Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank (16 page)

Well, almost.

As much as I adore my normal-size cats, you’d think that I might also enjoy the company of a dog, right? The truth is, I don’t like ‘em. Never have; never will. When you tell someone that you don’t like dogs, they usually give you a look that falls somewhere in between pity and outright disgust.

They just don’t get why I wouldn’t want to be hanging around an animal that has been known to eat not only its own poo but the poo of others it finds in the yard.

This is not rocket science to me. It’s a simple household rule: If you’re a shit-eater, you’re not living with me.

Naturally, since I don’t like dogs, they sense this intuitively and totally respect my feelings. This respect is demonstrated by jumping on me, often knocking me to the ground, licking me, and doing unspeakable things while wrapped around my leg. The more I back away and mumble, “Nice doggie, now go play in the street,” the more they seem to love me.

The only dog we ever had when I was growing up was a mutt who lived with us just long enough to rip everything on the clothesline to shreds and eat my favorite Davy Jones
poster. I can still remember Davy’s cute brown eyes dangling in a soggy mess from the corner of the beast’s jaw.

The last time I saw Blackie (hey, nobody ever said we were particularly original dog owners), he was headed toward the woods behind our house wearing my training bra on his backside and chewing the remains of a mood ring.

That said, I accept that most dogs are plenty smart. I’ve always been impressed by how they can sniff drugs and even bombs using their keen sense of irony, I mean smell.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of freaked out about the newest revelation about dogs. There is indisputable scientific evidence that dogs can actually smell cancer on you. Now, I’m sure your first thought is the same as mine:
What a cool name for a rock band: Cancer-Smelling Dogs.

After that thought passed, I realized that, because I am a profound hypochondriac, now I have to fret every time I visit my friend down the street and her enormous rug of a retriever lunges for me. Does Colby do this because he loves me or because he’s trying to alert me to a life-threatening medical condition? Is he saying, as he slobbers onto my shirt and nuzzles my earlobes, “Timmy’s trapped in the well, oh, no, what I meant to say is that you really should have that pancreas checked out.” Well, is he?

Not long ago, I learned about a local service station that uses the services of an elderly hound to “sniff “ tires. He can pinpoint a leak before you even know it’s there. Amazing!

I hate to admit this, but it’s obvious: Dogs have it all over my beloved but totally useless housecats.

I could drive up to the house on four flat tires, with a ticking bomb and a kilo of cocaine in the trunk, tumors hanging off me as big as pie plates, and my selfish cats would just yawn, stretch, and go back to sleep.

In the case of a woman with skin cancer, the dog not only detected the problem but set about trying to remove it himself! That’s cool, although it’s going to be a billing nightmare for her HMO. I can picture the back-of-the-phone-book ads: The doctor is
in
and it’s Rin Tin Tin!

Suddenly, being a housewife is downright trendy. In two of this season’s biggest TV hits, housewives are either “desperate” or “swapped.” My, oh, my, what a refreshing change from the days when a housewife’s only virtue was that she might “have the magic of Clorox 2.”

Finally, housewives are hot—whether they’re living lives of loud desperation on Wisteria Lane as in ABC’s megahit
Desperate Housewives
or they’re raising fat, pampered brats over on
Wife Swap.

Long ignored by everyone except peanut butter manufacturers, housewives are finally getting some ink for being sexy, complicated creatures that are too often underestimated. In other words, we’re here, we leer, get used to it.

Having dinner with my stay-at-home mom friends the
other night, we had to wonder why we don’t look like the babes on
Desperate Housewives.
I feel a little like most of New York City’s female population must’ve felt while watching
Sex and the City
for the first time. Who were these gorgeous women wearing five-hundred-dollar Manolos and little else as they bedded most of Manhattan? Doesn’t anybody have to get up in the morning?

To be fair, there is one harried
Desperate
housewife who is raising the World’s Worst Little Boys. Even wearing jam, though, she’s still beautiful and loves to show off those chiseled work-out arms that I’ve grown to hate in other women. Whither the batwings that we get from having too little time to work out and too much time to finish little Sally’s
Shark Tale
Happy Meal?

