You’ve already met Mr. Shopkeeper, Master Shopcat, and Junior. Now it is Mrs. Shopkeeper’s turn…
Defining physical characteristics: Hm. Well, the hair. It’s all about the hair really. Mr. S. is secretly grateful that he can always find his wife in a crowd, although he compares approaching her for a kiss to Livingstone’s assault on the Zambian jungle. Mrs. S.’ other notable thing is that she always sports glasses on a cord around her neck (which she therefore spends around half the day cleaning as they act as a perfect trap for everything from houmous to paklava).
Often to be found: Tied to the till on a piece of elastic. Cleaning aforementioned glasses. Skulking in the back room ironing, watching trash TV, ‘blogging’ and tweeting. Hiding from electricity salesmen. Chopping stuff. Hiding from telecoms salesmen. Mixing stuff. Hiding from Yogi fortune tellers. Cooking stuff. Making cups of tea for Mr. Shopkeeper. Giving directions to lost tourists. Writing idiotic annotations on bits of yellow paper.
What to say to her: “You make us laugh.”
“Have you got a recipe for….?”
Best not say: “Interesting hair…”
“All right, doll?”
“Is the boss here?”
“Can you show us the way to Big Ben?”
Potted CV: Although Mrs. Shopkeeper is an Essex girl in origin (and is still occasionally to be found wearing white stilettos and dancing round her handbag at the disco), she is passionate about her new country of residence, Peckham. A university dropout, she spent a number of years pretending she could cook for a living. Now she pretends that she know how to run a business instead, which is quite funny as it is patently obvious that she’s clueless. She eats unfeasible quantities of honey, listens to really unsuitable 90s trance music and dreams one day of living in Center Parcs ‘to concentrate on her writing’. Although she rarely roars, in all other respects she is an infuriatingly typical Leo.
Persepolis Staff Profiles #4: Mrs. Shopkeeper
