[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Todd Pruzan, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $14.50.]

The worst thing is: he sees the golf-ball bank two, maybe three full minutes before it breaks his nose. It’s sitting right there on the table, in full view of the whole room, next to a tiny recorder. This is 1980, and he’s never seen a recorder so small, except maybe in a James Bond movie. There are dozens of cameras in the room, but the photographers who will be craning for a shot of it just a few minutes from now, something to get out to the wires before five o’clock, aren’t paying the slightest attention to it. But oh, they will.

The woman who’s about to wing the golf-ball bank at the senator’s face is brandishing it with comic menace. She’s running her finger along the red laces, tracing the ball’s dimples. The senator is answering a question, but he’s thinking about the golf-ball bank, trying to figure it out. Let’s see: banking subcommittee, bill protecting The American People, he’s out playing the 18th hole at Burning Tree when he should be voting on it, hey, sorry, welcome to Washington.

So what the hell: he just calls on her. Young lady, with that golf-ball bank with the tennis shoes. Heads turn her way. Deadpan aside into the bank of live mikes: You look like maybe you’re wantin’ to throw that thing at me. Chuckles from the other reporters — and then she just does it. She really does it. She stands and picks it up and throws the bank at him, hard — not at all like a girl, he’ll remember later — and nobody reacts, because it’s too fast, and then it’s flying and getting bigger and bigger until it breaks his nose, and finally, everyone gasps and shouts. The senator screams at an octave nobody realized he could reach, including himself. The audio will be replayed for months at inopportune moments on “Saturday Night Live.” Years after the general public has stopped recognizing it, a d.j. in the Bronx will unearth the audio and turn the scream into a popular hip-hop sample.

The golf-ball bank hits the lectern first, then lands on the floor, on its feet. Two secret-service guards lunge for it, as though they really think it might run away, and clunk heads, hard. There’s a scrum of arms around the woman, who’s got straight blonde hair and enormous tinted glasses. Her chant, whatever it is, fades as she’s pulled further away from the front of the chamber. One of the guards, without thinking, hands the golf-ball bank to the senator. He probably thinks the senator dropped it. The golf-ball bank is unbroken, and there’s no blood.

The next morning, the New York Post is first out of the gate: FORE SCORE! One of his friends shows up at his Georgetown house with a copy of the paper. The senator signs: Craig — only 17 holes to go! Best wishes. The friend has a favor. He’s got a nonprofit doing a silent auction that Saturday. Can they auction off the golf-ball bank. A piece of Washingtoniana, a piece of Congressional history. It’s for a children’s hospital. All yours, says the senator, and hands it over.

The winning bid on the golf-ball bank gets raucous cheers — it gets as much as a pair of season tickets to the Redskins. The bank then sits on a coffee table for four years. Then the family moves, and it sits in a box for more than two decades, until the youngest son is in college and finds it in the attic when he’s looking for old VHS tapes. He mutters: No way.

The protester is retired now. She rarely does interviews, but when she does, she gets fired up again about the banking bill. It still gets to her. She doesn’t regret the 72 months in jail. She’s glad she did it.

The senator’s legacy isn’t in banking law but in Congressional security. Just try bringing a walking golf-ball bank into the Capitol Building today: you’re liable to spend a few hours explaining yourself to stern-looking police officers before they let you go. (You’re probably not really going to pull anything, they’ll decide, finally. Probably not worth our trouble.) Sir: We’re going to let you go, but you can’t be bringing that in here. Leave that bank at home.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Adam Davies, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $14.50.]

Authentic

MR. YODELS

Love Totem

The “Sylvia St. Etienne” edition

This is the only witness to — or, some say, the cause of — the tragic death of
legendary chanteuse and muse to famous Ecuadorian footballer

Francisco Chavarria

NOT AN IMITATION!

Condition

The artifact is in good condition.  Some slight damage, consistent with the violence of the wreckage, on the Tres Marias rabbit headpiece and on the hand-painted ovoid eyes.  Otherwise the piece is exquisitely preserved, including (as required by the folk magic tradition) Mr. Chavarria’s “plasma donation.”

The Mr. Yodels Tradition:

Jacob Tauxe, the notorious “Swiss Voodoo Houngan” from Bern, designed the original line of ceramic Mr. Yodels figurines employed by frustrated suitors as love totems.  By a feat of acoustic engineering yet to be explained satisfactorily, all custom-made Mr. Yodels figurines produce a distinctive upper-and-lower register song — the “love yodel” — when placed at an open window by which the loved one walks, provoking powerful spontaneous feelings of pair-bonding, veneration, and leghumpery.

Dangerous and unsanctioned Do-It-Yourself models — those made without knowledge of the proper techniques or precautions — are rumored to be responsible for the unions of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, Woody Allen and relatives, Elizabeth Taylor et al., Chrysler and Daimler, and others.

