Capt. Spalding
TMF Regular
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2001
- Messages
- 212
- Points
- 0
*The following all F ticklefest is copyright 2001 by the author.
*This story is intended only for readers 18 years and older, as it contains some sexual content (Talk about your red flags!). If you are younger than 18, please go elsewhere. (You’ll probably find much steamier fare on cable TV, for example.) All of the characters herein are 18 years and older, as well, even if not one of them acts like it.
*Hisses and kisses should be directed to [email protected]
*Please don’t e-mail to tell me that one doesn’t serve vintage Bordeaux with moussaka. I’m a
soy milk and herbal tea person. What do I know?
*While I enjoy spinning prose fantasies, I do not encourage the actual merciless tickling of teachers. Nor do I recommend that teachers resort to tickling when dealing with colleagues or students. Nonetheless, I sure wish that I’d tickled Ms. W. when I’d had the chance, and vice versa. Ah, regrets…
the curse of advancing age…
*While someone in this story is tickled to “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” I myself would use Ravel’s “Bolero” instead. To be tickled to that slowly building masterpiece would be maddening. Heh-heh-heh…
A TICKLISH MATRICULATION
a sequel to SABBATICKLE
featuring the return of Professor Hannah Davis
and introducing the Vellication Irregulars
by Tee Hee Lawrence
Set on a card table, amidst brushes, feathers, electric toothbrush, cordless shoe polisher, and a special pair of silk gloves, the Japanese lamp, a little white tower of rice paper and wire, provided the only light in the basement. Seated nearby in a recliner set before a padded pillar, Hannah twirled a little red feather between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. In the dim surroundings, her comrades were whispering and giggling in anticipation of the evening’s fun. All were waiting for the signs from upstairs that their special guests had arrived.
With her craved retribution imminent, Hannah’s tummy was serving as a racetrack for a hundred
butterflies. To divert herself from their fluttering, the lanky Professor thought back over the weeks of
her recent short sabbatical, to the day she met Clarice and Nikki, whose visit in turn prompted her to
return to the fold of her comrades in laughter, the Vellication Irregulars …
Hannah Davis was an associate Professor of American History who had recently enjoyed a fall
sabbatical from teaching at a prestigious college in a storied New England town. She was a respected
scholar and a popular instructor whose reserve her students vainly tried to compromise with laughter.
Hannah—tall, trim, taut, “unattached” in her mid-thirties, with long, lush auburn hair, a pleasing visage with a strong nose, high cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth with an alluring slight overbite, and
compelling smoky eyes behind wide, dark-framed eyeglasses—had suffused her fall days with research and writing in virtual solitude.
One November afternoon, however, her regimen was interrupted by the appearance of two young
women: blond Clarice and dark Nikki, who appeared to have lost their way. They claimed to be aspiring
students, who sold designer shoes door-to-door, and they beguiled Hannah into trying on their stock in her living room. Before long, bound barefoot to her recliner, Hannah was at length mercilessly tickled by the mischievous pair, whose stated sole aim was to video record their reputedly reserved victim’s helpless hysterical laughter and thus win a bet.
In the weeks after their calamitous intrusion, Hannah struggled to remain focussed on her work,
which included plans for a new course on the women’s rights movement. However, the urge for vengeance
against her tickling tormentors—an urge instilled before they were out the door—grew, and ornate revenge
fantasies began to overwhelm her academic discipline. She’d be plotting a timeline for passage of the
19th Amendment to the Constitution, when thoughts of what she would do to a helplessly bound Clarice and Nikki stampeded over her work like a gaggle of school kids upon the wet cement of a new sidewalk.
In one particularly persistent scenario, she would be seated in her office at her desk, over which
the prankish pair were bound, suspended from the ceiling, so that their feet hovered within easy reach
at eye level. While Hannah proceeded through her office hours, answering correspondences, downloading
articles, even meeting with her students, she would periodically stroke Clarice’s plump bare feet and
Nikki’s sleek, nylon-covered tootsies--heedless of their laughter-choked entreaties for her to stop.
Occasionally, a helpful colleague or fawning student would offer her a feather duster or hairbrush to
vary the casually administered, protracted torment. Clarice’s round, apple-cheeked face was red and tear-streaked as she screamed with utterly helpless, high-pitched laughter. Nikki had squeezed her eyes shut and
was shaking her head “no” repeatedly as her open mouth, stretched in a pearly grin, emitted breathy bursts
of nigh silent hysteria. Of course, this was even before Hannah brought the electric toothbrush out of her desk drawer…
Hannah realized that she wouldn’t finish the work necessary for the course—which debuted shortly in the winter term--unless she acted on her fantasies for payback against the prankish pair. As the year-end holidays approached, she decided to seek help from a group of simpatico friends she’d ignored for too long. Yes, this was a job for… the Vellication Irregulars!
******
Who would have guessed that the serious, scholarly Hannah Davis was a founding member, and indeed a driving force in its early stages, of the Vellication Irregulars? The group loved to talk, fantasize, and engage each other in unbridled, playful tickling—an exercise combining the high intellectual aspirations, combustible erotic tensions, and low comedy that only a small college town atmosphere could
engender. The Professor Davis who so frustrated undergrads trying to get her giggling at their jokes and horseplay was the same Hannah who had delighted in exploiting her fellow Irregulars’ ticklishness. The sober scholar quoted Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth and cited explicit details of a midwife’s routine in, say, 1880 Charleston by day. Amidst the Irregulars, however, her laughter, a bubbling, Southern contralto, flowed like the Mississippi in springtime. Some of the most celebrated schemes and pranks of the group’s early years (e.g., turning-the-tables on a notorious toe-teasing pedicurist in a nearby burg—a tale best told on another occasion) had been cleverly hatched by none other than the “serious” Professor Davis.
