The feral-prodigy how-to
Say something like I’m terribly sorry I can’t come out to see 8½ revived on a wall-size Cambridge Celluloid Festival viewer on Friday, Kimberly, or Daphne, but you see if I jump rope for two hours then jog backwards through Newton till I puke They’ll let me watch match-cartridges and then my mother will read aloud to me from the O.E.D. until 2200 lights-out, and c.;
Context
From Hal's voice-over for Mario's "New Eyes, New Voices" cartridge — the second-person manual for assembling a feral tennis prodigy, here the script for turning down a date so you won't be asked again. The mother reading aloud from the O.E.D. as bedtime ritual is the lexical-prodigy formation and the social repellent in a single breath. (The run-on "till I puke They'll let me" is the text's.)