Faster Than A Speeding Mullet
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

Bag Me: At Vintage Vinyl, Your Darling Your Diva, Your One True Love replaced a black, white and red casual Lassie lunchbox with a Misfits coffin model. At the counter, the clerk pointed to Lassie, "That’s awesome." Your Chinese Pear thanked him but it had to go. "People see it and mistake me for a nice person."
 

Howling mad: A new commercial, possibly for the Toyota Sienna: it’s a series of quick takes, fantasies children have. One child says, "If kids ruled the world I’d get all 31 flavors." The closing shot is a girl of about eleven. Only Turkish prison guards are crueler than eleven year old girls, and no one wants this child holding the keys to his cell. Thin lipped and prim, she is placing headphones over her ears. Her parents look a little on the transported-by-the-music side. The girl says, "If kids ruled the world, I’d never have to hear my parents sing Magnet And Steel again." Your Osage Orange had to lie down to laugh hard enough.
 

Shagadelic: Some radio stations won’t play the B-52’s for fear of hurting the figmentary sensitive feelings of our wussier compatriots, though the band’s name derives from bouffant wigs. How ironic then that American troops just found Saddam Hussein’s desert love shack.
 

Behold the power of cheese: New spring tops show a more back than winter turtlenecks. Twice in one day, someone grabbed the care tag of Your Pomegranate’s red shirt and asked if the tattoo was new. One lady, edging toward the legal retirement age, described in great detail the tats of her daughters and daughters-in-law. By the end of the list, it seemed like she might break down and show us the battleship.
 

This weekend’s cleaning music: Fugazi (Red Medicine) and Frank Sinatra.
 

That Fourth Horseman’s Riding Side-Saddle: You’re watching Spongebob Squarepants with your brighter nieces and nephews. A band is playing. You recognize the voice but the context is, like, way wrong. It’s...It’s LUX INTERIOR! You immediately regret that lost college weekend where you passed out and your "friends" say you absolutely positively did NOT eat the brown acid.
 

Conversational Flemish: TLC’s new show Faking It pits ordinary people in a three-week throw-down against their boundary issues and expert judges. A Milwaukee beer-guzzler tries to become a wine sommalier. A race car driver tries his hand at flaming drag. It makes a person wonder. And wonder. And wonder. Finally, you might have this chat with your best girlfriend.
 
You: (breathlessly) I’ve been thinking about it and thinking about it. What could I be? I mean, I do everything I like doing, and perfectly, I might add so what could I be? Maybe a child daycare provider but I hate children in angry little mobs and someone would ring up DYFS so that’s no good. Or how about a cake decorator? I wouldn’t mind working in an edible medium again, but I don’t know. Ooooh! How about a stewardess? I can’t wear heels but I love inflatable staircases but I can just hear myself saying, "Damn it! Get your own freaking peanuts! Your arms aren’t broken!" So that’s no good but I finally figured it out. I finally thought of the thing I could try that nobody else would! Isn’t that great?
 
GF: (patiently) And what is it you could fake being?
 
You: BELGIAN!
 
GF: (finally interested) Would you be a Waloon?
 

Cuts You Up: Last week, Your Mandarin Orange’s office was declared a no-headphones zone, which is to say that no music will play, and if it does, no one may listen. This is the same office Your Kiwi shares with one of David Lowry’s aunties, the mother of Matte Witte’s manager and mutual friends of George Is Dead. One co-worker threatens to retire and in the next breath recounts stories of Friday’s Brooks & Dunn concert. No music? Headphones were deemed "unprofessional," though everyone knows lawyers, brokers and computer professionals are the financial mainstays of internet music sources. Puzzling; not to mention that headphones tether our attention-span impaired counterparts to desks they might suddenly bolt from and be jerked back to. This is how the workforce concentrates on a task now, which is a radically different way to be than even ten years ago. Alas, in an age when thinking your own thoughts on company time can be considered stealing, one human step forward can appear from the outside to be a spastic hokey pokey.
 

©2003 Robin Pastorio-Newman