Gandhi was not Bald: Poofy Coifs
When you sweat you feel virtuous; it’s how you know you’re a good person and I’ve been doing some serious sweating this afternoon, or anyway my right armpit has been. Which must mean either that I’m only half the saint I like to think I am or that my mind wandered and I only rolled the Arrid Extra Dry onto the skin of my left armpit which happens all the time, of course it does think about it you’re using your right hand and it’s a nice easy reach across the body to get to the left armpit but a much more constricted curl to get to the right one. Kind of like when you sing the I’m a Little Teapot song and act it out at the same time which David does for us all sometimes and is frankly why I married him in the first place.
Well now here we are on the weekend which means it’s time for me to put up the new column which happens to just BE about what happens when you get to thinkin’ you’re deserving of canonization like a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa . All kinds of papers used it this week so as well as sticking it up at the top here under This Week’s Column why don’t I touch the magic wand to the words Citizen.com and let you click through and see how it looked in in New Hampshire.
Pride really does go before a fall, just as the story says. I thought I was so great one time, because Smith College where I went to school invited me to give as talk at the big reunion, calling me the Distinguished Alumna Speaker. I bought a silk dress just the bright–blue color of a peacock’s wing as well as a small scarf of that same hue with swirls of burnt orange and coral thrown in. I looked like the kind of lurid cocktail an 18-year old girl with a fake ID would order her first night at the Tikki Bar.
So there I was in the big the lecture hall where I once sweated earnestly over midterms and finals. Now I was up on the stage! With a microphone and a screen behind me! And everyone had to listen to ME, with my carousel full of funny and poignant slides that I just knew would make those 400 women laugh til their bras popped open, then cry a little, then near the end finish up with a last gentle chuckle and off to the class cocktail parties. I looked out at that sea of faces, went to take a tiny sip of water before I began.... and poured the thing right down my front and ended up giving the whole talk with a dark stain resembling the map of Argentina reaching from just under my chin clear down to my bellybutton.
It happens anytime you compare yourself to the great. In fact here’s a photo from the summer of '93 when I actually 'met' Gandhi at Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum in London and Zounds! By gosh if I’m not wearing the same ugly dress I refer to in this week's column! I see that I’m also trying to look like he and I are twins both inside AND out but anyone can see: his hair looks WAY better than mine
(But Yay for the 80s and early 90s huh? Look at me and my sister Nan up top here! We sure did have the poofy coifs!)