The previous spring, however, Hannah gradually drifted away from the Irregulars. Perhaps it was a consequence of the irrevocable departure overseas of her last lover, often a willing partner in wild Irregular play. The resultant void Hannah filled with increased, almost overwhelming responsibilities in the History Department and a nigh-punitive regimen of research and writing. Her monkish devotion to her articles and papers reached an apotheosis during her sabbatical following the summer term. She had then stopped being an Irregular altogether, rarely even answering phone calls and correspondences from her ticklesome comrades. Their ever more passionate entreaties to her, trumpeting their craving of her laughter and tickling facility, did not move her to join them.
So, it was feeling a bit the Prodigal that Hannah called Rachel Klamour, asking to come before a meeting of the Irregulars’ Girrlzz Squad. (While the Irregulars as a whole were a predominantly male
group, what the men jokingly called the Sapphic Squad was a committee of the most active women members. Hannah had been an avid Squad member before she had drifted away from Irregular doings.) Rachel was unabashedly delighted to hear from Hannah, and encouraged her to come to the Squad’s next meeting, which would be in her basement (as it was Rachel’s turn as Chair) one evening between the holidays. Hannah agreed, and found she worked more efficiently knowing the die was cast.
Came that chilly evening, with the taste of snow in the air, Hannah, feeling a tad shy, knocked upon Rachel’s front door, which bore in a corner of its tiny window a small octagonal yellow sticker stating, “Warning: Poetry Under Construction.” Rachel, a modestly built fifty-three-year-old with lively violet eyes and short sandy hair with silver highlights, was smiling broadly as she welcomed her in. She led her downstairs to join five vibrant women sitting in a warm, neatly finished basement lit by a number of akagi lamps. This den was complete with plush carpeting, a motley collection of worn, comfortable furniture, a ping pong table, a VCR, a large screen TV, a stereo deck, myriad examples of Rachel’s painting and sculpture—most “in progress” and who knew how many books on shelves lining the walls.
Accepting their effusions of pleasure at her return, Hannah initially discussed articles she’d written and the shape of the course she was preparing. However, she could tell from their polite silence that these women had not gathered for shoptalk. They seemed to know a matter most relevant to the Squad’s mission motivated her appearance. Thus, she took a measured breath and plunged into a detailed, animated account of the tickle torment that Clarice and Nikki had visited upon her. Concluding, she then offered the meeting a modest proposal . . .
“…Needless to say, I would like to identify those young ladies, catch them unaware…”
“—And give as good as you got. MMM! A delicious prospect,” purred recent Muscovite Alexandra “Sacha” Petrovna, a pert Mathematics adjunct in her mid-20s, with long, peroxide blond bangs and wide, dark eyes, “even if I can only imagine what you went through.” She giggled. “Really, Hannah, how did they—What is the word… English is so delightful…bamboozle--I only learned that one yesterday—bamboozle you so?”
“Believe me, Sacha,” assured Hannah, “these kids ran a thoughtful, disciplined operation, from their pretending to be lost, to their working-our-way-through-college shtick, to their extremely skillful
tickling.” As she said the last word, Hannah reached over to the ottoman where the Russian had carelessly crossed her ankles, and played her fingertips down the mathematician’s nylon-clad soles.
“Hey, no fair!” yelped Sacha, as she yanked her feet back and sat upon them. “This is supposed to be discussion.” She stuck out her tongue at Hannah, who chuckled softly, saying in fond, Southern tones, “Forgive me, darlin,’ but it’s been so long . . .”
Responding, Rachel, in her husky smoker’s voice, attempted the gravity of a Madeline Albright. “Now, Hannah, if you want us to help you, and not fall upon you”—her eyebrows wagging—“ in a gleeful reenactment of the crime, you’ll recall and honor the rules of discussion and corral your frisky fingers.” Rachel, the elder of the group, was a veteran of the school’s English Department, with the title of Senior Poet, which she often joked should be printed on a sash that she could wear around campus. “I must admit, my dear, that the thought of you being reduced by those two charlatans to an overflowing giggle fountain gives me pause. Penetrating the dignified Davis façade takes some doing.”
“I’m sure when we find the two ladies, they’ll be happy to offer us their expertise with Hannah’s most sensitive spots,” chortled Shaundra Manley, the Business Administration instructor twirling one of her beaded brown ‘locks as a melodramatic villain does his mustache. The full-figured, brown-eyed, 29-year-old, at 6’1” the tallest present, stared at the three long toes visible through Hannah’s worn woolen socks. “She’s been away so long that I’m no longer certain just where they are,” she mused, with a Jamaican lilt in her voice, “though I’m open to rediscovery.”
“Putting aside my motivation,” Hannah riposted, ignoring Shaundra’s salacious stare, “I would hope that the Vellication Irregulars would seek to discipline rogue ticklers blithely threatening the group’s hegemony in our chosen perversion.”
“Hah!” Dr. Valeria Gotteborg, the fortyish, roly-poly Norwegian psychologist snorted, her pale blue eyes dancing merrily beneath her short curly pale red hair. “Perversion! You sound, Hannah, as if you were ‘born again’ during your absence. Perversion: a term loaded with such self-loathing that I shudder. I prefer shuddering with laughter to shuddering with self-loathing, thank you.” She stretched, pointedly exposing her midriff and pink-hosed soles, all spectacularly sensitive.
“Careful, VeeGee,” cautioned Gelsomina Orrechio, her dark, almond-shaped eyes flashing and her right forefinger wiggling in the universal gesture of a tickle threatened. “One should always be very careful what one wishes.” The 27-year-old olive-skinned, ebon-pigtailed botanist, her 5’8” built like the solid triathalonist she was at the University of Turin, then suggested, “Wouldn’t our pursuit of these youthful interlopers be in violation of our pledge to leave undergraduates untickled in the name of academic ethics?”
