One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish sitting on a giant white triangular platter, asparagus spears, carrot whiskers, and a swath of something blue blue (to resemble the sea) on the bottom of the plate! The chef wore a Seuss hat. Stoli ole! Slid all of the way home in a late winter snow storm. HA!

Weeeeeeee-hoooooooooo! I am going to Marche's tonight. The chef is a Seuss freak and he is doing special dishes as a birthday tribute, and who do you think my pal thought of to take there? Well that would be me. He is going to be so sorry that he invited me. I know most of the Dr. Seuss books by heart and it is an hour to the city and I am tuning up!
I bought a new dress too. It's red with white flowers, silk.
Tomorrow I have a wedding shower and on Sunday a bridal shower. No. It is not for the same person. I need to go shopping and quit goofing off. Bye.
"I will not eat green eggs and ham. I will not eat them Sam I am."

I did watch the Grammy's this year. Two of my pals came over and we made veggie lasagna and drank Merlot. Yummmm!
Mostly I wanted to see my loveman Bobby D. Yeah to Train! I love love love "Drops of Jupiter" but the rest of that CD sucks. sorry. And I do like Lil' Kim. "How Many Licks Does It Take..." haha! although she did that great "kitchie, kitchie, ya, ya, Hey Joe, where do u wanna go?" Lady Marmalade. It was fabulous!!!!!!
My pal Pat called and I took the call in my bedroom because my gfs r too freaking loud. He has a new B movie for me. Something about biker chicks and Linda Blair and naked peeps. lol He wants to be here and watch it with me. SO get up here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dammit I walked back into the teevee room and Dylan was just finishing up. I saw him for all of maybe 3 secs.
What timing! Oh well.

Me & My BIG Mouth

If you are a corporate person leave now. You don’t want to hear this, then again maybe you need to hear it most of all.

I have two friends who have been eaten up by corps. Before signing on they we regular, fun people. Now they act like they are 50, no, make that 60-year–olds. They are both only 25, but they have grown uninteresting, manipulative, (oops I think this is called “delegating”) and totally lazy. Their bfs do the cooking and cleaning while they watch teevee. One friend’s bf has a 7-year-old son that she tells to do the dishes. Gawd! She can’t even fill up the dishwasher.

The corporations have drawn your brains out with a straw! They have killed your personality! Escape while you still can.

I miss you.

This is not a joke.

This has been a sad winter for weather peeps. It's difficult to create drama out of no snow.

Last night I was trying to watch "Practical Magic" when about 6 Xs an emerency alert horn would blot out the movie. Argh. Then scrolling messages. Stop.

The media likes to create something when it is nothing. Supposedly we were to get 2" to 6" of snow overnight. Didn't happen. We have maybe a 1/4". Woop-de-do.

Let's see...how do we get stress? Could it be from all of these constant alarms? A more interesting q is this: Why do we allow/need it? TURN OFF THE TEEVEE, THE RADIO, THE MEDIA. Tell them to grow up.

Two Tanks to Asheville
(part 2)

Yesterday at 3:30 I was in a doctor's office for the third time last week. Z called at 5:30.

"Ready to go?"

"What?" My mind had been so provoked by pain that I hadn't thought of anything else.

"You've been wanting to leave for a month. Feel good enough to spend a few days in a car?"

That's how awesome this man is. He didn't forget.

"We'll leave tomorrow at 8 sharp. I need to be back on Thursday for a meeting."

That's how I ended up here…TODAY!

By 5:30 we are zooming through Cincinnati…to the left wooden houses built on hillsides, ahead pavement swaddled pink mercury vapor light, ahead the bridge crossing the Ohio River. Just south of the city we get off in Florence. Zorrid likes it because it is brightly lit and everything is in one spot. Dream Street…for real, that is the actual name of the street. Four motels, eights restaurants, gas, and a liquor store…perfect for the traveler.

"It looks okay." I say as we cruise down the strip, "but it's too early. I'm not even tired, are you?"

"No."

"Okay, let's get farther south before we stop." Roadtrip Rule One: Get as far as you can the first day. You have the most energy and are totally excited, so the time passes quickly.

I strike a bargain. "How about if we stay here on the way back?
"Okay."

Back on the Interstate, six wide lanes. We are an hour and a half in when some moonshine-laden Kentuckian roars in on an access ramp and comes across two and a half lanes almost taking us out. He straightens out his rusty Nissan and is right in front of me, going 70. I had to slow down 10 M.P.H. just to let him in. There are no other cars or trucks around us. I am swearing like a crazy person. "First Lexington exit and we are off."

Around 7:30 we arrive in Lexington, Kentucky. I have been driving up and down large hills for hours. The landscape is a secret. We can only see what our headlights carve out.

Just a few miles up the Interstate we find a Holiday Inn. Perfect. Zorrid signs us in. He is so old he has an AARP card and gets a big discount on the room.

It's always the same damn room. Clean with a king sized bed, three pillows, innocuous framed art, mini-refrigerator, microwave, and bath with the sink outside the toilet/tub area. You could be in Arlington, Boise, or Dallas. Inside the room it is always a hotel, on the road.

We ask the desk clerk about food. "Six miles west is the city." she says with a soft Southern drawl, pointing us in the right direction, just in case we forgot our compass.
As we leave the parking lot I spy a Gentleman's Club called Pure Gold. Haha! "Zorrid, Let's go there after we eat." It's Saturday night and the sign says no cover before 9. (We will arrive well after 9) The parking lot is very crowded. "I have never been to one. Could we? Want to see some naked humans?"

