Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (12 page)

Marlena’s especially good at killing the goodhearted, dull ones like Caroline Brady and Doug Williams.

Doug was one-half of the famous Dougandjulie, long-time annoying
Days
soul mates. I think they signed their checks just like that: Dougandjulie. (True story: Back in the ‘80s, I entered a contest to win breakfast with the actors who play Dougandjulie and won! They were lovely and boring just like on the show. I think I asked Doug if I could have the rest of his hash browns, and he said, “I guess.”)

I know Doc’s going to get caught, but it won’t be anytime soon. The only one who’s figured out it’s Marlena is nineteen-year-old Sean, who’s dating Doc’s daughter, Belle, Salem’s only virgin.

“Let the police handle this, son,” said Sean’s idiot cop father. But his cell phone crackles alive: “Oh, no! Another body!”

And time for another doughnut.

Sadly, I was forced to go cold turkey for two weeks without seeing
Days
when it was preempted by the Olympics.

Sure, you think that’s pathetic, but that’s just because you don’t watch it. Otherwise you’d know that you can’t expect people to just go on with their lives like normal when the last episode was a cliffhanger with Jennifer out there having a baby in the wilderness, Sean busting out of the house where he’s been held prisoner by a psychotic wannabe girlfriend, and don’t even get me started about Marlena and Roman (miraculously alive again!) making out in the jungle while his foot gets more gangrenous by the second. On top of that, Mimi thinks she’s got cancer, Uncle
Mickey, 106, is gettin’ some from a barmaid, and Sami just found out that her mama clawed her way out of her coffin. (You gotta love a show where the character says with a note of superiority and utter calmness, “See? I told you that Mom was buried alive, and you didn’t even believe me. )

I get that it’s unspeakably shallow to miss
Days
to the point of tears when the real heroes were over there in Greece, sprinting and wrestling and fencing and underwater-checkers playing and whatnot.

So I tried to really get into the Olympics and after I finally, sort of, succeeded, they ended. My life could resume, and I need never hear the painfully earnest preachings of the Rev. Bob Costas or see serious journalist Katie Couric giddily pretend to master the balance beam.

Low moment of viewing? When I simply didn’t get the pole vault miscue and saw the woman sprint under the pole and told my husband, “Heck, I could do
that?

Because I’m not a guy, I won’t miss the barely there bikinis worn by the Olympic volleyball chicks. My husband says it has to do with wind resistance and improving their aerodynamic jumping abilities. He is so full of sand.

I think it has to do with them being hoochie mamas. Talented, sickeningly fit hoochie mamas, but hoochies nonetheless.

I came to the Olympics embarrassingly late and so missed the big ruckus caused by the American who won the gold,
although it was later discovered, after the judges sobered up, that the guy from Taiwan was the rightful winner. There’s a fascinating debate about this, but it’s not nearly so fascinating as watching Bo Brady of
Days
try to decipher signals his kidnapped family is trying to transmit from a mysterious island.

Now
that’s
gold-medal TV.

Vanity Flares

Probably the last people who are unapologetically joked about and ridiculed in public are blondes. People think we be stupid just because our hair is yeller, and they’re not too shy to say so. Most folks think the average blonde doesn’t know the difference between come ‘ere and sic ‘urn.

If you don’t believe it, consider that there are entire Web sites devoted to collecting and distributing dumb blonde jokes. Which reminds me, how many blondes does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the Diet Coke and the other to call “Daaady!” I love that one.

Or this one: What do you call it when a blonde dyes her hair brunette? Artificial intelligence.

Har-dee-har-har.

The stereotype of the dumb blonde is as old as that, uh, really dark stuff that grass and trees and stuff grow in.

I started out blond. Then something strange happened in my thirties, and my hair started getting darker and darker. Call it hormones, call it genetics, call it really bad luck, but I knew immediately that I couldn’t accept not being blond.

A trip to my beloved hairdresser, Brenda (pronounced “Branda” in the South), remedied the problem. It wasn’t painless, my hons. No, far from it. Brenda tied a plastic rain bonnet tight on my head, then used what looked like a crochet hook to pull wisps of formerly blond hair through holes in the cap. I cried and flapped my hands and endured the pain, all in the name of being blond again. Finally, she zapped the wisps with purple goo, and two hours later, I was blonder than ever.

Naturally, I was ecstatic, but as y’all know, a few weeks later, I was
Roots: The Next Generation.
It was horrible realizing that this would have to be an ongoing process. So, for the past fifteen years, I’ve faithfully trotted to Brenda, who now, mercifully, uses little foil strips.

All that said, imagine my shock when Britney Spears, our national spokesmodel for all things blond, decided to go brunette, literally and figuratively returning to her roots. One week, she’s blond as God and Preference by L’Oreal intended and doing things like marrying and divorcing in a day, and the next, she dyes her hair, becomes a brunette, and starts studying Jewish mysticism.

On behalf of blondes everywhere, what up?

Oh, Britney, must we turn to Christina Applegate or—horrors!—Courtney Love as our leader now?

As a blonde in mind, spirit, and bottle, I’m not worried. The ability to do math and chew gum at the same time is highly overrated. Britney’ll be back.

As if losing my blondeness isn’t bad enough, lately something strange has been happening with my eyeballs.

For a year or so now, I’ve gotten lots of snickers from friends who think it’s odd that I read my menu at arm’s length.

“Arms too short?” Heh, heh, heh.

“Isn’t it time you got some reading glasses?”

“The same thing happened to my eyes when I turned fifty.”

Fifty?!

I’m not fifty, although I can sort of make it out as a blurry image in the not-so-distant future. Yes, yes, I realize that “getting older beats the alternative,” but I am a vain creature.