“Yeah, right! You’re a fine one to lecture, Geli!” mocked Shaundra. “Weren’t you the one who
boasted of finding a new use for specimens gathered with one of your field trip cuties last spring?”
“Why, I…,” protested Geli, unable to hide her sexy, gap-toothed smile.
“’Nothing, girls, but-a nothing tickles botanical interns like a fiddlehead fern!’” clowned Sacha, her Russian accent colliding with her intent to mimic Geli’s Italian one. Sacha’s hands shot out to parry
Geli’s attempt to reply via the blonde’s underarms.
“Order, ladies, order!” Rachel waved the feather duster that served as gavel this evening.
“Then there was the classified ad we placed in the Weekly Gazette for ‘volunteer test subjects, modest stipend offered’,” Lucia Sierra Montanez, the compact, ruddy-skinned, 37-year-old political science research fellow, with a bowl-cut of thick, straight copper hair, reminded all with a rueful smile. “ Virtually everyone Osvaldo and I interviewed was an undergraduate,” referring to her husband, a demographer and fellow Irregular.
“Oh, that disaster!” moaned Rachel. “We never should have entertained ‘Chiro when he cooked up that scheme.” The chair was referring to another Irregular--Junchiro Yamaguchi (“Chiro Kootchy” to his friends here), away on an archaeological dig in Asia Minor—who concocted a scheme to tickle hapless “test subjects” as part of an alleged government study. The interviews to find a few amply ticklish volunteers were lengthy and tedious, the tickling in almost every case brief and blasé, and they had to pay these people! And it all came with the risk of exposure for the Irregulars! (But, that, as well, is an Irregular tale for another day. . .)
“In the matter at hand, though, I think these two terrorists have demanded our attention by
tricking our dear Hannah,” pronounced Valeria.
“Yes, and they’re obviously tickle enthusiasts as well as foot connoisseurs—a wicked combination,” chimed in Shaundra, admiring her bare brown right foot and wiggling her long toes, their toes painted a luscious mango.
“It does seem clear that they coolly targeted you, Hannah,” Rachel mused. “How did they
ever learn where you were so ticklish? Could they have stumbled upon your role in the Irregulars?”
“I think our group’s secret is safe,” assured Hannah. “I’m certain they would have gloated about their knowledge of the Irregulars while they had me helpless—if they indeed had known.” Left unsaid by the historian was a dawning suspicion that one of these Vellication Irregulars could have set her up for her giggling ordeal. The Girrlzz Squad was a staunch sisterhood—but one of her “sisters,” she thought, must have steered those two hellions to her door!, The cunning little vixen had been provided knowledge not only of the professor’s vulnerability to tickling but her predilection for tickling as well. That would explain the flaunting of Nikki’s stocking feet (which helped to disarm Hannah) and Clarice’s taunting of their captive’s yearning to tickle those feet. How could they have known, unless…
“Which one?” wondered Hannah. “Which of my ‘sisters’ wanted me so mercilessly tickled, and why?”
“The other day in the lounge at the Student Union,” offered Lucia, who wore silver-framed bifocals, which were always sliding down and sailing off her wide nose, to land, held by a lanyard, bouncing upon her ample chest. “ I did come upon some students closely gathered around a TV on with the sound real low. When I asked what was so interesting, they stopped the tape they were playing and fumbled out an explanation that it was a ‘stupid party video’. Definitely conspiratorial behavior.”
“Was it Luci?” considered Hannah. She remembered dropping by Luci and Osvaldo’s a few terms
ago to pick up some chart design software, only to find the Chicana sweetly dozing in a mesh hammock
gently swaying between two venerable oaks in the backyard. Her left leg had slipped through the mesh and was, from the knee down, below the hammock. How could anyone, especially an Irregular, resist the temptation provided by that bare foot with its espadrille dangling precariously from its toes? A few light strokes upon the sole from a passing historian’s forefinger, and the toes twitched off the shoe. Unprotected now, the bare bronze foot was helpless before Hannah’s five-fingered fiesta, and Luci’s giggling eruption from siesta saw her minutes later comically upended from the wildly swinging hammock. “Just you wait!” Lucia had vowed through a mouthful of acorns, as Hannah fled with the disk Osvaldo had already given her. She’d been wary around Lucia after that, expecting a specific retaliation that never came…
Pushing her eyeglasses to the top of her nose, Lucia concluded, “You know, I would swear now
that I heard crazed laughter coming from that TV.”
“Oh-ho!” chortled Sacha, raising her arms and baring her midriff with its tattoo of pi. “The percentiles shout that the ‘party video’ starred Ha-Ha-Hannah!”
“Good God! If the campus bootleggers get hold of that tape, they’ll be copies everywhere,” wailed Hannah. “I’ll have to lecture wearing steel-reinforced boots! Every one of my students will come to class
with a feather,” She then wondered to herself if Sacha recalled a year ago, when the group was painting Rachel’s basement, then a work-in-progress. At one point, the mathematician had fully extended both arms, guiding a roller across the ceiling. Hannah immediately daubed Sacha’s exposed navel, just below pi, with a brush. The blonde squealed, tumbled from her precarious perch on a teetering chair onto a drop clothed couch, where she lay mumbling in Russian with a coat of cream white across her puss. The ensuing chaos saw her richly painted and totally gang-tickled, for which she sarcastically thanked Hannah over the post-paint spring rolls and Chardonnay.
“Well, your students will have to wait their turn,” sang Valeria. “After all, we saw you first!”
Now Hannah was reminded of how merciless she was sixteen months earlier when a mead-tipsy
Dr. Gooteborg allowed herself to be bound in the stocks at the campus Renaissance Fair. Oh, the oaths the
redhead had uttered—amidst her howls of hilarity—as the herself-buzzed historian serenely maneuvered a goose quill between the Valerian toes! It must have been a good twenty minutes before VeeGee’s husband, Lars--a chain-smoking drama coach who bemusedly indulged his wife’s Irregular inclinations—stepped in to rescue her. The publicly undone psychologist had never caught the historian with her shoes off to return
the favor in kind.
