You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning (20 page)

Thankfully, the experts say that due to the cyclical nature of the stock market, we should expect to return to a prosperous “bull” market in, say, anywhere from eighteen months to twenty-four years. The world’s greatest economists have
boldly predicted that, basically, this whole recession/depression thing is “gonna hang around like a fart in a hot shower.” Or words to that effect.

Discussing all this with duh-hubby, we’ve decided that, as our piddlin’ investments disappear faster than a bag of weed at a Cypress Hill concert, we should consider augmenting our income in creative ways. Frankly, I’d like to be the new new host of
The Price Is Right
, for instance. The whole Drew Carey thing isn’t working out; he looks antsy. Could they have found anyone less well-suited for that gig? Oh, right. Out-of-work former veep Dick (“Dick”) Cheney. I could see him trying to pop a cap into an overly excited mom from Peoria who correctly guessed the price of Turtle Wax (“Shut up, you squealing cow!”).

Duh and I are inspired by the creative way the rich get richer. Did you know, for instance, that Jennifer Lopez got paid $1.2 million to sing “Happy Birthday” at some old billionaire’s party? Or that Justin Timberlake will drop by your party for $200,000 and, if you pay $700,000 more, he’ll sing to you?

So what? So this. We live in a world where it’s conceivable that even Z-listers like Gary Coleman could make a grand for simply showing up at a party, rolling his eyes and saying, “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

I don’t blame ’em. I say get it while you can, because fame is fickle. Pete Rose can’t even get twenty bucks for an autograph these days. And remember Anna Nicole Smith’s whatever-he-was, Howard K. Stern? His celebrity status rivals
that of the guy who used to play the blind girl’s husband on
Little House on the Prairie.

You can probably see where I’m headed with this. As a card-carrying Z-lister my own self, I’ll show up at your birthday party, hog killin’, bris, shrimp-a-roo, chicken bog, cockfight, or chili cook-off for, let’s say, $29.99. I can’t sing, of course, but I can juggle fire batons. OK, not really, but I saw it on
America’s Got Talent
one time, and how hard can it be?

You’re not feelin’ me?

OK, how about this—I’m going to become a cat whisperer. It pays better and I know I’d be good at it.

And, yes, I said cat whisperer.

Someone who counsels your cat.

Over the phone.

And claims to understand what the cat is thinking.

Duh and I researched this as a possible moneymaker and, turns out people who are otherwise able to feed and dress themselves and act normally will pay up to $300 to a long-distance cat whisperer.

The cat doesn’t actually hold the phone to its flappy little ear; that would be weird. Rather, the owner of the cat submits a photo of the cat that needs a good whisperin’, if you will, and later, during the human-to-human call, the cat sits nearby.

Laughing hysterically, I’m guessing.

This is the silliest thing I’ve heard since the cat yoga craze a couple of years ago. I went right out and bought a cat yoga
instruction book and tiny terry-cloth headband and renamed my girl cat “Olivia Neutered John,” which she didn’t think was funny. Cats have no sense of irony.

But they do have vocabularies, according to the cat whisperer who told the Associated Press reporter that one of her cats was unhappy because his food tasted “just like sawdust.” That’s right: “Cats have normal vocabularies,” said the whisperer.

Who knew? Wonder if they can define “scam”?

Here’s the thing. I have two enormous house cats curled around my bare feet at this very moment and I can tell you that they don’t know sawdust from Shinola.

But if their dumbass owners will pay me to say different, then I’ll do what it takes to stay outta that barrel on the bus.

In one case, said the cat whisperer interviewed, the client’s cat was upset that she was ignoring him in favor of a younger cat living in the home.

No Shinola!

Cats are notoriously jealous creatures. But the owner bought into this theory completely and used big, human-sized words to describe her shame at having “marginalized” the difficult kitty.

The cat, having heard a promise for “less marginalizing” was heard to think,
I say, that’s marvelous news indeed. But in other, more pressing matters, do you believe that we can actually sustain a fifty percent reduction in worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or is the G8’s goal merely a meaningless compromise that would actually do very little to stop global warming?

