Nobody Too
By Missy

SERIES: Nobody, Too
PART: one of one
Fandom: Laverne And Shirley
Author: Missy
Email: lasfic@yahoo.com
RATING: PG-13
PAIRING(s): Laverne/Lenny
Type: Poetry Challenge Response.

DISTRIBUTION: To rhelmofthepheonix, the Lenny and Squiggy Page, LASFic.com and FeensterGirl's LAS Fic page so far; any other archives are welcome to ask (Please Email Me), but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!

DISCLAIMER: Laverne and Shirley, of course, not my property and belongs to its creators.

CATEGORY: Drama
CANNON/SPOILERS: Spoilers for "Lenny's Crush", "Lost In SpaceSuits", "The Mummy's Bride"; Alter-Cannon post-"Mummy's Bride"
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SUMMARY: Lenny's nobody and so is Laverne; can they be happy with that?
NOTES: Response to the CLM Poetry challenge; written in fifteen minutes, edited in twenty. Based around the first four stanzas of the poem commonly entitled, "I'm Nobody!" by Emily Dickinson.

My debut Ame Souer post.

****

I'm Nobody!
Who Are You?
Are You Nobody, Too?
-Emily Dickinson

Lenny Kosnowski never dreamed of being somebody as a child.

No, his efforts were concentrated on getting the next meal into his belly; keeping the electricity on. His father wanted him to focus on the stars, but the money was never plentiful enough. He had started work at the age of ten, and a childhood spent down at the heel of industry made him humble and self-effacing.

Laverne never held dreams dear, either. The death of her mother had dissilusioned her young heart. A natural, simple practicality combined with a desire for the reality of life combined to kill her yearning. Making her hard by the age of thirteen.

All around them, their friends dreamed; of getting married. Of becoming famous dancers or rich singers. Of getting the hell out of the wrong side of the tracks in this godforsaken cow town.

Whn he picked up the guitar at the age of thirteen, it was mainly to impress Laverne, and partially because his father had kept the ancient wooden instrument in their apartment for years, the sole evidence of his mother's existence.

Yet he was surprised to realize that his love of music was strong, beyond even the power of his crush. Sound provided his calling, and he fell in love with Buddy Holly, Elvis, the Platters, and Frankie Lymon, anything he could borrow or beg his way into spinning on his tinny hi-fi. Eventually the hobby became an obsession that twined with his love for her. He would show Laverne how much he loved her through the art of song.

Years later, when they were on their own, he finally had the courage to play for her the song he'd written in her name. She was mortified by the sound of those words, and no matter how hard he tried they sounded inelegant and unworthy of her. She broke him with a final rejection, leaving him panting under her coffee table. But she had not rejected his music, the one fact that kept him from shattering completely. This sent him in another direction; turning him back into a hobbyist, fooling around with his guitar for fun.

She had a talent of her own; dancing. The love of his life could not really sing, and she couldn't play guitar (she mysteriously picked up that hobby when they moved to California). But hell, she could tap like a pro. For awhile, she dreamed of being on Broadway. They once drove across the state, in the hope of landing her a bit chorus role. The producers shot her down, announcing that she wasn't beautiful enough for the stage. With that, her sole dream was crushed as well.

Over the years, their friend's dreams became reality. Shirley married a doctor; Carmine became a Broadway star; Squiggy became a big-shot Hollywood agent. They turned to each other one day, at the age of thirty and thirty-three, with a thousand bad relationships between them, and simply said 'why not'?

Their coffee house tour, at the height of flower power, was a disaster. Mostly because 'The Times, They Are A'Changin'" kept transforming itself into "Da-Do-Ron-Ron" beneath his hands, and only the most stoned hippies were transfixed by the sight of her tapping to his accompaniment. They disappeared from the scene.

She landed a job at an aerospace firm, testing space suits, and he began selling ice cream from his old van. Their time together had been an exercise in bonding.

Two children came before their wedding, two more afterward. The year of that final birth of that final child, Carmine Ragusa won a Tony.

Lenny and Laverne vacationed in New York, standing at the back of the room while he belted out Andrew Lloyd Webber's words. When they met him backstage, they noticed only the lines around his eyes, the scent of whisky on his breath. He was on his fourth marriage, to a famous actress who instantly dismissed them as 'nobodies'.

"Nobodies, eh?" She asked Lenny as they strolled to their hotel. "We're nobodies to him now? I remember when he was a singing telegram!"

Lenny shrugged. "Laverne, wouldn't you like to be no one instead of some one like her?"

He had a lot of smarts, for someone who used to fall off of roofs with regularity.

The years fled by. Lenny continued writing songs that were, more often than not, called 'dopey' by the publishers he mailed them off to. Laverne danced while testing her suits, satisfied that her energetic tapping didn't seem to wreck the suit's seals. They retired to a modest house in a quiet neighborhood, and between them produced a very successful lawyer, two mildly successful restaurant owners, and an Oscar-winning actress.

Happy just to be nobody.



Fin











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