“Oooo, Hannah,” crooned Shaundra, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes—and especially not out of them—if that tape reaches the Dean’s office. You know what a closeted Puritan fetishist she is! And then,” she cackled, “there’s the Internet! Randall”—her lover (a campus technician)—“is always telling me
how quickly and pervasively any media file can be disseminated.”
“Lovely,” mumbled Hannah. She thought back many months to the time she electrified Shaundra, whose arms were full of financial journals clear up to her nose, as the economist fumbled with her keys in the otherwise empty corridor outside her office—a simply irresistible situation! —with a quick and skillful
ten-fingered ribs-tickle. The last thing Hannah heard before she escaped into a conveniently waiting elevator was the half-buried Shaundra’s hollered “You can run, but you can’t hide!” Were Clarice and Nikki the long-awaited instruments of Shaundra’s revenge?
“Who knows?” giggled Shaundra. “After seeing the tape, we may even want to apprentice the two girls as Irregulars! Catching Hannah unaware impresses me!
“Take them on as Irregulars? Is that wise, considering their youth?” cautioned Gelsomina, as she
removed the gold-rimmed granny glasses she wore for effect (as her vision was flawless). She used one earpiece to scratch under her arm.
“Is my nemesis formidable Geli?” pondered Hannah. There was that picnic the Irregulars enjoyed two summers ago, when Geli, showing off her athleticism, had clambered hand-over-hand way out on a thick branch overhanging the lake. Rachel warned her that the water would be chilly, but Geli assured her that she could hang out there longer than all of them put together. Just then, Hannah, who had sneakily positioned herself upon a limb slightly below and behind the botanist’s, avidly dug her fingertips into
Geli’s armpits. The Italian laughed a desperate “No-no-no!” before plunking fully clothed into the cold water. She emerged amuck with one sneaker gone, but she never cornered the prankish but elusive historian that day . . .
“Oh, Geli,” chided Valeria, “we know you prefer them young!” She, then, had to tuck her stocking feet under her seat when the botanist growled and made a swipe at them.
“I think I know a way to flush out your tormentors, Hannah,” suggested Rachel. “Maybe they’re
willing to sell that tape to an anonymous faculty member making an irresistible offer. Perhaps they’re even
greedy enough to accept an invitation to effect the sale at the isolated home of said faculty member. Naturally, they’d be invited downstairs to the discreet, well-appointed basement to view the tape on a very
big screen, whereupon they would find themselves subjects of a new production, directed by Professor
Hannah Davis.”
Hannah found Rachel’s idea exciting, and said so, but she was nagged by memories of a tickle
video night at VeeGee’s last winter. The group was sprawled in a semi-circle around a screen showing “A Tickling Habit,” with a Mother Superior stroking the bare tummy of an unconvincingly hysterical novitiate. Rachel yawned theatrically as she sat against the sofa at Hannah’s feet, announcing, “Y’know, if, in an ecumenical spirit, they’d have cast a nice Jewish girl she’d really laugh.” Hannah slipped down and grabbed the poet’s arms tightly from behind, shouting, “Let’s see, ladies, how a nice Jewish girl laughs!” Irregulars rolled towards Rachel, seeking out her tender spots, not forgetting, at Hannah’s insistence, the poet’s hypersensitive knees. “My kingdom for a camcorder,” drawled the historian, as she choreographed
the prolonged attack. When granted mercy, red-faced Rachel suggested that she’d really like a Hannah Davis video someday . . .
“It could be any one of them,” admitted Hannah to herself. “I’ve tickled plenty of motivation into each.”
“We’re agreed, then,” Rachel offered, “on the general plan for recovering Hannah’s…ah, honor, as soon as possible, say, by the start of term.”
“The devil’s in the details, though,” warned Shaundra.
Thus, the seven Irregulars moved into a tight huddle to hammer out those devilish details…
******
Ten days later, Professor Hannah Davis seemed to have her class in the palm of her hand.
She was wrapping up her opening lecture in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 1865-1920, the course she’d long planned, and had readied during her sabbatical. She had been able to make the final course preparations only because her sister Irregulars had insisted that she leave the plans for Clarice and Nikki entirely to them. Now, she stood, clad in a brown tweed jacket over a maize blouse, a long brown woolen skirt, maize knee-his, and leather half-boots, leaning back against the front of her desk, preparing to throw the floor open for questions before dismissal.
Perhaps it was just her imagination that, when she slipped her right foot out of her new boot—a Christmas present worn for the first time with the morning’s light snow—and flexed her stocking toes,
her students’ eyes, formerly fixed on two assigned memoirs she was holding, were in unanimity drawn to her wiggling digits. Did her smoky, bespectacled eyes catch a glimpse of a long feather being brandished by someone seated in a shadowy back row? And was that a stage-whispered “Kitchey-kitchey-koo…”, followed by ill-stifled giggles from a group to her right?
“Oh-no!” Hannah thought. “As I feared, my students have been…compromised by that tape those
two little fiends circulated. Oooo! I can hardly wait for this evening, when I’ll meet that pair again, with my
sisters around me.”
With the class dismissed after an awkward, but blessedly brief Q&A, Hannah, relieved that no one had sneaked a feather onto her desk in the exodus, gathered up her materials and hastened to her office for
a late afternoon meeting with a thesis student. The meeting ran long, and she was shocked to see that her
watch showed nearly 7 PM. That shock was nothing compared to that which froze her as she was locking her office door. A generous arc of feathers crowned her nameplate fixed to the door. Hurling her scarf around her neck, she smiled ruefully as she contemplated the fate she had in store for dear Clarice and Nikki—and set off for what promised to be a very interesting meeting of the Girrlzz Squad of the Vellication Irregulars.
