Who knew? An alligator, the bard of Avon and some peanuts helped form a trans=Atlantic alliance!

1. a tale of sister cities
by TOM LLOYD | illustration by JENNIFER CAHILL HARPER

2. Whoever first thought to pair Mount Dora, Florida with
Forres, Scotland was certainly a risk-taker. Any number of
folks could have gotten kilt – or even killed. As it happens,
one did and this is his story. It begins with Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
Once you wash your hands of all five acts' worth of the
murder and mayhem in that venerable play, all that’s really
left is a fifteenth century collection of eleventh century
recipes – a kind of medieval cookbook for bad, boiled food.
Dust off your copy and check. Sooner or later just about
everything in the Scottish play gets boiled. That not only
includes ‘eye of newt’ and ‘toe of frog’ but ‘wool of bat’ and
‘tongue of dog.’ In fact, there’s a whole laundry list of things
you’re not likely to find at your local Publix that get boiled
in Macbeth.
What your high school English teacher failed to tell you, and
“Hell’s Kitchen” chef Gordon Ramsay never will, is that all
that boiling is the real reason Mount Dora was destined to
become the sister city of Forres – the place where
Shakespeare’s Macbeth begins. Simply put, the two towns
share an ancient heritage. Bad boiled food.
S imply pu t,
the two towns share
an ancien t herit age.
B ad boiled food.
this gator swallowed one of the cola bottles, waded and
waddled all the way to the Florida east coast and then
inexplicably started swimming northeast.
When Birnam finally arrived in Scotland, he lumbered onto a
beach, trudged up nearby Dunsinane Hill, spit out the bottle,
keeled over dead from exhaustion and was promptly turned
into a handbag, two belts and a killer pair of stiletto heels by
a thrifty Scottish fashion designer, who then went home to
a dinner of the first-worst food known to man – Haggis.
Haggis is a uniquely Scottish concoction consisting of
assorted internal sheep organs stuffed inside the lining of a
sheep’s stomach and – you guessed it – boiled.
Surprised? Don’t be.
Despite the proliferation of some incredible restaurants in
Mount Dora today, the whole of Central Florida is now, and
always has been, plagued by a culinary curse worthy of
Banquo, Duncan, and the Thane of Cawdor himself in the
form of the second-worst food known to man – boiled
peanuts.
Also known as goober peas and redneck caviar, these
squishy, salty specialties of the south are so vile that when
town officials went searching for a sister city, they discovered
that no other town in America wanted anything to do with
Mount Dora and its slippery nuts.
So, the local bigwigs decided to look overseas.
They wrote letters soliciting sister cities and, in an effort to
save money on postage, elected to stuff those letters into
used Royal Crown Cola bottles which they tossed into Lake
Dora in the hope they would eventually be carried out to the
ocean and on to the rest of the world.
That decision could have doomed the sister city effort but,
as luck would have it, one overly ambitious alligator came to
the rescue. Known to his fellow crocodilians as “Birnam,”
Now, Scotland’s contributions to the world are pretty much
limited to the invention of Scotch whiskey, bagpipes, and the
aforementioned haggis. Clearly they are all inter-related,
since without consuming an incredibly large amount of
Scotch, no one would ever voluntarily listen to bagpipes, let
alone go anywhere near a plate full of haggis. QED.
In any event, once the local Scottish authorities got Mount
Dora’s message in a bottle, they quickly agreed to the sister
city proposition. The two towns, they decided, were indeed
bound together by really bad boiled food.
The Scots were also flattered to think that the term “Scottish
fashion designer” might not be the oxymoron that most of
the world still thinks it is, but in the end it was the bad boiled
food that really sealed the deal.
Happily, that sister city agreement is now flourishing.
Exchange students and tourists regularly make the transAtlantic trek. Even more happily, no boiled peanuts have
found their way to Forres and, as of press time for this issue
of Pulse, no parboiled sheep organs have made their way
onto a single Mount Dora menu.
Continued on Page 37
PULSE • FALL 2013 | 27

3. MATERIAL GIRL, continued from Page 25
exhibitors, artists, and fans mill about – many of them in costume. Zombies lurch
alongside Siths and Spidermen. Alice, looking like an escapee from Wonderland, dances
clumsily on an arcade dance game. There are miles of comic books, action figures, and
T-shirts. I purchase Star Trek socks and a Batman bikini, and we get our superheroine
caricature sketched.
We encounter Thor. Take a photo with Thor. Fall in love with Thor. Later we see Thor
walking around in Levis and drinking a Big Gulp. We love him only slightly less. We try
to find the speed dating room and the penguin knife fight, but there is no signage and
no seats in any of the discussion panels. Every room is a sea of capes.
My feet are killing me from wearing my make-me-look-gorgeous-three-inch heels,
so we return to the hotel. Refreshed, it’s back across the street to wait for our friends.
After two hours they finally got their photo op. We wait another hour for the photo
to be printed.
The convention center is now closed. There are just a bunch of angry Game of Thrones
people still waiting for their photos and a lone janitor, propped up against his mop
looking lost. The photo guy comes out and stands on a chair. The chair collapses.
There is applause. He brushes himself off and announces, “The printer is dead.” People
are not happy.
Tina and I have drinks and comfortable shoes so we don’t care – I can’t wait to come
back next year.
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CITIES, continued from Page 27
In other words, the whole thing has been a win-win proposition for everyone
involved. Well, everyone that is, except for Birnam.
Gone, but not forgotten, that overly ambitious alligator is still honored each year by
Scots and Shakespeare scholars alike. Together they climb to the top of Dunsinane
Hill where the local town crier calls out, “Who would cross the ocean to unite the
peoples of Forres and Mount Dora?” The gathered throng then waves their arms in
the air, like tree limbs swaying in the wind, and calls out the answer as loudly as
they can: “The Great Birnam would.”
In the end, however, this whole story is probably best described by Macbeth,
himself, in Act Five; Scene Five: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.”
So, pass the peanuts, please.
EDITOR’S NOTE: For the sake of “peace in the family,” it should be noted that a
lot of hard work and effort has gone into establishing and maintaining Mount
Dora's Sister City relationship with Forres, Scotland – which is flourishing. That
being said, this is one funny story!
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PULSE • FALL 2013 | 37