Monkey Shines

On her album, “Live At Last”, Bette Midler told the story of her encounter with a woman walking down 42nd street.

The lady was humongous and wore a big, blue house dress peppered all over with little white daisies. She was almost bald but sitting on her forehead was a fried egg.  Bette went on to say that she thought of that lady every day.

“Oh God,” she’d say to herself, “Oh God, don’t let me wake up tomorrow and want to put a fried egg on my head. Oh God.”    Then she’d say real fast, “Oh God, if by chance I should wind up with a fried egg on my head (cause sometimes you can’t help those things you know, you can’t), don’t let anybody notice.”   And then she’d say real fast after that, “If they do notice that I’m carrying something that’s not quite right and they want to talk about it, let ‘em talk about it but don’t let ‘em talk so I can hear, I don’t want to hear it, because the truth about fried eggs, you can call it a fried egg, you can call it anything you like, but everybody gets one, some people wear ‘em on the outside, some people they wear ‘em on the inside.” Read more…

I have this vision. I am dressed like a ninja, gripping my trusty Florian Ratchet-Cut gardening pruners. I sneak from desk to desk and…snick…snick…snick….cut the heads off of every rose in all the bouquets delivered to the office for Valentine’s Day.

There is nothing like Valentine’s Day to make single women feel like Janice Ian at seventeen.
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Houston has two seasons. Winter, which starts around mid-December, is when the entire city bundles up in coats and gloves and scarves and complains that the 40 degree temperature is bone-numbing. Summer, which starts about Valentine’s Day, is when we rev up the AC and life is back to normal. Some days, the humidity is so bad that it’s like breathing through a wet dog, but those of us who are over thirty appreciate that it keeps us from getting all wrinkly.
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