(continued below)
*This story is intended only for readers 18 years and older, as it contains some sexual content (Talk about your red flags!). If you are younger than 18, please go elsewhere. (You’ll probably find much steamier fare on cable TV, for example.) All of the characters herein are 18 years and older, as well, even if not one of them acts like it.
*Hisses and kisses should be directed to [email protected]
*Please don’t e-mail to tell me that one doesn’t serve vintage Bordeaux with moussaka. I’m a
soy milk and herbal tea person. What do I know?
*While I enjoy spinning prose fantasies, I do not encourage the actual merciless tickling of teachers. Nor do I recommend that teachers resort to tickling when dealing with colleagues or students. Nonetheless, I sure wish that I’d tickled Ms. W. when I’d had the chance, and vice versa. Ah, regrets…
the curse of advancing age…
*While someone in this story is tickled to “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” I myself would use Ravel’s “Bolero” instead. To be tickled to that slowly building masterpiece would be maddening. Heh-heh-heh…
A TICKLISH MATRICULATION
a sequel to SABBATICKLE
featuring the return of Professor Hannah Davis
and introducing the Vellication Irregulars
by Tee Hee Lawrence
Set on a card table, amidst brushes, feathers, electric toothbrush, cordless shoe polisher, and a special pair of silk gloves, the Japanese lamp, a little white tower of rice paper and wire, provided the only light in the basement. Seated nearby in a recliner set before a padded pillar, Hannah twirled a little red feather between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. In the dim surroundings, her comrades were whispering and giggling in anticipation of the evening’s fun. All were waiting for the signs from upstairs that their special guests had arrived.
With her craved retribution imminent, Hannah’s tummy was serving as a racetrack for a hundred
butterflies. To divert herself from their fluttering, the lanky Professor thought back over the weeks of
her recent short sabbatical, to the day she met Clarice and Nikki, whose visit in turn prompted her to
return to the fold of her comrades in laughter, the Vellication Irregulars …
Hannah Davis was an associate Professor of American History who had recently enjoyed a fall
sabbatical from teaching at a prestigious college in a storied New England town. She was a respected
scholar and a popular instructor whose reserve her students vainly tried to compromise with laughter.
Hannah—tall, trim, taut, “unattached” in her mid-thirties, with long, lush auburn hair, a pleasing visage with a strong nose, high cheekbones, a wide, sensual mouth with an alluring slight overbite, and
compelling smoky eyes behind wide, dark-framed eyeglasses—had suffused her fall days with research and writing in virtual solitude.
One November afternoon, however, her regimen was interrupted by the appearance of two young
women: blond Clarice and dark Nikki, who appeared to have lost their way. They claimed to be aspiring
students, who sold designer shoes door-to-door, and they beguiled Hannah into trying on their stock in her living room. Before long, bound barefoot to her recliner, Hannah was at length mercilessly tickled by the mischievous pair, whose stated sole aim was to video record their reputedly reserved victim’s helpless hysterical laughter and thus win a bet.
In the weeks after their calamitous intrusion, Hannah struggled to remain focussed on her work,
which included plans for a new course on the women’s rights movement. However, the urge for vengeance
against her tickling tormentors—an urge instilled before they were out the door—grew, and ornate revenge
fantasies began to overwhelm her academic discipline. She’d be plotting a timeline for passage of the
19th Amendment to the Constitution, when thoughts of what she would do to a helplessly bound Clarice and Nikki stampeded over her work like a gaggle of school kids upon the wet cement of a new sidewalk.
In one particularly persistent scenario, she would be seated in her office at her desk, over which
the prankish pair were bound, suspended from the ceiling, so that their feet hovered within easy reach
at eye level. While Hannah proceeded through her office hours, answering correspondences, downloading
articles, even meeting with her students, she would periodically stroke Clarice’s plump bare feet and
Nikki’s sleek, nylon-covered tootsies--heedless of their laughter-choked entreaties for her to stop.
Occasionally, a helpful colleague or fawning student would offer her a feather duster or hairbrush to
vary the casually administered, protracted torment. Clarice’s round, apple-cheeked face was red and tear-streaked as she screamed with utterly helpless, high-pitched laughter. Nikki had squeezed her eyes shut and
was shaking her head “no” repeatedly as her open mouth, stretched in a pearly grin, emitted breathy bursts
of nigh silent hysteria. Of course, this was even before Hannah brought the electric toothbrush out of her desk drawer…
Hannah realized that she wouldn’t finish the work necessary for the course—which debuted shortly in the winter term--unless she acted on her fantasies for payback against the prankish pair. As the year-end holidays approached, she decided to seek help from a group of simpatico friends she’d ignored for too long. Yes, this was a job for… the Vellication Irregulars!
******
Who would have guessed that the serious, scholarly Hannah Davis was a founding member, and indeed a driving force in its early stages, of the Vellication Irregulars? The group loved to talk, fantasize, and engage each other in unbridled, playful tickling—an exercise combining the high intellectual aspirations, combustible erotic tensions, and low comedy that only a small college town atmosphere could
engender. The Professor Davis who so frustrated undergrads trying to get her giggling at their jokes and horseplay was the same Hannah who had delighted in exploiting her fellow Irregulars’ ticklishness. The sober scholar quoted Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth and cited explicit details of a midwife’s routine in, say, 1880 Charleston by day. Amidst the Irregulars, however, her laughter, a bubbling, Southern contralto, flowed like the Mississippi in springtime. Some of the most celebrated schemes and pranks of the group’s early years (e.g., turning-the-tables on a notorious toe-teasing pedicurist in a nearby burg—a tale best told on another occasion) had been cleverly hatched by none other than the “serious” Professor Davis.
