Red was rummaging through a stack of old cardboard boxes, searching for just what he needed to put the finishing touches on his woodcraft. Suddenly Red heard the sounds of clumsy footsteps bumbling down the hall and that odd, strangulated vocalization that could only announce the arrival of his dorky nephew Harold.
"Uncle Red! Uncle Red!" gasped Harold excitedly. Uninterested, the lodge leader continued to dig through boxes, intent upon finding the leftover Christmas tinsel. "Uncle Red, you'll never believe what happened!" Content that the little box of silver tinsel was nowhere to be found, he decided to take a break and humor his nephew. Turning to Harold, he was taken aback by what he saw standing there. Instead of his nephew usually dressed just like himself in plaid and mismatched suspenders, with slicked-back dark hair and thick glasses – there stood the boy in full drag. Ugly drag. A horrible frilly dress in an unflattering shade of peach, clown-like makeup and granny glasses, and topped with a bouncy blonde wig. The dress was covered in dirt, and little branches protruded from the curls. Recovering quickly – since this was Harold, after all – Red grinned.
"Aren't you a little old to be playing Goldilocks and the Three Bears there?" he laughed.
"Ha! Very funny!" shrieked Harold, tugging at the wig but to no avail. "A few of the guys up at the college told me they were going to a big party up in Port Asbestos, then asked if I wanted to go, but it was going to be a 'dressup-as-the-opposite-sex' party -"
"So which did you decide to go as?"
Harold glared, his shiny white overbite unchanged. "They helped me get ready then halfway there they threw my normal clothes out the window, then 5 minutes later they tossed me out too. I had to run all the way back here, through the wilderness, at night – I tried to find my clothes but couldn't and ya knowhat? Ya knowhat? Those jerks put glue in the wig!" he wailed, trying once again to remove the hairpiece. "I even got these stupid glasses in my prescription because I was so excited to be invited!" He paused sadly. "I should've been suspicious when I noticed none of them were dressed like girls too," he sighed. "Well, at least I got here before anyone saw me."
Red's mind wandered to Ranger Gord.
"Do we have any clothes up here at the Lodge that I could borrow? This dress is so itchy. And I'm going to need to do something about this wig."
Red pondered. "Well, there's a pile of Stinky Peterson's laundry out back that started to disintegrate before he could get it washed." Harold grimaced. "Then there's those 10XL Hawaiian shirts that Moose Thompson outgrew last summer. We all were gonna make sailboats outta 'em but I guess we could spare one."
"One of Moose's shirts is just going to look like a dress too," he groaned.
"Yeah, if you're going to dress like a woman you might as well have better taste than Moose Thompson," Red snickered. "Look, why don't you wait here and I'll give you a lift home as soon as I finish up my important lodge business that keeps getting interrupted."
"Its not that stupid wooden possum is it?"
Red shooed him away to the back room.