Well, I've been away a long time, haven't I?  I hope I remember how to do this. 

First of all, I am spending a weird amount of time on the other blog - THE LEAGUE OF BRITISH ARTISTS.  http://www.britsunited.blogspot.com.  I have kind of become obsessed with where Colin Firth keeps his Oscar (wink wink nod nod) and if Keira Knightley will wear that print dress again and what lengh of hair Matthew Macfadyen will show up with for his next movie.  The Three Musketeers 3D is due to open soon and I'm beginning to hyperventilate, not to mention Downton Abbey and what a stud muffin Bates is becoming.

When did I regress to a fifteen year old?

And on top of that, Richie and I are on the road again.  And - you guessed it - the car broke down.  This time in Chicago, that toddlin' town that is now covered with antifreeze from our engine. 

We are here to either:

(a)  get our annual physicals from a REAL doctor, not the ones that lurk in Florida
(b)  see girls I went to high school with - Laura Ingles couldn't make it but Rosa and Caroline did.  My god we got old.
(c)  see people we used to go to DePaul basketball games with - or is it with whom we saw DePaul Basketball games?  Does DePaul even qualify as a team?
(d)  see my brother, Michael, who is currently in agony in Milwaukee - redundant, I know. 
(e) All of the above!

Our first stop was in Perry Georgia at a Ramada.  There was a reunion of Green Beret Special Forces there and they all seem to be congregating in the next room.  With any luck they will never find out that Richie was assigned to payroll for Green Beret Special Forces when he was in the army.  They weren't even called Green Berets back then.  I think they were called The Huns or something.  Anyway, Richie was with the Fighting Accountants, the geek squad, the College Boys.  When the CB's didn't like a "special forces" guy they would double his payroll one month.  The victim would never say anything, spend all his money, and then have no payroll for the next month.  Geeks can be cruel.

Then second night we were in Paducah Kentucky and we ate our way through a Drury Inn night snack buffet, a Chinese buffet and a morning breakfast buffet.  We were asked to leave - asked may be too kind a word.  Back at the motel later a group of aging motorcyclists came puttering in behind us - I'm used to this sight in Florida where the Hell's Angels have gone to retire.  But this group was strictly white bread.  One old guy came up to us and asked us where to eat, which restaurant better presented the "local fare".  I think he thought he was in Quebec or something.  The plates on their bikes said Wisconsin.  Figures.  What other badass would say "local fare" but a Wisconsin boy?

Saw my first fall foliage.

We got to Chicago Sunday night and invaded the home of a woman I've known since grammar school - at least 150 years.  Judy is blind, has been blind from birth.  Very nice lady, good friend, lots of fun.  We really should tell her we're here.  She's growing suspicious, though, with all the food disappearing and all.

More later...

VERMIN THEATER PRSENTS

GONE WITH THE SQUIRREL

Miss Scarlett is at the Twelve Oaks barbeque, the center of attention, the party slut, flirting and having a grand old time with the men, one of whom would later play Superman in a very tacky television series. She pretends to be happy but all she wants is Ashley Wilkes. In fact, before the barbeque she and Mammy, her slave, have had a fight over this dumb, effeminate Ashley Wilkes. Mammy pulls out a knife and stabs Miss Scarlett. End of story. Just kidding.

Scarlet finally sees Ashley at the barbeque. He’s there, so obviously he’s really into her, or so she thinks, but really, it is his house and everything so where else would he be? Besides big dumb Ashley is ready to announce his engagement to his sister or cousin, I can never remember which, Miss Mellie, or Melanie, or whatever. Big dumb Melanie. Big, dumb, masculine, Melanie. They were made for each other. Mammy pulls out a knife and stabs Scarlett. Pretty soon y’all will wish that was the truth.

Well slutty Scarlett begs Ashley to run off with her but he pees in his pants and hobbles out of the room. A rumbling masculine laugh is heard from behind a sofa. Is it Miss Melanie? NO! It is the one and only Rhett Butler. Hubba hubba say Miss Scarlett’s eyes but she pretends to be royally ticked and they fight. Rhett, who is a distant cousin to Saddam Hussein, is intrigued. He also has one GINORMOUS boner.

The war starts! Hallelujjah! People are really happy and the slaves sing on the front porch. Or was that Jezebel with Bette Davis? Doesn’t matter, same heroine. Before going off to war Ashley marries Melanie and just to be perverse, Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton. Well, dearie, you know this guy’s not long for the world. I think he drops over while riding down the driveway immediately after the ceremony.

