of eggs to
make an omelet.
Photo © Copyright 1998 Nancy Floyd, used with permission. |
By
Peggy Tartaro,
With the nursery rhyme's reference to
"all the king's horses and all the king's men," it
wasn't long before Humpty Dumpty became a convenient political
metaphor. Countless hapless politicians-from crowned heads to
elected officials to appointed "czars"-have all been
depicted as Humpty over the years. Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer
Prize winning novel, All the King's Men, is perhaps the best
known example. 