"Not really."

"Just an hour. Okay?"

"All right. You should see for yourself. You think its "Eyes Wide Shut," it isn't."

We cross over Man O' War Boulevard. Zorrid is impressed. "Probably the best racehorse ever."

We run the restaurant strip…Chinese, Mexican, a steakhouse…

"Mark's Feed Store. How does that sound?"

"Sure."

We sit in front of the fireplace and order up barbecues. I have pulled pork; he has beef. I ask what burgoo is, and am extremely curious so I order it. The other diners turned and looked at me when I asked. Maybe it's my northern accent, or perhaps burgoo is as common as dirt in this part of the world. How could anyone not know what it is?

Barbecues come as stacked meat on a bun. You put on your own sauce. "Original," which has a distinct vinegar aroma and is pale orange, or the dark red, which smells like Masterpiece BBQ sauce to me. I buy a bottle of "Original" for my barbecue buddy back home.

Burgoo…yippee! It is a very thick stew made with beef and pork and chicken and a few veggies. It is tasty. My friend John, whose mother worked as a café waitress and did crockpots every night at home, would call it "one-pot-slop." The waitress tells me that it is served on Derby Day, an honored tradition. You chomp it down while listening to political speeches, rant, and raves.

I chase my Kentucky food down with a Big Red. It is a cherry-cream-soda-tasting pop bottled and brewed up in Texas.

Zorrid wants to go back to the room to change. I say, "Why?" The "club" is a big nondescript metal pole building. "Certainly they cater to people coming off the road. Travelclothes."

Inside it is a $10 cover. Everyone is dressed. Z was right. Black suits and white for the women, the patrons. The dresses glow in the blacklight. All of the white floor-length tablecloths are glowing too. There are three levels. A woman is on the stage. Another one is at a little back bar. Many women are giving lap dances. It is a very nice-looking club. Spotlights in pure colors-red, blue, green, blue trace through the room. It is dark. The women are naked except for a g-string, yet the lighting is so strange they don't seem naked. It is difficult to focus on them because of the weird bouncing lights. Men and women are gathered at tables; oddly most of them are in conversation, not watching the naked women.

I am watching, intently. The women move quite sedately. They all are wearing very tall platforms, at least 5". I probably couldn't dance in them neither. They cannot touch the men and the men cannot touch them. They barely touch themselves. Now I can see some of the women are totally naked. The women are very very skinny, tiny breasts, some with just nipples. Their bodies are androgynous. Stickgirls. The one with waist-length blondish hair wraps her locks around a bald man's head. An older women strips out of a shiny catsuit. This one has breasts, circles, bought. When the woman in shiny blue shorts takes our drink order she surprises me. Up close, she has the hollow face of the woman that is called "The Coal-Miner's Daughter." No one is dancing on or at a pole. Maybe that part is just on teevee.

What I am most entranced by is the DJ. He does a constant patter. Interrupting the music with "Kitty. Kitty" "I want to buy everyone at the drink a bar." He talks to the women. He tells them to all go backstage. All twelve of them come back out, dressed in a variety of skimpy Frederick's of Hollywood outfits, with a hurricane-pink in a shapely glass with an umbrella, in hand. The DJ says you can get a lap dance for $25. The women wander through the crowd looking for takers. Some don't get any. They take turns on stage, scarcely moving, going to the edge of the stage to a man, any man with money in his hand, the dancer squats down, the mark tucks the greenback in a garter that is down near her knee, she bends and kisses him on the neck, and goes back to dancing. The DJ asks the girls, "Does anyone have a stiffie?" All of the lap-dance girls raise their hands. "Any 8" or more?" Again they all raise their hands. The humor here is thin, a bit tragic. No one wears a genuine smile.

I am wondering why the owners don't hire some tall, long-legged women, some large-breasted women, and some zaftig beauties? Surely a number of men that come here would like some variety, or at least a shapely ass. I wonder why they are all the same versions of one type of girl. Perhaps they are facsimiles of a woman the hiring-person once loved. It is a bit bizarre. More flesh=more eroticism. Hell, I want to see an authentic fat girl, one that moves her flesh so attractively, that she draws all of the light in the room directly to her. Isn't this about getting turned on? What do I know?

I think you could get fooled here. It's just like any club back home. You meet a guy and he looks gorgeous and then when you walk outside into real light, you look at him and Whoa! You say to yourself "What was I thinking?" I think I need to drink more so this part of dating works better.

Back at the room Zorrid tells me that the men getting lap dances probably were just tossed by their girl so they go there, spent $200 on a stripper, and pretend the woman actually likes them. "The whole stripper routine is a fraud. It lacks one thing: meaning. So it is nothing."

Ha! To me it was almost sanitary. You would see more "activity" in almost any dance club. Or at the beach. And the clothes are a LOT cuter!

All-in-all it was a bit boring and pathetic. And now I know that I am not a lesbian. None of it turned me on at all. No meaning, I guess. It did sate my curiosity though. Stripping seems to me to be an exceptionally lazy, stoopid way to make a living. I know. They are all college girls, right? Maybe they don't know about grants and loans.

Back at the hotel we showered and went to bed.