[Northkeep] Talana Plunders Medici Bank - Film at Eleven

[Anawyn at aol.com]

Well, Bon Fortune, gal! You certainly deserve it, and it was really, really 
 good story too!
Anawyn
 
 
In a message dated 3/1/2011 4:06:02 P.M. Central Standard Time,  
talana1 at hotmail.com writes:


Good  evening, Northkeep,

Since some of you may see it on the news tomorrow,  I figured I'd best be 
pre-emptive and explain why you will see me acting like  an idiot on TV. . . .

A couple of years ago, I found a broken pendant  on the sidewalk.  Although 
the markings on the back were worn nearly  away, I could tell it was good 
stuff, not electroplated.  I put it in my  pocket, because that's what you do 
with things you find when you're out  walking, and when I got home I tossed 
it in a drawer and forgot about it,  until last month, during the blizzard. 
 

After three days stuck at  home, I had cleaned the house, reorganized my 
fabric stash (no mean feat,  that), and had gotten down to straightening out 
my desk drawers, when the  pendant resurfaced.  I thought "gold prices have 
shot up over the last  couple of years.  I ought to sell this."  I put it 
back in the now  semi-tidy drawer, and again forgot about it until last week, 
when I was  helping a friend clean out her mother's house, and she made a 
remark about  having found a place to sell some old coins and jewelry.  I 
remembered I  needed to sell that pendant, since Diarmaid and I will be driving 
to Virginia  in March (while you all are at Gulf Wars), and every little bit 
helps when gas  prices are what they are.  A few days later, a co-worker 
suggested I use  Tulsa Gold and Gems (this is a shameless plug for TG&G, but 
you'll  understand in a minute), which is close to where I live.  I had some  
errands to do in that part of town on Saturday, so I stuck the pendant in my 
 pocket and head
ed over.

Let me tell you, the spirit of the di  Medici lives on.  You go from the 
street into a tiny hallway, and from  thence into an elevator.  An elevator 
that is, I must say, obscenely  tricked out in oak paneling and acanthus-leaf 
crown molding.  It deposits  you in a hallway of rich, dark wood lined with 
benches, which made me recall  my Roman history professor talking about the 
great Roman patricians and how  their cliente (people who wanted to get 
favors from/do business with them)  would wait in the vestibule of the 
patrician's villa for their turn to do  business.  After getting past the door guard 
- a security lock by which  you are buzzed into an inner chamber - I filled 
out some paperwork, and was  instructed to wait until they had assayed my 
paltry little pendant.  I  sat on a very nice leather sofa, watching three HD 
TVs, mounted on walls  covered in gold-tone wall paper and more expensive 
panelling, and decided that  this definitely was the modern equivalent of the 
business wing of
a  Florentine palazzo.

A few minutes later, a clerk called my name, and  gave me a very good price 
for my little piece of gold.  He told me that  Tulsa Gold and Gems holds a 
contest every month in which you guess what the  closing price of gold will 
be on the last business day of the month.  I  asked what it had closed at on 
Friday, considered that the Asian and Middle  Eastern markets would be open 
on Sunday, and that the craziness raging in  Bahrain and Libya wasn't going 
to resolve overnight, and rattled off a  figure.

Well, I won.  I came within seven cents of nailing  yesterday's closing 
price.  So, this morning, I stepped into the Money  Booth, a plexiglass case 
the size of a small shower stall, with a pile of cash  on the floor.  They 
locked me in and turned on a fan, and gave me thirty  seconds to catch as many 
flying bills as I could.  For half a minute, I  grabbed money and stuffed it 
into my sweater like a mad woman.  My take  came to $1,170.

I declare to one and all that I am more than satisfied  with my first Tulsa 
Gold and Gems customer experience.

You can watch my  brazen display of greed and my total lack of dignity on 
Channel 6 tomorrow on  the 10:00 pm broadcast.  And yes, Diarmaid took 
pictures and will post  them on his Flickr page tonight.

Feeling like a condottieri after a  good campaign season,

Talana               
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