You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (13 page)

It would be easier if they named jeans for celebrities so you’d know exactly what you were getting without even having to try them on. “Mary-Kate” for itty-bitty jeans that come with a cartoonishly oversized caramel latte cup; “Angelina Jolie” for jeans that are sold with two tiny Cambodian orphans stitched right into the back pockets; “Katie Holmes,” jeans which spell out “help me!” in the fabric if you look very closely; and “Dina Lohan,” self-promoting stage mom of Lindsay, for jeans that look OK from a distance but, when you get closer, are actually completely transparent.

For men, there could be “David Hasselhoff” jeans, made entirely of cheese, and “John Mayer” jeans which, when removed, become instantly bored and walk themselves over to the house of the next “it” girl in Hollywood.

Victoria’s Secret, once famous for its sweet-sounding “Emma” line, seems to be going in a different direction with its new ipex wireless bra, which doesn’t scream sexy romance so much as it makes you remember it’s time to pay your cell phone bill.

Something tells me Audrey would approve of this bra.

And speaking of buying a bra, why does this have to be such an ordeal?

People are constantly telling us that 80 percent of American women are wearing the wrong bra size. What? Do we just pick up somebody else’s left behind in the dressing room? How can this be?

To answer the wretched revelation that many of us are walking around with droopy straps and back-fat spillage,
most department stores are now employing “certified bra counselors” who have gone to actual classes for this.

The cool part is that they don’t charge for this service. My friend Amy, who is always looking for a bargain, went for a fitting at one of the big department stores in the mall recently and reported that “the entire experience was perfect.”

The certified bra fitter measured her up, down, and all around, taking about thirty minutes to pronounce the perfect size.

“I felt like we really bonded,” said Amy. “I felt like I should’ve smoked a cigarette or had a glass of wine after it was over.”

One of the reasons that the right bra size is so important is that researchers (boy ones, I’m guessing) have discovered that the wrong bra size can make women short-tempered.

This comes under the time-honored “no shit, Sherlock” school of statistical analysis.

Men are always trying to find out why a woman might be in a bad mood. Turns out, it’s not because hubby hasn’t helped out around the house since the Reagan administration. It’s because our bras don’t fit properly. Our collective bad.

Discover
magazine, no less, reported that the right bra size is crucial to staying in a good mood because, if you wear a D cup in which both breasts have a combined weight of fifteen to twenty-three pounds, it could be “the equivalent of walking around all day carrying two small turkeys.”

It’s a powerful image, to be sure, but why stop there?
Why not four roasting hens, eight pork tenderloins, or sixteen bags of frozen chicken nuggets?

Still, it was hard to argue with Amy’s delight at her bra-fitting experience. Appearance is very important to Amy, a definite “Lindsay” who keeps herself in tip-top shape through a regimen of vitamins, yoga, and other things that make me sleepy to think about.

Joining her one day at her country-club pool, she motioned to me to scoot toward her a bit on my chaise lounge.

“Honey,” she said, reaching out to pat my hand, “you gotta work on your a-ree.”

“My what?”

“Your a-ree, hon,” she said, now whispering this weird word I’d never heard of.

Amy is the only person on God’s green earth who can make me feel like I’m from Staten Island. She is purely, deeply Southern and, on top of that, she’s
mountain
Southern, which has its own lexicon.

Apparently my “a-ree” was in the general vicinity of my naughties.

“Ohhhhh,” I said, as Amy delicately removed her designer sunglasses and jutted her head forward like a chicken toward my fun box.

“This is my a-ree?” I asked, innocently.

“Sugar, of course. And you have to tend it better than, well,
that.
”

She waved her hand in a dismissive circle and I realized that this was exactly the same scene played out in the
Sex and
the City
movie between a perfectly groomed Samantha and the too-busy-to-care Miranda.

Amy continued, “You need special a-ree scissors that you only use for trimming and you need a clamshell mir-rie that fits in your palm just so and you need a special comb to collect all the, uh, trimmage.”

Trimmage?
Is that even a real word?

“Darlin,’ I know that you’ve been busy what with your book tours and your fancy life but you simply can’t ignore you’re a-ree like that.”

