Would you like boobs with that?

After a very long, largely unfulfilling day of watching paint dry, I like to reward myself by doing errands, and paying a visit to the Super Uber Market to buy lettuce and maybe some Formula 409. It's my little "Me" time, and I enjoy it fully.

Tonight, ringing up my oranges and baby spinach leaves was an interesting character I call Clown Hair. Her real name is Kitti, and I'm placing her at about 60. She's probably younger, but she's put in a lot of time under the sun, so it's hard to say. Tonight, Kitti did not say hello to me, because she was involved in a counseling session with the bag girl, concerning a domestic dispute among the bag girl, her parents, and her lying, unfair older brother who tell lies and misrepresents the facts and makes bag girl feel misunderstood. (According to my very sketchy notes, taken without looking, using a pen I held inside my purse.) So involved were the two that I got a chance to analyze Kitti's ensemble in detail.

I feel strange calling her "Kitti," because for so long I've thought of her as Clown Hair. She wears her hair in an intriguing style reminiscent of Bozo the Clown, were he to go blonde and go to a more expensive hairdresser. My mother taught me that "certain types of women" (i.e., tramps) wear their hair in the style they wore in the years they felt most attractive, which has the unfortunate reverse effect of making them look, according to my mother, "dated." Kitti is definitely working that theory, and I would "date" her hair-do at 1980, at the latest. Her hair is a little hard to describe, but I'll try.

First of all, it is dark brown at the crown, gradually lightening into blonde. On some hairstyles, this would appear to be "roots," but on Kitti, it looks like she is wearing a brown hat. The brown hair is brushed straight down in all directions, including forward, stuck tightly to her scalp, for a length of about three inches. Then, the hair takes an abrupt 180-degree turn, curling up in exuberant pale-blonde peaks, like stiff whipped cream, all across the back of her head and down to the nape of her neck. Her bangs also froth up all the way across her forehead. Except for the bang-al area, the proportion of down-pointing hair to up-frothing hair is 1:4. It is startling and great and I should probably start going in another checker's line at the market.

The hair is not the only great thing about Kitti. She is fairly slender, but she has a giant rack. Not freakishly large, but certainly ex-stripper large. They are so fake, you can tell even through the unflattering navy blue Super Uber Market polo shirt she was wearing. Tonight, her nails bore out the ex-stripper theme, in that they were long, square and acrylic, painted in bright apricot with pale gold and lime green sprinkles. Sparkles. Glitter. And of course, white "French" tips, for that Continental flair. I was totally riveted as she took my club card with her talons, the glitter flashing as she swiped it over the laser beam. The "beep" of the register jolted me out of my hallucination, and I was able to complete the transaction successfully, but for a moment, I was at dancing the Hustle with John Travolta in a Santa Monica disco circa 1979.

So, I am sorry if I made you envision a borderline-elderly cashier's rack. At least I didn't use the word "boobs." Can we all agree that this is one of the more irritating words ever devised, especially as it is pronounced by a lot of the women out here who speak in what I call "The Quack"? The Quack is a speech pattern characterized by monotonous, rapid-fire, nasal speech, over-reliance on the phrases "Oh my God," and "You don't understand," and is generally accompanied by a blood-chilling machine-gun laugh. Many of the women getting "boob jobs" on tv reality shows about plastic surgery have the Quack, which is unfortunate, because one of the characteristics of the Quack is the pronunciation of the word "boobs" in a highly irritating way that sounds more like "beebs." I just tried it out to see if I could sound out a more lucid spelling, and irritated myself so much that I might have to stop talking about it.

OK, yes. I have to stop talking about it.

But listen for it! You will hear it and understand, and it will irritate you, too, and you will be unhappy.

My work here is done.



Star of the day. . .Double Agent 77
posted @ 9:03 p.m. on April 16, 2005 before | after

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She lay awake all night,

zzzzzzzzzzz......