by Patrick Ness
2 This paper will use the original lower-case spelling of the term commonly used in most Western U.S. media. The trend started in the West and was only (mistakenly) capitalized in an aggressively negative Washington Times editorial.
3 Distinct from the fabgrab, which evolved later.
4 They were ‘just friends.’
5 Which may or may not have been appropriate to Booher’s age, but neither Roddick nor Marshall had nieces or nephews by which to gauge when a child would have read a certain book. Marshall apparently had to talk Roddick out of Judy Blume.
6 Though again, in the interests of disclosure, the author wishes to indicate that he wouldn’t trade his groomgrab experience for pretty much anything in the world.
7 The senior Morrison, of course, being President O’Donnell’s recent, controversial appointee to the Supreme Court.
8 As well as Groomgrabbing: A Reflective Memoir, The Groomgrab Guidebook (softcover), A Personal Oral History of My Life Leading Up to and Following My Groomgrabbing (two volumes, audio only), The Groomgrabbing Sonnet Cycle, and The Groomgrabbing Find-A-Word, by which time it was pretty much agreed she was flogging a dead horse.
9 ‘Unlike most girls, I’m not looking for my father in a husband; I’m looking for my groomgrabbers, which sucks because they were gay.’
10 Only three out of 714 respondents reported negative experiences: A boy in Rochester, New York, said that his groomgrabber’s idea of fun was three hours of Monopoly, an idea of fun with which the boy did not concur. A girl in Humptulips, Washington, reported that her groom- grabbers declined to let her select the colors of her own clothes, citing their expertise in ‘someone with autumn features,’ an event which traumatized the girl to such an extent that she has only worn black (a winter color, apparently) since her grabbing. The last was a boy from Tucson, Arizona, who had an anaphylactic reaction to some roasted peanuts at a minor league baseball game, something which he does not blame on his groomgrabbers and about which he says, ‘Up until that point I was having a great time.’
11 99.01 per cent, 110 positive responses out of 111. The lone negative response was from the autumn-featured girl who also manages to pop up In the only two other studies of groomgrabbing: the infamous Brookings survey now in its eleventh year of litigation, and a surface- skim report in Us-People that was more personality profiles along the ‘Whatever happened to …?’ line rather than in-depth analysis.
12 Thirty-seven interviewees scored a perfect 1600 on their SATs. Average was 1571 (almost a thousand points over the national average of 592), and most students generally had a fistful of 5s on AP subjects as varied and esoteric as Bavarian German and Mathematical Paradoxes.
13 Literally. Blandershot-Fields’ interviews alone comprise seventeen volumes.
14 Not true. A nine-year-old girl was grabbed in Helena in the summer of 2001, and an eleven-year-old girl was grabbed in Missoula in early 2002. Interestingly enough, the two girls were opposing point guards in the 2009 Montana State Girls’ Basketball Championship Finals. Missoula won.
15 Probably either Chas E. Cheese Pizza or Charlie’s Cheesy Pizzeria, both of which, remarkably, had chain stores in Butte. The latter closed its doors in 2006 as a result of litigation by the former.
16 Spidergirl Eternal, Universal, 2001. Record domestic take of $997 million only recently surpassed by P. T. Anderson’s Equestrians Ho!
17 Carmichael was one of the 37 perfect SATs.
18 A variation on the groomgrab which focused more on having a fun time than on getting better clothes. These were especially popular in the East.
19 Referring, of course, to the dark blue flag left at the scene of a groomgrab. It originated during a groomgrab in Erie, Pennsylvania, when a groomgrabber wanted to leave a note but had no paper. He left a dark blue Fendi scarf he was wearing tied to a chainlink fence near the site of the grabbing, assuming (correctly) that if the parents came out to check on their son, they would figure out what happened. It’s also how the blue flags came to be known as ‘Fendis’ or ‘Fenders.’
20 Though less so since the Introduction of the Spark-Bailey Outvitro Harvesting technique.
21 Yet another example of the incongruous bends of logic taken as the millennial swirl wrapped the country in holier-than-thou contests.
22 Whatever. As Dr Shaniqua Jackson, head of UWLAIBMSMSPVC’s own History, Sociology, Gender, Xenophobia, Misogyny, and French Studies Department says, ‘There’s a reason Dr Prong is in Nome.’
23 Along with the pairing aspect, anonymity remains a second puzzlement of the phenomenon. The author had intended to devote a section to the topic, but what can you really say except a bunch of theoretical hokum without one jot of fact? One day, one hopes that a grabber will at the very least write a memoir, to be published posthumously even, giving the world some insight into the mysteries that remain about groomgrabbing.