The “Sylvia St. Etienne” Mr. Yodels:

Caracas, 1956.  The fiery Ecuadorian striker Francisco Chavarria meets the legendary Hollywood songstress Sylvia St. Etienne, best known for her sultry interpretations of “Ashes in my D-Cup,” “Cabana in Urbana,” and “That Was It?”

For seven glorious, champagne-drenched, strawberry-inserting, mogul-free weeks the couple was inseparable — until Ms. St. Etienne met the mogul Sven “Big Krona” Uggla.  Then they separated.

Heartbroken, and publicly humiliated, Mr. Chavarria vowed to get her back, but Ms. St. Etienne was — as they say in Monte Carlo — “avec mogul.”  With no other recourse to intercourse, the jilted footballer traveled to Switzerland and implored Mr. Tauxe to fashion for him the most powerful of all Mr. Yodelses. But the Swiss Voodoo priest, bitter over Mr. Chavarria’s last-second game-winning header over the Swiss, refused.

Desperate, Mr. Chavarria fashioned his own Mr. Yodels, ignorant of the necessary protocols, and tied it underneath the passenger seat of Big Krona’s BMW 507 roadster, thinking, you know: The windows will be down. Gotta work.

Only ten hours later, after Sylvia St. Etienne gave the last performance of her life, singing the hits from “Hurry Up, These Sheets Itch and I’m Sweating,” “Waiter! There’s a Jackass in my Demitasse!” and “Side-Saddle Won’t Work,” she drove off into the night with Big Krona and plunged to her death in a mountain gorge.

All that remains of the great singer are her treasured recordings—and, now, available for the first time to the public, from the estate of Mr. Abernathy Hastings of Newport, this gloriously preserved Mr. Yodels.

Look at the eyes:  you can almost see what Francisco Chavarria saw.

Witness the ears:  you can almost hear what Francisco Chavarria heard.

Observe the mouth:  you can fit a Bud Kinger in that thing.

Reserve set low by request of the estate, this auction represents a rare opportunity to own the last remaining vestige of one of the 20th century’s most tragic love stories.

It may also possibly crack walnuts.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $32.08.]

This object is best known from its appearance in the 1939 film No News From The Navy, a comedy starring James Wilton as a hapless midshipman who cannot set aside his seafaring ways, even when he is confined to dry land as a result of an injury.  Wilton’s character (who is called, simply, “Sailor”) competes for the affection of a young woman named Evelyn (Mary Hannan) despite the opposition of her father (Gordon Howard) and a larger, determined suitor (Kenneth Lopp). The film is a second-tier comedy, but there is one classic scene in which Sailor shaves before taking Evelyn out on a date. He is clearly accustomed to shaving aboard his ship, and as a result, he is constantly attempting to regain his balance, despite the fact the floor is level and stable. The critic Leonard Folsom has written that “The unheralded Wilton has a scene that combines the physical complexity of a Chaplin solo with close-ups of inexpressive expression that rival the finest moments of Keaton.” At the beginning of that scene, Wilton uses this smiling mug as his shaving mug, and while he sets it on the shelf above the washbasin midway through, it remains, as Folsom writes, “an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer.”

There are other shaving mugs that resemble this one, but none was created as this one was: by hand, with the assistance of a kiln, by a famous surrealist sculptor. This one was. In fact, it was wheel-thrown and fired by the Belgian artist Paul Coppens in 1932; Coppens, of course, was part of the group of artists supported by the patronage of Edward James. “I have dreamed of a smiling shaving mug,” Coppens wrote to James in June 1932. “A sketch is attached. It looks like a face, of course, because a face is the only thing that is capable of smiling (or is it?), but it also looks like a tooth, because a tooth is the only thing that is capable of showing when a face is smiling. In addition, I have noticed that daily washing rituals, including shaving, are illogically equated with the whiteness of teeth. But there is more to the image. Look at the handle. It functions like an ear visually, but as there is only one, this figure is incapable of ‘smiling ear-to-ear,’ as the idiom has it. In addition, I have recently learned that ‘mug’ is a slang term for the human face in some parts of the English-speaking world. (Ironically, this practice comes from the fact that beer steins were fashioned in the human image, and unattractive specimens of our race were said be ‘mug-faces.’)” Coppens’ piece, which he called Tooth Fils (the wordplay refers both to dentistry and to its small size), was part of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

How Tooth Fils came to be in No News From the Navy is simpler than the creation of either work. James Wilton, who himself trained as a painter and considered himself an acolyte of, if not a participant in, Surrealism, attended the exhibit, acquired it, and insisted that it be in every one of his films. As there was only one film, this is a condition that history has found easy to satisfy.