See how good I whisper?

The reporter admitted to being skeptical at first but, after getting her own cat whispered, she did stop her compulsive licking (the cat, not the reporter, although I did once share a cubicle with a reporter who compulsively smelled her own feet) after just one session and the other cat no longer sticks her face into the other cat’s ass.

Baby steps, y’all.

Cat whisperers are paid all this money to read the cat’s minds and you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own home! You could be one of those freaky 740-pound women who pays the misfit neighbor kid to bring her pizza every hour on the hour and still make money at this. Hey, it beats the living hell out of working the fourth-meal nightshift at Taco Bell, am I right?

I’ve had cats all my life, so I’m just as qualified to “whisper” as the next person. Plus, I believe we’ve all established that, unless I want to keep dividing entrees and cutting my own bangs, I’m going to have to generate some extra scratch.

I just this minute did a little test run on my own two fur “slippers” still curled around my feet and snoring loudly.

“Do you think a human can read your mind?” I whispered.

One yawned and stretched and the other, uh, yawned and stretched. I think they’re saying they’re “tired.”

I got the gift! Let the whisperin’ begin.

Here’s a budget-conscious recipe for the current economic climate that Duh and the Princess just love. Added benefit:
You can give the drained tuna juice to the cats and they’ll whisper loving thoughts back to you. I swear.

• 1 large can tuna (drain and pour juice into cat’s bowl)
  
• ½ cup
  each
  chopped celery and onion, sautéed ’til translucent
  
• 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
  
• 1 can cream of celery soup
  
• ½ cup mayonnaise
  
• ½ cup milk
  
• 8–12 ounces wide or curly egg noodles, cooked
  

Mix all that together and pour into a greased casserole dish that’s big enough to hold it all. Sprinkle with bread crumbs. (Make your own from Wonder Bread; your fancy-ass Panko crumb days are over.) Bake at 350 degrees ’til bubbly, about 30 minutes. Serve with hopes for a brighter future.

My pick for the best quote of the year comes from the Australian woman Anna Warrick, who was asked to comment on one little town in the Outback’s attempt to boost the female population by, essentially, recruiting ugly women.

The mayor of Mount Isa got in deep roo-doo after telling the newspaper that women of the, er, homely persuasion should consider moving to his town because Mount Isa men aren’t all that picky.

There was also a ham-handed reference to just how grateful these women appear to be once given the attentions of a Mount Isa man.

But it was Anna Warrick who noted that there aren’t a lot of gems to be found among the town’s men, either: “We
have a saying up here that the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

Amen, sistah.

Perhaps the oddest is Hizzoner John Molony, who told the newspaper, “May I suggest if there are five blokes to every girl, we should find out where there are beauty-disadvantaged women and ask them to proceed to Mount Isa.”

Recruit ugly women, in other words. ’Cause we all know how grateful they are.

Unable to stop himself, Mayor McCheese added his personal observation that, “Quite often you will see walking down the street a lass who is not so attractive with a wide smile on her face. Whether it is recollection of something previous or anticipation for the next evening, there is a degree of happiness.”

That’s right. Mae-Jean’s gon’ get some on her—at least that’s the way it sounded.

The mayor is like the clueless husband who buys his wife a steam iron for her birthday and then wonders why she spends the day weeping behind a locked bedroom door.

Because Google is a wonderful thing, I was able to satisfy my own curiosity as to what this mayor looked like, this man who would judge other people’s beauty with such confidence.

Would he have the rugged good looks of Mel Gibson? Or would he more closely resemble the talented and handsome Heath Ledger, who left us way too soon? Or would the
mayor possess the more sensitive, even delicate, features of that cerebral Aussie country singer Keith Urban?

Nope. He’s pretty much Fred Flintstone. The goods are, well, odd, just as Anna said.

The mayor had to start backpedaling when his comments got out and he had to apologize for dishing up a big bowl of wrong to the women of Mount Isa. The next time he encounters “a lass who is not so attractive with a wide smile on her face” I’d bet that smile has nothing to do with her envisioning that night’s steamy encounter in the sack with one of Mount Isa’s menfolk, but instead she’s probably picturing tossing the mayor into the eager jowls of a wild dingo.

