Giving the death sentence to famous first lines

Published 1/17/06

I have always enjoyed playing with words, particularly other people’s words. Call it editing. Call it misquoting. Call it tweaking the text of famous front lines of literature. I like putting a little twist on the tales of Twain, Thoreau, Dickens and Melville. And some of these immortal words just need a modern makeover. Like…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and I was feeling a bit bipolar myself.”

“Marley was dead, to begin with. This according to CSI—the Christmas scene investigation.”

“Call me Ishmael. Or call me Izzy. You can call me Ray. Or you call me Jay. You can call me R.J.”

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;’ but that ain’t no matter. I can still learn ya the rudiments of English grammar.”

What if Henry David had disclosed this up front in his popular beach book?

“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands as a desktop support technician for a shopping mall developer on the outskirts of Boston.”

Think of how that classic stray dog story might have opened…

“We called him Old Yeller. So old that he constantly peed all over himself. Yep, he was old and he was yeller.”

This author was asking for it…

“It was a dark and stormy night. The clichés fell like rain.”

A movie based on this book is out there in theatres right now…

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ And when Truman Capote, an eccentric New York writer with a high-pitched lisp, arrives to research the story of a murder performed in cold blood, Kansans agree that he, too, is ‘out there.’ ”

Dostoevsky’s underground memoir might have begun…

“I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I am a lobbyist for the oil industry.”

If I were ghost writing for Jane Austen, she would have admitted this in the first words of “Pride and Prejudice”…

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife—or tickets to the Super Bowl or a wife with tickets to the Super Bowl.”

In light of today’s intelligent design debate, maybe Moses and his editorial staff should have gotten straight to the point…

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Charles Darwin would evolve much later.”

For affect, the Apostle John might have written…

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Any questions so far?”

Let me help Mark Antony out here a bit…

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I seemed to have lost mine in the Gallic wars.”

There’s always a quote somewhere that needs an appendage of explanation or refutation…

“Only the educated are free,” said Greek philosopher Epictetus. “Although many go deep into debt to get there,” I might add, knowing the adverse cost of college tuition.

“Nothing exists in a vacuum,” someone once said. “Once you’ve emptied the bag,” I would clarify.

I’ve always puzzled over this quote which has appeared in a couple different literary settings: “The victor belongs to the spoils.” Who is Victor, anyway, and why does he get the spoils? And if they’re spoiled, why would he want them?

Well, so much for these favorite passages from the pages of time. I meant to give them new life. But I fear I may have given them the death sentence.