1 2 MAGIC WORDS Balance Sheet In Literature: • "The balance-sheet! That is the magic word. All through the year we go on and on in the eddying whirl of business. Money comes and goes, circulates, attracts other money, vanishes; and the fortune of the firm, like a slippery, gleaming snake, always in motion, expands, contracts, diminishes, or increases, and it is impossible to know our condition until there comes a moment of rest. Not until the inventory shall we know the truth, and whether the year, which seems to have been prosperous, has really been so." -- Alphonse Daudet, Fromont et Risler, vol. 2 (c. 1874) Bam Wham Ham Flam Jamb Cram Alla Kazam Slam In Literature: • Linda Varsell Smith, The Rainbow Redemption (200 ) Banana Bones From bananas to bones. With one . . . spark, the imagination can be set on fire. -- Elizabeth Gilbert, A Writer's Workbook (2000) Facts: In a Chinese story, the "banana yellow bones" of the mystic water spirit "Bro" Gao's descendents rise up from the ashes of a wandering shaman's fire: "The shaman had said, 'Water is born from fire . . .' The fire burned blue turning to purple, purple to red, for exactly one day and one night. It was said that eventually eight sets of fragrant, banana yellow male bones emerged from the ashes. These were the sons of 'Bro' Gao." In Vodou, green bananas and bones are offerings to Legba, the supernatural Master of Passageways and opener of doors. In an early advertisement for bananas, "Josephine Baker, clad only in a girdle of bananas, sang a song with a refrain to the effect that she liked bananas because they had no bones."4 Banana Bones are a snack consisting of frozen banana dipped in chocolate or peanut butter and rolled with nuts. 2 Beatrice Spade, "The Birth of the Water God," China's Avant-Garde Fiction, edited by Jing Wang (1998) Mal Leicester, Classroom Issues (2000) 4 Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food (1992)