The previous spring, however, Hannah gradually drifted away from the Irregulars. Perhaps it was a consequence of the irrevocable departure overseas of her last lover, often a willing partner in wild Irregular play. The resultant void Hannah filled with increased, almost overwhelming responsibilities in the History Department and a nigh-punitive regimen of research and writing. Her monkish devotion to her articles and papers reached an apotheosis during her sabbatical following the summer term. She had then stopped being an Irregular altogether, rarely even answering phone calls and correspondences from her ticklesome comrades. Their ever more passionate entreaties to her, trumpeting their craving of her laughter and tickling facility, did not move her to join them.
So, it was feeling a bit the Prodigal that Hannah called Rachel Klamour, asking to come before a meeting of the Irregulars’ Girrlzz Squad. (While the Irregulars as a whole were a predominantly male
group, what the men jokingly called the Sapphic Squad was a committee of the most active women members. Hannah had been an avid Squad member before she had drifted away from Irregular doings.) Rachel was unabashedly delighted to hear from Hannah, and encouraged her to come to the Squad’s next meeting, which would be in her basement (as it was Rachel’s turn as Chair) one evening between the holidays. Hannah agreed, and found she worked more efficiently knowing the die was cast.
Came that chilly evening, with the taste of snow in the air, Hannah, feeling a tad shy, knocked upon Rachel’s front door, which bore in a corner of its tiny window a small octagonal yellow sticker stating, “Warning: Poetry Under Construction.” Rachel, a modestly built fifty-three-year-old with lively violet eyes and short sandy hair with silver highlights, was smiling broadly as she welcomed her in. She led her downstairs to join five vibrant women sitting in a warm, neatly finished basement lit by a number of akagi lamps. This den was complete with plush carpeting, a motley collection of worn, comfortable furniture, a ping pong table, a VCR, a large screen TV, a stereo deck, myriad examples of Rachel’s painting and sculpture—most “in progress” and who knew how many books on shelves lining the walls.
Accepting their effusions of pleasure at her return, Hannah initially discussed articles she’d written and the shape of the course she was preparing. However, she could tell from their polite silence that these women had not gathered for shoptalk. They seemed to know a matter most relevant to the Squad’s mission motivated her appearance. Thus, she took a measured breath and plunged into a detailed, animated account of the tickle torment that Clarice and Nikki had visited upon her. Concluding, she then offered the meeting a modest proposal . . .
“…Needless to say, I would like to identify those young ladies, catch them unaware…”
“—And give as good as you got. MMM! A delicious prospect,” purred recent Muscovite Alexandra “Sacha” Petrovna, a pert Mathematics adjunct in her mid-20s, with long, peroxide blond bangs and wide, dark eyes, “even if I can only imagine what you went through.” She giggled. “Really, Hannah, how did they—What is the word… English is so delightful…bamboozle--I only learned that one yesterday—bamboozle you so?”
“Believe me, Sacha,” assured Hannah, “these kids ran a thoughtful, disciplined operation, from their pretending to be lost, to their working-our-way-through-college shtick, to their extremely skillful
tickling.” As she said the last word, Hannah reached over to the ottoman where the Russian had carelessly crossed her ankles, and played her fingertips down the mathematician’s nylon-clad soles.
“Hey, no fair!” yelped Sacha, as she yanked her feet back and sat upon them. “This is supposed to be discussion.” She stuck out her tongue at Hannah, who chuckled softly, saying in fond, Southern tones, “Forgive me, darlin,’ but it’s been so long . . .”
Responding, Rachel, in her husky smoker’s voice, attempted the gravity of a Madeline Albright. “Now, Hannah, if you want us to help you, and not fall upon you”—her eyebrows wagging—“ in a gleeful reenactment of the crime, you’ll recall and honor the rules of discussion and corral your frisky fingers.” Rachel, the elder of the group, was a veteran of the school’s English Department, with the title of Senior Poet, which she often joked should be printed on a sash that she could wear around campus. “I must admit, my dear, that the thought of you being reduced by those two charlatans to an overflowing giggle fountain gives me pause. Penetrating the dignified Davis façade takes some doing.”
“I’m sure when we find the two ladies, they’ll be happy to offer us their expertise with Hannah’s most sensitive spots,” chortled Shaundra Manley, the Business Administration instructor twirling one of her beaded brown ‘locks as a melodramatic villain does his mustache. The full-figured, brown-eyed, 29-year-old, at 6’1” the tallest present, stared at the three long toes visible through Hannah’s worn woolen socks. “She’s been away so long that I’m no longer certain just where they are,” she mused, with a Jamaican lilt in her voice, “though I’m open to rediscovery.”
“Putting aside my motivation,” Hannah riposted, ignoring Shaundra’s salacious stare, “I would hope that the Vellication Irregulars would seek to discipline rogue ticklers blithely threatening the group’s hegemony in our chosen perversion.”
“Hah!” Dr. Valeria Gotteborg, the fortyish, roly-poly Norwegian psychologist snorted, her pale blue eyes dancing merrily beneath her short curly pale red hair. “Perversion! You sound, Hannah, as if you were ‘born again’ during your absence. Perversion: a term loaded with such self-loathing that I shudder. I prefer shuddering with laughter to shuddering with self-loathing, thank you.” She stretched, pointedly exposing her midriff and pink-hosed soles, all spectacularly sensitive.
“Careful, VeeGee,” cautioned Gelsomina Orrechio, her dark, almond-shaped eyes flashing and her right forefinger wiggling in the universal gesture of a tickle threatened. “One should always be very careful what one wishes.” The 27-year-old olive-skinned, ebon-pigtailed botanist, her 5’8” built like the solid triathalonist she was at the University of Turin, then suggested, “Wouldn’t our pursuit of these youthful interlopers be in violation of our pledge to leave undergraduates untickled in the name of academic ethics?”
“Yeah, right! You’re a fine one to lecture, Geli!” mocked Shaundra. “Weren’t you the one who
boasted of finding a new use for specimens gathered with one of your field trip cuties last spring?”
