Robert Helps was especially intrigued by anecdotes concerning friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances; his insatiable imagination was able to modulate to distant keys through these virtual forms of social contact.
Friends invited to one of Helps’ legendary dinners (always composed of baked fish or roast beef, baked potato and arugula salad with his homemade vinaigrette elegantly served in an old pickle jar) would usually offer one of these far-out stories in exchange for the hospitality and blended scotch.
At one of these intimate evenings in the early 1980's, an oboist/waitress recounted her discovery of a delightful literary corpus penned by one of her restaurant co-workers: a set of poems written on a basketball in felt-tipped marker.
The author of the poems was a rather unstable woman by the name of Wanda Sue. She came from the defavored Tampa, Florida suburb of Thonotosassa.
She seemingly suffered from a persecution complex, insisting that there had been several attempts (by complete strangers) to steal the poetic basketball. She bitterly assured that most of her oeuvre had, in fact, already been stolen!