I take
Desperate Housewives
for what it is: a fun, fluffy farce with a slight
Twin Peaks
edge to it. Still, I feel insecure when I compare my housewifely look to theirs. Around the house, I wear a Kathie Lee floral shift that has seen better days. It’s fabulously comfortable and ideal for vacuuming. But it’s nothing like the put-together look modeled by Marcia Cross of
DH
as she toothbrush-scrubs her toilet while wearing a scarf tied jauntily around her graceful neck.

On the surprisingly poignant reality show
Wife Swap,
we see women more like ourselves: a little chubby, a little loud, a lot loving.

The great thing about
Wife Swap
(settle down, right-wingers; there’s no hanky panky among spouses here) is
that there’s no hero or villain. Granola mom and SUV mom are right some of the time. And mercifully neither one believes that a bottle of bleach contains anything approaching magic.

But both shows do illustrate, in an over-the-top way, that American women are getting a little screwy when it comes to picking our mates. And increasingly, mind-bendingly desperate.

How else do you explain the hundreds of sacks of love letters that show up at Scott Peterson’s San Quentin cell every week?

Murder conviction? Oh, nobody’s perfect. To these women, Peterson is just as cute as a bug’s ear. They apparently assume that if you’re good-looking and famous, even if it’s for murdering your wife and kid, then you’d be a great catch.

But you never see men doing this, hons. You never hear about men writing Andrea Yates or Susan Smith in prison, do you?

That’s because men are statistically more likely to read about heinous family-killing crimes committed by a woman and say, “Damn, that bitch is crazy!”

A California criminal justice professor who was asked to explain the mail-to-murderers phenomenon said it usually happens when women don’t believe the accused is guilty and they want to come to the rescue of someone whom the whole world is against, someone who is “beleaguered.”

For my money, beleaguered beats dead any day.

Yep, Scott Peterson is a prize catch, all right. And now, he’s single!

O. J. Simpson, who has finally suspended his exhaustive personal crusade to find “the real killer” of his wife on finer public golf courses throughout the state of Florida, never has a problem finding willing and wonderfully attractive women to date.

What up?

Not only do we “desperate” women want to date murderers, but we also want to date gay men.

Why else would we invite
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s
Fab Five into our homes to “make over” our husbands? I know I’d like to.

Why can’t our straight-guy husbands understand that we’re sick of fighting about where to hang the velour rug depicting the poker-playing dogs? I want to drape it lovingly over the top of the garbage can on Monday morning just before the truck comes rumbling down the alley. He wants to hang it over the buffet like it’s some kind of rare tapestry from the Moron Dynasty.

While I don’t want to correspond with murderers just because they would never leave their undershorts on the floor, I also don’t want to be married to a gay man. I couldn’t take the fault-finding.

It would take a nanosecond for
Queer Eye’s
menswear counselor Carson to dis my husband’s “Got Duckheads?”
approach to fashion, but I wouldn’t have time to feel superior once Thorn, the decorator, spotted our ironing board as nightstand. Culinary expert Ted would sniff and make gagging noises over our grocery-store wine. And, sure, grooming guru Kyan would lecture my husband about proper shaving (“It’s not a race, bro!”), but we’d both suffer when culture expert Jai examined our pitiful collection of CDs. (“The Eagles?
The Eagles!
Get this couple some Beyonce,
stat!”)

Every woman I know is gaga about these five gay men who “makeover” the looks, and the lair, of a particularly needy straight guy. In the end, the gays got the girls. It’s high school all over again, but look who’s kicking butt! Sure, Bubba may have snickered at the sensitive young man who sewed sequins on his cousin’s wedding gown back in the day, but who’s laughing now? I can’t
hear
you!

The beauty of
Queer Eye
is its ability to reduce a huge, hulking straight construction worker into the kind of guy who waxes his back hair, quotes John Donne, and literally weeps with gratitude for a makeover, hugging his five new friends until they have to pull away.

When the Fab Five’s work is complete, straight guy usually turns, teary-eyed, to survey his redecorated crib, transformed from messy, dorm-room mishmash to a sleek yet warm tribute to the wonders wrought by Thorn let loose with the Bravo credit card in Pottery Barn, Urban Outfitters, and Pier 1.