“Are you saying ‘area’?”

“That’s what I said—a-ree.”

“You mean my, er,
bush?
”

At this word, Amy looked deeply insulted, although it was hard for me to see how “a-ree” was much better.

“Well now,” she drawled in her aristocratic way, “That’s just
common.
”

In the South, there is nothing worse than being “common.” It’s far worse than being “tacky,” which is used by everyone. To be “common” is to have committed the vilest of lowlife offenses.

It is akin to another ultimate aristocratic Southern put-down used when confronted with the misbehavior of someone, be it the server at the club who has skimped on the amount of gin in the glass or the revelation that a beloved business partner has fled the country after embezzling from the company: “He (or she) just makes me taaaaarrrrdd.” As in tired.

This whole discussion was making me taaarrrrdd, as Amy proceeded to tell me about the heirloom clamshell “mir-rie” her sainted grandmother had bequeathed her in her will for just such “a-ree maintenance.”

I would’ve hoped more for the sterling silver iced-tea spoons myself, but sure, I guess the “trimmage” scissors and heirloom mirror are almost as good.

I placed the large towel that a nice young man handed me when I signed in (ohmigod, did the cabana boy notice my lack of a-ree upkeep?!) over my bottom half and told Amy about a wonderful new product I’d just heard about called Subtle Butt.

They’re disposable gas neutralizing pads that you place inside your underwear so you can toot away and no one ever smells it. Not even he who dealt it.

“Heavenly Lord!” Amy said. “Who would use such a thing?”

“Well,” I said, suddenly ashamed I’d even brought up Subtle Butt pads, “like if you’re in a meeting and you really need to—”

“No!”

I looked around and realized that this was probably the very first time at this particular Southern country club that anyone had discussed activated carbon pads that let you poot in your underpants. Amy looked as if she was ready for me to go.

“But I haven’t even gone in the pool yet!”

She lowered her sunglasses once again and looked in the direction of my neglected pum-pum.

“What? It’s not like I’m gonna clog the pool drain.”

“Of course not, darlin’. That would be . . .
common.
”

I’d heard enough and decided to go. Frankly, it’s hard to be at the pool with a hair-free “Lindsay” when you’re rockin’ the one-piece “Mamie” with the built-in “Slimsational” panel.

Hons, it’s a sad day when a woman can’t cuss out her own toilet when it overflows.

“I was in my own house,” said Dawn Herb of Scranton, Pennsylvania, after being charged with disorderly conduct for cussing. “It wasn’t like I was outside or drunk.”

Which, in the South, can often be redundant, depending on the neighborhood.

Chalk it up to one more difference between North and South that poor Dawn Herb was threatened with thirty days in jail (where the toilets don’t even have lids!) just for screaming at her daughter to bring the @#$%^-ing mop.

I used those little symbols because the family newspaper couldn’t use the exact word, but I’m pretty sure it’s a good guess.

Ms. Herb explained to the police that the toilet had overflowed and was leaking into the kitchen when she loudly called for a mop. A @#$%^-ing mop, to be exact.

Her next-door neighbor, hearing this agonized plea for help, didn’t get off his @#$%^-ing ass to help her, say, with a plunger in his hand, but rather reported the cursing to the police who showed up to give her a citation.

Along with possible jail time, she was told that she could be ordered to pay a fine of $300, which could be better used to pay for roughly three minutes of a plumber’s time, if you ask me.

So, why does this sad tale from many states away give me the shivers?

Simple. I live in a ninety-year-old house and I know what it’s like to stand in highly questionable water every now and then. And by highly questionable, I mean shitalicious.

The last time this happened, I seem to recall saying something on the order of “Oopsie daisy! This silly goose of a toilet is overflowing all over the floor. Let me just shut the water off and grab a few towels! It’s no big deal!”

No, wait! That’s not what I said at all. It was more of a “Oopsie @#$%^-ing daisy! This @#$%^-ing toilet is overflowing all over the @#$%^-ing place. Let me just shut the mother@#$%^-ing water off and grab a few @#$%^-ing towels. This is a big @#$%^-ing deal.”