What
is
it with men, anyway?

Hons, I have to tell you that I was crushed at the revelation that my former political crush, John Edwards, had strayed.

My attractive, single friend Susie quipped over a glass of wine when the news leaked that she was upset about Edwards’ cheating heart for two reasons.

“On the one hand, it’s just so horribly disappointing that he’s that kind of man,” she said, “but on the other hand, I’m upset because all this time I didn’t know he was available.”

Awful, but funny, right? Edwards was my U.S. senator when I bumped into him at the post office and was too star-struck to even manage a “howdy.”

His impossibly boyish good looks and earnest antipoverty speeches were as intoxicating as a Limoncello mojito, which
they drink a lot of in Beverly Hills, where John Edwards visited his mistress and their “love baby,” if the
National Enquirer
can be believed. Which, I think, it can.

Mainstream media: You snoozed and loozed while the Edwards scandal was broken by the same supermarket tabloid that reported that Barack Obama’s stepmother likes to talk to the ghost of Elvis (as if he were really dead)
and
, doing the math here, that exercise-addicted Kelly Ripa now officially weighs less than my left thigh.

I miss reading the
Enquirer
at the beauty parlor because now it’s gone upscale and calls itself a “sah-lon” and took away the
Enquirer
and even
Weekly World News
, with its interviews with wolf-faced little girls and whatnot. Now it’s all chichi with French
Vogue
and a bunch of other high-fashion stuff that doesn’t tell me a damn thing about the important events unfolding in the world, like Edwards’ dalliance or how a cat walked across the country three thousand miles to reunite with its owner. French
Vogue
wouldn’t know a good story if it bit its entire editorial staff on the ass, but then I’m guessing it would be almost impossible to find any ass on those models and their handlers.

Time was, I wouldn’t have believed anything in the
Enquirer.
Sure, it was fun to read; who can honestly resist a good story about a child who is born half boy and half bat or somesuch. No one I ever want to know, that’s who.

But exposing my former favorite millworker’s son as a womanizer bedding a rather horse-faced hoochie while his wife battled cancer has changed all that.

Now I am, to use poker parlance, “all in” with the
Enquirer.

Sure, they pay their sources and their sources are often anonymous and perhaps spend their days walking outdoors behind shopping carts, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then.

This time the nut was Edwards, who must’ve been nervously pulling out the very $400 coiffure I had defended to the point of needing bed rest, as he wondered just how the hell his forty-four-year-old girlfriend got pregnant.

I mean, I know
how
she got pregnant, it’s just that, don’t you imagine Edwards thought that was one thing he didn’t have to think about? (She said she was forty, she looked like she was forty-eight. . . .)

Having supported Edwards’ various campaigns on state and national levels for years, I just hoped that he was the real deal. I ate up that “two Americas” stuff like a plate of cinnamon pancakes at the IHOP.

Which, now that I think about, might be as close as Edwards ever gets to international involvement for a while.

The one positive is to realize that, now that the
Enquirer
has broken a real story, I no longer have to feel the least bit self-conscious about reading anything in the little tabloid newspaper that has ads in the back for “removing evil spirit curses.” I repeat: all in.

Edwards was just the most recent bad boy. Men are simple creatures and easily distracted by the new and bleached.

Because in my muddled noggin all roads lead back to TV
at some point, it makes me remember the
Trading Spaces
fiasco when the network suits fired perky Paige Davis.

Discarded by her corporate “boyfriends,” Paige made ’em crawl back to her by doing nothing more than watching them fall flat without her.

After a couple of seasons of low ratings, even the suits admitted they’d been jerks.

“We felt like the bad boyfriend who had dumped her at the prom and now we’re asking for a second chance,” said one.

To fire Paige, they had even used that tired old excuse: “We just felt that we needed to go in a different direction.”

How many times you heard that one, sistahs?

TV Guide
coyly noted that the search for a new direction was answered when the show went “straight down the ratings tubes.”