“Why, I…,” protested Geli, unable to hide her sexy, gap-toothed smile.
“’Nothing, girls, but-a nothing tickles botanical interns like a fiddlehead fern!’” clowned Sacha, her Russian accent colliding with her intent to mimic Geli’s Italian one. Sacha’s hands shot out to parry
Geli’s attempt to reply via the blonde’s underarms.
“Order, ladies, order!” Rachel waved the feather duster that served as gavel this evening.
“Then there was the classified ad we placed in the Weekly Gazette for ‘volunteer test subjects, modest stipend offered’,” Lucia Sierra Montanez, the compact, ruddy-skinned, 37-year-old political science research fellow, with a bowl-cut of thick, straight copper hair, reminded all with a rueful smile. “ Virtually everyone Osvaldo and I interviewed was an undergraduate,” referring to her husband, a demographer and fellow Irregular.
“Oh, that disaster!” moaned Rachel. “We never should have entertained ‘Chiro when he cooked up that scheme.” The chair was referring to another Irregular--Junchiro Yamaguchi (“Chiro Kootchy” to his friends here), away on an archaeological dig in Asia Minor—who concocted a scheme to tickle hapless “test subjects” as part of an alleged government study. The interviews to find a few amply ticklish volunteers were lengthy and tedious, the tickling in almost every case brief and blasé, and they had to pay these people! And it all came with the risk of exposure for the Irregulars! (But, that, as well, is an Irregular tale for another day. . .)
“In the matter at hand, though, I think these two terrorists have demanded our attention by
tricking our dear Hannah,” pronounced Valeria.
“Yes, and they’re obviously tickle enthusiasts as well as foot connoisseurs—a wicked combination,” chimed in Shaundra, admiring her bare brown right foot and wiggling her long toes, their toes painted a luscious mango.
“It does seem clear that they coolly targeted you, Hannah,” Rachel mused. “How did they
ever learn where you were so ticklish? Could they have stumbled upon your role in the Irregulars?”
“I think our group’s secret is safe,” assured Hannah. “I’m certain they would have gloated about their knowledge of the Irregulars while they had me helpless—if they indeed had known.” Left unsaid by the historian was a dawning suspicion that one of these Vellication Irregulars could have set her up for her giggling ordeal. The Girrlzz Squad was a staunch sisterhood—but one of her “sisters,” she thought, must have steered those two hellions to her door!, The cunning little vixen had been provided knowledge not only of the professor’s vulnerability to tickling but her predilection for tickling as well. That would explain the flaunting of Nikki’s stocking feet (which helped to disarm Hannah) and Clarice’s taunting of their captive’s yearning to tickle those feet. How could they have known, unless…
“Which one?” wondered Hannah. “Which of my ‘sisters’ wanted me so mercilessly tickled, and why?”
“The other day in the lounge at the Student Union,” offered Lucia, who wore silver-framed bifocals, which were always sliding down and sailing off her wide nose, to land, held by a lanyard, bouncing upon her ample chest. “ I did come upon some students closely gathered around a TV on with the sound real low. When I asked what was so interesting, they stopped the tape they were playing and fumbled out an explanation that it was a ‘stupid party video’. Definitely conspiratorial behavior.”
“Was it Luci?” considered Hannah. She remembered dropping by Luci and Osvaldo’s a few terms
ago to pick up some chart design software, only to find the Chicana sweetly dozing in a mesh hammock
gently swaying between two venerable oaks in the backyard. Her left leg had slipped through the mesh and was, from the knee down, below the hammock. How could anyone, especially an Irregular, resist the temptation provided by that bare foot with its espadrille dangling precariously from its toes? A few light strokes upon the sole from a passing historian’s forefinger, and the toes twitched off the shoe. Unprotected now, the bare bronze foot was helpless before Hannah’s five-fingered fiesta, and Luci’s giggling eruption from siesta saw her minutes later comically upended from the wildly swinging hammock. “Just you wait!” Lucia had vowed through a mouthful of acorns, as Hannah fled with the disk Osvaldo had already given her. She’d been wary around Lucia after that, expecting a specific retaliation that never came…
Pushing her eyeglasses to the top of her nose, Lucia concluded, “You know, I would swear now
that I heard crazed laughter coming from that TV.”
“Oh-ho!” chortled Sacha, raising her arms and baring her midriff with its tattoo of pi. “The percentiles shout that the ‘party video’ starred Ha-Ha-Hannah!”
“Good God! If the campus bootleggers get hold of that tape, they’ll be copies everywhere,” wailed Hannah. “I’ll have to lecture wearing steel-reinforced boots! Every one of my students will come to class
with a feather,” She then wondered to herself if Sacha recalled a year ago, when the group was painting Rachel’s basement, then a work-in-progress. At one point, the mathematician had fully extended both arms, guiding a roller across the ceiling. Hannah immediately daubed Sacha’s exposed navel, just below pi, with a brush. The blonde squealed, tumbled from her precarious perch on a teetering chair onto a drop clothed couch, where she lay mumbling in Russian with a coat of cream white across her puss. The ensuing chaos saw her richly painted and totally gang-tickled, for which she sarcastically thanked Hannah over the post-paint spring rolls and Chardonnay.
“Well, your students will have to wait their turn,” sang Valeria. “After all, we saw you first!”
Now Hannah was reminded of how merciless she was sixteen months earlier when a mead-tipsy
Dr. Gooteborg allowed herself to be bound in the stocks at the campus Renaissance Fair. Oh, the oaths the
redhead had uttered—amidst her howls of hilarity—as the herself-buzzed historian serenely maneuvered a goose quill between the Valerian toes! It must have been a good twenty minutes before VeeGee’s husband, Lars--a chain-smoking drama coach who bemusedly indulged his wife’s Irregular inclinations—stepped in to rescue her. The publicly undone psychologist had never caught the historian with her shoes off to return
the favor in kind.