When I recently asked the waiter at a fancy restaurant for a pair of “house reading glasses,” he looked at me with the same disdain as if I had asked for a foam doughnut to sit on.

My friend who is a little younger than me recently had a miniature nervous breakdown after a department store clerk cheerily deducted an extra 15 percent “because today is Senior Day!”

“What does that have to do with me?” my friend asked innocently, still not understanding the full horror of what had been bestowed on her forty-two-year-old self.

“Well,” continued the smiling and clueless clerk, “see, on Tuesday, everybody fifty-five or older gets an additional discount!”

“You think I’m fifty-five?” she asked, an edge of hysteria creeping into her voice.

“Well, uh, uh, well.”

Although I haven’t been offered the Senior Day discount, I have experienced a sad, nostalgic tug as the grocery store clerk doesn’t even bother to look up to okay my wine purchase.

Oh, of course, I don’t look twenty-one, or even double that, but it would just be so much fun if she would falter, just for a nanosecond, before punching the override key.

When it’s time to write the check and I fumble for the reading glasses that now live in the bottom of my purse in complete denial, I could swear she sighs and rolls her eyes.

Not long ago, as I stood in the grocery line, a nice man in his seventies, I’d guess, noticed my giggling six-year-old as she completed the joyous task of choosing between Gummi Savers and Nerds.

“Lord-a-mercy, don’t we love our grands!” he said with a kindly chuckle.

I thought he meant the biscuits, so I nodded enthusiastically. I was halfway to my car with the bag boy (“Ma’am, do
you need help with that? I mean what
is
your bone density these days?”) before the full impact hit. Grands?
Grands?
Bring on the Botox, hons. I’m not going down without a fight.

The awful truth is that, if I have to choose between being a dumb cute blonde or a smart mousy brown, I’m going with cute every time. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose. Although I’ve always thought that smarts-wise, I’m somewhere between the two Simpsons—Jessica and Marge—it turns out I’m a genius.

At least that’s what the on-line IQ test I took said.

It turns out that there are like a million of these on-line IQ tests out there in cyberspace. (That’s ten hundred thousand to the rest of you.) Some are sponsored by Mensa, the worldwide organization of smart people. In my experience, Mensans tend to be a bit belligerent about how smart they are. (I say belligerent, but I could also have said haughty, pugnacious, or quarrelsome. See how smart I is?) They’re also disproportionately fond of medieval fairs and
Star Trek
conventions and living in their mamas’ basements.

So, anywho, I took the IQ test, and guess what? I’m, like, a
genius!
Right. I already told you that. Okay, technically, they didn’t use the G-word once my score was computed, but they did say that I fit the profile of a “visionary philosopher.” Well, roll me up and call me curly! Who knew?

I was so excited with my score (it’s tacky to brag, but let’s just say it was in the, ahem, 140s) that I shoved the
printout under hubby’s nose at breakfast the next morning.

“Read it and sleep,” I said triumphantly.

“You mean weep?” he asked.

“Whatever.”

So he read the analysis and damned near choked on his Cheerios when he read the part about me having “a powerful mix of skills and insight, like Plato.”

“You sure they don’t mean Pluto?” he joked.

Now wasn’t that an odious, repugnant thing to say?

I suppose the reason he questioned my test results was a single sentence that referred to my “exceptional math and verbal skills.”

This phrase did not have the ring of verisimilitude because I am famously bad at math. If I’m in charge of tipping at a restaurant, the waiter will either fall to his knees in gratitude or slash my tires. There ain’t no Mr. In Between.

The results of my IQ test said that as a visionary philosopher, I can “anticipate and predict patterns.” It’s so true. Don’t I know, instinctively, every time the clearance at Stein Mart is going to jump from 50 to 75 percent? It’s God-given; you can’t learn it.

You’re probably worried that, from now on, I’m going to write about just boring visionary stuff, but I’m not. One must bloom where one is planted. I think Pluto said that.

It’s official. Every human being I know is now on the Atkins Diet. Sure, they look kind of silly, sitting there eating puddles of spaghetti sauce without the noodles underneath like God and Emeril intended, but they’re
serious.
No side of garlic bread for them. But, yes, please, another eight-pound meatball!

Like most women my age who eat a lot of fudge and don’t exercise, I’ve gained a bit of weight recently, and so I decided that the Atkins Diet was worth a try. Any diet that encourages mass consumption of T-bones and kielbasa sausages can’t be all bad, right?

Wrong. I lasted exactly thirty-two hours on the Atkins Diet and have no intentions of ever trying it again. Without
carbohydrates—and lots of them—I discovered that I really did have the capacity to take another’s life. And
enjoy
it.

Particularly if the “other” was eating a big, fat yeast roll in front of me. In which case we would, once again, trot out the “but, Yer Honor, he needed killin’ “ defense so popular in our South.

Carbohydrates, from the Latin,
carbo
which means “yummy” and
hydrates
which means “cinnamon bun,” are not something I can eliminate or even drastically cut back on.

There is no joy in a steak without a baked potato, a hot dog without a bun, a casserole without noodles, a movie starring Jimmy Fallon.

The late Dr. Atkins believed that restricting carbs would cause the body to burn up its stored fat faster. Ha! That might work for most people, but I can assure you that my body, in thirty-two hours, was already plotting new and more embarrassing places to store fat.

I don’t dispute that the Atkins Diet works for most people. I’ve seen women shed fifty pounds in a matter of weeks using this diet. The only bad part is that if you slip up and eat, say, a single French fry or a saltine, you will wake up twenty pounds heavier. It’s cruel that way.

Weight Watchers makes more sense to me, and that would be my first choice of diets except they assign “points” to food, and this involves a lot of math, calculating the dietary fat grams divided by the calories and then converting it all into these “points.”