There will never be another one like her - The Chaff with Scott Stephenson
Xtra! Xtra! This just in! We here at The Chaff have received some breaking news about an earth-shattering Chaff staff shake-up that’s sent the entire team here at Chaff World Headquarters (CWH) twirling into a tizzy and reeling into their feelings - The Chaff’s very own founder, Lee Rug ‘Buggley’ Boudreau, has announced that she is finally ready to finally retire, after 50 fruitful years of publishing Huron County’s most revered source of unhinged rantings and ravings. So we’re going to take our regularly scheduled Chaff, which is an absolute crackerjack exposé on hot dog water, and set it on the back burner for another seven days of simmering, because right now, it feels impossible to put out a high-quality column like The Chaff without our fearless leader - Boudreau is The Chaff, and The Chaff is Boudreau. Before her, everybody was going along, being reasonable, all the time. None of us would be here without Boudreau - she either hired or kidnapped every single member of the Chaff staff. The office just won’t be the same without her.
Boudreau has always been, by far, the best, brightest, buggliest, and Chaffliest Chaffler that has ever stalked the halls of our grand and venerable publication. We did the math once, and, as it turns out, it would take 52 Dervid Hamsons to equal just one Lee Rug Boudreau. That’s how great she is.
In light of this earth-shattering news, we’re going to let Chaff readers peek behind the dirty curtain of journalism to take a little time to tell the whole damn world about the good, great and grand lady of letters who is Lee Rug Boudreau. So let’s carve a few slices off the truth turkey, and dip them into the sweet, sweet gravy of history. (Sidenote - get it together, Dervid.)
As the legend goes, in the days of her wild youth, Boudreau discovered the ancient powers of the written word when she woke up in a mysterious cave after a wet and wild Mardi Gras party, with no recollection of how she got there. Scrawled on the wall in iridescent elf-blood was a single word - ‘Chaff’. Now, Boudreau is no stranger to elf-blood graffiti, but she could tell that this time was different. This word had been written there since time immemorial - it seethed with an eldritch and unmistakable power. She reached out, touched that ancient mark, and The Chaff was born. In that moment, Boudreau could see it all - the entirety of the cosmic truth. She realized that writing doesn’t need to have a point, or go anywhere - sometimes, you can just string together whatever the heck words you want until you either get bored or run out of space.
Armed with the wild danger of this epiphany that had transformed her very soul, Boudreau traveled to her ancestral home of Chicago to spread the word and expose the heathens of the Illinois literary scene to the new world order. She was flat broke when she arrived in the city, but shortly thereafter, her brother passed away and left her his restaurant in her will. The restaurant wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but they had a great reputation for serving one of the best Italian beef sandwiches in all of Chicago. Boudreau brought in a few passionate and talented chefs to help her elevate the menu, but she still kept the loyal staff that had worked for her brother - it was a complicated dynamic that led to all kinds of wacky situations and scenarios that they had to get through as a team. Each week, her Chicago crew grew closer and closer, until they eventually felt like a real family.
One morning, Boudreau was prepping in the kitchen before the rest of her staff came in for the day. She opened a can of tomato paste to make a nice sauce, and she discovered that there was money hidden inside. She opened another can, and it also had money in it. So did the next one. She realized that her brother had been stashing his ill-gotten gains all over the restaurant. It’s unknown how much money she found in total, but what we do know is that she took that cash and brought it to Canada, and started up the little pile of loose letters that eventually evolved into The Chaff. And the rest is history. She also burned down her brother’s restaurant for the insurance money.
Boudreau’s retirement is going to be hard on all of us - she’s always been the absolute essence of who we are here at CWH. But nobody deserves a break more than her. Those of us left at The Chaff will just have to muddle our way through without her staggering genius and cataclysmic beauty. Goodbye, Buggley. Keep on dancing, wherever you are.