“Oooo, Hannah,” crooned Shaundra, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes—and especially not out of them—if that tape reaches the Dean’s office. You know what a closeted Puritan fetishist she is! And then,” she cackled, “there’s the Internet! Randall”—her lover (a campus technician)—“is always telling me
how quickly and pervasively any media file can be disseminated.”
“Lovely,” mumbled Hannah. She thought back many months to the time she electrified Shaundra, whose arms were full of financial journals clear up to her nose, as the economist fumbled with her keys in the otherwise empty corridor outside her office—a simply irresistible situation! —with a quick and skillful
ten-fingered ribs-tickle. The last thing Hannah heard before she escaped into a conveniently waiting elevator was the half-buried Shaundra’s hollered “You can run, but you can’t hide!” Were Clarice and Nikki the long-awaited instruments of Shaundra’s revenge?
“Who knows?” giggled Shaundra. “After seeing the tape, we may even want to apprentice the two girls as Irregulars! Catching Hannah unaware impresses me!
“Take them on as Irregulars? Is that wise, considering their youth?” cautioned Gelsomina, as she
removed the gold-rimmed granny glasses she wore for effect (as her vision was flawless). She used one earpiece to scratch under her arm.
“Is my nemesis formidable Geli?” pondered Hannah. There was that picnic the Irregulars enjoyed two summers ago, when Geli, showing off her athleticism, had clambered hand-over-hand way out on a thick branch overhanging the lake. Rachel warned her that the water would be chilly, but Geli assured her that she could hang out there longer than all of them put together. Just then, Hannah, who had sneakily positioned herself upon a limb slightly below and behind the botanist’s, avidly dug her fingertips into
Geli’s armpits. The Italian laughed a desperate “No-no-no!” before plunking fully clothed into the cold water. She emerged amuck with one sneaker gone, but she never cornered the prankish but elusive historian that day . . .
“Oh, Geli,” chided Valeria, “we know you prefer them young!” She, then, had to tuck her stocking feet under her seat when the botanist growled and made a swipe at them.
“I think I know a way to flush out your tormentors, Hannah,” suggested Rachel. “Maybe they’re
willing to sell that tape to an anonymous faculty member making an irresistible offer. Perhaps they’re even
greedy enough to accept an invitation to effect the sale at the isolated home of said faculty member. Naturally, they’d be invited downstairs to the discreet, well-appointed basement to view the tape on a very
big screen, whereupon they would find themselves subjects of a new production, directed by Professor
Hannah Davis.”
Hannah found Rachel’s idea exciting, and said so, but she was nagged by memories of a tickle
video night at VeeGee’s last winter. The group was sprawled in a semi-circle around a screen showing “A Tickling Habit,” with a Mother Superior stroking the bare tummy of an unconvincingly hysterical novitiate. Rachel yawned theatrically as she sat against the sofa at Hannah’s feet, announcing, “Y’know, if, in an ecumenical spirit, they’d have cast a nice Jewish girl she’d really laugh.” Hannah slipped down and grabbed the poet’s arms tightly from behind, shouting, “Let’s see, ladies, how a nice Jewish girl laughs!” Irregulars rolled towards Rachel, seeking out her tender spots, not forgetting, at Hannah’s insistence, the poet’s hypersensitive knees. “My kingdom for a camcorder,” drawled the historian, as she choreographed
the prolonged attack. When granted mercy, red-faced Rachel suggested that she’d really like a Hannah Davis video someday . . .
“It could be any one of them,” admitted Hannah to herself. “I’ve tickled plenty of motivation into each.”
“We’re agreed, then,” Rachel offered, “on the general plan for recovering Hannah’s…ah, honor, as soon as possible, say, by the start of term.”
“The devil’s in the details, though,” warned Shaundra.
Thus, the seven Irregulars moved into a tight huddle to hammer out those devilish details…
******
Ten days later, Professor Hannah Davis seemed to have her class in the palm of her hand.
She was wrapping up her opening lecture in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: 1865-1920, the course she’d long planned, and had readied during her sabbatical. She had been able to make the final course preparations only because her sister Irregulars had insisted that she leave the plans for Clarice and Nikki entirely to them. Now, she stood, clad in a brown tweed jacket over a maize blouse, a long brown woolen skirt, maize knee-his, and leather half-boots, leaning back against the front of her desk, preparing to throw the floor open for questions before dismissal.
Perhaps it was just her imagination that, when she slipped her right foot out of her new boot—a Christmas present worn for the first time with the morning’s light snow—and flexed her stocking toes,
her students’ eyes, formerly fixed on two assigned memoirs she was holding, were in unanimity drawn to her wiggling digits. Did her smoky, bespectacled eyes catch a glimpse of a long feather being brandished by someone seated in a shadowy back row? And was that a stage-whispered “Kitchey-kitchey-koo…”, followed by ill-stifled giggles from a group to her right?
“Oh-no!” Hannah thought. “As I feared, my students have been…compromised by that tape those
two little fiends circulated. Oooo! I can hardly wait for this evening, when I’ll meet that pair again, with my
sisters around me.”
With the class dismissed after an awkward, but blessedly brief Q&A, Hannah, relieved that no one had sneaked a feather onto her desk in the exodus, gathered up her materials and hastened to her office for
a late afternoon meeting with a thesis student. The meeting ran long, and she was shocked to see that her
watch showed nearly 7 PM. That shock was nothing compared to that which froze her as she was locking her office door. A generous arc of feathers crowned her nameplate fixed to the door. Hurling her scarf around her neck, she smiled ruefully as she contemplated the fate she had in store for dear Clarice and Nikki—and set off for what promised to be a very interesting meeting of the Girrlzz Squad of the Vellication Irregulars.
(continued below)