I Dream of a Dead Jeannie

(Here is another installment from my series TV Character Obituaries.)

COCOA BEACH, FL – Former genie, Jeannie Nelson, died three days ago when, in a moment of absentmindedness, she forgot that she no longer possessed magical powers. Mrs. Nelson was on a hotel balcony on the 25^th floor gazing at the rising sun, thinking of her dear departed husband, Tony, a once famous astronaut. She was recalling their wedding night when she empowered Tony with a ten-hour erection. At the time, she had called it “my gift to you, master,” though now, as her heart quickened at the memory, she had to admit that, nineteen orgasms later, it had been a gift to herself as well. Then she remembered that her shampoo and conditioner were in the glove compartment of her car, which was visible in the hotel parking lot below.

“I better fly down there real quick to get them,” she thought. “I don’t want anyone seeing me with my hair looking like this. I hate bed-head.”

She had been a fully licensed genie for over two thousand years, and had taken off from higher elevations than this hotel penthouse, like the time she leapt from the top of Mount Ararat onto the head of the Colossus of Rhodes. And so she stepped off the balcony and…fell to her death.

The body was identified by Tony Nelson’s best friend, Roger Healey, who once tried to steal Jeannie from Tony so that she could bestow on him a life of luxury, and maybe a little genie puntang on the side. Healey is now deaf and gets about on a scooter. He stood over the body of Jeannie, and said:

“Yes, that is Jeannie Nelson. Maybe now I can bang her.”

Jeannie Nelson was born on April 1, 64 BCE in Babylon. Other Persians thought it was odd that a girl from the swarthy Middle East could look like a Swedish model – before there was ever such a thing as a Swede, let alone one with a tiny waist and a perfect rack. The evil Blue Djinn asked the blue-eyed peasant girl, Jeannie, to marry him, was rejected, and so turned her into a genie. He joked afterward about what a bad pun it was to have a girl named Jeannie become a genie.

“I couldn’t make this shit up,” laughed the Blue Djinn.

Jeannie and the bottle she now called home were passed from one master to another before being left on a desert island by a Carthaginian shield smelter. She remained on that island alone for two thousand years. She used the time to catch up on her reading and crochet.

Then, in 1964, the astronaut, Tony Nelson found the bottle, rubbed it, and, bam, Jeannie put down her knitting and appeared before her new master. Jeannie thought Tony was an absolute dream boat. Then again, she had not seen a man in two millennia, and so would have thought Samuel Johnson a modern day Adonis – and, yes, she had once spent a steamy night in Crete with Adonis, who had a strange fetish for thumbnails.

Tony and Jeannie were married five years later, and spawned a djinn son. In 2005, Tony had a stress-related heart attack from being exposed to forty years of genie high jinks, or as an increasingly irascible Tony had come to call it, This Babylonian Bullshit. His death made Jeannie want to return to human form. This was accomplished when son, Tony Jr., took the infamous genie bottle and filled it with orange juice and thus broke the spell.

Tony Jr. will give the eulogy and then fold his arms and blink like his mother used to do when performing her magic and make Larry Hagman disappear for having refused to show up for reunions of a show called I Dream of Jeannie.

(Check out my website: http://www.authorjamesfjohnson.com)

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