Ev Ehrlich's Everyday Economics

Jack Sprat Speaks

He walks out of the paddock door, his gait gangly but brisk. Your first thought is the one everyone has...Jack Sprat is still lean.

“Oh, sure,” he smiles, sitting angularly on a nearby bench. “I still hear it all the time — lean, gaunt, lanky, scrawny. But however you say it, that’s me,” he smiles. 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 race track at Santa Anita. “I had to get away,” he laughs derisively. “Ma Goose might as well have been Ma Bell by the time I left. The operation had gone corporate. And when those on-line blokes bought up the other fellows, I could see the writing on the wall.

“I would’ve ended up like Mickey Mouse, shilling for a network,” he sneers, flicking his ash. “What then? The old cat-and-mouse stuff, sticking the firecracker up the poor cat's ass? Not me,” he says, shaking a knobby, close-cropped head.

So when others would have gone with the program, Jack Sprat walked.

But what of the famous partnership with his ex-wife — the Burns and Allen, Burton and Taylor, of the Goose stable?

“Oh, at first it was ideal,” he smiles nostalgically. An early publicity still shows them together — she, with spoon, hovering over a banana split, while his needly fingers reach around her for the banana. “My solo act wasn't going anywhere: it 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, 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. Sprat’s eyes sadden. “But she became so self-destructive. Fat, grease, lard, all the time. One night I found a piece of suet hidden under the sofa. That was the end. I couldn’t watch her hurt herself anymore.”

***

Dora Sprat is sweating. Not the dissipated moisture of the obese, but the glowing, rigorous 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. An archipelago of studs, hoops, and bangles runs down her right earlobe. On stage, she moves in every direction at once, as only a big girl can, 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 young New York today.

She swirls a frozen kaluha concoction between sets and gulps it down lustily. “Oh, he got quite testy at the end. He’d hide my food, wanted me to eat crudites with him. ‘Dora, you’re killing yourself,’ he’d whine. But look at me!” she commands. “I’m getting bigger all the time and I’m just beginning to live!”

So she came East to join 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. “After all those low-end children’s books, we were finally going to have a big payday. But Jack wouldn’t hear of it — he was true to his art, he said — and he split. They tried to pair me with Wee Willie Winkie but it didn’t work. He was short, 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!”

***

A jockey leads a laconic thoroughbred past where Jack Sprat sits. “I don’t worry about the future. I like what I do. And I have plenty of options.” A film deal was said to be in the works, but is on hold. “Roseanne was interested. They wanted Robin Williams to play me, but I said, ‘But he’s not lean.’ I said, ‘Malkovitch, how about Malkovitch?’ but they said, ‛Too dark.’” He shrugs and reedy hands light another smoke.

“Still, I’m alright. I still do personal appearances — mummy and daddy want all the little nippers to see me. I lecture the kids on good food habits. And I’m doing public service spots about eating disorders. Want to hear it?

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