Even worse than losing her husband within five minutes of her marriage, Scarlett is forced to wear black. She thinks it makes her look fat ant that makes her want to dig poor old ugly Charles up from the grave and prop him in the front window. But she can’t do that wearing gloves so she goes to Atlanta to live with big dumb Melanie and Aunt Pittipat. Mammy follows with a gun, duct tape and a wheel barrel. Not really.

Scarlett and Rhett meet at a Rotary Meeting where people are scandalized when Scarlett and Rhett dance and he says to her she should be "kissed and often, by someone who knows how." That, or really good oral sex, has Scarlett eating chimmy chongas from Rhett’s furry upper lip. They are happy. Don’t worry, it doesn’t last.

At Christmas stupid, insipid, effeminate Ashley asks Scarlett what color she does her nails and “oh, by the way, will you take care of my woman for me, the one for which I dumped you.” Scarlett tries to grab the AK47 from Mammy and blow Ashley’s head off. But she doesn’t. Rhett takes off for Mexico without Scarlett cause she wants to go back to Tara - she has cable there - Belle Whatling, the Lady Gaga of the south, donates money for a hospital, Scarlett gets stuck in the middle of Bobby Sherman’s March to the Sea and big, dumb, Melanie has gotten herself knocked up. She avoids the cannon fire Scarlett aims at her window and a resigned and heavily drugged Scarlett remains in Atlanta to “birth the baby,” hoping against hope to sew Miss Melanie’s vagina shut.

The baby is born and now Scarlett really wants to get the hell out of town so she drags Miss Mellie out of bed, bounces her down the stairs by her hair and flags down a passing carriage. It’s Rhett! Who’d have guessed? He gets her through the carnage only to dump her in the middle of a fire and gives her one of the all time great movie kisses in history. Everyone genuflect. He still dumps her though.

Miss Scarlett gets to Tara to find out her mother is dead, her father thinks he’s Dumbledore and Tara has been turned into a housing project.

Scarlett utters one of the great lines in cinematic history. “shit.”


INTERMISSION

MORE SEPARATED AT BIRTH - AT TIMES A GREAT ARGUMENT FOR BIRTH CONTROL

The world is a strange place, isn't it?  I wonder if we came face to face with our own look alikes would we even know it?  Here are some real puzzlers and some nonsense.  You decide which is which.

 

Daniel Radcliffe and Shostakovich!  Who knew.

I always liked this Soprano guy who also plays in Bruce Springsteen's band.  He looks like a gangster baby, doesn't he?  And then what's his name and Ben Kingsley.  It has to be just the bald head.

Denis Leary and William Dafoe.  I just figured out where "Rescue Me" is on cable and the series is over.  I enjoyed the few episodes I saw even though it was pretty predictable at times.  When faced with moral choices the guys of the department always picked the low road.  I said that to someone and she said, "I like the low road."  Each to their own.  Now William DaFoe was a great Dracula in a creepy movie I saw years ago about the filming of the original "Nosferatu."   I think that was him anyway.

This is confusing. 

All married couples of long sentencing begin to look alke, even begin to act alike.  This chipper couple were married for at least four hundred years by the lustful glance he is casting at her.  Even their glasses are the same.  Hope its not their anniversary.

I mean no disrespect to Mrs.Hill with this.  Forgive me.

What kind of God is it that would make two women look like this?  And also give us Joan Rivers?  I wonder if their parents look alike too.  That would be interesting - go back a few generations and see what ancestors look like.  Maybe clone  people come from a whole series of look alikes.  You think they check out each other's hairdos to see what would look good on them.  My only double is John Denver and he's not available. 

How did cute little Valerie Bertinelli ever marry this guy?  And who's the one on the left?

Odd but true.  A nazi torturer is the cuter of the two.

One of these is a movie producer I think.

Not enough Swedes in this gene pool.  Who are they anyway?  I see the girl from "Gilmore Girls" second from the right - a show my husband and I really loved so it was immediately taken off the air, and just as Gilmore Mom, Lorilei, married the dishy cafe owner.  Bummer.

I do really like Sean Bean.  He was so great in Sharpe, always the perfect evil guy in any scary movie.  However, he is aging a little roughly.  I think he (1) is not getting the required botox injections of most actors over fifty, or (2) has had one helluva life.  The other guy is familiar but boring looking.  Funny, the same face, but only one attracks me  Huh.

Always suspected, never proven before this. 

An insult to dogs.

I love this scrappy little dude from "300"  He shows up everywhere on my stuff.  I love the Arby's one - "TONIGHT WE MEET IN HELL.  Tomorrow I'm thinking Arbys.".