24 The vast percentage of information about groomgrabbing comes, of course, from the grabbees themselves, who share an abundance of self-confidence and media-sawy. An astonishing fourteen out of twenty- five nominees of on-air personalities for last year’s Talk Show Emmy Awards were former grabbees. Average age: 24. Grabbees won all five categories, Including Trinity Sheffield-Conyers, 22, who won the coveted Host of the Year, an award that had never previously gone to someone under 40. This year, grabbees account for nineteen of the twenty-five nominees with Sheffield-Conyers considered a lock to repeat as Host of the Year.
25 Attempts to contact and interview an actual grabber, of course, were fruitless and in vain. The attachment to anonymity continues a decade and a half later. The author did, in fact, contact many grabbees, but that’s it as far as first-hand knowledge goes. The source Information remains, and probably ever shall, one-sided.
26 And grabbers generally seem to have been couples, that is, lovers who were in a relationship together. At least, that would seem to be the impression among the grabbees whose viewpoint, granted, was a bit young to be judging intimacies among adults.
27 Small town in northwestern Oregon. Coincidentally, Bopp’s school was one of the seven buildings in Monmouth demolished in 2004 when a piece of the ‘forgotten’ Russian space station Horosho hurtled through the atmosphere, making for a lot of embarrassed apologizing on the diplomatic front.
28 An impressively apt description of the lottery, which is hardly surprising as Bopp-Twernig’s series of editorials on consensual crime law was shortlisted for this year’s Pulitzer.
29 After the millennial Governor of the State of Washington who trailed his more moderate and, it turned out, far saner opponent by upwards of forty-seven per cent in polls going into the election, an election which he then won by 17,000 votes. It turned out voters were far too embarrassed to admit to pollsters that they supported the, ahem, colorful Cramwell. After the ensuing conflagration, loss of life, in absentia impeachment hearings, mass suicide, and consequent move of the state’s capital from Olympia to Everett in Cramwell’s second year, it was nearly impossible to find anyone who would ever have admitted voting for him in the first place, although you can’t really blame them. The effect is also blamed for the fall of France to Greenpeace in 2009, as well as Finland’s hostile takeover of Norway in 2013 and, to a smaller extent, the election of U.S. President D. Rumsfeld and Vice President P. Anderson Lee in 2008.
30 Neglectful or groomgrab-hopeful parents were often turned in by an older generation of grandparents who just about had to glue their mouths shut to get their jaws off the floor. The author’s own grandfather has a decade-old rant spouting incredulity on the actions of parents during the groomgrab period, most especially the author’s own. The rant remains the same, as does the degree of passion accompanying it. The family has learned to not bring the subject up.
31 As Blandershot-Fields notes in one of her less academic moments, ‘What else do they have to do up there?’
32 Things got to be so circular and reflexive that the most common movie bad guys went from being splinter-grou
p Muslim terrorists to actual movie studios and executives: q.v. Rush Hour: Product Placement, No Matter How Hard I Try I Still Can’t Quite Shake What You Did Eight Summers Ago (a movie so ironic and self-reflexive both the heroes and the anti-heroes commit suicide), and Tarantino’s unwatchable, five-hour Fuck the Producers, Man! They Fucking Suck!
33 Including Booher’s parents mentioned at the top of this report. Within a month, they had dropped the charges and signed a book deal.
34 There weren’t even many conspiracy theories. Televangelist Rob Patrickson tried many times to raise the issue of a ‘left-wing, homosex- ually agendad [sic]’ plot to ‘ruin our precious children.’ But in order to get the details on the conspiracy, you had to mail the Patrickson ministries two hundred dollars, your social security number, and a handwriting sample, so that never really went anywhere.
35 Jackson Hurd, aged nine, from Scottsboro, Alabama. His grabbers (a pair, as always) dressed him in new Levi’s and new boots, then took him to a funny-car race. Hurd is now a Republican (‘though very moderate’) U.S. Representative from Alabama’s Fourth Congressional District.
36 Her main focus being profiles of the grabbees.
37 Who would only discuss the secret with a fellow grabbee. The author will not name them because part of the instruction is to pretend that there were no instructions. Any grabbees mentioned by name in this paper will profess no knowledge of these instructions.
38 I.e. an unsourced, undergraduate term paper.
39 If pressed, the author will deny having said any of the things contained within this paper.