Although ratings are huge among the straight set, some members of the gay community have protested the show’s “perpetuation of gay stereotypes.” As one gay activist told public radio recently, “Gay men can dress sloppy, waste a weekend watching sports on TV, and not know how to cook, too.”

Note to gay activist: These are not good things. Learn how to take a compliment, would you?

They say that the show’s flamboyant gay stars make it seem as though every gay man is a boa-wearing oversexed weirdo.

I don’t get that. With the exception of the always-randy Carson, whose wit is eat-your-young mean, the rest just seem like very smart, very kind guys who just want to help a unibrowed brother out.

In the words of Rodney King, can’t we all just go to the spa, slap on some eucalyptus exfoliating cream, and learn how to shave with something besides a Bic disposable? I thought so.

I received one of those Mr. Wonderful dolls as a gag gift for Valentine’s Day. If you haven’t seen one yet, allow me to explain. Mr. Wonderful is small enough to fit on a key chain and depicts a square-jawed neatly dressed man who, when pressed in the tummy, says some pretty hilarious things. Things like, “Let’s just cuddle” or “You’ve worked hard today—let me cook dinner tonight” or “Awwww, can’t your mother stay at least one more week?”

While I’m quite taken with Mr. Wonderful (who can resist a soothing male voice saying, “Here, you take the remote. As long as I’m with you, I don’t care what we watch”?), it occurred to me that men have every right to expect a Mrs. Wonderful to be in production, too.

I mean it’s not as if we women are perfect. Well, at least
most of y’all aren’t. So I’ve come up with my own list of Mrs. Wonderful’s possible utterances. Feel free to think up some of your own.

Things a “Mrs. Wonderful” Might Say

“What? There’s a new episode of
Grey’s Anatomy
on tonight? Oh, let’s watch that some other time. I’d much rather make love.”

“You know, I really like the speed limit you have chosen and I wouldn’t dream of telling you the best way to get to Chip and Susie’s house. I’ll just sit here and be a thoughtful, considerate passenger.”

“Oh, honey, do you really think your mom would give me some pointers in the kitchen? I would love to be able to cook for you and serve you just the way she did! Oh, and shouldn’t we be making love right about now, mister?”

“SportsCenter
is on again? Why it seems as if it comes on every hour on the hour. Aren’t we lucky to live in a country like this? ESPN truly separates us from the savages!”

“Sweetheart, do you think you could wear that old Carolina sweatshirt with the tung oil stains and the holes in it to have dinner with my family just one more time? We all just
love
you in it!”

“Now, honey pie, you don’t need to know where the car keys or the milk and bread are. That’s what you have me for!”

“Oh, fudge! You forgot our anniversary again? Well,
heh-heh, I know something we could do to celebrate that wouldn’t cost a thing!”

Marriage would be easy if we all acted more like our key chains, wouldn’t it?

With the U.S. divorce rate at 57 percent, you have to wonder why President George Bush has decided to spend $1.5 billion of your tax dollars to develop programs that will encourage people to get married instead of just live together.

Bush’s “healthy marriage initiative” calls for gobs of federally funded counseling on the benefits of marriage through mentoring and instruction in how to make a marriage work. (Short version: “Jus let her win.”)

The notion of the government getting into the business of matchmaking is a hoot. What next? TV spots with Dick Cheney as a caftan-wearing marriage voodoo priestess? Condoleeeeeza offering tips for the lovelorn via those eight-bucks-a-minute “love hotlines”?

Making healthy marriages is a laudable goal, but it’s a notion that needs a high-profile test case like, say, Britney Spears and Jason Allen Alexander, a prime example of a couple who never gave their marriage a fair chance. Under the Bush plan, there would never have been any time for Kevin Federline.

Under the Bush plan, Britney and Jason would have been given orders to work on their fifty-five-hour marriage and
iron out their differences. (He thought “gravy train with old high school buddy”; she thought “Face it, after five sour appletinis I’d pretty much marry Christina Aguilera, who is hairier, by the way.”)