I can't even pretend that I had any reason for this other than the obvious.  I don't even like vampire stuff, not in the least.  Is this vampire stuff?  Who cares, in the words of the late, great Elizabeth Taylor, come to momma.

MY SHOWDOWN WITH DONALD RUMSFELD

I have had a number of extremely odd jobs in my seven hundred or so years on this planet, the weirdest coming to me after I returned to college and worked my J-LO prosthesis off going to weekend college and night classes. But before my six decades of education at Loyola University and Mundelein College I was a secretary, or as I liked to call myself, THE OFFICE ENGINEER.

My first secretarial job was with G. D. Searle and Co. in Skokie, Illinois. They invented “the pill” among other things, (like Dramamine to avoid motion sickness.  Oddly enough, Dramamine was trial tested as a migraine medicine.  It helped none of the people they tested it on, but one woman did say she wasn't getting sick on the bus getting there anymore.  True story.  I think.  But I digress...) and that was their big money maker, the pill I mean, in the wild sixties and screwball seventies. However, during that time, they also created a little thing they called Aspartame, an artificial sweetener that sadly killed some lab mice,

But then…

a Christmas miracle happened and those very same lab mice came back to life. Unfortunately for the mice however, they lived only on reports submitted to the government requesting FDA approval for Aspartame to be sold to the public. (We suggested they rename the stuff “Lazarus” but G. D. Searle (or God Damn Searle) was not amused)

Searle got into a lot of trouble with that little snafu. Big time. Suddenly we had Federal agents all over the place, shadowing lab workers, poking into files, cross examining suspicious looking squirrels in the parking lot…it was unnerving and humiliating and we all enjoyed it tremendously. I offered my body for frisking but was repeatedly turned down.

In fact, in order to extricate their bony butts, the idiot Searle brothers who ran the place at the time, Little Earl and Big Earl (I think those were their names), were voted out of the presidency by the Board of Directors, and, the man who spearheaded their dismissal, their own father, called on a buddy of his to take over the family business for a while, straighten it out, grease some wheels, get them in good again with the U.S. government, ensure his drug was approved. He called in his big gun.

Donald Rumsfeld.

Stop my beating heart.  Oh Yeah. Himself, doncha know.   Donald Rumsfeld.   It’s a touching story, filled with angst and just a touch of paprika, showing what a charismatic, refined gentleman he was.

It was the morning of his first day and I was walking along the corridor on the ground floor of our building, scurrying along the right side wall like one of our lab mice, hurrying to the cafeteria and my one bright spot of the day, a cheese sandwich and a coke. The doors to the garage were facing me at the other end of this hallway. They opened up. Who should come into the hallway from the garage but – you guessed it – Donald Rumsfeld himself. We slowly walked toward each other, both of us with our shoulders pressed against the same glass wall of the cafeteria, on the same side, heading straight for each other. He was carrying luggage and his suitcase, I was clutching my five dollar bill. No one else was in the hallway – it was completely empty. He was ‘The Man With No Name’. Do you feel lucky, punk? I asked myself. Well do you?

As we got nearer to each other (I was, at that time, completely unaware of just who the hell he was) I kept thinking, “Surely, he will move a little to his right so we won’t collide. Surely, (and don’t call me Shirley) he is a gentleman – a very handsome gentleman in fact – and very, very well dressed. That meant he was rich and educated, of a higher class than the usual programmers and analysts with whom I worked on the third floor, in the animal cage. Surely (you keep saying that) he will step aside for a lady, even a really young lady (I was once you know) seeing that, if we were cars in traffic, he was in MY LANE AND WE WERE ABOUT TO COLLIDE!

It was the gunfight at the OK Corral. It was The Good, the Bad, and the Hungry. Nope. The bastard of the balkans was going to make me move around him, like he was the greater good of humanity, the more important life form on the planet. HE WAS IN MY BLOODY LANE, the creep! There was no one else with us – he had plenty of room. We stopped when we reached each other, nose to nose, mano a mano, and the tension was palpable. My trigger finger itched, I felt sweat pool in my palm. I thought to myself “move old man, or your wingtips will feel the ire of my two inch heels.”

Finally, he gave in. HA! He took a step to his right and walked around me, grumbling and mumbling under his breath. It was a small victory for an even smaller person, but I reveled in it, then almost as much as I do now. Of course when I found out exactly who he was I went into hiding for the two years he was there.

I am not stupid.

next week - The day I bitch slapped Sir George Solti

THE ALL AUSTEN TELEVISION NETWORK PRESENTS...

