Let Me Set the Record Straight—8

This Is Just Wrong

What the heck kind of story did Smarts write? you probably want to know. A baby boomer turns serial killer exposé? One woman’s odyssey from Shaddrach to Allentown and back?

No, in the heap o’ lies known as Sitcom, a character named Jejune May Cleavage refuses to budge from her bed for two months because of a nervous breakdown due to not one but two migrating silicone breast implants, implants, in other words, that wouldn’t stay put.

And during that hiatus a fellow who bears a suspicious resemblance to Poor Ray—handsome, sweet-tempered, not scrunched-nosed, etc.—visits his wrath upon her for having scorned him in high school. In excruciating and morbid detail, Smarts described how her sadistic insensitivity turned the Ray character against women, forever ruining his chance for a happy life.

All I can say is this is just wrong in so many ways.

For starters, I would never have scorned Ray, for crying out loud, although he was much too old for me at the time. And as for scorning Smarts himself, how could politely declining a date to the Snowflake Ball—held in a high school gym for godsake—cause irreparable damage?

Okay, so I didn’t technically decline.

For a girl to actually decline a date for a specific event back in the Stone Age meant she couldn’t accept a date from anyone else. Those were the rules set down by the two Ms. Manners of the predawn era, Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, proving beyond doubt they both sprang fully grown from alien pods and could never have lived the life of your average teenage girl.

So I had to finesse the invitation—which entailed feigning deafness around Smarts for what seemed forever but was probably only five days—till some guy I could actually stand to be around for more than three minutes asked me to the dance. A girl didn’t ask a boy for a date back in Carboniferous times unless it was to her own private freak show.

© 2010 by Virginia Gerhart