Fortunately, my neighbors didn’t report this outburst for a couple of reasons: They have ninety-year-old plumbing themselves and were probably busy cussing out their own
toilets and, let’s see, what else? Oh, yes! They are not complete morons.

I dunno about y’all, but I’ve cussed out every appliance in my house at one time or the other. The time-honored tradition of cussing out appliances is as American as magnetic car ribbons.

The @#$%^-ing food processor usually gets the worst of it, followed closely by the @#$%^-ing vacuum cleaner. They’re a couple of @#$%^-ing assholes, those two.

I also feel sorry for Ms. Herb because she said the cursing began while trying to get her daughter to hear her cries for a mop.

Having both a toilet and a daughter of my own, I can say with absolute certainty that the daughter was probably listening to her @#$%^-ing iPod and wouldn’t have noticed unless the toilet had physically propelled itself off its wax seal and lurched into her bedroom right by itself to demand a little help.

At which point, the daughter would just close her eyes tight and scream: “Mooooooommmmm! The @#$%^-ing toilet is in my room again.”

Now who’s screaming for help?

People are just too @#$%^-ing sensitive these days, if you ask me. Consider the case, also from up north, New Hampshire to be precise, where four town hall employees were fired for gossiping.

One fired employee was probably puzzled about being fired for gossiping about the boss’s cozy relationship with
another employee. After all, she admitted to casually calling him “the führer” to his face without any ill effects.

This means that he would apparently rather be compared to Hitler, the greatest mass murderer in history, than to be accused of spending too long talking about last night’s episode of
Two and a Half Men
with the cute chick in accounting.

Go @#$%^-ing figure!

Digging deeper, I learned that this Podunk town in New Hampshire wasn’t the only place where you could be fired for gossiping.

Turns out, just an hour or so from my North Carolina home, liquor store employees in a neighboring county can be fired for gossiping, thanks to a new rule enacted by the county commissioners.

They’re all wife swappers, by the way. What? What’d I say? Everybody knows that.

I’m just guessing, but this probably stems from some busybody blabbing about the holiness preacher buying bourbon one day and him not even seeming to have any semblance of a stubborn cough.

Growing up in a very small North Carolina town, I was always amused at the fortresslike protective wall around the front and sides of the local liquor store. Once parked in the back, you could scurry inside in utter shame and, a few minutes later, scurry back out, brown paper bags in hand, without the threat of gossipy biddies seeing your every move and reporting it back to the loaves-and-fishes committee.

Perhaps similar walls could be erected between offices with employees forced to navigate
Survivor
-style mazes to get to another’s cubicle for a little harmless flirtation to break up the day.

Having worked in a cubicle environment for more than two decades, I can promise you that gossip is absolutely essential to the mental health of an employee. Without it, well, you’d just work all day and that’s too @#$%^-ing horrible to contemplate.

Gossip doesn’t have to ruin lives to be fun, although that is an added bonus if it’s about somebody you really can’t stand.

This is America, after all, and we have the right to free speech. And if that speech happens to be about the boss’s porn addiction, so what?

I was telling someone about my outrage at people being fined for cussing and fired for gossiping, and you know what she said? “It is what it is.”

Well, yes, what else would it be? This has got to be the most overused, idiotic expression since “It’s all good.”

Even my plumber used it recently, now that I think about it. I shoulda given him a piece of my @#$%^-ing mind.

Listen in, with my permission, of course. . . .

Me: “I think the flapper’s busted; what do you think?”

Plumber: “It is what it is.”

Me: “What the hell does that mean?”

An hour later, the toilet is repaired and the bill is presented. I give the plumber a check that isn’t signed.

Plumber: “You forgot to sign the check, ma’am.”

Me: “Oh, did I? Well, it is what it is.”

Plumber: “Well what it
is
is an unsigned check.”

Me: “It’s all good.”

Plumber: “Not without your signature it’s not.”

Ha! I got him! It’s my birthday! It’s my birthday! (OK, also overused. I envision spending my golden years at the Old Clichés Home where I can sit with my friends on the front porch and cheerfully say things like “Word” and “Not!” and “My bad” without shame.)