AS THE JANE AUSTEN WORLD TURNS
Episode Four

In the sleepy town of Meryton, a suburb of the great throbbing metropolis that is known as London, live several families.

This is their story.

Meryton MemorialHospital

(The new and vastly improved Dr. George Wickham)

Nurse Baker:  Dr. Wickham, you look…so different…so un-English…so Buenos Aires-ish.  And oh my.  Is that a polo mallet in your pocket or are you happy to see me?

Lucy Parker-Bowles – Back off Blowfish.  Wicky is here only temporarily - on loan you might say.

Nurse Baker:  The name is Baker.  Baker, all right.  Not Blowfish.  And who are you when you’re at home and not munching on those dead mice you have in your hand?

Lucy Parker-Bowles – Me?  Why I am Wicky’s body guard and ball washer.  Hey!  Let me slap that smirk right off your face, Brunhilde – he plays Polo for Nosferatu United.  And Mistress Bingley has a vested interest in our Wicky boy; he’s her favorite thing for lunch – especially his neck.  I’m along to make certain you oversexed women of Meryton don’t take advantage of him while he collects his things.  Jeez.  Get your hands out of his pockets Butt-face.

Nurse Baker:  IT’S BAKER, OK!  BAKER!  Besides, I always count Wicky’s change for him.  And then we have a cigarette.  You don’t mind, do you Wicky.  Good boy. Such a cutie, such a big boy, cuchie, cuchie - fetch.

Lucy Parker-Bowles – Not tonight Busty Barb.  We are meeting someone named Emma Woodhouse and Mistress Bingley will then begin her long awaited revenge on Meryton as Wickham begins his long conquest – one pathetic, wimpy, proper Jane Austen heroine at a time, starting with the plain, ghastley, useless and highly suitable Elinor Dashwood.  Mistress Bingley will be very proud of us and the amount of retribution we can squeeze into the next four hours - and then we’ll hit the Matlock IHOP, that good for you Wicky?  Great give me five.  No five.  What comes after four...? Just puzzle it out for a moment, Wicky - I'll get back to you.  But first, just to take the edge off, I think I WILL let Wicky take a little sip from you, Beavis.  Yeah, I think that will help him get his ‘blood’ o-meter moving.  Wicky – tear her up!

The Home of Elinor Dashwood and her aged Mother, Butterfly McDashwood, or as she was know in the ‘theater’ – Blase the Bombshell Dashwood

Elinor Dashwood:  Mother, if I should receive a call from Miss Emma Woodhouse I would like you to lie through your teeth for me, say I’m not in.  All right.

Blaze the Bombshell Dashwood:  Certainly dearest child.  I do adore lying, it’s so like the theater, especially if you pay me to do it.  I could take off my clothes too.

Elinor Dashwood:  Or.. I could simply poison your food.

Blase the Bombshell Dashwood:  Yes, I remember your father’s death very well.  There is that.  I should never have sold that restaurant of mine.  Oh well.  Or… I could recall that you’ve suddenly returned from wherever it is you’ve supposedly gone to when Miss Woodhouse calls. 

Elinor Dashwood:  Will you take a checque?

Blase the Bomshell Dashwood:  Sweetling, I would take bottlecaps if I thought I could annoy you.  Now why ever do you want to avoid the incredibly pompous Miss Woodhouse?  Has she scraped together yet another suitor for you?  Possibly a blind man who’s been in some sort of disfiguring carriage accident that resulted in such vile and revolting scarring that he has been reduced to accepting assignations with pathetically plain and boring middle aged spinsters.

Elinor Dashwood:  Just like daddy.

Blase the Bombshell Dashwood:  You are too, too, funny dear.  I think I’ll stand outside and disrobe when the Reverend Collins limps past.  Will you play the drums for me dear?

Elinor Dashwood:  Mother, I can still have you committed.  Actually, I believe Emma has selected someone quite handsome for me.  Handsome and humorous, intelligent, well spoken and impeccably dressed.

Blase the Bomshell Dashwood:  Ah.  He’s gay then.

Elinor Dashwood:  No, he's a Gynecologist.

Blase the Bombshell Dashwood:  Same thing.

Tune in next week.  Will Elinor succumb to Wicky’s intense beauty? Will Butt Face Barbara rise up as yet another vampire to attack the Jane Austen men? Will Reverend Collins stop peaking into the window chanting “boom chicky boom boom” every time Blase the Bombshell removes her chemise.  Will Lucy Parker sue me for defamation of character?  Which other of the people who leave comments (any comments) appear in this ridiculous nonsense?

Who is next on the Jane Austen hit list? Tune in next week.